There is a saying among those who know about such things. It always happens in Central Park, even when it’s not Central Park yet. Not that this line of wisdom could be known at the time by those who were there to witness it.

For some people, the moment the world changed was just the best time to do your morning exercise in Central Park. When the first ray of the late spring sun starts getting through the skyline, and the shadows recede. Before people start flocking to the park, no longer afraid of the ill-deserved reputation of the dark nights of former decades, eager to catch some greenery before their morning commute to high-rises and their offices, a day of work like every other day.

It might cost a shit-ton of money to live in Manhattan proper, but that’s what makes it worth it. Or so Elsabe Opperman thought, as she made her way across the near-desert alleys of the park on her ritual morning jog. The slow, steady rhythm of feet hitting the asphalted alleys, amidst the curated greenery. Not quite enough to think you are in the wilds, but enough to be outside of NYC, even for just a moment.

What didn’t conform to the ritual of a morning jog was loud yelling coming up from ahead. For a fraction of a second, she hesitated. New York might have been cleaned up a lot in the recent decades, but that did not mean it was safe all the time. Maybe it was undeserved, but Central Park kept its reputation for a reason. Pretty much like dark roads in the woods at night had, in ancient times.

But the yells didn’t seem panicky. More… surprised? The cause of the commotion was seemingly just ahead. As she negotiated the turn into Skater’s Circle, she slowed and came to a stop, staring at the incredible sight.

Upright in the middle of the large asphalted surface, there was a circle of molten lava – or metal?

At least, it was looking that way. A yellow-white waxy glowing fluid that absolutely looked like some kind of molten steel poured out of an invisible point up there and seemed to slowly flow across some invisible mold, tracing a huge arc and slowly filling it with matter that lost its color, darkening as it descended to rejoin toward the asphalt.

She whipped out her phone and aimed it at the spectacle, starting to stab icons to record and stream the view.

All around her, people arriving at the place held their own, doing the same.

Matthys Opperman was starting to get warmed up and oiled up with coffee. He’d been at the office early, to finish rehearsing the morning’s presentation at 9 am. It wasn’t a really important project, but one of the bigwigs from Seattle was there, and he was going to attend the meeting for some cost-based reason, and thus, everything needed to be perfect. So sayeth his direct boss. Matthys was convinced said bigwig would still be half confused from the jet lag between the coasts at that unseemly hour, but you didn’t say that when your own manager told you to “make it so”.

So, early morning presentation last touch-ups and rehearsal, bloating an already enormous file into higher sizes. The aging laptop replacement couldn't come faster.

Up until his personal phone started vibrating. Matthys pulled it out, and saw the picture and name, and groaned before stabbing the green icon.

“Sis? Really? At this hour?”

“Fuck me sideways, bro! You need to see this!”

“What? You walked again in a homeless’ gigantic dump? I’m not interested in scatological park adventures…”

“No. That’s huge. Honking huge. Sending stream!”

Opperman sighed before looking at the phone. When she spoke like that, it was hard to reconcile the image with the up-and-climbing management consultant. Then, he frowned. Then, he turned on the speakerphone before asking his sister what the fuck was going on?

“Don’t know! It’s like a mold pouring. I don’t know if the stream is getting it all. Do you see the sign?”

“What sign?”

“There’s… a kind of neon sign above it. Like a half-transparent view? Wait, let me… fuck, it does not render on the phone. It’s not there!”

“What are you talking about. Slow down. Where are you?”

“Central Park, you dummy. And there’s this metal pour right in the middle.”

“What’s that about a sign? This looks like a badly mixed trailer for a music video, what are you doing?”

“Fuck. There are probably already streams all over the place, everyone’s recording. You can probably get it on the Internet. You can probably even see me in some of those. Check it if you don’t trust your little sister.”

“It’s not that I don’t trust you, it’s that you are making even less sense than usual. You’re not even answering my questions.”

“Go watch! I’m going online! Call you back!”

She hanged up and quickly swiped to the streaming options, before adding quickly her own crispy title. The only thing that really bothered her was that the kind-of-sign didn’t seem to record. Hallucinations? Well, at least the circle was a shared hallucination, given how many people were aiming their phones at it.

Transit: Earth 139 - Domesbor

Integrity: 59%

Building, please wait

Stability: 6%

“So, what’s up Mat?”

Matthys waved down his colleague as he watched the first stream titled #CentralParkAliens on his laptop.

“Is that a trailer for a new movie?”

“No.”

He pointed out to the side of the stream he was currently watching, which had admittedly better quality than his sister’s phone one.

“That’s my sister there. The mauve tracksuit is impossible to miss.”

“Yee… chhhh?”

“Brought it instantly when her then-current boyfriend remarked it was awful-looking. That was the tail end of that relationship – I think they separated less than two weeks later. Low score, he lasted five months only too. She hasn't started hunting for a replacement yet.”

“What’s that glowing wax circle, though? An art demonstration?”

“No idea. She notified me something funny was happening in Central Park, and apparently, it does.”

“This goes way beyond the usual funny for New York, though,” Roger noted.

“You’re telling me,” Matthys replied.

“Don’t you have a presentation to make?” Roger asked, immediately focused back on mundane matters.

Matthys looked quickly around, checking if Roger had spotted someone headed their way, but it seemed not. Not enough people yet.

“It’s been done for days. Unless I want to add a stupid animation at the last moment, it’s just re-reading it until my fingers stop itching for last-minute fixes,” Matthys replied, refocusing on the streaming window on his laptop.

“Pour looks like it’s over.”

“It seems like it’s cooling. You’re starting to see some details, like sculptures. Hey, are those people stupid, or what?” he exclaimed, as people started moving toward the very metallic-looking hoop.

He noted that the thing now really looked like an art demonstration. An extremely large circle covered in what, from the streamer’s distance, looked like sculpted animal heads.

“Can’t beat the primate curiosity. We’re monkeys, it’s weird, we want to check it up close,” Roger said.

Matthys laughed, “I got that reference. Don’t forget Kubrick’s been dead for years.”

“I’m pretty certain they’re going to start fondling this like it’s a bunch of prehistoric cavemen.”

“Well, it IS morning joggers in Central Park. Primitive might be an appropriate term, except maybe for my sister… wait, what’s going on.”

Matthys refocused on the stream.

“What’s that sparking stuff in the middle?” Roger asked.

Elsabe slowly approached the darkening metal hoop, holding her phone up to make sure she caught everything. There were tinny ping sounds, like cooling metal, reassuring her that the whole process – whatever it had been for – was now complete. But the circle didn't even radiate heat up close, as something this size fresh out of a forge should. While a lot of morning joggers were keeping their distance, many were already trying to get the best angle on the fantastic decoration that came out of the invisible mold. The metal circle was engraved in a plethora of heads, all kinds of animals, mundane and fantastic. Whoever – whatever – made this was making art. She’d seen worse in many galleries on Manhattan. She moved, like a handful of witnesses, eager to catch close-ups of the artwork.

The only thing the damnably unrecordable window above the thing lacked was a progression bar, she thought briefly, watching the second set of numbers reach one hundred percent.

Transit: Earth 139 - Domesbor

Integrity: 100%

Connecting, please wait

Stability: 100%

Sparks started to blink in existence in the middle of the circle, as small, quiet fireworks were going on. For a second Elsabe recoiled as the sparks multiplied, in an avalanche of lights, before everything exploded around her.

Nikolas Hyde half-walked, half-jogged toward the reported disturbance location. NYPD central had roused him and a handful of morning patrol officers because nine-one-one had started getting calls reporting a significant disturbance in Skater’s Circle in Central Park, but nothing apparently made sense to the responders. So he was directed to check the thing.

He had no idea what it was about, but when he found himself dodging screaming morning joggers running away from the location, he suspected it was indeed a serious problem, and that prompted him to speed up.

But the sight that greeted him was not the kind of problem he’d anticipated. A gigantic metal circle, easily twenty feet tall, filled with a kind of glowing nearly-translucent membrane, taut and vibrating like a drum, standing in the middle of Central Park was definitively not what a cop would expect instead of some random mugging or a homeless crazy attacking passerby.

What he immediately noticed after the metal loop was that there were people strewn on the ground around it.

No, he realized after a second. There were parts of people strewn on the asphalt all around the Gate. Blood was already pooling all over the area from what looked like sliced limbs and other parts, still clothed. Even the worst car crashes in the city couldn’t compare.

He managed to hold onto his morning donuts, but only barely. Then, he thumbed his radio and started to call every officer and reinforcement possible, while watching the placid light-filled circle.

“What the fuckery?” Dangelo Walls asked, rhetorically. No one was around to answer anyway.

The fuckery in question was one of the many streams pouring out on his browser. Dangelo had woken up, dragged himself out of bed onto his wheelchair, started the complex construction that made breakfast almost entirely automatically before moving to his “office”.

For someone with a withered non-functional leg from childhood, working from home made sense. He’d snagged a job at a progressive bank that liked having its own development team rather than an endless string of contractors. And if it involved “agile” work, it meant you dropped what you had been working on every three weeks to switch to the newer business spec, not doing gymnastics. He could work from anywhere, and his boss only cared about the metrics of code produced and pushed into actual use.

But before work called, he had lots of time to check up on the day’s news, and that one day promised to be all about #CentralPark stuff.

Digging among the streams and videos had yielded information. The whole thing seemed to have started a bit over half an hour ago only. Apparently, something had appeared out of nowhere in Manhattan Central Park just over the Hudson from his home, some people were dead, and the NYPD was running amok like headless chickens, as expected.

Or something like that.

From his distant perspective, Dangelo thought the whole thing looked like the old syndicated series and movies of Stargate. Metal circle, check. Lighted surface, check. So, who cared if the circle looked more like a fantasy mesh of monster heads and less like a sci-fi futuristic Egyptian-themed device, and the surface more like a non-blinding neon light disc that vibrated like a badly-made CGI instead of water. Metal circle, meniscus, ramp, Stargate. The alien parasites would come out later.

Or not. Hopefully, not.

“Central, this is Hyde.”

“Go ahead.”

“Confirm situation in Central Park. We have… a number of dead people there. Not enough intact bodies to hazard a count. Send everyone you can, and mobilize the adjacent area.”

“Please repeat?” the voice of the central dispatcher replied.

“We have a number of casualties in Central Park, Skater’s Circle. Along with an… anomalous device that probably caused them. I need enough to confine the area. The BDU. And everything you can get for forensic.”

Nikolas Hyde gulped before continuing.

“I think some of those will be very hard to identify.”

“I am calling more units.”

“If they’re not involved in life-and-death, send them in. Now.”

He contemplated the upright metal circle, swallowed again before adding, “Call State and Federal. I don’t think this is simple. It’s… more like… aliens have landed than someone blowing a bomb.”

There was a small delay before the voice of the dispatcher came back.

“Are you okay?”

“No. No, I’m not. But we need a perimeter, and immediately.”

He then laughed half-hysterically, spotting more people coming back and starting to record on their phones again.

“If you don’t believe me, you can probably watch me on the Internet live.”

He waved at the handful of incoming officers as he hung the radio back on his belt.

“Any got something to mark the scene? Tape?”

One of the officers fished out a yellow roll.

“Get borders up. And if you can find any rod or something to plant to mark those borders, do so.”

Matthys Opperman had given up stabbing his phone repeatedly trying to call his sister.

The call immediately went to voice messaging, telling him that his sister’s phone was no longer available to connect to. That, alone, should have been enough to tell him what he needed to know but refused to accept.

He finally came out of his office chair, which rolled out of the way, grabbed his jacket, and headed toward the lifts. Roger Watmore’s call for calm went on deaf ears, and the doors closed on his frantic yells, and the looks of the rest of the office’s workers present at that time that were only starting to worry what had just happened.

As Matthys stepped out of the turnstiles on the entrance floor, he looked toward the direction of the park. If you didn’t know better, New York seemed normal. Morning gridlock already in full swing, and the distant sound of sirens.

There might be a bit more sirens than usual, though. He started toward Central Park.

Before 100 yards, he was running faster than any morning jogger would.