All-Monster Action!

by Cody Goodfellow

  Still, Otaku was deeply frustrated. His current body was less than eight micrometers tall. His body was composed of fewer electrons than there were pixels in a sixteen-bit videogame character. His brain was a quantum electron shell running his uncondensed consciousness in a matrix smaller than the tiniest known bacterium. Trapped in this microscopic homunculus, he had few real needs and he had gotten a tremendous amount of work done, but his zeal for new discovery, for intrigue, was undiminished. After Corben shot his old body, he’d transmitted his memories and holographic personality matrix into this nanotech toy, one of thousands already adrift in Corben’s bloodstream. Essentially, this little doll was the only real Dr. Otaku, but it wasn’t enough to keep him busy.

  Outside this body, the world was still reeling from the aftershocks of his city-animating virus, which warmed his heart… but these new developments could only mean that someone else was pulling the strings. He had worked all his life to make a laboratory of the world, and when he was at the top of his game, he had become trapped inside the putrid gut of his archenemy while a usurper played with his toys.

  Days stacked up into weeks and months, and Otaku had toiled to adapt to his situation. His old labs were torched from orbit by the Russians, just before their antiquated strategic defense system went self-aware. Corben reneged on his promise to let him out, and forced him to help care for his brood of motherless monstrosities. He had learned much from his sojourn into helplessness, but he was growing restless, and he was nearly ready to assume his rightful place in

  the world.

  With only his fellow micro-homunculi comrades and a field lab smaller than a cold capsule, he’d become quite a power in the world of Wes Corben. At half a micrometer in height, he occupied an odd physical gray area where neither the gross laws of the macroscopic world nor the quantum laws of subatomic particles held sway over his results. If not for the inevitable reprisals, there was no end to the improvements he could make in his host. He limited himself to manufacturing raw neurotransmitters and changing the giant honky’s mood with a bucket of balls and a nine iron. Otaku was bored, and his host was becoming a junky.

  This puzzle at last spurred him to consider leaving his acidic self-exile. Kaiju-cities were truly seamless cyborgs, with flesh and blood assembled by nanomite compiler swarms out of inert matter. His perhaps heavy-handed riff on corporate personhood was supposed to create gestalt organisms, like coral reefs. Their greed and ingenuity hardly surprised him, but he had never considered them truly living things, because their business acumen and pompous mission statements came from blow-dried CEO mouthpieces grafted onto seething protoplasm that betrayed no sign of true sapience. They had disappointed him, because they were not even gifted with the intelligence of animals.

  But if the kaiju-cities were breeding, then perhaps the experiment was worthy of his special attention, again.

  Sure, several of the city-beasts were breeders, but sexual apparatus was just another weapon to use against their rivals. Tucson skunk-sprayed a nanoreactive mist on its enemies to give them a host of receptive orifices, then injected them with a mating lance and uploaded its reprehensible specs. There were three Tucson clones scuttling around the southwest before the other city-beasts developed immunity and wiped them out.

  Clearly, Corben had been hiding things from him.

  Slipping into a black kimono, he let his stupid homunculus slaves bind his belt and set the brainwave transmission helmet on his head. This was a pathetic step back from his previous achievements, but he had never met a challenge he could not conquer, never found a mystery he could not master.

  “Activate,” he said, then did it himself before the bumbling slave could reach the control. Clearing his throat, purging his voice of accent, he spoke directly to Corben’s subconscious mind.

  “Listen, boy. I am your master. You will obey my every command. You must chew your food more thoroughly…”

  High above the islands of Japan, Mariko rode the jet stream and contemplated the empty nest of her great nation.

  Everything Nippon had achieved since the Tokugawa Shogunate had gotten up and walked away, to pursue their separate destinies, and left a gutted landscape adrift with shell-shocked refugees who threw rocks and trash at her as she flew overhead.

  Mariko had been the divinely chosen defender of Tokyo for all of a couple hours before it changed its name to Zaibatsu, pulled up its roots and flew away. She wondered if she had failed in her sacred trust then, or if she was failing it now, by leaving the flying jellyfish city to its own devices. Each kind of shame was a complementary flavor that she alternated to keep herself awake. One thing she knew, was that Zaibatsu hardly needed her protection.

  Mariko was only a dragon for a few days before the novelty thoroughly wore off. It was just like her phone. All her classmates this year had the new iPhone with the camera that let you see through boys’ clothes—or so the boys believed. Her father, the Prime Minister, could talk the veneer off the parliamentary walls lecturing about Japan’s role at the forefront of technology, but he never got her the good phone until her peers had something newer.

  It was his fault, ultimately, that she had become what she was, and yet she had survived where millions had died, in the wars of the walking cities. Central Asia was a scorched netherworld, buried under steppes of compressed ash and nuked slag heaps where cities of millions had marched to war and destroyed each other.

  Remembering her mission, Mariko turned south and battled upstream against the nagging waves of psychic noise emanating from near the South Pole. In American movies, ancient evil always bubbled up out of places like Antarctica, and turned out to be something unacceptably icky. In Japanese movies, the ancient evil always looked like a beautiful girl.

  The annoying psychic ripples had begun to drown out the ambient grief and despair of the human race when she woke up in her aerie atop Mt. Fuji three days ago. She had ignored them for as long as she could. One cool side effect of being a dragon was sleeping for weeks on end, and dreaming deeper than ever before.

  Another was being well above crap like the battle going on below. Singapore’s sterile flying man o’ war swarm had cornered and ravished the alligator snapping turtle of Osaka, and dug with its stinging tendrils into the crumbling gaps in the city-turtle’s rusty armor plates. The turtle snapped at the wriggling white shower of pain, but soon went limp as a puppet on the stinging strings of the floating masters. Tentacles glowing with electrochemical force throbbed as they filled the skyscraper-studded shell with uncontrollable shuddering pleasure.

  She probably wasn’t old enough to be watching this. Probably not old enough to fly alone, either, but here she was. Sweeping the horizon and the empty vault above her, she couldn’t shake the sense that something dogged her sparkling contrail.

  As if to punish her for getting distracted, the psychic wail—like whale songs and angry chimpanzees and the drawn out sound of a leather glove on the strings of a contrabass—came wailing back into her head.

  Leaving the cold cauldron of the China Sea behind, Mariko banked to avoid the radioactive aurora over the grave of Taipei, a radiant warrior in glass and steel armor who died in a Chinese nuclear fire just a few baby steps from the crater of his birth.

  After the Philippines, the waves of psychic distress became much louder, echoing off the open ocean with a terrible clarity; something was in dire need, and screaming at the whole world. How it didn’t liquefy every puny human brain in the hemisphere was a mystery to her.

  Fleets of calving icebergs flitted by beneath her beating wings. Banks of stainless steel clouds like melted battleships plummeted out of the troposphere to cling to the steaming whitecaps and hide the world.

  There was nothing out here until she reached McMurdo Sound, but the raw mental waves were like a fever, sapping her vitality even as she winged closer to their source.

  There could only be one place, out here. Her father, Prime Minister Mud-Shark, often left Japan’s state secrets lying around th
eir home like so many empty candy wrappers, and needed her help decrypting half of them.

  Diving lower to cleave to the simmering sea, she felt a flock of dead-stick TOW missiles pass overhead. The clouds parted and Mariko almost crashed into the island of Dr. Otaku.

  She beat her wings to stall and climb the sheer face of the cliffs. She’d seen the place in plenty of manga—manga Otaku was way cuter, a dreamy Captain Harlock type, not a gross, toothless, crazy old pervert—but here too, the real thing was nothing like the comics.

  The twisted canyons in the tortured basalt cliffs were overgrown with towering fungi. The iridescent violet blacklight glow of their gills was brighter than the sun. The canyons got too tight to fly in, but cyclopean manta rays patrolled the skies, and a hybrid of polar bears and tiger sharks shredded anything larger than a penguin on the ground. But she would press on, if only to find out what made this silent noise, and stop it.

  To her surprise, she reached the highlands and perched on the pagoda in Dr. Otaku’s remarkable tea garden unmolested. No giant robots or chimerical abominations reared up to assault her.

  The air was dank and stuffed with drifting mist and spore-clouds, but the psychic distress signal shivered every atom. Mariko trembled with its continuous onslaught. She took off, her wings ripping holes in the curtains of purple mist. The mountain peak ahead of her was split by the hollow mouth of a dormant volcano, stuffed with wreckage and steel girders woven into a crude but enormous nest.

  The air above the nest simmered with waves of fiery energy pouring out of something that was itself invisible, but which bent the light around it as it stabbed the nest with a tractor beam.

  There was no time to think. Mariko was a teenage dragon, but the maternal instinct was strong enough in her that she responded instantly to the plight of the nest of shrieking daikaiju larvae.

  She inhaled and gagged as the rush of incoming oxygen met her outgoing flammable phlegm. She hacked up a gout of napalm lung-butter that plastered the hovering invisible thing and rendered it in lines of blue-green fire.

  Hello Kitty, what the fuck was this? A horseshoe crab the size of a 777 airliner leapt out of the emptiness in front of her, dripping flaming mucus and straining to take off with the gigantic nest in tow. Mariko lashed out with her hind legs and pummeled the flaming flying saucer with her beating wings. The alien ship squirted out from under her like a bar of soap in the shower, but miscalculated badly and slammed into the wall of the volcano. Its shiny cloaking field split open like a cheap toy. An escape pod ejected from the wreckage, but Mariko swooped down and caught it in her claws and circled back to crack it open over the nest.

  “Serves you creeps right,” she growled, “for picking on helpless babies.”

  They were as hungry as they were adorable. Their terrified whining turned to adorable chirps of gratitude as the tiny humanoid forms in their silver spacesuits tumbled out of the broken escape pod and into their snapping mouths.

  The part he still could not understand was why they chose him, or any single human, for this mission. It must’ve been some dumb idea they got from comic books. In comics, heroes never got old, never got too broken-down or shell-shocked to keep fighting cardboard soap opera evil. That was their real superpower, and the reason he hated them, even as a kid. In the real world, every era created the human tools needed for the species to get itself out of its latest mess, and it used them up, ground them down and buried them in an unmarked grave. To send Corben into this crisis seemed almost as hopelessly stupid as it was needlessly cruel.

  From space, the kaiju-cities looked too large to be real, like toys on a sandy playground, until, of course, you remembered that you were looking at them from outer fucking space. From a helicopter flying below the radar of a monster-city on the move, it was a sight to snuff out any lingering delusional traces of human relevance.

  All told, there were worse places to live. Small cities and towns all over the flyover states spontaneously tried to animate, ripping themselves apart but turning out stillborn because they lacked the requisite infrastructure, industrial ingredients, real estate value or any kind of collective consciousness. When the city of Indianapolis came to life, most of its citizens must have left the opinion poll ballot blank. Some effort had been made to transform the lumbering rustbelt city into a kind of car, for it had colossal wheels in place of hind legs, but it looked more than anything else like a huge, headless hippo with asses everywhere.

  And then there was Louisville, a shambling monstrosity that was actually a single colossal teratoma grown from a specimen of lung cancer that overran its cultivation chamber in a top secret Philip Morris flavor laboratory. The cancer had devoured everything organic in the city and replaced it with gray, malignant clones that waved and blew synchronized smoke rings from the shacks and plantation porticos on its membranous flanks.

  There was no question of dropping him on the Mega Snake directly—its anti-aircraft defenses could shoot down a dandelion seed in Nigeria. The only window of vulnerability was when it was busy.

  The drop site they chose for him looked like a six-armed albino mandrill, nearly two miles in height. As it squatted on the shingled shore of Three Mile Island and lazily peeled the reactors apart and ate them like breadfruit, its gloomy, indigo-rimmed features bearded in the ever-present ceiling of smoke that capped the eastern seaboard.

  The titanic spider-mandrill had few conspicuous signs of human habitation visible among the dreadlocked snarls of its mangy fiber optic fur, but thermographs showed that a rainforest’s worth of life thrived in its undercoat. The telltale flash of Winnebago white and Airstream silver were dug into its vast tracts of its meta-flesh like unreconstructed ticks. Its principal exports were moonshine, old timey country music, a notoriously potent tobacco-marijuana hybrid and fervid evangelical race identity bullshit.

  Corben asked the crew chief which city it used to be, and was surprised to hear it was once Mobile, Alabama.

  “Didn’t used to look like that,” the chief grumbled. “When it first woke up, it was draped in this beautiful white sheet…”

  The spider-mandrill’s eyes were hooded as it pried up the glowing foundation slabs of the power plant and crushed them like Saltines in its massive jaws. Its swollen gluteal display was certainly eye-catching, and left no doubt about its readiness to mate.

  Twin bloated lobes of deep purple and fiery scarlet jutted out provocatively from the spider-mandrill’s backside, yet the flesh of the spider-mandrill’s buttocks was knurled and whorled with the folds of a pulsating secondary brain the size of Bryant-Denny Stadium. Forking blue lightning caressed the cauliflower convolutions of the gargantuan hindbrain, but the spider-mandrill seemed blissfully unaware of the intense activity going on in its ass. Absently, it stroked a grotesque erect dong larger than the hospital Corben was born in. Strangely, it didn’t make him feel insignificant at all. He was going to break this awful monster, or know the reason why.

  “Why isn’t it working?”

  Corben had been inserted in a daring and precise maneuver that forced the escort choppers to pour their Hellfire missiles into the masturbating monster’s crotch by way of a distraction. Flocks of vicious flying lamprey-crabs took wing from the blazing pubic thickets to choke their rotors and nip them to ribbons while they fell from the sky.

  Corben leapt out the open hatch and kicked in his rocket pack. Thrusting with surgical precision up the puckered pink onramp of the spider-mandrill’s urethra, Corben forced himself to relate to it as just another landscape. It’s just an unguarded access point leading to an objective, he reminded himself. It’s not a gigantic monster cock.

  Corben hadn’t had enough time to program a neural whip for the spider-mandrill’s dual-brained neural signature, but he wouldn’t need to dig in for an extended stay.

  On the shuttle up from his Antarctic hermitage, Svetlana had tried in her terse way to explain to him how the mega-kaiju cities had abruptly abandoned their ironclad habits of the last two fiscal
years—devouring everything in their path and shitting out products like windmills and solar panel forests, monster-designed fashions and action figures from recycled plastics, and incredibly deviant pornography. The monsters were not merely the walking avatars of the cities that once defined the human race’s highest achievements; wandering the earth to rape and pillage like dumb super-sauropods, they were still living cities, with hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of busy, well-fed workers churning out mostly useless crap.

  They never communicated with the outside world, but sometimes, you could see them looking out the windows, and some passing kaiju cities left a stormy footprint of frantic electronic nonsense on every bandwidth, like a million lunatics trying to sing their walking city’s praises or cry for help in languages of their own invention.

  They walked the earth like gods, ravaging and consuming all the inert works of man, and selling the repackaged wreckage back to the dwindling populations of serfs and nomads who yet survived. They dominated a mindless monster parody of the global market, and they suffered no human competitors.

  Washington, DC promised no answers now or ever again, after its whited sepulchral carcass slithered into the Potomac with a pestilential cloud of winged human vultures circling its hydra-headed domes, and an armada of giant mutant remora that turned out to be nuclear submarines. One by one, the covert black sites where the government tried to weather the crisis in bunkers went truly black. America joined the rest of the developed world in a dark age more brutal than the first, while most of the third world ignored the kaiju city’s debt collection notices and went on with their suddenly rather peaceful lives.

  All this only meant, of course, that Wes Corben would have to live inside a monster, yet again.