The Tallest Building in Chicago

Read any history of architecture that includes skyscrapers, and you will know that the tallest building in Chicago is the Willis Tower. Built for the retailer, Sears, Roebuck and Co., as a headquarters in 1973 and originally named, simply, the Sears Tower, the building was an engineering marvel. At the time of its construction, standing at 1,451 feet tall, the 110-story structure was the tallest building in the world, not just the city. Now, it is merely the third tallest building in the Western Hemisphere. Or, at least, it was, until Friday, May 16th, of this year when something taller than it appeared on the shore of Lake Michigan.

It was a sunny spring day with barely a cloud in the sky, warm enough for shorts and spending time enjoying Grant Park. Those people unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity of Buckingham Fountain must have been enjoying themselves until about 2:24 in the afternoon. It was then that the fountain and the area in the park surrounding it were destroyed beneath the feet of a giant nude blonde girl who appeared suddenly in the park, growing in a matter of seconds to a height that put her at eye-level to the top of the Willis Tower. There were sixty seven people in the vicinity of the fountain who lost their lives as the girl's feet expanded to a length of over 230 feet long, based on measurements of her footprints. The fountain was destroyed as well, but that was a small concern at the time. The people of Chicago had a much bigger problem to deal with.

People panicked. No one could quite comprehend what they were witnessing, a teen girl, barely an adult, loomed above them, her head high enough to call for emergency air-travel restrictions in the city. She seemed just as surprised and panicked by the situation as everyone else did, covering her chest and crotch beneath her arms as if suddenly shocked at being unclothed. The loop cleared out as a stampede of tourists and office workers fled the giantess. Police and emergency workers approached but kept their distance, unsure of what they should or even could do in response to the presence of the enormous young woman. Naturally, it was not long before the president was notified and the federal government got involved. Even then, there was no clear sense of what should be done aside from watching and responding to what the giantess did.

A rumbling sound filled the air, deeper than thunder, which shook the ground like a low-level earthquake. Scientists who had been monitoring seismic activity recorded the vibrations. It was only later on that they figured out what the infra sound was, the girl's voice. After converting the seismic data into a frequency that humans could hear, they were able to understand the first words she had spoken after becoming a giantess, “What's going on? My clothes! What happened to me? Oh God!” From this, all suspicion that she had intended to grow to this size was set aside. It seemed that she was as much of a victim of this transformation as the people she had immediately inadvertently crushed to death. Only, in her case, she still lived, creating an enormous problem for everyone in the city including herself.

Once her situation had sunk in and her initial panic had subsided, she crouched down and created a pair of craters on the beach with her backside as she took a seat on the lake shore. Tears poured from her eyes in rushing waterfalls taller than those in Niagara. Fear, confusion, and maybe even a sense of culpability for the deaths she had unintentionally caused left her disconsolate for the first evening. Shortly after sundown, as she still sat there, pouring tears onto the sand, did they finally identify her. Her parents had recognized her face and called the police. Soon, the confused couple had been brought to the FBI to share what they knew and to seek some way of restoring their child back to normal.

This is what we learned. Her name was Raegan Willis (coincidentally enough). Only days before had she celebrated her 18th birthday. A suburban girl since birth, she had been on a high school trip downtown to the city to celebrate her upcoming graduation when she had been transformed. Most of the deaths that had occurred in the park were to her classmates and teachers. Aside from her inexplicable size, there was nothing extraordinary about her, average grades, unexceptional soccer playing record, and no disciplinary issues. By all accounts, she had been a good girl and yet nobody of any significance before that day. Afterwards, she was the most famous person in the world.

As she posed no immediate threat by her behavior, being content to sit and cry at first as helicopters circled her at a safe distance, the first concern had been what to do to safeguard the people of Chicago if she were to become a threat. The city was quarantined and evacuated for a distance of over a mile surrounding Grant Park. Not many complained and quite a few more left from beyond that evacuation zone. By the next day, they recognized that she posed unique problems for everyone, even without showing any sign that she intended to harm anyone or damage any more property. 

Raegan scooped up handfuls of lake water more voluminous than Olympic swimming pools to slake her thirst. However, it became clear to everyone that would do little to help her with her increasing hunger. She would need to eat something, eventually. If left to her own devices, she might start roaming around looking for something, or someone, edible. The unanimous decision was made to find a way to collect food for her.

Meanwhile, attempts were made to communicate with her. They spoke to her over loudspeakers, but she showed no sign of hearing them, not even when the sound was blasted toward her ears from helicopters. Scientists studying her theorized that the frequencies that our speakers could produce were too high to be audible to her giant ear drums. They could translate her words from the infra sound, but they could not reply to her in kind. At best they were able to display words on enormous screens on truck beds that were just large enough for her to see if she leaned forward and squinted at them. In this way, they were able to communicate, slowly.

Raegan asked many questions about what had happened to her. She begged for someone to turn her back to normal and was assured that every attempt was being made to do that. She avoided asking about her classmates. Not wanting to upset her, no one mentioned them to her either. She apologized for any problems she was causing, which was a great relief to everyone. It seemed that she would be cooperative, which was the best anyone could hope for in the situation. After all, there would be no peaceful way to stop her if she chose to be uncooperative.

She slept in the park, her body filling up the majority of the empty space within it. She bathed in the lake when she felt the need. TV was played for her on the truck screens, which she watched intently, having little else to do but sit and lay and stretch her legs occasionally.

As was true in the past for Chicago, train loads of cattle began being sent to the city. Great bonfires were lit and the freshly slaughtered livestock was cooked on them, having removed only the heads and hooves from the animals. When the beef was laid out for her on the street, she gobbled hundreds of cows up. Still, afterwards, she thanked them and asked for more.

By the time another train load arrived, she had begun to lose weight and seemed to be growing ravenous with hunger. Before anyone could unload the cattle, Raegan lifted an entire train car of beef cows to her mouth, peeled it open, and swallowed a whole herd, alive. She finished off the rest of the livestock on the train, including two more cattle cars and a car full of pigs, apologized, and begged for more.

From then on, trains began arriving on a continuous rotation, every hour, every day. They would empty out their livestock into huge pens before exiting the city to collect more. Raegan would then scoop up the cattle and pigs with her huge fingers, like mooing and oinking specks of rice, which she would stuff in her mouth over and over again to sustain her. People were careful to keep out of the way of the cattle, not wanting to become a part of her diet by accident. There were a few close calls, but after that first fatal day, through some miracle, no one else died.

There was a related problem of what to do with the remains of the cattle that she left in piles at the south end of the park. Enormous mounds of human excrement, three hundred times the size of ordinary human waste, just like everything else about her was 300 times bigger. Her urination washed away on its own, but the piles of waste needed to be carted away using mining equipment and dump trucks. Afterwards, an impromptu treatment station was constructed to dry it out, partially sanitize it, and convert it into a dirty fertilizer, which, in a roundabout form of recycling, was used to grow crops that would be fed to new herds of cattle to be fed back to her.

A supplement of vegetables was added to the cattle, but her diet was mostly un-slaughtered livestock for the summer. It strained the food production of the nation, but there was just enough excess capability to feed the giant girl. Everyone agreed on the necessity of it. After all, no one wanted to discover what she might do to find something to eat if she began to starve.

For a while, the world adjusted to her illogical size. A new sense of normalcy developed that allowed for the existence of a woman who had grown to titanic size through some inexplicable means. All attempts to provide a scientific rationale for what happened to her body failed to offer a satisfactory explanation. No one could offer any comprehensive reason for why she had suddenly grown, why her clothes had not grown with her body, or why her body had continued to operate normally, despite expected issues with the square-cube law. Lacking a scientific explanation, people turned to more magical or spiritual explanations for her size. Some people even began to revere her with a religious fervor. After all, who else in the world had such god-like power and size? Whole cults developed to pray to her and worship her. Some people even attempted to sneak into the evacuation zone to touch her… or be crushed by her. Many other more prurient people just treated her as a sex symbol, a continuously publicly nude figure, impossible to ignore or fully censor, overwhelming in scale and feminine power.

To her credit, Raegan seemed to ignore the way people reacted to her. We were just too small comparatively to bother her. She was content to go about her days, lazily snacking on livestock, or going for a brief, tidal-wave-inducing swim, not straying too far from the familiar confines of the park. Aside from some early train damage, and the destruction of the fountain when she had grown, she made no attempts to cause more destruction to the city. It was admirable and affirming of the altruistic impulses of human nature that she never took advantage of her size to wreak havoc on the relatively miniaturized world she now lived in. Whatever else people thought of her, everyone appreciated her deliberate restraint.

Then, as fall crept in and everyone started to wonder what might be done about her when the cold weather of winter came, something unexpected happened: she vanished.

A search of the lake produced no sign of her body. There were no giant footprints leading out of the city. She had not left any trace of a path out of the park. She had simply disappeared as suddenly and as inexplicably as she had appeared.

No one knew what to make of the whole situation as winter crept in. It was a month before anyone felt safe enough to return to living and working in the loop, to restart life as it had been before her arrival as the tallest building in the city. Meanwhile, speculation had run rampant to explain what had become of Raegan. Some speculated that she had returned to her normal size and had been quickly snatched by the military and transported away to a secret facility somewhere. Others wondered if the same magic that had made her gigantic had simply worn off, causing her to poof out of existence along with it. No one had answers, or if they did, they refused to share them publicly.

A memorial has been planned to be built in the park in the spring, right where the fountain had been. Aside from that, there seems to be little interest in remembering Raegan Willis. Most people are relieved that the mystery she represented is no longer present to confound us. The world feels more logical again, and people are grateful for that. Still, no one can deny that life feels more uncertain and inexplicable now than it had felt before. In that subtle way, she will always be with us.