“Oh, hey, I like you all too.” Troy got up. The mayor got up too. “This is a great town you have, and I’m going to keep doing my best to make it better.” He started to guide the mayor out the door. “Thanks so much for coming by. Feel free to come by anytime if you have something needs doing or if you just want to talk. I love talking.”

The mayor left the house, feeling uneasy and like he had not accomplished anything at all.

The Troys continued to multiply. Soon there were entire neighborhoods full of them, smiling and waving and offering to help each other out.

The other people in King City changed too. They became forgetful. They found they were talking less to people that did not live in King City. They would get calls from their mother, telling them that they hadn’t called her in so long, and they would realize that until the moment she called, they had forgotten that they had a mother.

It wasn’t just their memory. There was something happening physically. They were finding it harder and harder to leave town. They would try to do just a quick twenty-minute drive out of city limits and find that all the roads led back to town, that the sky for a moment looked like video static or maybe just a lot of stars, more stars than anyone had ever seen, but either is strange in the middle of the day, right? The 101, so closely tied to the life of the town, became impossible to reach. There didn’t seem to be any entrances, and no matter where they drove, it didn’t seem to get any closer. Soon they couldn’t even hear it, as close as it was. Silence descended on their town.

And the Troys continued to multiply. The mayor tried to warn the town about Troy, but no one could hold that thought in their minds long enough to do anything about it.

“We need a mayor,” they would say. “A mayor would be able to lead, would know what to do,” and then they would discover that they had a mayor but had forgotten about him. And then they would forget that they had discovered that.

The man who happened to be mayor the day that Troy came to town felt these changes too. He went home less and less. Sometimes he would forget where his home was, and even when he did go home, his wife and daughter and he would all stare at each other with wide, blank eyes, unsure of who any of them were, terrified of the strangers in their home.

Every time he looked down, he seemed to be wearing that tan jacket. He would decide to take it off, and then he would forget until he noticed again and the process would repeat.