There was the monster, standing on a hill in the distance, its blades slicing through the air, its singular eye blinking at her. Blink, blink, blink. Katie knew what was coming. The car she was traveling in with her husband continued west on the I-580 freeway, through a low mountain pass in the Diablo Range of Northern California. They went around a curve in the road and now there was an entire row of monsters, some rotating faster than others, all blinking in unison, watching them.
“I hate those things,” said Katie, referring to the wind turbines that stood on each side of the road.
“I know, honey,” said Blake. “This is just a temporary solution, you know.”
The temporary solution was the job Blake, a qualified engineer, had got doing maintenance work on the wind turbines. The job required leaving Los Angeles and moving more than three hundred miles north, but it’s not like they had another option. Blake had lost his job in the recession, and then they’d lost their home. This was their opportunity to start again.
“It’s the best thing for all three of us,” said Blake, and he reached over and touched Katie’s tummy – the tummy where their baby lived. Their baby. Katie put her hand over Blake’s and smiled. She knew he was going to be a great father. “And as soon as the economy recovers, we can move back to LA,” he said.
They got off the freeway and drove along a dark road, past another row of blinking wind turbines, to their new home. Katie had only seen photographs of the house and she was surprised by how big it was.
“It’s enormous,” she said. “Can we really afford this? I thought you said your new job doesn’t pay very much.”
“It doesn’t, but the houses up here are incredibly cheap,” he said. “I guess we’re not in LA anymore!”
Katie tried to adapt to her new life, but she found it difficult. “The people here are strange,” she told her husband a few days later. “They all stare at me, like I’m an impostor.”
“They stare at you because you’re beautiful,” said Blake, and hugged her. “You’ll soon make new friends.”
“And this house… It’s great,” she said, not wanting to seem ungrateful. “But it’s full of someone else’s possessions.”
“Oh yeah, the agent said the previous couple left in a hurry. He said we can keep what we want and donate everything else.”
Katie forced a smile. She didn’t want to tell Blake what she hated most about living there, which was the presence of the wind turbines. She could hear them at night, the whoosh of their blades, and she could see their blinking lights, illuminating the entire house. She knew she was being irrational, that they were just machines, but they seemed alive, full of sinister intent.
A few days later, she was collecting the previous couple’s possessions for donation when a woman called Trudy came to the door.
“Please can you help me?” said Trudy. “I’m looking for my sister. She and her husband used to live in this house, but they’ve been missing for months and nobody will help me. Not the neighbours. Not the police.”
Katie was shocked to hear that the couple was missing. She invited Trudy inside and helped her search through their possessions for any clue to their disappearance.
When she told Blake about the visit, he was as concerned as she was. He went to the local police station to ask about the couple, and when the police told him the same thing that they’d told Trudy, that they couldn’t help him, he promised to talk to his brother, who was a police officer in Los Angeles. But the next day, everything changed. He changed. When he came home from work, he seemed cold and distant, and that night, Katie woke up to find him standing at the window, staring outside.
“What’s wrong, honey?” asked Katie. He turned around and for a moment, she thought she saw a light in his forehead. It blinked and was gone. No, she must have imagined it.
“Nothing’s wrong,” said Blake. “Everything’s fine. I’m happy here. You’ll be happy here too. You and the baby.”
“No, no, no. I’m not happy here,” said Katie. “I want to leave. I hate everything. This house. This community. And those horrible wind turbines… That sound. Those lights.”
As she spoke, the sound got louder. The blinking lights got brighter. And now the room was full of the whooshing and the blinking, and Katie couldn’t speak anymore. She couldn’t move. And she was inside the light and the sound, inside that sinister intent that was full of intelligence, an alien intelligence that was telling her that she was trapped, that this community was a laboratory, and that she’d better conform, or she’d end up like the missing couple.
Katie felt a pain in her forehead, the insertion of a chip that would remind her to conform, and punish her if she didn’t. And when Trudy came to visit again, Katie told her she didn’t know anything about the missing couple and closed the door on her face. She had to conform. She had no other option. She had the baby to think of now.