When they flash his sign at the top of the Space Needle, he shoots out from the center of Lake Union and flies high into the sky. A mushroom wave erupts from where he surfaces and expands radially. Children watching from the shore jump in place and scream and point at him. The shy ones clap.

A reporter once asked Dr. Seattle how he acquired his powers. Dr. Seattle said, “There never was a French Indochina,” and after that there wasn’t. The Vietnamese resumed writing in logographs and became net importers of Indian rice. Khmer loanwords entered everyday English. We took this to mean Dr. Seattle was God.

Dr. Seattle has no features. If you look at his face, you will see one thousand faces at once, and when you look away or he flies out of sight you will fall on your knees and weep because it is a horror to see one thousand faces where there ought to have been just one. They blur his head in all the photos and on all the broadcasts.

There was a terrorist plot in Westlake last winter. A free-speech hacktivist, a warlord’s treasurer, and a nihilist walked into the headquarters of an internet company and said, “We have a big bomb.” The city functionaries flashed Dr. Seattle’s sign on the Needle—a stethoscope listening to itself, like an ouroboros—and not seconds later he landed on the street outside the terrorist-occupied building, creating by his impact a shallow crater and exposing several underground pipes and wires. From this rubble, Dr. Seattle lumbered toward the building and into the lobby.

Those who have met Dr. Seattle in conflict unanimously name this ominous lumbering as the most traumatic element of the experience. Why would an all-powerful God act tired, or injured? Dr. Seattle could inhabit any body—or several bodies, or several species, or new forms never before conceived of—but he chose to approach them in a damaged human body, slowly, the head lolling and wearing one thousand faces. Until the moment of their encounter with Dr. Seattle, these people, like most animals, had always had a sense, even if vague, of what the animate agents in their environment intended. For peers, they relied on social instincts, theory of mind. For machines, they relied on intuitive physics to make estimations like: that truck in the distance will not hit me if I cross the street now. With Dr. Seattle, they had nothing to rely on. His was a different kind of mind, driven by incomprehensible motives to execute even less comprehensible plans, something animate and powerful in the universe against which they had no defense or prayer, and they are forever burdened by the knowledge that he cannot be hidden from.

So Dr. Seattle lumbered into the building in Westlake with the three terrorists. “Detonate it,” he said.

We mourned the workers who perished in the explosion and the subsequent fire, but we did not mourn in public because Dr. Seattle can be touchy about such things. He may worry that we do not appreciate his oversight.

He duplicates in the sky, branching into thousands of himself and expanding to colonize the firmament with a hexagonal grid of his own bodies. The children continue jumping and pointing but their affected enthusiasm falters. Their mothers fearfully command them, through their own strained smiles, to keep fucking smiling if they want to live. When Dr. Seattle’s expansion stops, there is one of him above every ten-foot stamp of land in the city, the bodies hanging a hundred feet above ground like limp puppets strung up by their thoracic spines, each one staring down unblinkingly at whoever looks up.

His many bodies begin to chant, at first out of phase and under-enunciated, but then clusters of them sync up and intone consonants. “I love you,” they say.