NOT YOUR PARENTS MOUNT WILSON

 

The real Hooker dome is nine stories of white steel — formidable enough on its own, enough to make first-time visitors stop dead when they crest the ridge on Angeles Crest Highway. But the thing that came back after the Enemy got hold of it wasn't nine stories. It was over forty: a tower that didn't belong to anything humans had built, hunched over the ridgeline like it had outgrown its own sky.

Worse, it had moved. Where the dome once sat a comfortable half mile from the Cosmic Cafe, visitors now find it practically on top of them — twenty yards, maybe less, between a cup of coffee and something that shouldn't have been able to close that distance without anyone noticing it happen. From the cafe deck, from the switchbacks below on Angeles Crest, it doesn't read as an observatory anymore. It reads as a lighthouse — a baleful one, built to call something home instead of guiding anyone safely in. And all of this sinister enhancement is found in Terra Firma out now!