Landscape with Invisible Hand

A drive-in movie theater is showing a film in which two teenagers are kissing in a car on Lover’s Lane while an alien watches from the bushes. When the alien lunges at the car, the audience gasps. The movie is dissimilar to how the actual alien invasion occurred.

The vuvv, an alien species that has invaded Earth, live in floating houses with rendering sails that emit a constant low light, so the town is never in darkness. Adam Costello and Chloe Marsh are watching the rippling sails, which Adam sweetly compares to Chole’s hair, although he hates her. Their interaction is being watched by vuvv customers.

Adam hasn’t been to the vuvv’s first landing site, which was at Wrigley Field; however, he has seen the monument on a hologram. The vuvv started watching Earth in the 1940s. They aren’t humanoid beings: “They looked more like granite coffee tables: squat, wide, and rocky” (5). The vuvv came in peace, offering to end work and cure diseases, and they invited humans to join their “Interspecies Co-Prosperity Alliance” (6). Now, a large floating luxury condominium floats over the initial landing site, blocking the sun from hitting the glass monument erected in the vuvv’s honor.