The renegade monster didn’t run amuck or switch sides to pull Corben out of its own skull. On all fours, Ike crawled away from the gutted lair and began to dig a hole in the middle of the minefield.
The hole was wider than it was deep, and of no strategic value whatsoever, that Corben could see. Yet Ike squatted over it in blithe innocence of the onslaught of bombs and lasers chopping away at its hunched shoulders.
Corben tried to harangue Mission Control, tried to raise anyone, but the airwaves were a helter-skelter of random red noises and bleeding shortwave chatter.
He watched the monitors in disbelief. Fuck the regs, he thought, and lit up a cigarette. He’d need at least that long to figure out what to do next, assuming he could do anything.
Ike was engineered to have no secondary sexual characteristics, no hormone arousal receptors that might make the monster hard to control in the event of a “gay bomb,” or other sexual bioweapons.
So, even if he couldn’t do anything about it, Corben still wanted very much to hear the guys at the lab explain how Ike could be laying eggs.
Of the seven million Tokyo residents who watched the newborn, nameless monster materialize in their midst, no fewer than fourteen died of heart attacks or strokes, while another hundred and twelve leapt or fell to their deaths as it passed harmlessly through their apartment blocks. A perfect self-projecting hologram, a thirteen-story ghost; when it thrust its metamorphic forelimbs through towering skyscrapers and maser-tank battalions, its tiny human victims lay quivering yet unharmed in their own urine, quite convinced they’d been crushed.
And there was no shortage of real destruction. The two Self Defense Force artillery units flanking Otaku’s monster in the business district of Akasaka Chuo never particularly cared for each other. Infiltrated and thoroughly compromised by rival mystic prosperity cults, and with no enemy to fight but endless kaiju invaders, the rival tankers could be accused of little more than excessive zeal and poor hearing when reports came in that their barrages were passing through the target and hitting each other, the US Embassy and the nearby Imperial Palace, with devastating accuracy.
“Shit,” Otaku hissed, cutting a botched line of code and pasting a revised binary phrase into the command line. “Forgot to carry the one …”
And the monster instantly became utterly, inescapably solid.
The most coherent accounts of the monster’s appearance described it as some sort of chimerical centipede, with hundreds of armored, highly articulated limbs that wrought street-level holocausts wherever the creature went, like a Rose Parade of whirling combine threshers.
Skyscrapers toppled against each other in its wake like felled stands of bamboo, their foundations whittled away as if by colossal Weed Eaters. The business end of the creature was a burly, almost humanoid thorax with a deadly array of wildly scything meat cleavers for arms. For a head, it had only a blunt, lobsterish battering ram festooned with hosts of compound camera eyes, and a freaky crown of trembling downlink dishes, radomes and antennae, like the collected receiving arrays of the NSA and KGB, stuffed into its face.
The indestructible apparition seemed to frolic through Tokyo with the blind fury of a tsunami on two hundred dancing feet, but the civil defense authorities watching the city’s transit grid saw an insidious plan taking shape behind the chaos.
As the monster rampaged through the city, it surgically cut off all bridges, subway routes and highways along the Sumida River, severing central Tokyo from the eastern suburbs, and moving north, chopping down monorails along the narrow trash-chute of the Kanda River.
Even as Otaku’s giant centipede raged through the city, it shrank, but not from the puny onslaught of the Self Defense and NATO forces. The behemoth was an Internet Worm made flesh, an apparition of pure data cast in a candy coating of wantonly destructive matter. And it was dismantling itself, shedding boxcar-sized segments of its serpentine body that in turn disintegrated into streams of data radiation that made gross matter thrum like overclocked chipsets, and hordes of giant spiders that spread throughout the island it had created out of central Tokyo, repairing damage and weaving webs of carbon-steel around the leaning skyscrapers of Akasaka, knitting them together to reinforce them against an imminent quake not even the doom-obsessed engineers of the city could have predicted.
Wracked with a pain like a thousand periods, Mariko cried out and shattered her cocoon.
Sure, she should feel exultation and curiosity to discover what she had become, but mostly, she just felt shame. The whole day had been a surprise final exam in degradation.
Getting dropped off at school by your shit-eater of a father’s mistress was humiliating. Freaking out in class was lethal. Turning into some kind of giant amoeba and eating everyone in your path? Priceless.
And so, when she crept out of the crater of her rebirth in the parking garage behind Shibuya Station, Mariko did not give a shit what she looked like. Her awesome wings spreading to dry in the sun, radiant scales throwing off showers of holographic rainbows when she launched herself effortlessly into the air, all of it—totally boring.
But it got interesting fast.
Mariko took to the air, and immediately was cut down by the vibra-katana of Mega-Ronin 2, the new and improved defender of Tokyo. The crackling blade only grazed her, but its disruptor field rebooted her brain, grounding her but good. Well, her job was done, then, but the robot kept trying to cut her head off.
She only breathed on the stupid thing, and melted its knees as it charged her. Collapsing on its overloaded katana, the giant mecha-samurai cut off its own head, but kept trying to get up and spaz out on her again.
Fed up with the robot’s retarded shit, Mariko flapped her wings and climbed to the top of the marine layer to survey the city.
On the smoky eastern horizon, a colossal buzzsaw chewed a southwesterly course through Akasaka’s black glass towers and mowed through the shopper’s purgatory of the Ginza, oblivious to carpet-bombing jets and irate giant moths. She noted with dismay that her home and the shit-eater’s offices lay just inside the forty-square kilometer island isolated by the shrinking centipede’s unchecked swath of destruction.
It wasn’t like she could go home, even if she wanted to. Not like this.
The monster turned northeast to disable the Hibiya train line. Directly in its path, Mariko noted with a fiery squeak of panic, lay the corporate headquarters of Sanrio.
The monster was more than welcome to step on her school and the shit-eater’s mistress, but she’d be damned if she’d let it fuck with Hello Kitty.
Millions of eyewitnesses described the epic battle that followed between the flying savior of Tokyo and the city-killing centipede. Thousands of hours of video from cameras, cellphones and webcams made every one of them a liar.
Not a single conclusive image of any kind of monster would ever be recovered or extracted from the Tokyo Otaku Event, except for the spotty coverage of the rampaging dragon that NHK identified as the Prime Minister’s academically unserious and somewhat homely daughter. The damage seems to appear spontaneously around her, as if shockwaves from her temper tantrum are spreading to slice the heart of the city free of its setting.
According to the most reliable eyewitnesses, exactly fifteen minutes and fourteen seconds after it materialized, the Tokyo Otaku Event vanished. Witnesses reported a brief vacuum when it disintegrated into clouds of civic-minded giant spiders which immediately leapt to work repairing the damage—but from there, they diverged into a variety of scenarios, from Mega-Ronin 2 beheading the monster with its sword, to the people bringing it down and ripping it apart with their bare hands until it imploded back to its home dimension.
Five seconds later, it appeared in London.
In the guise of a fire-breathing, hundred-headed eel, it crushed and cremated all bridges over the Thames, then turned its gnarly gnashing lamprey-mouths on the West End, vomiting napalm death with uncanny precision on banks, media outlets and private military contractors.
Thirteen breathless seconds later, it came to Moscow.
It looked like Stalin. It flattened the kleptocratic Duma and hurled Lenin’s Tomb into orbit, then lobbed fistfuls of moldering Soviet public works across eleven time zones at strategic targets in the plush offices, dachas and barracks of Russia’s robber-barons. It tried to eat Putin, and almost kept him down. The President was left alone, nonplussed and naked when the gargantuan phantom of communism dematerialized from the eye of the maelstrom it created, leaving legions of giant spiders to gift-wrap the Kremlin.
It struck San Francisco at 4:20pm PDT, so it was, like, gone, before anyone noticed.
Wherever they materialized, Otaku’s phantom kaiju were only the thin end of the bulldozer. Underfoot, the real threat seeped like bacteria into the wounds the giant monsters inflicted: cadres of kamikaze hackers, armed with mainframes, laser projectors, truckloads of highly virulent nanotechnology and portable karaoke.
While the spiders toiled overhead, the bosozoku gangs dumped the nanomites into the sewers, and waited around, sniffing glue and belting out Motörhead tunes until the gestating city throbbed and incorporated them into its mad self-improvement campaign. Out of thousands of tons of garbage and raw sewage and even the pipes themselves, the mites forged the mighty thews of a living god amid the infrastructure of the city center.
Unseen, they spread and assimilated every communications system, every computer, every unproductive scrap of biomass, to form a new, vital body out of the old one; and out of the stink of their shit and the drone of their dreams, they conjured the sleeping soul of the city, coaxed it into that uneasy, unborn body, and goosed it up the ass with a psychochemical hot poker.
And the world, already braced for some unspeakable new menace for well over three exhausting cable news cycles, collectively shit itself.
When the wheel began to turn on the hatch of Ike’s cockpit, Commander Corben took cover behind a bulkhead and drew his sidearm.
No new alert had sounded to drown out the systems failure claxons since Ike went back to nature.
Ike calmly watched the perimeter of the minefield, glancing every so often at the clutch of leathery speckled eggs under its—her?—flanks. Each egg was about the size of a minivan.
Beyond coming up with a betting pool and a lot of rotten jokes, Mission Control had been no help at all.
So, when the tiny assassin with the jet pack skulked into the cockpit, Corben was overjoyed. Here, thank God, was a problem he could lick with his own fists. He wanted to hug the little man, and he did, with chopping blows to the nose, throat and solar plexus.
Gagging on his own blood, the intruder staggered back into the milky daylight streaming through the open hatch.
Corben was stunned. Dr. Otaku himself lurched at him, spitting blood, inscrutable black goggles telescoping out in alarm. His pipestem arms and childlike hands, so adept at perverting the miracles of nature, could barely hold the huge old Kraut pistol they tried to lift off the deck.
The dying doctor squeezed off a single wild shot before he keeled over. Had he lived a moment longer, he might have stopped his own bullet, which rattled round the cockpit for almost a full second before it hit Commander Corben in the armpit, grazing his left lung and flattening against his shoulder blade to lodge in the intracostal muscles of his back.
Corben kicked the scientist a couple times. No escape pod launched out of his head; no miniature emulemurs chewed their way out of the corpse to wreak bloody postmortem revenge.
It just laid there, being dead.
He would have expected something, after all that trouble.
Corben rang Mission Control to give them the good news, but they put him on hold.
“Anyone who thought Tokyo’s real estate market could go no higher was eating humble pie with a side of crow today…” The bullshit news copy practically wrote itself. But this time, it literally made the monster stronger.
Fueled by the inexhaustible flood of computer-modeled, expert-vetted bullshit about its birth, the new entity that awakened beneath the center of Tokyo did not rise to destroy the city. It was the city, as much as the streets and buildings and helpless salarymen trapped in its legions of skyscrapers. When it awakened, the city center itself, ten square miles of the most expensive real estate on earth, including the Imperial Palace, the stock market and the address of every major technological and financial entity in Japan, stood up.
Tired of rebuilding after an endless barrage of kaiju attacks, Tokyo’s metamorphosis was the only sensible response: become a monster.
On millions of arachnid legs, the city detached itself from surviving streets, subway and monorail lines and then, to the shock of the world, it floated.
And then it flew.
Like everything for which the Japanese became renowned as innovators, it was assembled from parts built elsewhere, fiendishly practical, and not nearly as hard as they made it look.
Once the spiders had done away with the pesky Self Defense forces, they devoured thousands of tons of heavy, rigid concrete and secreted light carbon-steel webbing, replacing much of the rigid, dead weight of the city’s infrastructure with a flexible, living skeleton.
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 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 miles behind the city. They radiated enormous arcs of raw electricity, which leapt out at news choppers and disabled passing fighter jets, much as the trailing stingers of a man o’ war paralyze its prey.
What the fuck was Mariko 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 materials 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 H
OSTAGES. 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 EZ-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.
All-Monster Action! Page 14