The Mammoth Book of Kaiju

by Sean Wallace

  The subway tunnels and parking garages were filled with membranous organs which, when inflated with hydrogen separated from the air by nanomite factories, became the nacelles of an enormous dirigible, wrapped in the musculature of something that one might describe as a giant jellyfish, if it were not flying, and didn’t have the global headquarters of Sony on its back.

  Venting a firewall of methane, the dyspeptic monster-city took to the skies like a plastic shopping bag in an updraft, sweeping aside a torrent of spy drones, news choppers, and the beleaguered dragon-crane protector of Tokyo, who set down alone in the vast cavity left by the city’s awakening.

  In the sky, the newborn monster-city seemed to drift, weightless as a cloud. Flailing bio-steel tentacles like the supports of a suspension bridge trailed for miles behind the city. They radiated enormous arcs of raw electricity, which leapt out at news choppers and disabled passing jets, much as the stingers of a man o’ war paralyze its prey.

  What the fuck was she supposed to protect now?

  Tokyo floated out over the Bay, raining waste and suicides as it passed over a nakedly envious Chiba City. It followed the coastline south, like a hurricane, but its rainfall was not destructive, except for those who stood in its way. A rain of revolution, it conscripted everything it fell upon, in the factories, warehouses, and fish hatcheries of Yokohama, for every droplet was impregnated with millions of greedy, highly motivated nanomites, which in turn manufactured spiders out of any raw material they found. Within minutes, Otaku’s spiders set up shop turning the Japanese coastline into a slave state of the flying city of Tokyo.

  The monster-city had all but devoured or taken over everything of use around its former resting place, before it made a statement to the press.

  The city spoke simultaneously over every terrestrial broadcast frequency, every satellite feed and PA system on Earth, in the sonorous, gravitas-laced voice of a notable American actor who had long moonlighted doing commercials for Royal Dragon Sake. “I AM ZAIBATSU,” it said. “YOU CANNOT DEFEAT MY PRODUCTIVITY.”

  The media attempted to commandeer the interview, but the UN Field Commander cut them off to demand a chance to negotiate for the release of the 1.3 million hostages inside Zaibatsu.

  The monster-city laughed. “I HAVE NO HOSTAGES. THESE ARE THE CELLS OF MY BLOOD, WHICH FLOWS WHEN I AM ATTACKED. THESE ARE THE CELLS OF MY BRAIN, WHICH REMEMBER AND PREDICT, AND DREAM OF SUPERIOR PRODUCTS AND ENTERTAINMENTS FOR A NEWLY REVITALIZED WORLD MARKET.”

  It went on like this until they stopped trying to reason with it. There was no question of lobbing missiles at a populated megalopolis, no matter that its ragged borders were festooned with vast flytrap mouths, spastic radioactive anuses, and satellite dish-sized compound eyes.

  “We won’t negotiate with monsters,” the UN field commander bravely stated for the record, but no one was listening.

  “ZAIBATSU 1 WELCOMES OUR BROTHERS AND SISTERS,” said the giant flying city-jellyfish, and released its grip on the global network.

  Still stumbling to contextualize the event that had explained itself on their channels only moments before, the talking heads were ill-prepared for the plague of virtual deities hatching and rampaging across the web in search of host city-bodies, or the holocaust of awakening cities that swept the globe over the next twenty-four hours.

  Moscow took swift action to stop its own transformation. Having once been the symbolic head of a monolithic monstrosity, the kleptocratic capital could not accept rebirth as a literal monster. A fire-bombing to make Dresden look like a child’s Easy Bake Oven reduced the Kremlin to ashes before the tomb of communism could rise up as a gargantuan spider-bear.

  China fared even worse. For some reason the party elite refused to dignify with an explanation, the viral attack could not activate any of its centrally planned, stiflingly dull cities. Despite having more than the critical mass of human density and infrastructure in Beijing, Hong Kong, and a dozen other cities, the roving spirits of Dr. Otaku’s unborn Zaibatsus balked at infusing any of their offered cities. When faced with the failure of drastic measures like building a city entirely out of the old Olympic complex and living and dead workers fused with several metric tons of meat glue failed, the last Communist superpower began building an army of giant robots to protect itself. They were still busily churning them out when the Mega-Yeti came.

  Mariko flunked Western Conspiracies in grade school, but she doubted that the mile-tall golden behemoth was really the animated monastery of Shangri-La, the lair of the Illuminated Masters who secretly control the world. And yet the monster that trampled the Great Wall and left a Grand Canyon-sized swath of destruction en route to Beijing did indeed resemble a shaggy, fire-eyed, triple-tusked yeti made of living, molten gold, and the pagodas on its head and shoulders were teeming with hundreds of laughing, saffron-robed monks.

  How overwhelming is the sight of a city at night, the combined work and worth of millions of humans reborn as a neon beast-god sleeping uneasily in the miasmic cocoon of its own pollution?

  And how mind-boggling to witness titanic monsters striding through such cities, laying waste to all in their path, to forever bear the burden of sharing the world with Titans?

  How much more insane, when the cities themselves awaken, arise, and walk upon the land, suddenly elevated and animated into a colossal tortoise, or floating overhead like a swimmer of alien seas? To witness the passage of a living city, its rainbow-scaled electric exoskeleton mocking the perpetual blackouts below, the question becomes not how to defeat the monster cities, but how to prevent, postpone, or control their worship as gods.

  Back on Otaku Island, one man had not given up the fight, though he was crippled, yet again, by the failure of his manned kaiju. He nervously thumbed the eject button, knowing that to do so would dump him on a hostile island rife with monsters, or out in a hostile sea rife with pissed-off corporate mercs whose checks probably just bounced.

  “Ike is, uh— Well, he’s not really . . . . ”

  “I figured that out when he started laying eggs! But why is this happening, now . . . ”

  “Well, it’s . . . more complicated than that . . . Wes, she wasn’t grown from scratch. You know that would’ve taken years. But they’re working wonders with gene therapy, now, just little bugs. Catch a flu, and you’re off to the races, you know?”

  “What is it? Tell me later! For now, just tell me how to shut it off —”

  “You need to know this now, Wes. She was a volunteer. Her lawyer vouched for her sanity. She was distraught, but she wanted to do something for her country—”

  Wes suddenly smelled shit. “No . . . no, she wouldn’t . . . and you couldn’t . . . ”

  “She didn’t want Steve’s sacrifice to be in vain.”

  Ice filled his stomach. “She was fucking flipped out before her husband became America’s Other White Meat. You let her—”

  “She practically forced us. She demanded that we treat her right away, and that you be assigned to pilot her.”

  Corben looked around for a bag to throw up in.

  “Her mind was wiped, of course. She can’t possibly respond in any way. We gutted her forebrain to make room for the targeting opticals. Those eagle eyes really soak up a lot of neural bandwidth—”

  “Why are you telling me this, now, Control?”

  “Because we were in a hurry, and, um . . . well, the president wants you to know he’s counting on you to do the right and honorable thing . . . ”

  “What is the right and honorable thing?”

  “The eggs are fertile, Wes. And we’re pretty damn certain that they’re yours.”

  As with every disturbing new trend in America, San Francisco was first.

  Mariko flew low over the city, weaving among the intertwined spines of the skyscrapers. The spiders had done their work more thoroughly than in Tokyo, and were only just retreating or withering into empty husks in the streets. In the Transamerica Pyramid alone, she saw thousands and thousands of faces
, watching as blandly as if they were on an elevator, as the city of San Francisco awakened, and found its feet. The skyscrapers of the financial district quivered on the gnarled, colossal shell made of the rewired raw materials of the hills beneath their foundations, while a spade-shaped head the size of a stadium reared up out of the waterfront slime, blinked a million eyes, and bellowed a sonorous foghorn roar that shattered bay windows and knocked over bongs from Sausalito to Petaluma.

  Crawling clumsily into the sea on hundreds of battleship-sized paddle-limbs, the megalopolitan sea turtle was twelve miles long. Ahead of the leviathan, the earth subsided and crumbled, water, oil, and gas lines erupting under its feet, sending it sliding into the sea.

  The waves off its flanks swamped the San Francisco Bay like a fat man’s bathtub, flooding Oakland and Berkeley. The leading towers on its shell drew near to smashing into the middle span of the Golden Gate Bridge, when swarms of spiders leapt out from the Pyramid to dismantle the bridge like Lego blocks. So many movies had dreamed of this moment, yet when it came, the fall of the bridge was a lame anticlimax; the spiders didn’t drop a screw as they took apart the span and the adjoining towers, and returned with the famous deep bronze hardware to their nests, as the Brobdingnagian city-turtle sailed majestically out onto the open sea.

  The awesome sight of the new Zaibatsu’s towers adrift on the Pacific, bejeweled in light and sheathed in a fiber-optic corona of glistering holograms, inspired new apocalyptic faiths in dozens of schizophrenics, which quickly became mainstream cults with hordes of celebrity adherents.

  Missile attacks were countermanded at the last instant, when the first electronic shockwave of the monster San Francisco’s awakening was unleashed: millions of cellphone calls, texts, and mails from the human hostages inside its web of skyscrapers.

  They were not prisoners. They were not afraid. They were employees. And they were very busy, so please stop calling them at work . . .

  Deep within the Zaibatsu’s bowels, an arsenal of deadly weapons was churned out and deployed by the living city’s most fearsome weapon—its lawyers.

  Within minutes of the city’s awakening, the UN, the United States Supreme Court, the WTO, and every media organization in the world were bombarded with faxes outlining the unique legal status of the sovereign corporate entity formerly known as the city of San Francisco. All real property within city limits had been appropriated into the newly incorporated being; claimants were free to fight the grab in international court, but it would be days, if not weeks, before companies like Sony and Honda recovered from having their whole legal and bureaucratic systems, to say nothing for the Nikkei Stock Index itself, defect and sue them.

  The president sat on his hands until San Francisco was safely in international waters before he dared to fulfill the wildest dreams of his heartland constituency, and pushed the button. But by then, of course, it was much too late. SAC/NORAD’s mainframe computers disregarded the launch orders, locked down the command centers in the Pentagon and at Cheyenne Mountain, and filled them with nerve gas, all while blasting the Weathergirls’ “It’s Raining Men” in the president’s ear over the secure hot line.

  Mariko settled down in yet another empty crater, and pondered her impossible task.

  The Zaibatsus had wreaked uncounted damage on the world in a long weekend, and utterly destroyed its communications, commerce, and economic systems.

  Far from stamping out these institutions, however, the Zaibatsus had claimed full ownership and control of their daughter corporations’ assets and legal status. In most developed nations, international corporations had lobbied for and received “personhood,” a status equal to any private citizen, albeit one with thousands of bodies, hundreds of houses, fleets of vehicles, and armadas of lawyers to enforce patents, contracts, and options.

  Building on this legal precedent, the Zaibatsus were working relentlessly to rebuild the economy in their own image. They found it very easy to do, because the remaining 99.9 percent of the real estate and population was still starving in darkness, and the monsters owned everything needed to rebuild.

  It could take forever to kick all their asses. Like, she’d be in her twenties—

  Somewhere, deep inside Mariko’s pearl-scaled, serpentine magnificence, her Hello Kitty satellite phone meowed.

  Her mercurial mind, still that of a bright, ADHD tweener several days off her meds, flicked from deep despair to insolent pique.

  Her father was always bugging her, ever since Mom got incinerated at the catastrophic christening of Mecha-Ronin 1, and now that he’d lost his job, and she had become a mystical kaiju guardian of all the empty craters of Earth’s dead cities, he seemed to want to try to be her dad again.

  He’d decided not to go back to Japan, and had taken a cushy gig golfing with the rich Americans in their walled enclaves back east. He’d pined for his beloved Shinjuku waterworks for all of a week, before he discovered New Jersey. He’d already bought a controlling interest in a sewage treatment plant in Newark for pocket Yen, but he still found time to meddle in her business.

  As she unfurled her wings and whipped tornadoes of debris with her takeoff, she saw clusters of survivors bearing flower garlands and food offerings to the mighty (too-late, too-small) celestial dragon.

  The bowls were full of Colonel Steve’s Freedom Meat. The vat-grown clone-flesh of the dead American kaiju was marketed to instill rugged American patriotism into the basic brain functions and even DNA, but she could not look at the gibbering, three-toed mutants bowing to worship her (morbidly obese, clad only in shredded American flags, covered in tumors gnarled with fetal GI Joe faces barking malignant orders) without wondering about the side effects.

  Merciful to a fault, Mariko circled back and roasted the crypto.fascist freaks with her napalm breath, and found their flash-blackened flesh far tastier than the tainted crap they tried to feed her.

  Mariko climbed into the jet stream and broke the sound barrier so she wouldn’t have to listen to the meowing phone in her gut.

  Once, Wes Corben flew planes. He was good at it, but not as good as his friend, Steve, who volunteered for a top secret project that left him a seventy-foot vegetable. They trained Corben to “pilot” Steve, and together, they made the world safe for democracy. Until a conniving Nipponese cocksucker unleashed a diabolical communist monster that perverted everything it touched, including his beloved friend, the most expensive fighting vehicle in Pentagon spending history.

  But Steve was only flesh and blood. And so was his wife, and Steve’s wife was hard to refuse—

  Steve’s last words stung him, all over again. “Why can’t you stop fucking my wife, Wes?”

  Corben stroked the polished bone bulkhead of the cockpit. “I wish you would have told me, Laura.”

  With that, he holstered his own pistol and picked up Otaku’s Mauser. If it looked like he was killed in the line of duty, he wouldn’t forfeit his insurance.

  Holding Otaku’s tiny hands in his own around the trigger. Corben put the barrel to his temple. Maybe this was a mistake. This gun didn’t weigh half as much as it should, and the bullet in his back hurt less than a mosquito bite.

  Aw, why should everything be painful? he thought, and pulled the trigger.

  Nothing.

  He put it in his mouth and pulled it again.

  Both times, the gun went off with a deafening report, but he felt little more than a burning in his mouth, as if he’d swallowed bees. It wasn’t even a fucking prop gun, like the kind stupid action stars were always offing themselves with.

  Suspicious, he broke out the magazine and popped the bullets.

  They were transparent cylinders of a wax-silicon gelatin that vaporized when the gun was fired. A tiny microdot-sized dart in the bullet was the only active projectile. Corben had swallowed two of them, and had one in his back.

  Then he looked at one under a microscope.

  The darts were coated with a syrupy solution seeded with microscopic frogmen, sea monkeys with
spear-guns, nets, and prop-driven gadgets to tow them around inside Corben’s bloodstream.

  Horrified, Corben turned up the magnification.

  The nano-divers were all identical: the same tiger-stripe wetsuits, telescoping goggles and long, flowing white hair, but they seemed to be at odds about who was in charge. As he watched, the nano-frogmen attacked each other as viciously as wolverine sperm in a fertile uterus, severing each other’s air hoses and puncturing tanks so the tiny bodies piled up before his very eyes.

  “That’s what happens when you look at them under a hot lamp, you idiot!”

  “Oh God, what now?” Instantly, Corben deduced who and where

  the speaker was, and reflexively attacked the enemy.

  He punched himself in the head.

  If you’ve ever tried and failed to shoot yourself while trapped inside the monstrous head of your ex-girlfriend/best friend’s widow, you know how hard it can be to think clearly under such circumstances, and are free to judge.

  “My nano-frogmen have installed my wetware mainframe in your brainstem. Did you think I would foolishly attack you alone, hoping to be killed? When have the proud Nipponese people ever thrown their lives away in suicidal futility? Ha, that’s a rhetorical, Yankee devil! In any case—”

  “Shut up. I’m still going to kill myself.”

  “Fine, fine, let me help you. Just do nothing . . . act naturally for about another . . . what, thirty seconds?” The miniaturized Otaku bickered with his clones in the sub-basement of Corben’s brain, all of which Corben was as unable to understand as he was unable to tune it out.

  The cockpit radio squealed and triggered the subsonic buzzer in his spine, which must be what the tiny Otakus were trying to hotwire. If they could download his consciousness into his brain, they’d control Ike, the most powerful kaiju in the NATO arsenal . . .

  Fine . . .

  “Let him sit on these fucking eggs.”