by Sean Wallace
When would any other pilot be that desperate again?
When . . .
Now. Now is exactly when a pilot would be that desperate again.
An elevator ride up to a door in the mech’s midriff marked
with a radiation warning. I remember that sign clearly:
The failsafe mechanisms are well designed. There are back-up systems of back-up systems. All are carefully programmed.
They are beyond my understanding. I was not a careful student at school. I was never a jock, never quite a geek, that awkward middle position of being nobody in particular.
But then Lila.
It wasn’t a revolution. There was no astonishing makeover. It was simply that being nobody to everybody else didn’t matter if I was somebody to her.
Love is a slow creature. It isn’t like a Leviathan. There is no sudden violence. Rather it wraps its tendrils around you slowly. By the time you are aware of it, it has already won.
Or maybe I was as slow at grasping the concept of love as I was at understanding the complexities of a programming language.
In the end, I reprogram the machine with a ballpoint hammer. That seems to suffice.
The cockpit. Closer to the now.
Mechs aren’t meant to work without proxies. Some inputs require needles pressing deep into muscle. They sample DNA. They demand diversity.
But I remember once—a proxy, an older woman, she had a heart attack on the elevator ride up to cockpit. The Leviathan was already visible. There was no time to call in a back-up.
Adam Grant showed me the trick.
“Give me that damn thing.” He’d grabbed the needle from a panicked technician. “DNA is everywhere.” He wiped the needle along the crevices of the seat. Dirt, lint, and hair clinging to it. They never really cleaned the cockpits.
Grant rammed the filthy needle into the arm of a proxy already getting input from other sensors. The technician looked appalled.
Grant shrugged. “He’s a proxy. He won’t remember.”
It worked. That proxy took input from two sensors. I don’t know what happened to him. Maybe nothing. Maybe he was fine. Maybe the poor bastard died of septic shock.
It was harder jamming the dirty needles into my own flesh. But, I reasoned, it wasn’t like I’d remember.
Closer:
They tried to stop me leaving. They sealed the city gates against me. I could hear someone raging through my headset but her voice was overwhelmed by the data pouring into me. Heat readings, pressure sensors, gyrostabilizations, revolutions per minute.
I fired missiles. I felt them leaving my body. I felt the heat of their burning fuel burn inside of me. And worse. I could feel pieces of me leaking out with each projectile. The taste of strawberries carried away in a burst of flame. My father’s name. What I’d eaten last night. All the inconsequential minutia that we’re made of.
But I had sabotaged a nuclear reactor. I had re-engineered hardwired failsafes. Mere doors and words couldn’t stop me. I blew my way out of the city. I marched on, marched out. I went to face my Leviathan.
One final memory:
“What do you think?”
Lila on the doorstep of our apartment. And she had redecorated. Repainted. New furniture. New art on the walls.
They’d not allowed her to go to the rehab facility to pick me up. A driver had dropped me off at the curb. She’d been waiting when the penthouse elevator doors opened. She looked perfect and anxious in equal measures.
I hesitated, trying to work why she was worried. I was the one who should be worried.
But she misread my hesitation, thought I didn’t like her work. And I could see how much she had wanted me to like it. But she just nodded and bore it. She didn’t bend, didn’t break.
All I had done to her. And she thought I was doing it again. But she remained undefeated. All the monsters I had beaten, but she was the one thing I could never conquer. And I loved her for that. So deep and so strong.
“You made it beautiful,” I said.
She smiled. The sun banishing clouds. “Good.”
Now.
Ankle deep in water, my mech stumbles. I try to correct, overcook it. Massive, clumsy, the machine goes down on one knee. Around me, flat-bottomed fishing boats are swamped, sink with viscous gurgles. Gulls shriek angrily, billow around the mech’s knees.
Get up. Get moving. You can do this.
Do what again?
I make it to my feet. And for a moment memory bubbles up, surrounds me. For a moment I remember everything. Lila. Grant. The people down in the slums of Chicago. The broken ribs. The sabotaged core at my mech’s heart. I know exactly who I am and exactly why I am here.
Then it’s all gone.
Later?
I stand. I wait. I marvel at the world. The water is so beautiful. I wonder how it got there.
Movement on the horizon catches my eye. Something cutting through the water. I stare at it. Red signs flash in the corner of my vision but they are just one more confusing detail in the mass of data piling into my head. I want to ignore them. There is peace in that line of water as it races towards me.
I watch it. The efficient beauty of it. It distracts me from the wrongness in my limbs. From the foreignness of my body.
It is almost on me. I want to see what it is. I am curious.
And then—rearing out of the water—a vast unspooling nightmare of flesh. And God. Oh God.
Peace is gone. I scream, flail. And the wrongness of my limbs can’t be ignored now.
Why am I made of metal? Why are my thoughts numbers?
The monstrosity’s jaws smash into me, tear pieces from me. I can feel teeth in skin that is not my skin. Coils ensnaring me. Sensors scream in my head. A strangely remote disemboweling of my electronic innards. Reams of my coolant system spilling out onto the ground.
Why am I made of wires and metal? Why am I dying?
Warning sirens split my skull. And heat. A jagged spike of heat in my chest. Building unbearably.
What is wrong with me? Why am I wrong?
Jaws and claws and teeth and scales and death and crushing and heat and everything caving in caving in and heat ohgodtheheatIamgoingto—
And then the heat in my chest crescendos, swells, consumes.
Everything is eclipsed. Pain, and heat, and light, and the world, and memory. All reduced to single point and blown away.
Afterward:
A voice. A voice brings me out of the darkness. It repeats the same word over and over. There is something familiar about the word. I grasp at it for a moment, but cannot place it.
Where am I?
Somewhere dark. I am strapped in. Wires cover my body. I work one hand free, pull at them. They come away with small wet sucking noises.
The voice is getting nearer.
How did I get here?
Light bursts into the room. I blink, try to shield my eyes with my free hand.
When I can see again, an open door floods the room with light. It is small, full of smashed screens, cracked dials, and trailing wires. I am strapped into a chair in the middle of it all.
A woman stands in the doorway. Tall. Dark hair worn long. A muddy red shirt worn loose. She stares at me.
“Hello,” I say when the silence becomes as strange as everything else about this situation. “Could you please help me?”
The woman starts as if breathed into life that very moment. She crosses the small room, pulls at the straps holding me in place. Halfway through she stops. I look at her face, and I almost believe she is going to cry.
“Are you all right?” I ask. She closes her eyes. When she opens them they are clear. She nods, resumes her work. While she frees my legs I massage life into my arms.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her, “but I think I took a bump on the head. I really don’t remember where I am.”
She nods, frees my legs. She lets me lean on her shoulders as we cross the room’s sloping floor.
Then, as we reach the door
way, I stop, stare, gasp. In the distance there is the wreckage of a massive robot lying half drowned in a shallow sea.
The woman grabs my head, pulls it around, studies me carefully.
“Are you all right?” They are the first words she’s spoken to me. They are full of concern.
I turn to stare again at the fallen machine. I point. “What is that?”
Her eyes cloud again. She hesitates before she answers. “It was called the Behemoth,” she says.
The name rings some deep drowned bell. I try to put a finger on the swirl of emotions. Something is wrong with my memory. Is that what’s upsetting me?
The Behemoth. I shudder. “That sounds like the name of a monster.”
She nods. “It could be.” Then, after a hesitation. “But it was a savior too.” She smiles suddenly. And it strikes me that is a very pretty smile. “It could do terrible things, but it was beautiful when it did them.” A second smile. “When it fought, it always reminded me of Bruce Lee.”
I don’t recognize the name. “Who’s that?”
Another smile. Like the sun through clouds, I think.
She lets go of my head, takes my hand instead. “Why don’t you come with me,” she says, “and let me show you?”
The Kansas Jayhawk vs. The Midwest Monster Squad
Jeremiah Tolbert
John Quiñones: Did you ever imagine that you would make it this far, Mr. President?
President Poindexter: John, you would be surprised how often I’m asked this question. Certainly, there was a tongue-in-cheek element to our party in the beginning, but I truly believe in our ideals. To answer your question, I never had any doubts. And does the Christian Bible not say, “The geeks shall inherit the Earth?”
John Quiñones: I believe it says “the meek,” Mr. President, but given your success, that may have been a typo.”
20/20 Interview, December 3, 2028
“Big . . . smackdown . . . comin’.”
We’d been watching a cheap Taiwanese dino hack-job butt heads with a gigantified gibbon on TV—some territorial battle in a West African country with “New” and “Republic” in the name—when Scooter had run into the room, skidded to a stop between us and the vid-wall, and made his pronouncement.
“Oi, get the fuck out,” Toni shouted and tossed a throw pillow at him. This was hardly unusual behavior, seeing as how she believed throw pillows existed solely for that purpose.
I should explain that Toni is my girlfriend, and a “right proper” British gal. Me, I grew up in the wilds of Western Kansas—in an agrarian commune, actually—and if you’re wondering why she was with me, you wouldn’t be the first. She joked it was the folksy accent, but that was just a dig because my attraction to her was about seventy percent accent, thirty percent hips. I always figured the real reason Toni liked me was because I was the only guy in our BFM chapter that didn’t have crippling body odor.
Scooter—he’s a big feller in all three dimensions, and that means he never runs unless something momentous is about to happen. He was most wired guy I knew and spent most of his time up in his room chatting with other Daij-heads around the world, so if he pried his ass out of his two-thousand-dollar maglev Aeron, you knew there was something major brewing. Presently, he dodged back and forth on his pudgy legs and tried to catch his breath as Toni continued to pelt him with cushions. A pile deep as his knees had collected at his feet already.
“Spit it out, man,” I said. Eventually, we were going to convince him to go with some body-thinners, but his self-esteem was so low that he didn’t believe they’d be an improvement.
“Big smackdown comin’.” Scooter said again.
Toni rolled her eyes. “Jesus, mate. Ping us with an IM next time.”
“No! We need to get on the road!” Scooter said. I’d never seen him so flush with excitement, except the time he scored one of the Big Guy’s scales off eBay Japan. “You know how the Missouri Tiger’s been marking territory over on our side the border?”
“You think we live in a cave?” Toni took a glance around, smirked, and corrected, “A cave without ’net feeds?”
“No, yeah . . . I mean . . . anyway, it’s shaking everything up, just like Kilroy predicted! The Jayhawk’s on the move, and monsterologists are tracking the Nebraska Noog—he’s headed right this way—and Iowa’s Cornfed Carnage is moving in as fast as he can. We’re talking the perfect monster storm here, guys, and it’s supposed to hit five miles north of Overland Park in the next twenty-four hours!”
Toni’s eyes were wide and dancing around the room as she took in the news. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t excited myself; it was all I could do to keep from flying out of my seat and hooting like a happy owl. Here was the key to my senior thesis, unrolling a week before the due date. The Jayhawk’s moping was creating a low monster pressure system which was drawing in the others like a vacuum. This was a gift from the Daij-Gods. The old Toho Men were smiling down on us.
“Toni, go get the gear!” I said, and she was up the steps before I finished the sentence. Ordinarily, a guy can’t just boss his girl around like that (at least not without giving up his nookie privileges), but in this instance I was issuing a direct order as president of the KSU chapter of the Big Fuh-reaking Monster Fan Club, and our charter specifically forbade violent retaliation (thank Heinlein).
I tossed the keys to my van to Scooter. He fumbled and bent over to collect them from the floor, but I was already headed out the door and didn’t have time to give him hell. “Warm up the Battle Wagon. I’ll raid the pantry.”
Scooter giggled. “Pantry raid.”
p0iNd3x+3r r0x0rz by 1@Nd$1id3. +3ch $+0x0rz uP 30 p0iN+z. d00d!
NYTIMES.COM headline, November 8, 2028
Westbound traffic on I-70 was heavy—damn near everyone east of Topeka had decided to take a spur-of-the-moment Rockies vacation. Seeing as how we were headed in the direction from which everyone was fleeing, I caught the occasional “are-you-that-stupid” glance from passing motorists. I just nodded and smiled back.
I tried to get some shut-eye while Toni drove, but she kept joking about swerving into the wrong lane, and I kind of believed she’d do it.
I gave up on sleep and started going over the maps with Scooter. He’d pulled them down onto digiflex pads from the MTC site just before we left. Toni fiddled with the sat-radio until she hit a station that provided regular rampage updates: The mech Division of the National Guard was on highest alert readiness; the governors of Missouri and Kansas were on non-stop flights to Washington to accept Daikaiju Act reconstruction checks from President Akira; construction contractors from Des Moines to Denver were drinking heavily in anticipation of new contracts.
“It’s a good thing the big guys move so slow,” Scooter said. “The MTC estimates this battle will do seven billion in damages. It sure would suck to be at ground zero.”
“Anyone still at ground zero right now is already dead or is so bloody stupid they deserve to be,” Toni said, passing a rental car full of Japanese tourists with gear I would have died for. Hopefully the tourists would upload their data to the ’net afterwards. I was going to need everything I could find to prove my theory, which concerned using predictive weather modeling as a basis for daikaiju behavior modeling. Creatures their size were not subject to ordinary animal behavior principles, I believed, but were real forces of nature. I figured I could get twenty pages out of it, easy, if things went the way they looked like they would.
I whistled at the red lines painted across the smart map. “Highfill wants primary sources, I’ll give him primary sources. He can’t give me less than a B with this brewing.”
“What was it you needed to pass the class?” Toni asked sweetly.
“At least a B+,” I grumbled.
Scooter snerked. “Too much time chasing BFMs,” he faux-whispered to Toni.
“Nah, too much time in the sack with me, love.” Toni looked back to leer, and the van drifted over onto the wake-up strip. I flushed; I was
n’t as comfortable with that kind of talk as she was, me being an innocent farm boy and all.
Scooter shot me a you-lucky-bastard look, and I rolled my eyes. “We need to figure the best vantage point. Did you pull topographies?” He nodded and the map reloaded. We set to examining the landscape, arguing over which bump might provide marginally better views of the battle, and Toni drove on through the night.
The big guy had been sulking down in the southeast corner of the state around Coffeyville when Tiger had made her move. It’d taken a while for the big cat’s pheromones to waft south, but as soon as the ’Hawk had caught a whiff, he’d perked right up.
I was most happy about that. I knew the monsters were dumb as a fish (hell, a few of them, like Mississippi Mal, were fish), but the three of us had a theory—an anthropomorphic one that would have never flown in Highfill’s class: the Jayhawk was disappointed with his territory. Scooter’s personal belief was that our Jayhawk must have caught a glimpse of Manhattan Island from the BFM labs before being shipped out for release, and had been longing for a real metropolis to stomp ever since.
I wasn’t so sure. Sometimes, you just know that things are better elsewhere. Grass, fence, other side, etc. Toni, meanwhile, had wagered that Jayhawk had a severe case of blue balls. That was impossible, of course, given we only called it a “he” because it was convenient. The BFMs were gender neutral.
“All this moving around means he’s coming out of it,” I said. “His funk. I was starting to think he never would.”
“You’d be demoralized too if a ten-story tall Tiger laughed at your most powerful attack,” Scooter said.
“Face facts, boys. He’s a pathetic one, he is,” Toni said. “I mean, it’s cute that you care so much, but there’s no way he can win this.”
“Shut up!” “Can too!” Scooter and I said simultaneously. Toni laughed at us.
Truth was, neither Scooter nor I wanted to admit it, but the Jayhawk was lame by most standards. New Jersey had its Devil. Her flame-strike could light up the sky for miles and miles around. Oregon’s Sasquatch was so powerful it set off a 4.1 miniquake when it battled the Californian GoldFist with his super-pummel attack!