Ike’s scrappy, undersized saurian hindquarters had to scramble to keep up with his top-heavy forelimbs, but the monster hustled across the battlefield with a stampeding gait that looked awesome on TV with the accompanying stadium butt-rock theme music the Pentagon had commissioned for all his media packages.
“A tragicomic triumph over every sound principle of genetic engineering,” said Scientific American, “and a perfect totem spirit for America’s moribund status as a world power,” added the Washington Post. “The most idiotic abomination to shamble out of the Beltway groupthink cuddle-puddle since the New Deal,” jeered the Wall Street Journal. (The President took umbrage at the harsh reception of his “personal brainchild,” and invited the seditious press corps to review Camp X-Ray Delta in the DMZ bayous of the former state of Louisiana, but the damage was done. Ike’s reality shows, cartoons and merchandise tanked.)
At least, Commander Wes Corben told himself, they hadn’t succeeded in putting wings on him. When the people who turned cloned tissue from his friend Steve Mancuso into a mystery meat served in every cafeteria in America sat down to make a monster, you had to expect some unpleasant surprises.
It seemed like he had arrived just ahead of the rush. Out on the ocean, he heard but couldn’t see a massive naval battle––men, machines and monster pointlessly blowing each other up in the fog. Approaching the island’s central volcanic peak, Corben was almost disappointed at the lackadaisical resistance he had encountered. The mushroom-jungle was teeming with Otaku’s recent experiments in mini-kaiju, anklebiter chimeras bred for tyrants as crowd control in Indonesia and Africa. Iguanadonkeys nipped at Ike’s flanks with their toxic jaws and hurled inflammable feces at him, but Ike smashed them to jelly with his mighty fists. Scampering emulemurs proved harder to target, but their kicking spurs proved only a minor annoyance, gouging shallow, bloodless divots out of Ike’s carbon-steel endodermis before he mowed them down with his rail guns.
Ike scaled a thousand-foot waterfall and bounded across an open plateau with a heliport and observation bunkers arranged around rows of open missile silos.
The ground shook, and a gargantuan shadow rose up out of the murky mists to blot out the milky light of the sun.
Ike thumped his chest and let out a shriek like a thousand eagles in a document shredder. Corben charged up the rail guns and kicked in Ike’s adreno-blowers, thrilled to finally face a foe worthy of his undiluted wrath.
At first, it seemed as if a mountain of mushrooms shambled out to attack him, but the leviathan laboring underneath the shaggy carpet of parasitic fungi shook itself free and honked a defiant roar from its gaping maw and slime-choked blowhole.
Corben felt pity seep like lactic acid into his reflexes, slowing, but not stilling his hand, as he spurred Ike to engage his miserable enemy.
The assholes called it Ishmael.
Bred by Dr. Otaku for an overfunded Greenpeace in a fit of grandiose pique in the late 90’s, the walking mega-cetacean wiped out the Japanese whaling fleet in a month—but not before the fickle eco-activists had a change of heart, and stopped the cash transfer to Otaku’s account.
Ishmael had been missing and presumed dead for nearly a decade, but now, it thundered across the helipad like something out of the Golden Age of Greece, when the earth was raped by the sky, and gave birth to monsters.
Despite his political repulsion for everything Ishmael stood for, Corben had to marvel at the workmanship. A gigantic orca on functional sauropod legs, Ishmael could have been a real threat, if it had arms. The monster’s useless flukes had been ripped off, burned or shot away dozens of times, but Otaku had finally overcome the fatal design flaw. You could hate the game, but never the player. And yet, Corben discovered new depths of loathing for the mind that could replace the hapless tyranno-orca’s flapping flippers with gigantic, chrome-plated chainsaws.
The huge, ungainly lumberjack blades struck sparks off each other as they roared to rusty life, but Ishmael struggled to keep up, big black eyes bugging out in bloodshot shock at what it had become, wheezing and flinging great streamers of slime-mold from its infested blowhole. A blood-flecked yellow beard of the disgusting stuff hung from the whaler-killing killer whale’s sick, toothless maw like a hillbilly patriarch’s beard.
Ike ducked under the slashing blades and pivoted, clipping one rampaging chainsaw forelimb by its tender, infected organic stump, and bent it to sever its mate at the base as neatly as such a monumentally ghastly operation could be executed.
Ishmael fell with a shockwave that lofted Otaku Island spores to Manitoba, asthmatically bleating its melancholy love for its cruel, careless creator until Ike, wielding Ishmael’s own chainsaw-limb, cored the miserable monster’s speech center, signaling lunch.
With all the waste disposal paperwork the eco-activists and Right to Lifers had foisted on the mad scientists’ guild, it was almost easier to clean house by provoking an international incident every so often, Dr. Otaku observed.
Ishmael and his ilk were bittersweet reminders of a simpler era, but all Dr. Otaku saw were their defects.
He never wanted to make weapons. He wanted to create life, which no one could corrupt, tame or control. Which forced him to come around to the unseemly business of the hour.
“Greetings, friends, allies and interested parties. You have been briefed on the rules. Shall we start the bidding?”
Otaku waved to cut the feed and sank into a chair to sip a restorative tonic of Tang and vat-grown human cerebrospinal fluid. Though it was like a cannon in his pygmy hands, he never put down the vintage WW2 Mauser which, the eBay seller promised him, was the gun Goebbels used on himself and his wife in Hitler’s bunker.
His unpaid summer interns, the Seppuku Clan, had the auction well in hand. The federation of bosozoku hackers had come to Otaku’s attention when they took over Mega-Ronin 1, Tokyo’s old-school corporate defender mecha, and orchestrated the monster robot’s spectacular hara-kiri in Tokyo Bay. The rusting remains of the beloved robot, still hunkered over the haft of its vibra-katana, had become Japan’s Statue Of Liberty, a moving symbol of its enduring love affair with heroic self-defeat.
With their bleach-blonde mohawks and pompadours, their huge blue cybernetic anime eyes and biker gear made of cured Yakuza hitmen hides, the Seppuku Clan were laughably campy henchmen, but he couldn’t argue with the results as they expertly filtered the flurry of wire transfers, Trojan horses and data packets, both overt and covert, pounding the firewalls of Otaku’s network like piranha sperm trying to fertilize an egg. Every corporate bidder worth entertaining had tried to spike the experiment with its own software, hardware specs and genetic codes. Most of them had also sent armadas of mercs and Somali pirates, drone blastboats and mecha-kaiju swarms to shell the island and shoot expensive lasers at each other.
Bioweapon bombs hit like smoke tracers and sprayed viral mists that made the mushroom forests sprout wings, tails and udders. Each was trying to outbid its rivals with one hand, while gaming the birth of Otaku’s last monster with their own protocols, and sabotage the process in case anyone but them succeeded… exactly as he knew they would.
The reason the concerted intelligence forces of the free world could not shut down Dr. Otaku’s control network was very simple. It was everywhere, and nowhere, at once.
The moment the auction cycle reached critical mass, the system appeared to crash, and Dr. Otaku ceased transmitting from his island stronghold. The auction had only been a ruse, anyway. Otaku had no intention of selling his masterpiece, but he had used the mountains of credit put on the block in millions of micro-transactions to finance the real project, and to focus the world’s attention on this project, and thus, bring it to life.
The virtual womb in which his masterpiece gestated was buried in the Seppuku Clan’s server on the Hardsoft Gaming Network, where the unborn monster would awaken in millions of households, cafes, arcades and pachinko parlors around the world, to take control of its new body.
While Interpol, N
SA and a hundred corporate and government agencies in the United States and Europe frantically scoured the globe and the Net for his latest dastardly creation, at any given moment an average of 1.2 million subscribers wasted their lives online via the Hardsoft Gaming Network, which was unofficially Seppuku Clan’s bandwidth-hogging bitch. While upwardly mobile parents tried to avert or manage or just profit off the impending kaiju holocaust, none noticed how their tween and teenaged kids stayed locked in their rooms and immersed in a marathon cooperative tournament, even after some of them started to die.
Today, the current peak audience of four million distributed across five continents worked like virtual slaves racing to build a pyramid, but also served as the surrogate nervous network of a new artificial intelligence cloud, training it to work in concert as parts of a single, unborn beast, straining to break out of its egg.
The game demanded their total concentration, as terabyte parcels of data comprising Dr. Otaku’s ultimate monster were uploaded onto the net, and downloaded to a battery of masers and nanotech fabricators set up atop the NHK parking garage in the geographic center of Tokyo.
With the conclusion of the game, half a million elite survivors emerged victorious from the final level and were whisked into the synthesis of a new order of kaiju.
The inferior three and a half million gamers simultaneously choked to death on their own vomit, but moments later, their bank and credit accounts were drained and maxed out, and flurries of spam blasted out of their respective mail accounts (W3 G0T PWNED BY ZAIBATSU!!! UR NXT, NOOBZ!!!!), proving that there was life after death, if only in the belly of an unborn god.
At the top of the highest peak on Otaku Island, the bleeding and battle-scarred Ike reared up on its hind legs and roared defiance at the last circle of security around Otaku’s lair.
The lab itself was no paltry matter, a six-story geodesic dome surrounded by minefields and automated machine-gun towers, but the staging area for Otaku’s final project was as absurdly oversized as a workbench would need to be, for the construction of giant monsters.
A paved, silicon-lined bowl the size of the Arecibo deep space radio telescope filled the yawning chasm where the mouth of the volcano once yawned. The vast expanse was traversed by a network of cables from which gondolas dangled over the great work. Swarms of hovering drones monitored or controlled the process, which, despite the teams of uniformed lackeys racing around in golf carts, the squads of ninjas drilling on platforms, and the flocks of white-coated nerds hassling with banks of expensive technology under the eye of tattooed Jap biker terrorists… had amounted to nothing much, that he could tell.
The bowl was empty.
Corben didn’t take too long to puzzle it out. If you drove a giant monster around the world and smashed into nefarious assholes’ hideouts for a living, then sooner or later, you might just stumble in a bit before the eleventh hour, and you’d only have to kick over a bunch of charts and nifty conceptual sketches.
He ordered Ike to take apart the lair. Shrugging off the depleted-uranium rounds the machine guns pumped into it like so many fleabites, Ike picked up tanks and tossed them into the minefields, loping across the field towards the lab dome when the debris stopped bouncing.
No more giant monsters dropped out of the sky or crawled out of cracks in the earth. No satellite death weapons or clouds of mustard gas to thwart his claws when he set Ike to pounding on the steel and Plexiglas wall of the dome. It yielded instantly, spilling him into the flimsy interior of his archenemy’s lair, which looked like a gigantic Benihana steakhouse.
“Corben, what’s the status of the operation?”
“There is no operation! There’s nothing going on, here. I think the old geek just wanted the attention—”
Corben lost his train of thought as he saw something on the aft monitors. Disengaging Ike from the dome, Corben brought the vista of the huge, empty bowl up on his main monitor.
It was still empty, but suddenly, and vitally, full of… bullshit?
The concave surface of the bowl lit up and danced with weird circuit-frying waves like St. Elmo’s fire, summoning and containing arcane energies that warped the air. There were no hoses or artificial womb machinery, or the small factory needed to assemble even modest combat mecha.
All in a flash, Wes Corben understood.
The project was all but complete.
The bowl was, as he originally pegged it, a satellite dish. It collected all the world’s communications, filtering them to focus on the events that had the world’s undivided attention: the battle here, and all the endless, airtime-eating, empty expert speculation about whatever the hell Dr. Otaku might be up to.
Psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists, concerned parents, politicians, pundits, noted futurists and even a few actual scientists, speculating, debating and spitballing, molding the clay of inexplicable events into instant mythology. And all this bullshit, as well as the corporate gamesmanship to try to control the process, had created a tremendous sink of energy and wealth and consciousness, out of thin air. And somehow, Otaku’s ingenious lackeys had figured out a way to harness all that hot air and bullshit, to coalesce it into a power source, and more—
Because the raw uncertainty, the yawning mass hysterical terror of the unknown that the bullshit sought to overcome, was the root chord that drove that awesome symphony, and dictated the form that the chaotic energy began to take.
The bowl was much more than a satellite dish. It was more like a laser, collecting all the world’s fear and misinformation, transmitting it anywhere in the world, and transmuting it into flesh.
Corben had to hand it to the old devil. In a world so eaten up with the fear of the lights going off, Dr. Otaku had harnessed the earth’s only inexhaustible power source, and turned it loose to make his monster for him.
Ike redoubled his efforts to gut the dome, which disgorged armies of antique flatbed tanks with energy projector lamps. They hardly singed Ike’s feathers, but the static charge made all the cockpit monitors go to random satellite feeds of Brazilian children’s shows. Blind, Corben kept smashing, hoping to somehow pull the plug, sure nobody was listening as he screamed, “Stop talking about it, you’re making it happen…”
Mortified, Mariko rolled through the trendy streets of Harajuku, eating everything.
Every door was closed to her. She even tried to squirm down the storm drains, but they had been sealed. Everything organic that she touched dissolved and added to her already unbearable mass. Even the disgusting germs on every surface gave up their secrets with a toxic whimper, as they became her.
It was liberating to be free of fear of bacteria, but the shock of tasting everything she touched sent her into a panic, stampeding through the quarantine roadblocks and out into the city, seeking a huge bowl of tapioca to stand in until someone could administer an antidote that worked.
Soldiers shot at her, and with a wave of her pseudopods, she crushed and slurped them into her abominable spreading belly like so much melted ice cream. Classmates shrieked and hurled burning textbooks at her, and she wept hydrochloric acid tears, reducing them to crumbling husks while an NHK camera drone peeped it all. Lashing out at the drones only attracted a dozen more and set fire to a KFC, and all its flaming patrons leapt into her foaming flanks to put out the fire.
In her blood, the kaiju RNA-potentiator agent had triggered a chain-reaction throughout Mariko’s body, causing every cell to revert to totipotency, a science word that meant every one of them could easily go its own way with no regrets. Made up of a colony of anything-goes amoebas casually dedicated to the idea of Mariko, if not to the form or the other dull mortal stuff, the new, mutant Mariko had cast off the uncool gene therapy scheme behind the spiked Kungmin Horangi jerky, only to regress into a blob.
When she broke out of the classroom, a team of mercs shot her with tranquilizer darts spiked with the antidote. But they didn’t reckon on Mariko’s spunk, or her morning diet of ginseng, black market estrogen, and Blue Otak
u Ecstasy. The havoc these ingredients played in the total reshuffling of Mariko’s genetics and morphology had rendered her a seething, primordial pit of awful potential.
She wept at the manga-scale irony. Once, she could not bring herself to eat anything but kaiju jerky, for fear of becoming a fat girl. Now she could eat everything, it seemed, but herself.
Slithering down the alley, she met a ragpicker woman, ancient and seemingly held together by dust and cat hair. Alone, the charwoman stood in her path, bent under a knapsack bulging with recyclables, but singularly unimpressed.
“Foolish girl, what are you making of yourself?”
“I don’t know!” Mariko wailed, shocked at the clarity of her words, as well as the volume, which shattered windows and set off car alarms for eight blocks.
“Foolish girl… become the champion Japan needs.”
Mariko tried to thank the old woman, but ended up eating her.
Perhaps it was the old woman’s words, or just her gamy old body digesting within Mariko’s formless new one, but a deep, cosmic serenity took hold of her, enfolding her like a cocoon, soothing her with dreams of a new shape.
On the verge of what he earnestly thought was victory, Wes Corben was already reaching for the emergency booze locker when Ike suddenly seized up and defied orders.
“Orders” are what they called them in the manuals, but as Ike’s pilot, Corben entered commands directly into the monster’s hacked brainstem. Most brain functions above the autonomic level were modeled by onboard computers, but the men who designed and modified Ike had learned from their costly previous model, Major Steve.
Ike should have shut down the moment it refused an “order,” or gone to a fetal crouch until it was airlifted. There was no “Ike” to defy Corben’s “orders,” or so he thought, until he came within a hair’s breadth of crushing Dr. Otaku himself.
Smashing away at the mad scientist’s lair like a rabid badger with its snout in a beehive, Ike burrowed deeper into the lab complex, flinging crushed concrete, satellite dishes, lab equipment and flattened hordes of subhuman orderlies like so much beach sand. Corben dared to hope that he could finally exact revenge for all the awful twists Dr. Otaku had introduced into his life, when he lost control of Ike.
All-Monster Action! Page 13