The erection of the “large, triangular apparatus” was first noted in the Western Cities Observer on May 11, 2021, when an eight-year-old girl, Savannahe, was quoted as saying: “Our apartment building is shaded by the purple thingy they are building in the sky; my mom can’t keep her balcony herb garden alive.” The author of the story, Sandy Sergebrooke, had not intended to write about the large edifice under construction. Her article, part two of a three-part feature on homelessness in the urban center, had indeed mentioned the newish skyscraper only in passing—sandwiched between paragraphs about increased drug use in and police sweeps upon the homeless camps.
There is no known record from this time period documenting the loud and incessant drumbeat that would later be said to be associated with the construction project.
On May 13, Sergebrooke devoted 253 words in her diary to the structure, “a reddish-bluish vertical bridgeworks of sorts, occupying at its base an entire city block, which reach[ed] into the sky three-hundred meters presently.” In her diary she clarified that the “apparatus” was a “massive skyscraper,” which was “triangular” “in the sense that it seem[ed] to consist of many triangular shapes, although the apparatus itself is not itself triangular.” Sergebrooke’s diary was unusual in that it was lined with vertical rather than horizontal lines. This required her to turn, at minimum, the book at a 90-degree angle for use; however, her preference was to turn the diary at a 270-degree angle and write on the lines upside down.
In that same year, Mayor Teena Galbraithe, a known rodent sympathizer (in the eyes of her enemies), gave a public speech nineteen days before Christmas in which she called upon all citizens to “consider foregoing a tiny portion of their holiday spending to donate to the public fund supporting the REACH project.” Just under one hundred fifty million dollars were donated that holiday season, by the public, to the project. Galbraithe stole two hundred thousand dollars from the fund and routed it to purchase the skeleton of a baby wooly mammoth found in a dig in Spain. She animated the skeleton with electric pulleys and lights and placed it in the front yard of her property on Christmas Eve. All the scientists in the city mocked her for celebrating Christmas and all the Christians mocked her for celebrating wooly mammals. In any event, it was the first time in the history of the universe that a wooly mammoth’s skeleton had been lit-up with Christmas lights.
On Christmas day, 2021, Robbie Saint-Jacque, whose friends called him RS-J (they pronounced the “dash”), and who lived in an apartment two blocks north of the base of the REACH structure, wrote in his diary: “I awoke full of light and peace, something I have never before experienced. All things feel possible. My life is a circle of light. I begin to hear the drumbeat of the other world.” Robbie ended his life later that day with a rope. Before killing himself, he placed a new gallon jug of chocolate milk in the lobby of his apartment building; this was found by Savannahe, an eight-year old girl who was attracted to flavored dairy. Robbie was the first of one hundred eighty-three suicides over the coming decades who would in some way reference a drumbeat or similar in a suicide note, the hearing of the drumbeat believed to be associated with the REACH project, although many would deny that there was a drumbeat or that, even if there was, that it was associated with the REACH project; and indeed, many would say that the erection of the REACH structure in fact diminished previous unpleasant auditory experiences and made the city a more quiet, harmonious place to live; and in any event, one hundred eighty-three suicides over decades was not statistically significant in a city in which thousands of suicides occurred annually; and, in fact, the number of suicides per capita diminished during all the years in question.
Each day that winter, hundreds of trucks deposited construction materials at the base of the REACH site. Dozens of giant cranes operated in tandem, pulling beams and towers high into the sky, beyond sight even, and apparently connecting to a pulley system that drew the materials up even higher.
A woman named Satire Norway, aged 37, with black hair and pale skin, moved into a two-bedroom loft in Thermopolis, home of our story. She walked around her loft nude at night with the lights on and the blinds open, but no one ever noticed, not even the blind man who lived next door and who accidentally entered her loft one evening after taking garbage to the garbage chute.
In winter and spring, parents picked their children up from school and drove them by the REACH site, where they collectively wondered at the scope of the project. Some families began forming lines to celebrate the construction workers who left their shifts at five p.m., making way for the evening shift. Other families set up grills and tables that were used to feed the workers elk meat and cottage cheese. One family announced that they hoped their daughter would grow up to marry a REACH construction worker. Many children born that year were named REACH. Indeed, many people involved in the passionate cries of lovemaking exclaimed, just before ecstasy, “REACH! REACH!” and so on.
Satire Norway began importing European sports cars, not otherwise available in the United States, such as the BMW 11 series, complete with a driver’s side toilet and warm-water bidet, to her lot in Thermopolis. In her first quarter of business, she sold fifteen cars for a total of fifteen million dollars, half of which was profit. She paid her mortgage, closed her car business, and opened an indoor miniature plant-washing business for wealthy homeowners. The plant-washing equipment (the equipment itself was miniature, and the plants she cleaned were also miniature) she purchased was both expensive and proprietary, and on account of these high entry costs, Norway effectively had a monopoly on high-end miniature indoor plant-washing within the region. While washing miniature plants she would replace her customers’ expensive jewelry with high-end fakes. Her most prized theft was that of a ruby the size of a basketball.
By Easter of 2023, the skyscraper cast a shadow over the city from Dumpling Square to Geronimo Park. The Shade Gang, a local health group, marched twice a day the length of the shade, to bring awareness to blood cancers. The movements of their marches were said to be inspired by the sound of a drumbeat they heard, although, under prolonged torture, one of the members confessed he had not, in fact, heard the drumbeat (he also confessed he had no mother, biological or otherwise, which cast doubt on his other numerous confessions). No one in the Shade Gang had ever worn a tee-shirt, hat, belt, or scarf of any kind; indeed, such behavior was grounds for exclusion from the philanthropical society.
By May of 2023, REACH reached the ten-thousand-foot mark. A modest celebration of fireworks, free Mexican food, and fluorescent castrated clowns dancing in blacklight was held in the public square. The economy of Thermopolis, boosted by the thousands of high-end blue-collar jobs associated with REACH, together with an overflow of tourist dollars, buzzed.
Soon the base of the REACH structure was expanded to two city blocks, then four. A prestigious firm named EARTHWORKS, whose employees could be identified by their black and yellow balmoral boots, moved their entire central office from Manhattan to Thermopolis in support of the construction. It is unknown what structures were erased to make room for the expanding base of the massive edifice. Pursuant to a corporate bylaw, EARTHWORKS’ employees were prohibited from having sexual relations (even imaginary ones) with anyone in the Shade Gang.
In a poll conducted on the first day of school in fall of 2023, the majority of children at Wildron Elementary in Thermopolis checked a box indicating they believed the building to be purple in color. Most adults queried the same day, however, said the structure looked blue or red, depending upon the angle of the sun. The designer of the building, an eccentric woman named Clara Seddletter, who carried with her a mannequin wearing a cloak and roller skates (Seddletter herself wore the same outfit, and had twice avoided assassination by using the dummy as a prop), refused to say what color she had intended for the building. But her comfortable smirk when asked suggested she had intended this confusion.
There were only three children at Wildron Elementary on the first day of school in fall of 2023. Thousands of children attended Idrite Elementary across the street, but Wildron was extremely unpopular, and no one could say exactly why. Perhaps it had to do with the school requiring students to carry a warmed mason jar of their own blood with them to school, in case of a school shooting.
Satire Norway was the first person to purchase a residence within the REACH structure. Her large condominium was located on the one-thousandth floor, although her arrangement with the HOA allowed her the option every six months to move to the highest then-existing floor in the building. Satire sold her loft, her miniature plant-washing business (the business itself was large), her stolen jewelry, paid off the condominium, and began fostering Great Pyrenees in her apartment, in violation of her lease. Every morning at four a.m., she would descend the elevator one thousand floors with her dogs, the descent lasting each time ten minutes exactly. She repeated this exercise four times per day; by day-end her black clothing would be covered in white hair, which she sold on the internet for tens of thousands of dollars.
Numerous news stories published in 2023 make it clear that by this point in history, the sound of a drumbeat, associated with the REACH project, was audible to nearly half the citizens of Thermopolis. Some hearers believed that some facet or feature of the construction itself caused the drumbeat, said to be a repeating beat of tap-tap-tap-THUD, the three taps said to be light snare drum sounds, and the THUD said to be either a timpani or a base drum sound. Other hearers believed that the drumbeat was manufactured by the construction companies to encourage their crews to work more efficiently. Other hearers worried that the drumbeat was the cry of the earth itself being crushed under the weight and size of the ever-growing REACH structure. However, approximately half the citizens of Thermopolis heard no drumbeat, or if they heard a sound that seemed to be associated with the REACH worksite, they reported the sound to be pleasurable, or associated with removing previous, less pleasurable sounds from their lives. Many moderate, reasonable persons worried that the drumbeat issue had been politicized by both sides of the debate. One thing was certain—everyone either heard or did not hear the drumbeat.
By 2024, nearly all the engineering, architecture, and business internship placements at the state’s flagship university were located at the REACH site. All local, state, and national politicians in the state supported the REACH project, which not only now employed more than fifty percent of the state, but which had created an offshoot charitable hospital for the free treatment of all blood cancers. On a first come, first-serve basis, treatment at the hospital for any form of blood cancer was completely free. This was not a small hospital; this hospital had 1,000 inpatient beds, all full. Scientists from around the world flocked to Thermopolis to stage related research projects. Not all of these scientists were hairless.
In late 2024, a mob of drumbeat hearers, angry at being mocked by non-drumbeat hearers, slaughtered all the livestock that had previously roamed free in Thermopolis. The entrails of the slaughtered animals were rubbed on the windows and doors of the cars, homes, and other properties owned by the non-drumbeat hearers. The non-drumbeat hearers retaliated by collectively urinating in the river that ran through the center of the city. This collective action had the effect of rendering extinct two species of fish that were prized by the drumbeat-hearing community on account of their succulent flesh, said to taste like cantaloupe with a squirt of citrus and brown mustard, although many who prized the fish were, of course, non-drumbeat hearers. No one bothered making the point that humans were descended from fish and that human meat itself tasted like cantaloupe with a squirt of citrus and brown mustard, for indeed such information was not known to the human race at this time.
Satire Norway did not hear the drumbeat but allowed the possibility that others did, or that they believed they did. She believed the drumbeat was true, but not factual, in the sense that many people apparently had a psychological need to understand the REACH project as an important, historical, and possible world-saving undertaking, but that the drumbeat could not be replicated using scientific methods (if you tried to record the sound, nothing was captured). Around this time, Siamese Gentry, Norway’s girlfriend, moved into Norway’s condominium at REACH. Gentry never accompanied Norway on the elevator rides with the dogs; instead, she fashioned lightweight aluminum lutes (the lutes were not musical instruments, but rakes used to flatten wet cement during installation).
A few days later, Norway and Gentry were covered from head to toe in bruises, but the bruises originated from sources that pre-existed their co-habitation relationship.
In 2025, two families reported that the drumbeat sound associated with REACH had cured their twelve sons of autism (all twelve children (six in each family) were fathered by the same man, Yves Krenshaw, who lived in Los Angeles, where his profession was to father (from a biological standpoint) autistic children, such children often being prized or preferred on account of their ability to solve mathematical puzzles); this led to litigation where the autism cure deprived the twelve children of their special mathematical abilities (the case is still in litigation, to this day). One middle-aged stockbroker reported “abandoning a toxic and previously unbreakable pattern of self-abuse, thanks to the drumbeat, which interfered with my normal dysfunctional rhythms.” Thousands of people moved away from Thermopolis, pointing to the drumbeat as the primary reason for the move. But even more moved to Thermopolis, attracted by the drumbeat, or the strong economy, or a growing sense of purpose among citizens of Thermopolis, or all of these.
Time magazine, which began weekly national print circulation again in 2025, before going out of business again in 2026, ran a cover story called “Thermopolis, Athens Reborn?” in September of 2025. No living person viewed this statement as hyperbole, for indeed Thermopolis had become somewhat of a mix of the best and most vibrant parts of Manhattan, Paris, Tokyo, ancient Rome, ancient Athens, and Yorktown, Virginia.
Each year, between zero to three suicides occurred in which a suicide note referenced the drumbeat. Some of these suicides were with rope, some with pills, and some with handguns or exhaust pipes. Two suicides in 2026 occurred when residents of REACH jumped to their deaths from the fifteen-hundredth floor, leaving only what appeared to be boysenberry jam on the sidewalk, their bones completely liquified on impact. One brave reporter wrote that these were not “true suicides,” because the two decedents seemed, based on the testimony of family members, to be happy just before jumping to their deaths. This reporter was immediately snubbed, shamed, stymied, shunned, and otherwise canceled, although the dark human spread on the sidewalk would indeed be scraped up by an ambitious grocer and sold as boysenberry jam; the brave reporter would resurface a few years later as a popular stand-up comedian for early dementia patients.
Satire Norway trained her dogs to growl at anyone who tried to enter the elevator while it was occupied by her. This gave her fifteen quiet minutes per ascent or descent (she now lived on the fifteen-hundredth floor within REACH) to make her social media videos, which were increasingly popular worldwide. The videos featured foster Great Pyrenees baking, vacuuming, cleaning the toilets, and performing other domestic tasks. The videos were of poor quality and all obviously digitally manufactured by Norway on her smartphone but nonetheless were extremely popular and lucrative.
In 2027, Horace A.x. Smith, whose name at birth was A. Horace x. Smith, the president of the state’s flagship university, said, “the fulfillment of all human desires, dreams, and potentials can be found within the REACH project.” A state-funded audit, that year, proved that Smith’s statements were true. As the project had grown in size and scope, so, too had its needs. The project employed fourteen world-class pianists, seventeen Parisian pastry chefs (formerly Parisian, now of Thermopolis), three different Swiss watchmakers (formerly Swiss), two monogamy coaches, twelve butlers, eighteen green grocers, and so on. Such was the size of the workforce of REACH that the needs of the workforce were said to be as varied as the human experience itself. Masturbation was strictly forbidden within the structure; moreover, it was a felony for anyone within REACH to reference use by great apes of tools for self-pleasure.
The language of Thermopolis was said to have changed in the ten years between 2021 and 2031. Thousands of public statements made in 2021 and 2031 were compared and contrasted. 81% of statements in 2031 were classified as optimistic in nature, as opposed to only 14% in 2021. Not only had statements become more optimistic, but they had become more mathematical in nature. Linguist Janis Grey noted in an academic journal in 2031 that “many expressions, formerly questions, were now formed as declarative statements.” Footnote 344 of Professor Grey’s article referenced the following examples:
The purpose of my planetary existence is to support the REACH project with all my heart and mind, in order that my mind will be clear, so that because I have a clear mind my body will be clear of smut also.
I told my dear husband on our wedding night (which we call Noces as an inside reference, of which a thing!) that I wanted to have at least ten children to ensure that there might be a sufficient growing population of young people to further the REACH project, such that the project might continue, because of the need for the project to continue to grow, so that it might grow, in order to achieve.
Norway and Gentry did not speak in this manner because their spoken language was Esperanto, which was structurally sound and resistant to such cultural change.
On a clear day, standing at any point within one hundred miles of Thermopolis, a person looking into the sky could see REACH itself or if not, a reflection of the sun from REACH. The Western Cities Observer, August 11, 2032, asked five adults to describe the project in one word:
Earthworks Enormous Bridgelike Spidery Psychotic
It was Sandy Sergebrooke who had been quoted in the paper as summarizing the project as “psychotic.” No longer with the paper, Sergebrooke functioned as a third-grade schoolteacher for children of left-handed proctologists, and had recently married another former reporter, now a popular stand-up comedian for early dementia patients. Two years earlier, in 2030, still with the paper, Sergebrook had ridden an elevator to the 100,000-foot level within REACH. “At the 100,000-foot mark, I could no longer see in color, everything was reduced to greys and whites and blacks.” Now, two years later, Sergebrooke elaborated that it was:
“Psychotic to construct REACH in face of the knowledge that the millions of people who worked and lived or would work and live in the structure would not be able to see in visible color. I don’t care if REACH saves all women, children, and men, I don’t care if our banks are full of goldcoin and our waters as fresh as the original oceans, it is against nature to abandon visible color.”
In addition to the loss of visible color and the suicides referencing a drumbeat, there were other anomalies associated with the REACH project. For reasons that were hard to explain, for example, no women in their twenties worked in or lived in REACH, no man in the building whose parents were divorced lived past age fifty, and no one who had ever been to Canada lived in REACH, although every other age demographic for both genders had tens of thousands of representatives. Children born to REACH parents had an abnormally high rate of heart disease, but also an abnormally high resistance to airborne viruses. All of the suicides were (or would be) single men aged twenty-seven (one suicide was aged only twenty-six but his birth certificate had been doctored to make it appear that he was aged twenty-seven at death (this had apparently been done to give him better chances of playing elite-level croquet as a teen)). And most notably perhaps, those directly associated with the REACH project, when asked on a survey to rate on a scale of 1 to 10 their belief that following authority would lead to positive social results, scored an 8.5 on average (denominator sufficiently large), whereas those indirectly related to the project scored 6.5, and those unaffiliated with the project scored only 2.
Of course, no one could agree on the meaning of these aberrations. With respect to the phenomenon in which at a certain height within the REACH structure humans would be unable to see the normal colors within the visible light spectrum, many pointed out that Sergebrooke had merely identified in 2030 what had been predicted and experienced all along. In that sense, Sergebrooke was seen as politicizing well-known facts and norms. Society attempted to cancel Sergebrooke but her elementary school, Wildron Elementary, held fast and did not terminate her employment. Sergebrooke’s partner was of immense support at this time.
In 2033, a competing construction project named BLAST-OFF took shape. For a while, it grew at double the pace of the REACH building. Some associated with REACH worried that they had backed the wrong horse. However, the founders of BLAST OFF soon ran out of money, declared bankruptcy, and the project was abandoned. This failure reinforced the zeal of those who supported REACH. Debtors of the BLAST OFF project rounded up everyone associated with BLAST OFF and force fed them chili until they died; one decedent had such efficient diarrhea that he lived eleven months under such forcefeeding before dying of an unrelated cancer. The documentary about his life and death, “Red River,” was not nominated for an Academy Award.
In 2033, the REACH project attempted to evict Norway because her fostering of Great Pyrenees in the REACH building was an ongoing violation of the lease. Moreover, the building, ever ascending, was not equipped with sufficient elevators, and her constant use of one elevator to the exclusion of other residents was a sore spot (use of the elevators had been rationed to once per person per day but many people went days between elevator rides). In response, Siamese Gentry threatened to stop supplying REACH with her newly patented aluminum lute that had become invaluable in the cement-laying aspects of the REACH construction project; the REACH HOA quickly backed off. As thanks, Satire Norway agreed to wed Siamese Gentry, whose marriage proposals had been rejected already two dozen times by Norway.
Following the wedding, Norway was made the official public face of the REACH project. In her first assignment, she attended the board meeting for the affiliated blood cancer hospital, and demanded that the hospital be expanded every third year going forward (for three cycles) to double its size from the previous three-year period. No one could tell what she said because she spoke in Esperanto. In any event, blood cancer had been eliminated from the face of the earth (only to be replaced by an even more insidious “atomic cancer”); the hospital was now empty of patients and used instead to store collectible steel cans.
By the year 2100, every person referenced above had died. Those persons whose deaths were referenced above remained deceased, in the year 2100, and in every year thereafter, until the extinction of the sun itself. Some deaths had been mourned a great deal, some a very little.
In the year 2100, REACH was ongoing, said to be within months of touching the moon. It continued to expand, not as fast as before, but still considerably fast. New elevator shafts were added which allowed residents to descend and ascend, each, twice per day (assuming they were current on their HOA dues, including those related to body hair). An HOA Bylaw had been passed to once and for all eliminate the fostering of dogs in the building. On the other hand, many windows in the building randomly exploded (always inwards) under the tremendous weight of the structure, blasting glass shards and metal frames like grenades into residents, killing them immediately like a mosquito hitting the windshield of a semi-tractor-trailer traveling at the speed of light. But there was little doubt that the benefits of the REACH project outweighed the risks, at least if you asked supporters of REACH. Those who did not support REACH could of course enumerate grounds for ceasing construction of REACH. One philosopher-poet claimed that it was this tension between the drumbeat hearers and the non-drumbeat-hearers that, in fact, propelled the project forward, and supported its vast mass. However, no one heard her proclamation and she died of a massive heart attack (all four chambers clogged then exploded!) before she could write down her claim. This philosopher-poet, in any event, was not speaking of REACH specifically, but of large societal projects generally, as indeed the philosopher-poet lived in Estonia and was completely unfamiliar with REACH. Nonetheless her statement was possibly the most correct thing ever said about REACH.
In the year 2101, the earth underneath REACH began to rumble greatly. Tremendous shocks rippled across the earth daily, hourly, in fact, always. The people of Thermopolis lived in great fear. Many prophets and spokespersons for mute prophets said the end of humankind was near and the Lord would come again. Scientists said the sun was running out of gas. Military women and men said the United States needed to respond by launching thousands of nuclear warheads to destroy the Arab world. Pagans masturbated constantly (except masturbation was forbidden within the REACH project itself). The REACH project itself, said to be within days of touching the moon, quaked and shook, causing a terrible screeching sound to seep forth across the land. Many said the sound was so awful and distinct it felt like an electrified razor wire was being pulled through their ear canals. So great was the screech that many zoo animals committed suicide and many human newborns and infants were shipped via air carriers to Canada and Japan with bleeding ears.
Soon, however, the source of the noise, commotion, and earth-shaking was discovered. The REACH architects had made a slight mathematical miscalculation. Instead of touching the moon, the REACH tower had instead been built into outerspace, several miles to the side of the moon, and then into an extremely large and gradual circle (nearly touching Mars), ending up not at the moon but at the South Pole on earth. Like a giant phallus probing for release, the REACH project deployed powerful drills and explosives to pound through the Pole’s ice layer, into the core of the earth, through the base rock, across the smoldering ore and the oceans, until the phallus reached just beneath the foundation of the REACH tower, ready to tickle it into complete eruption and destruction.
Fortunately, however, the miscalculation was identified, and the drilling and explosions were stopped just before the entire tower toppled to the ground. The project was saved! Apologies and explanations were issued, and the people exclaimed their great relief.
END