Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters

by James Swallow

  Meanwhile she cranked her spending habits even further. Imported vat-leather couches, hallucinatory sono-holo chambers, printed diamonds. And the real coup: a five hundred gallon freshwater fish tank. Even Keto balked at hauling that much fresh water from the mainland, and so a compromise was reached: a small handheld desalinator.

  Keto was now blocking communications for eight hundred miles in any direction, meaning that Airi and the mayfly would have only the barest notion of where they were going. They could make a play if she (and Uki) could survive on the ocean for the number of days it would take to reach the edge of Keto’s range.

  Once the desalinator was in hand, there was only one thing left to do: fall off the balcony again.

  This time the mayfly would be waiting hundreds of feet below the floating station. If it rescued her close to the platform, Airi reasoned, the crab-bots would be aware of the escape attempt critical seconds before they might if the mayfly whisked her away from the ocean’s surface.

  As she stood with her face to the wind and setting sun, Airi had a moment to wonder if the mayfly, too, might have decided she was too expensive to save. The flutter of panic in her chest had despair underneath it. Here again her humanity measured by a machine. What was it all for?

  She placed a booted foot up on the round white rail. The Eye, ever present, blinked lambently at her. At first her plan had been to throw herself off the balcony all at once, but contempt filled her now. She stepped up onto the rail slowly, one leg at a time, climbing up the rungs until she was balancing unsteadily at the top, her hands gripping the metal, her weight tilting on the balls of her feet, the wind lashing wisps of hair against her cheek.

  The Eye watched silently.

  Just as silently, Airi gave it the finger with each hand, and pitched backward into the air.

  A strange exuberance filled her as she plummeted, the balcony and expensive condo diminishing above. Maybe the mayfly wouldn’t rescue her—she’d die of rash human will. Better that than life on this hunk of metal.

  The roar of that fury combined with the wind and pounding of her heart to drown out all sound. There was only the faintest servo buzz preceding the jolt that was the mayfly—Uki perched in a basket on its handlebars—plucking her from the sky.

  Airi gave a wild whoop as they shot out over the water. Uki yapped in response, paws on the edge of the basket. As they buzzed out in a direction—any direction—she shouted down at the mayfly, “Thank you!”

  “You’re welcome, Airi.”

  ~

  If Sandra had not plugged an antique flash drive into a hole in the pavement at Folsom and 2nd for precisely fifteen seconds earlier that day, the ski-masked woman who appeared at her doorway would have been substantially more distressing. Instead she looked her up and down, measuring.

  “So—” she began.

  The woman held a finger to her lips and Sandra quieted. She pointed a gloved finger at Sandra’s ear, wrist, and waist, then started removing things from her own person. Silently they exchanged gear: health monitors, social apparatus, VPN keys. Sandra’s logs would show a brief blip that would look like signal disruption before her contact’s hacked gear silkily persuaded it that all was well.

  The contact didn’t speak, and her body language continued to warn Sandra to follow suit. She gestured and Sandra followed, taking a route down to the building’s disposal area. From there the contact waved before returning upstairs, leaving Sandra in the custody of another contact, this one masked by crypto facial tattoos. The tattoos, which once would have made a person ultra-recognizable, now were designed to foil recognition algorithms and worked if thousands of people in all the major cities bought into the program.

  The tattooed figure led her to a sedan with tinted windows. Sandra ducked inside—

  And woke up groggily some undetermined number of hours later. She was in a gray-paneled room of some sort, a hole-in-the-wall done up to look like any of approximately jillion cheap hotels in the city.

  “Sorry about that,” a redheaded and tattooed face was saying.

  “Can’t be too careful nowadays.” This from another tattooed face; male, with darker hair. Both of them sat at a faux bamboo kitchen table, their faces illuminated by a green glass hanging lamp.

  “What did you do to me?” she muttered, trying to summon the energy for a righteous tirade. “Nobody said anything about drugs.” She wobbled, but was caught. They’d tied her to a chair. Of course.

  “You put a flash drive full of personal data into a crack in the sidewalk. Were you expecting COPPA-compliance?” dark-haired tattoo asked.

  “Yeah, here’s the other thing,” the redheaded was saying. Sandra bookmarked her as Tweedle Dee. “We need you to spill your plan in a convincing way in the next few minutes, or we give you another dose and drop you in Golden Gate Park.”

  “And, uh, we’re not really supposed to use that drug multiple times in the same day. Unintended side effects, et cetera,” dark-haired tattoo (heretofore: Tweedle Dum) added.

  Sandra throttled the urge to freak right the hell out. She reminded herself that going back to Dytel was not an option. The resignation letter was already written, awaiting a confirm note sent to her doppelgänger, who would immediately release the letter to Helen and the entire exec staff.

  Thus reminded, she asked herself once: self, do we really want to let Keto run rampant all over the damn country? Do we want something we created adding what Keto adds to the world unchecked?

  She sighed, and started to talk. Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum listened, and neither reached for the knock-out gas.

  “Think about it,” Sandra said. “Algorithms that disaggregate. Algorithms that automate privacy settings. Processes that saturate the signal with noise. An intelligence composed of these functions rather than aggregators and analyses.”

  Tweedle Dee stared at her, the fixed gaze of a cat sighting a bird. “You can show us how to make that?”

  “Better,” Sandra sighed, hitting confirm on her resignation email. “I can build it for you.”

  Tweedle Dee looked at Tweedle Dum, starting a staring contest that lasted for three minutes, doubtless containing a hud exchange invisible to Sandra. At length, Tweedle Dum pushed himself away from the table with a clatter.

  “This is bullshit.” He seethed, tossing a chair onto its side on his way out the door.

  “Is he going to be a problem?” Sandra asked, once he’d cleared the hallway. A tiny icicle of unease had taken up residence on her neck. Had she just thrown away a six figure career for nothing?

  “Nothing he can do,” Tweedle Dee said. “I called a vote and we got quorum in sixty seconds.”

  “Can’t he, I don’t know, sow dissent, or something?”

  “He can try.” The other woman smiled wryly. “That's the upside to an anarchist organization, lady. None of us has to listen to a fucking thing anyone else says.”

  ~

  March 2155

  “It’s not goddamn working,” Matthew (alias Tweedle Dee) muttered. “It’s just a bunch of goo.”

  “Shh,” Sandra said.

  “Yeah, shut up,” Kari (alias Tweedle Dum) added. They all stood at the rail of an old fishing rig, an antique behemoth that had chased tuna across the Pacific fifty years ago when tuna was still a thing.

  The water in front of them was slowly turning green.

  There were several things Sandra had wanted to try for a while. One of them was an organic growth system, bioengineering, neural networks linked to engineered cells that built circuitry out of chloroplast-like structures that controlled their own solar-powered growth. Dytel had shown no interest.

  The anarchist group, whose name she still didn’t know, had nearly dumped her when she told them it was going to take the better part of a year to grow the new intelligence. Matthew still hadn’t come around, but he hadn’t quit, either.

  The green patch had started about three months ago. Diving recon had found it extended down under the surface some twenty fat
homs, a massive translucent structure dotted with pearls of bioluminescence. When they’d brought back the first photos of it, Sandra had cried.

  Now the green was growing fast enough to observe with the naked eye. Two weeks ago it had started to speak, though not in words—primitive sounds, then finally phonemes. Ocular nodes had sprouted at intervals around the shape, moving slowly, blinking.

  As they watched, the green rose up out of the water, Fibonacci tendrils blinking with incandescent buds like the lures of a thousand tiny anglerfish. Steadily it rose into the air, arms weaving together like ivy, climbing upon itself.

  They had camped on the boat for days to hear a single word, which scouts had reported hearing just days earlier. The audio files of the green’s voice were disturbing. Where Keto’s was single and clear, the green seemed to echo words from one point to another in a sea of whispers like wind through leaves.

  At midday it spoke the word that the scouts had reported:

  “Who,” the cloud mind said. There was no inflection of a question.

  Her breath quickened. She remembered this from Keto’s awakening. The mind seemed to need to calibrate itself against the idea of an identity. But, like Keto, it couldn’t be given that identity. It needed to be drawn to it with a question.

  She leaned out over the rail. “What’s your name?” Sandra asked.

  Light rippled across the surface of the green, tendrils writhed and knocked together. The creature conferred with itself, searched its many structures for an answer.

  “Lethe,” the cloud mind said.

  Sandra smiled, a thousand emotions filling her heart. “Nice to meet you, Lethe.”

  Big Dog

  Timothy W. Long

  It was a different world inside the box.

  The pod rattled loud enough to make her ears ring for days. It smelled like exhaust and raw fuel. Her eyes stung from spent shells and multi-stage accelerants. Vertigo ate at her gut every time she looked outside, and just when she thought she was used to all of these sensations she would be picked up and tossed back into her chair hard enough to knock the breath right out of her chest.

  The world rocked back and forth as Commander Katie Cord attempted to keep up with the viewports. Each three inch thick glass window provided a limited view of the world ahead, and what she saw was not pleasant. The act of actually turning to view her ‘six’ was worse thanks to a creaking chair that more often than not, smacked her head against the side of the padded portcullis.

  What she saw of the hills of Saipan were beautiful but there were also patches of scorched earth among the trees and grass.

  But for all that she wouldn’t give this up for the world.

  “Six degrees lift. Hit ‘em with the fifty-fives again.” She bellowed into the radio. It hung a foot from her head and she had to reach for it because holding on, she’d learned early on, could practically dislocate her shoulder.

  The machinery screamed around her as the beast fought to move sixty-seven hundred tons of metal, gears, grease, fuel, and ammo. Not to mention five souls all of whom were under her command. A staggering step, and then she was in the air again. Exhale, wait for it and then just like that, smashed into her padded chair.

  Katie lowered her headgear exactly eight seconds later as her commands were relayed to waiting gunner, Mack. She knew her seat was uncomfortable but the gunner had to hang on for dear life every time the big guns fired.

  “Hit six!” the gunner rattled back.

  “We got a oil leak in seven primary,” Kilmer called from the reactor room. “I need two or three minutes to get it under control.”

  “Sorry, Kilmer. We don’t have time to stop and shut down a boiler.”

  “I’ll do what I can but these are not the ideal working conditions.”

  “Noted,” she said and clicked off.

  “Movement right, I make it forty five degrees,” her topside spotter yelled into the nearest porthole. O’Hare’s position was perilous at best. His mount swayed with each step of the beast. During trial runs, Katie had sat there for a few hours, and if there was a scarier place on Earth, she’d never heard of it.

  At least in the hole she was protected by a couple inches of American steel. A direct hit was nothing. Big Dog could take it. It was the Kaiju she had to worry about. The minute one of them got close enough to engage in actual combat she was going to be sent home in a bunch of little boxes.“

  Commander, I see movement,” the man next to her said in a thick German accent.

  I wish the movement was a bullet seeking your head, she didn’t say out loud.

  Heinrich Glaus, former commander of the famed Panzer Corp was smug. He wore his adopted American uniform with the same aplomb he’d worn his Nazi clothing. His shoes were spit-shined so that they gleamed in the dank pod and his rank insignia shined like gold.

  Another shuddering couple of steps and she saw it, too.

  “It’s a Mark One?”

  “Mark Two, begging the commander’s pardon. We are headed for some fun time, ja?”

  “You think this is fun? I’d hate to see what you do in your down time.”

  “Mainly listen to music. I must confess that sitting in a metal box for years has damaged my hearing some but when I hear Grieg’s music I can, for a time, forget all of this.”

  “Do you forget the screams of men? Asshole.” The last word was under her breath. The man probably didn’t hear it, but she really needed to learn to hold of her tongue.

  Dammit. What would her very proper and very Kentucky father say if he heard his daughter using such language? Since Germany had surrendered six years ago, her feelings of hatred for her nation’s former foe had not lessened. They’d killed her Teddy, and she would never forgive them. Any of them.

  “It was a bad time for us. You know? It was a bad time for all of us. I did not like what I did just as I do not like this.”

  He didn’t like this? What did he like, the screams of millions of Jews as they were fed to the fires? So many questions remained after the surrender, and with the truce in effect many of them remained unanswered. Germany had agreed to reparations but when the threat of Kaiju, as the Japanese had named their new allies, had spread, so had the need to present a united front with the assistance of the European nations.

  When Katie’s career in the Air Force had nearly come to an end, thanks to a test flight gone wrong, she’d thought that a peaceful life lay ahead for a year, or so. At least until the beasts picked up their attacks and spread their seed and rage across the rest of the world.

  “We need delta wing and we need them now. Let command know.” She squinted at the shape ahead. She used to wear eye glasses but had given them up in recent months to appear more able. She was not about give up command of the largest machine of war the US had ever created.

  “On the way.”

  “How did they know? How did they know we were coming here?”

  “Did you think they would leave a nest unprotected, Commander?”

  “But ground pictures didn’t pick up anything this size.”

  “We can take it. Think of the glory from this mission when we take down a class two and bring home a sample of the beast.”

  “I don’t know. This feels wrong.”

  Big Dog continued its lumbering steps. Glaus yanked the radio transmitter to his mouth and shouted directions, and then made adjustments as they drew nearer to the enemy. The Kaiju might be huge and they might be nearly unstoppable but they were still as dumb as rocks. Rocks that could swat fighters from the air and crush tanks with hands the size of busses, but still, tactics needed to be adhered to.

  “Ach! It’s a class three. No, I make two of the creatures.”

  Katie grabbed the command receiver and triggered it.

  “Lightning one, lightning one. This is Big Dog. Where is that wing?” she yelled. Katie triggered the transmitter several times, and then asked again.

  “Big Dog, we are sending you some love. Stand by.” The man had a Sou
thern Drawl heavier than her own.

  “Can you hurry it up before we engage?”

  “We hear you, Big Dog. General Patton sends his regards, ma’am,” the man replied.

  “The general is here?”

  “Ah. Patton is a great strategist. Perhaps there is hope,” Glaus replied.

  “If you didn’t believe in this mission, then why the hell are you here, Glaus?”

  “I am here, Commander, because I believe in the mission, and I also believe in you. Now lead us forward,” he said and lowered his viewfinder.

  Big Dog had not been her idea. She was brought in late and that was only thanks to a favor that General Monroe and his admiration for her work on the latest destroyers. Many of them lay at the bottom of the ocean, thanks to the Japanese alien allies, but many of them still patrolled near home, and that was enough for her. When she’d proved herself to have a good eye for tactics against the beasts she’d been moved up to the project.

  Big Dog was the first of its kind. A machine large enough to contend with the Kaiju. Work had begun after the third disastrous battle of Fukujima when all was had been going in the Americans’ favor. Then the wave of advanced and larger beasts had descended on their forces and decimated them. The war had been all but at an end when the alien’s craft, damaged and lost near Earth, had sensed the detonation over Hiroshima and come to investigate. It was sheer bad luck that the ship had crashed near Fukishima, making a new island in the Japanese sea.

  “Target ahead. It’s firing. Shift fifteen degrees. No, make it twenty five,” Glaus bellowed.

  “Shit!” Katie yelled as commands were translated to drivers.

  Below them the boilers screamed as they poured power into four squat legs. Big Dog swayed to one side, and then took a couple of shuddering steps. Something whistled overhead and created an explosion she felt in her gut a few seconds later.