When you turn on the TV, you find that every station is airing the same message—seemingly the work of a government emergency broadcast system.

EMERGENCY 

THIS IS NOT A DRILL

SHELTER IN PLACE AND AWAIT FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS.

Naturally, this gives you pause. You’ve never seen anything like this before, and you can’t help wondering what kind of emergency it indicates—although none of the options that come to mind are particularly comforting. Most of your major points of reference involving the phrase “this is not a drill” are games and movies, and few have happy endings. Hopefully, you’re not about to live through the opening of some post-apocalyptic blockbuster. 

Already feeling a knot forming in your stomach, you decide to open your laptop and boot up Twitter—but when you finish logging in, the trending topics on your feed do nothing to calm your nerves. 

• STORM VALLEY

• "WALKING W.M.D."

• GIANT MONSTER

• KAIJU MOVIE

• ALIENS???

While this significantly limits the possible range of explanations for the current “emergency,” it only makes the whole situation feel more confusing. You like giant monsters and aliens as much as the next 18-year-old guy, but you’ve never had any illusions about stuff like that being real. Is this all some kind of elaborate marketing campaign? Clearly, you still need more information.

When you click through to the second trending topic, your screen fills with smartphone videos. All have the same subject—a giant, supernaturally curvy woman stomping around a big, bustling city. Not just any city, either, but yours: Storm Valley, California. Based on how easily she dwarfs most of the mid-rise buildings around her, you're guessing she's at least 250 feet tall. And she looks very, very familiar.

“No way...” you say, shaking your head in disbelief.

Surely, you tell yourself, this is all fake—either some kind of freakishly immersive dream or the most elaborate practical joke you’ve ever seen. Someone decided it’d be funny to hack your TV and fill your feeds with AI-generated videos just to mess with you. Your first thought is your friend Lillian, although you doubt she’d have the technical skills to pull something like this off on her own... unless she got some help from your brainy classmate, Zuemy. Right now, that feels much more likely than the alternative.

Still, the more time you spend scrolling, the more seemingly-real videos you find—and their subject never varies. To make matters even more unsettling, when you sort by latest uploads, several dozen newer clips seem to show the giant woman moving out of the city and heading right toward your neighborhood. Then, just when you’re starting to seriously consider the impossible, you feel the ground start to vibrate.

Slamming your laptop shut, you decide to go outside and see what’s happening for yourself. While you know that it’s never a good idea to move around during an earthquake, this doesn’t feel like normal tectonic activity. Instead of being one long vibration, it's more like a series of steady pulses, almost like giant footsteps, getting louder and louder by the second—hopefully just more evidence that all of this is some kind of prank, including what appears to be the biggest subwoofer you’ve ever heard.

Unfortunately, when you open the door and step out onto your lawn, the truth is right in front of your eyes. Standing a few blocks away, easily visible over the roofs of your neighbors’ homes, is the same 250-foot-tall giantess from all the clips on your feeds—and when you see her face, you realize that everything you’ve spent the last half hour trying to debunk is real. The “giant monster” who’s been stomping around Storm Valley all morning is none other than...