Corben shook his head, wiped his nose. He really didn’t want to cry in front of this dragon. “It’s not that simple! I’m a war hero, I’ve proved my loyalty and my ability a thousand times, but it’s never enough, and the people in charge are insane bastards just looking to make a profit off the mess before it all burns up. And I’m not… I’m not such a good person.”
Now the dragon’s attention was really piqued. “What did you do?”
“I left… a litter of… puppies.”
“That’s terrible!”Her superheated gust of outraged breath raised welts on his face.
“It wasn’t my fault! I got abducted by NATO, and I… I just couldn’t take care of them anymore… They were orphans… and, uh, I took them to this trainer who said he could raise them to behave, but they’re still wild animals, and I couldn’t face living with them. So I ran away, but now I see I was wrong to try to tame them. They’re right to be wild animals, now. It’s not a human-sized world, and if I have to live, I don’t want to be a human in it, anymore. I want to be—”
The dragon’s eyes had clouded over. He thought maybe he’d bored her to sleep, but suddenly, a huge pearl dropped from one of the dragon’s great black eyes. Wiping away tears that were worth more than diamonds, she said, “That’s so sad… I want to eat you for being such a coward, but I can’t… because I’m no better than you! I found this nest of larval monsters on this island in the Antarctic sea… I fed them for a while, but they were vicious little shits, so I left them alone. I could hear them from halfway around the world, calling for their Daddy… and I can almost still hear them now…”
Now, Corben felt his eyes welling up with tears. He and the dragon hugged each other. “They’ll be alright,” the dragon purred, “My monsters and your puppies. Knowing what you want is the only kind of intelligence that matters.”
“I’ve been a fool. I should try to get back to my… puppies…”
Suddenly, the dragon went rigid and wadded him up like a dead spider in a Kleenex, then plunged down the monorail tunnel. “So sorry, Commander Corben,” she said in an unaccented monotone, “but you have something that belongs to me inside you, and I will stop at nothing to get it out.”
The voice that came out of the dragon’s mouth was a scratchy transmission, but Corben recognized it immediately. The world believed that it had suffered its last Internet worm at the hands of the Hardsoft CEO who unwittingly helped Dr. Otaku infect the world’s cities with the mega-kaiju virus, but Corben had known someone like Spruance must be at the apex of this operation, from the moment he learned there were no aliens. Only corporate software engineers could make such a promising prospect into such a shitty reality.
If nothing went wrong today, history would remember it as the greatest day in the history of science.
“Before the advent of civilization, Man, in his ignorance, filled his world with monsters. Cast adrift in a world he could not understand, let alone control, he worshipped the Sun and the Moon. Now, thanks to the excesses of science, he has begun to do so again… but the Moon, at least, will answer his prayers.”
Gary Spruance delivered his sermon to the people of the moon (and anyone on Earth with a really badass satellite dish) from the launch bay of the lunar shuttle Hegemony, which floated over KVK-788m6, a near-Earth asteroid that was about the size of the city of Indianapolis, which floated in the leeward shadow of the moon, and thus was easily visible to amateur astronomers on Earth.
Hegemony floated belly-up over the asteroid with its launch bay doors open and pointing what looked like a gigantic X-ray machine at the rock. Four flying saucers floated in a ring around the shuttle, but they had precious little to worry about. Earth’s defenses were utterly devastated, and the International Space Station had not issued even a token automated response to the Moon’s ultimatum. PEOPLE OF EARTH—ORDER IS BACK IN STYLE. FOOD, SHELTER AND FABULOUS PRIZES FOR THOSE WILLING TO WORK. TERROR AND DEATH FOR FREELOADERS.
As soon as the traumatized atmosphere stopped rearranging the landscape down there, the Moon’s movers and shakers would begin establishing plantations, gulags and other reform programs to remake the Earth into something the lunar elite would be able to someday return to. At least, that was the Moon’s plan, but you can’t get cows to walk into a slaughterhouse if you show them a flank steak.
“We’re all just as excited for you,” said the President of the Moon, LLC, “as we are grateful for all your hard work to establish our humble home among the stars.” He and the rest of the lunar HOA watched from the floor of the Tranquility Stock Exchange. The relief in his voice, in his sweaty twitching smile, was like a fart in a car. Though they had no idea what he was planning, they were pretty sure they’d almost seen the last of Gary Spruance. Their biggest fear now was that the confetti and disco ball would drop too early.
“Mr. President, peoples of the Earth and the Moon… get ready to meet your new god.” Gary threw the mic to the deck, which rebounded in zero-G and hit him in the crotch a moment before the cameras cut out.
“Make it happen,” Gary growled.
Commander Wes Corben could barely follow what was going on. He barely cared. Cruel, cliché-ridden fate had teased out his last working nerve and extinguished a cigar on it. That he still had some vital part to play in this cosmically retarded farce only convinced him that it was doomed to fail, whatever it was. With his arms zip-tied behind him and the treacherous Oriental dragon coiled around him like a circle of death, he was forced to chug bottle after bottle of hefty barium solution, or something like it. It was blueberry flavored.
Dr. Otaku floated within reach, life-sized and smirking at him with special contempt. Corben lashed out to kick him in the nuts. His boot passed through the holographic ghost and he kicked himself in the chin, chipping his teeth.
“Resolved as always,” Otaku grinned, “to use violence against others as a mask for self-destruction. American to the end.”
“Is this the end?” Corben asked. “I don’t think I’m that lucky.”
Gary stalked over to the specimen jar which contained micro-Otaku, gnashing serrated mantis-arms like gigantic pruning shears. “I’m not paying anybody here by the hour! Get on with it!”
Smiling and bowing, Otaku spoke extra slowly, as if to a signing chimp or an American. “I will explain in great detail, so there will be no unexpected eventualities.”
The first stage would entail the potentiation of the asteroid—it would be bombarded with the beam of a 23-terawatt gallium arsenide laser that would convert the carbon molecules in the rock into complex and very aggressive nano-compilers. The gigantic millipede that had invaded and infected Tokyo had been a Trojan horse stuffed with nano-compilers, animated and controlled by the combined attention of half a million Hardsoft Network gamers. Because this new daikaiju would be an apotheosis of one human mind, it would be charged and then imprinted with the human pilot in the second stage, which would, if all went well, result in a miracle to beggar all the cat and pony parlor tricks in the Old Testament.
“Stage Three,” Otaku continued after killing the live video feed, “will deliver the charged asteroid into the receptor in the Copernicus Crater. When the bird reaches its nest, then we will finally see something exciting.”
Looking down on the Moon, even on the big monitors, made Corben queasy. The imaging somehow penetrated the dead lunar shell with something much gnarlier than X-rays to reveal the whole staggering extent of the lunar colony, but also extensive veins of exotic metals and organic materials. The opaque shape nested within the dead gray lunar regolith was a fetus the size of Texas. A blinking red dot over its blank, shapeless head, beneath Copernicus, seemed to suggest that the god-sized embryo was a Hindu, or perhaps it was just the target zone for where they intended to drop the animated asteroid in order to bring the moon-god to life.
Corben finished his second liter of blueberry death. A third slid into its place.
Somewhere behind him, staring icy daggers at his head, he knew he�
�d find Svetlana Kurchenko.
Strapped into a bionic spacesuit with a crazy array of pincers and long mantis-like scissor-arms, Gary Spruance looked like the spoiled fat kid intent on ruining his own birthday. Corben began to hope that maybe the whole thing would blow up in his face, that maybe Otaku hadn’t sold out the human race, yet again. “What the hell are we waiting for?”
“The final ingredient,” Otaku snarled, “cannot be rushed.”
“I need to piss,” Corben mumbled.
“The final ingredient!” Otaku crowed. “Someone get the receptacle.”
Svetlana hovered into view with a clear plastic tube. “I take no pleasure in any of this,” she whispered.
“You don’t have to explain. You’re just a conniving, evil witch. I only blame myself for trusting you.”
“I don’t mean that. This is excellent. I earn big dollars, retire tomorrow on the moon.”
Expertly, she snapped the head of his manhood into the snug bell end of the tube and massaged his pelvis until his bladder relaxed. “I mean about touching your penis again. I hope this time, is free of parasites.”
“It was until now,” he snapped.
When he’d filled the receptacle, Svetlana floated it over to a couple of Gary’s giant cadaver-rat lackeys, who fitted the canister of frothy golden urine into a sort of lens on the maser projector which took up half of the launch bay and jutted out at the asteroid like an accusing robot erection. An electron microscope scanned the piss, revealing a busily recombinant sea of elaborate crystalline molecules that Otaku pronounced perfect for imprinting.
Rubbing his pincers together in naked geek lust, Gary shouted, “Make it so!” The entire shuttle vibrated like a dog scratching an itch. Everyone put on their helmets and sealed them up.
Corben strained and twisted in vain against the kind of ordinary plastic band that tied up garbage bags, when Gary seemed to remember something and turned back to point at him. “That asshole always ruins everything. Toss him out the airlock.”
Corben did a cartwheel and caught Svetlana’s head between his ankles and scissored her face-first into a bulkhead. Springing away and stepping over his arms, he brought the zip-tie up to his teeth and bit through it. He snarled at Svetlana, daring her to come closer and get her throat ripped out, when something enormous grabbed him from behind and whipped him end over end into the airlock. The outer hatch popped bolts and spat him out before he could bounce off it. His angry curses came out as silent puffs of frozen breath as he spun off into the void.
The black depths of infinite space inscrutably shrugged at the puny machinations of humankind, as they had since before man or Earth or its sun existed; but for a moment after Hegemony’s oversized radiation projector fired up and blasted KVK-788m6, the whole universe itself seemed to collectively emit a short, sharp gasp of horror. Or at least disgusted resignation that humanity was finally about to escalate to a genuine nuisance.
The crackling energy beam that bathed the asteroid swiftly began to dismantle it, but it was no mere destructive laser. It was so much fucking worse…
For the asteroid itself—a seven billion-year old slug of silicon, carbon, titanium and sundry trace metals left over from the destruction of the planet which once hung between Mars and Saturn—the transformation was as close as any celestial body could ever come to being raped and forcibly impregnated with such a virulent offspring that the molecular bonds that withstood eons adrift in space gave way like ripped pantyhose and shed cascades of heat and radiation, which the horrible embryo taking shape within hoarded for its own hideous development.
For the unborn product of this unholy union was an incarnation of life itself; the molecules charged with the essential spark that imbues gross matter with the entropy-defying essence of existence, yet simmering in an terribly unstable quantum state of infinite potential. Far more volatile than the animated Tokyo, for it did not catalyze the already existing infrastructure into a living organism. It took supremely inert matter and kept it roiling in a state of possibly becoming anything. It awaited only the yoke of a dominant will to give it form and function.
Inside the launch bay, Gary Spruance was itchy. He wasn’t sure if he should trust the hologram of his nemesis with his life, but there seemed no other way to step into true godhood.
“Of course, we could simply download your consciousness into the catalyst,” Otaku allowed, rubbing his ghostly hands together, “but you would remain yourself, and the monster would obtain a copy of your psyche. It would think like you, of course, and know all that you know. But would it be you? It would certainly believe it was, once it destroyed you. Perhaps you should try it. Only my way is certain to put you inside the monster, so that you will be the one who inhabits this absurd construct of yours.”
Otaku would lecture him on the phenomenology of consciousness until the mission clock ran out, if Gary let him. The micro-clone was under a microscope onboard the shuttle. A mercenary stood prepared to execute the tiny devil with a paper towel and some Windex at the first sign of treachery.
The hologram directed his tech support rats to paste on the biofeedback cap, a mesh with hundreds of tiny needles which would prick his scalp and convey the totality of his mind through the shunt, which would in turn directly take control over the boiling mass of quantum protoplasm below.
“Plug him in,” Otaku ordered. After executing some devastating coordinated freefall dance maneuvers, the rats obeyed.
“I don’t feel any different,” Gary said. His dog-arm reached out feebly for a cigarette, causing a mantis-arm to reach out and pinch off a tech-rat’s head.
“Look down,” Otaku said. On the monitors, the asteroid was undergoing a massive state-change, flowing and shifting like a school of fish to become a huuuuuge lit menthol cigarette.
“Wow,” Gary said, holding Señor Dinky up so it could see.
“The process works like simple biofeedback therapy. Relaxed conscious control is essential to maintain the structure of your new intermediate body. This is the part that not every half-wit Caucasoid could begin to master. Now!” The hologram took a swing at Gary, who, in the midst of his mantis-armor, cringed and killed two more rats. “Clear your mind completely! Picture only your new incarnation, your new self, and cloak yourself inside it. For at this critical juncture, you will run the risk of losing yourself to the manifested chaos of the id.”
Gary breathed like he was having a baby for a couple minutes. When he looked at the monitor, he felt like a proud mother, the mother of a god that was himself. The tech-rats cheered. The asteroid was a glowing cocoon about nineteen kilometers long.
“Say,” Dr. Otaku said, “I could not help but notice that you have several extra asteroids…”
Feeling euphoric, Gary thought nothing of revealing the full extent of his plan. “That’s the beauty of the final phase. You know, the Voyager probes won’t even reach another star for a couple hundred thousand years. I can open a wormhole from here to the center of the Milky Way galaxy. I can open a door and go through it and travel a squajillion miles in a subjective instant. It’s just a question of generating enough power to overcome the impossibility debt.”
“And you propose to produce this energy by solar panels and stationary bicycles? Your vaunted physics-fucking power has already destroyed most of the coastlines on Earth.”
“I should’ve thought it would be obvious. Why else would I go to all the trouble of bringing all that nature shit out here? The kaiju larvae from the breeding swarm have weakened the Earth’s crust, and the Gate power stations have created instability in the core. When I am transformed, I’m going to drop the asteroids into the volcanoes I created in California, Peru, Iceland and China. As it explodes, the Earth, for about 1.8 milliseconds, is going to be a wormhole. After I become the Moon, I’m going to ride the quantum backlash from the Earth’s destruction to the center of the galaxy, where I’ll search out new worlds to colonize, to sow the seeds of a glorious new posthuman empire.”
; He truly expected Otaku to argue or scoff or even to bow his head to Gary Spruance’s superior diablerie, but the wizened homunculus just nodded his head slowly and wiped his brow. “You’re ready for the next stage. You must merge now with the intermediate body.”
“I’m ready.”
“Of course you are.” Otaku directed the rats, who screwed on Gary’s helmet. At the last second, one of them checked and rechecked his headset, while another fed a treat to Señor Dinky, who listlessly bolted it down. The miserable dog was allergic to everything, even its own hair. It immediately started to vomit and shit into Gary’s suit even as he was lowered into the VIP escape pod. The stench of irritable dog bowel syndrome filled his suit, but he somehow got past these mortal trivialities to hold onto the vision of his new godly body.
The pod descended like a thrown baseball from Hegemony to the rippling, serene winged form that his beautiful mind had called out of its cocoon. Just a moment before the escape pod made physical contact with the fluid surface, the headset in Gary’s ears began to blast Creed.
He screamed, and the asteroid screamed back at him. Every noise he made caused the song to start over, or another song on the album to start, until the whole album was playing simultaneously, using the bones of his skull as bassbins. A mouth the size of Wembley Stadium gaped wide and swallowed the falling escape pod.
Mariko sat up in bed as if she’d been falling, felt with her hands her favorite silk pajamas and the manga she’d been reading when she fell asleep. She looked at her hands for a long while, trying to remember why it should seem strange that they were human hands. What a weird dream!
Father said people who remembered their dreams were always unhappy. She wondered if she should tell anyone at school about it tomorrow, but decided against it. They would think she was a freak, and she already had a hard enough time fitting in…
Rolling over and over in zero-G with all her limbs clutched to her flanks like a flash-fried duck on a spit, she blinked her eyes and looked around. She drifted high above the Moon and quite close to a space shuttle in deep trouble.
All-Monster Action! Page 23