The Nehalem Pyramid

At first the pyramid over Nehalem was a little black chip in the sky. It had probably been there for weeks before anyone noticed, but once it was spotted it was only a matter of hours before everyone in the town knew about it. Which isn’t saying so much— only two hundred some people live in Nehalem. And, just being a speck floating up in the sky, it was forgotten before long, around the time the local paper ran their story on it.

“Is it getting bigger?”, people started asking a few days later, necks craned, squinting into the sky. Someone in town with a telescope made a time-lapse of it, and indeed it was gradually getting bigger. The local paper wrote a follow-up to their earlier story, which included the time-lapse video. The story quickly went viral. Journalists and tourists and ufologists started flooding into the town.

The pyramid got bigger over the summer and took on a definite shape to the naked eye. By September it was big enough that for two hours at midday the town was wholly in its shadow. The population of Nehalem grew along with the pyramid. People came from all over the world to see the it, this impossible thing. All these people came with their money in hand, and a lot of folks in Nehalem—not a wealthy town by any means—found themselves suddenly flush with cash. The military also came to town, with their scientists, to understand the pyramid and mitigate the risk it might pose, but the scientists managed only to learn that the pyramid was made of iron and the military, with no understanding of the pyramid, had no plausible means of mitigating anything.

For lack of any better idea, the town was evacuated. No one was allowed within a mile of it. There was a lot of grumbling about it, but only few people ignored the order to stay out, a group of tourists from California, and they all got caught and spent the night in jail. For a month the pyramid didn’t grow, didn’t do anything. A rich Silicon Valley venture capitalist, who had taken a keen interest in the pyramid and was used to bulldozing with money anything in his way, bankrolled a lawsuit against the government to get the ban lifted, and in mid-October it was.

People came flooding back into Nehalem, eager to have what they had been denied. There was some worry that the pyramid would start growing again with all the people returning, like one had something to do with the other, but the pyramid went on floating there as it had since the start of Autumn.

For the remainder of October the skies stayed clear, but the rain had to come eventually, and when it did the cloud cover meant no one could see the pyramid anymore. Sometimes a dark square could be seen through the clouds and remind the townsfolk the pyramid was still there. The tourists had left—taking their cash with them—and the military had become such a fixture that they went unseen. Everyday life in Nehalem resumed.