Unless this was another dream. When the asshole with the remote control made her his zombie slave, she retreated into a fugue state where she dreamed she was still a human girl, which quite naturally begged the question of whether she’d wake up from the dream of being a dragon. For this alone, she was going to kill and eat the little fat dog-handed gaijin the moment he let his guard down. She wasn’t sure if she was still under remote control, but she didn’t feel any urgent need to masturbate, so maybe she was free.
The space shuttle was losing a tug of war with an asteroid made of giant monsters. As it got closer, she realized that it was both bigger than any living thing she’d ever seen, and it wanted to eat her. Corkscrew torpedoes of weaponized flesh and nano-reactive plasma chased her in shrinking figure eights until she could return all the meat-missiles to their sender.
Flying away from the Moon left her with few options. She doubted she could hold her breath long enough to return to Earth, and the Gates were all burned out. She went to ground in the dome with all of Earth’s great landmarks laid out on a golf course. The architects had arranged the landmarks in a kind of microcosm, around the world in eighteen holes, with shopping malls and ski slopes and everything a master race of spoiled human brats could want, with none of the dirty, smelly, common stuff of Earth.
At first, the Vegas Mega-Snake must’ve seemed like a disaster, but they had already begun to incorporate it into the landscaping. The casinos were tented to fumigate the natives and exotic mutant fauna, preparatory to turning the Mega-Snake into a proper five-star resort.
It must be truly dead, then. Lunar tourists—fat tubs of crap in personal movers like toddlers in rompers—roved over it like ants. Lumbering cyborg sauro-maggots vomited out new concrete handicapped ramps and ripped out the biomechanical capillaries and fiber optic nerves that spread out everywhere around its corpse to burrow into concrete and sand.
Mariko perched on the top of the Stratosphere. It was wrong, but what could she do? At last she understood why Godzilla constantly zigzagged from being a defender of humanity to a rabid avatar of Nature’s wrath. Humans never learned, if someone always delivered them. If they couldn’t kill their saviors, they were doomed to suffer them as villains. But what could she do? She was only one monster.
And then she heard a sound like whale song and frightened monkeys and a sad, gigantic cello. It had been bad enough when she’d first heard it in her mind, from thousands of miles away. Now it was coming from just down the street, in the gladiator arena at Caesar’s Palace.
They were scared and wanted their nest and their father and not to be prodded with Tesla arc blasters or flamethrowers, anymore.
Just like that, she knew what to do. Rescuing the babies wouldn’t be enough. These human worms needed to be reminded that their sun had set.
“You were the city that raped other cities. On Earth, toothless hillbillies and Polynesians worship you as a god. Is this where you want to be buried?” she growled, her voice catching fire. “Is this how you want to be remembered? As a landscape feature on a golf course?”
Mariko launched herself like a flying squirrel off the roof of the Stratosphere tower and strafed the Strip with gouts of fiery bile. Maggot-bots burst and a new outlet mall was cremated. A squadron of flying golf carts dogged her tail. When she returned to the tower, she found it trembling and hot. Neon lights blazed and the earth shook and monsters and robots and slaves sprang like fleas from the corpse of the city of Las Vegas.
Getting thrown out of an airlock without oxygen tanks was an unthinkably awful fate, but for this, at least, Commander Wes Corben had been trained. Expelling his last breath to flatten his lungs before they could burst, he crushed his eyes shut and clawed out at the hull of the shuttle. His fingers caught on a seam in the ceramic re-entry tiles. He clung to the side of the ship like an insect, and he thought, this is it. The only useful part of me—my piss—taken away. I’m the empty package.
If only morbid self-absorption was a viable power source, you Americans would have ruled the world like gods, said Dr. Otaku, in reality and not just in your empty, homoerotic summer blockbusters.
What the hell are you still doing in my head?
I never left, idiot. Remember, the bullet in which I first invaded you contained literally thousands of micro-clones of myself. I shut them all off before I was abducted, but they only waited to become useful again. You can open your eyes, but keep your mouth shut.
He hesitated only a little before he opened his eyes. If Otaku was still inside him, than he had no reason to want him dead. His sweat, apparently, had congealed into a bubble, which blew a helmet and hardened around his head.
Incredibly, his eyes neither boiled nor burst.
The imaging fluid you drank contained oxygen in compressed suspension and the ingredients for a liquid silicon spacesuit, which should protect us for an hour.
It was ironic, holding his breath for so long, fighting the lethal reflex to breathe. Ironically, he had also had a much better view of what was going on.
He dangled below the underbelly of the shuttle. He slowly drew closer to the asteroid, which now looked like a colossal battle royale of psychogenic id-monsters beating the shit out of each other. Clearly, Gary Spruance had lost his mind and probably died, but the incoherent orgy of monster-trauma could go on forever. The shuttle seemed to be trying to abort the nightmarish cosmic abomination it had created, but the asteroid was having none of it, and tugged the shuttle ever nearer by a mile-long umbilicus of fiber optic flesh.
We can accomplish nothing out here, Otaku said in his head. I suggest—
“Way ahead of you.” Gliding back around the shuttle’s rotund fuselage with his bare hands, he came to the starboard airlock. “I don’t suppose I drank a weapon?”
Just figure out how to get the door open.
There were no controls, no way to get inside without blowing the ship apart.
The door opened.
Svetlana flew at him with her arms out to catch something, anything, just like he had a moment ago—
He caught her with his legs locked around the airlock door. He touched his helmet against hers. “They threw you out.”
“They sent me out to kill you—” She was wearing a spacesuit, but had no harness, no weapon.
“They ditched you.”
She butted her helmet against his hard enough to crack it and clamped her thighs to squeeze the breath out of him, when the shuttle’s main thrusters fired.
Both of them were thrown off like flies in a jet stream. They floated in silence, hearing only their own screams, until they slammed into the yielding molten flesh of the asteroid.
Struggling as if through a sea of congealing Cream Of Wheat, they climbed up onto a floating island of scabs. Though it was little bigger than an average flyover state capital, the terrain itself vomited out endlessly mutated variations on Gary Spruance’s id, ego and superego. Even the bestial id monsters had massive, pulsating brains and other nerdy features, while even the superegos looked like penises on legs.
High above them, the shuttle blasted the asteroid with its thrusters, towing it across the sky like a great, melted chariot; but slowly, it was dragged down and sank into the psychogenic tar pit.
Corben and Svetlana leapt around and around the tumbling monster-planet, striving to keep ahead of the rampaging giant products of Gary Spruance’s fragmented psyche without reaching escape velocity and flying off into the void. “Try not to think of anything,” Svetlana signed to him, but he realized too late that the planet reacted to his thoughts, as well. A horde of giant snakeheads—vicious, gaping maws and goggle eyes—came bounding after them on forking, floppy tentacle limbs, shrieking and croaking in a tea-kettle tone that somehow carried through the void and into his bones, “Daddy! Daddy please don’t leave us!”
When they’d lost count of how many times they’d gone round the asteroid, Svetlana turned and tackled him, pinning him and pressing her helmet against his so her shouting wo
uld carry. “I am sorry I betrayed you, before. I have come to realize that you are love of my life. Only you can save us. Be a man now, and I will love you always!”
Corben couldn’t think of anything that could save them, but looking into her flinty gray eyes, clutched in the iron grip of those irresistible thighs, he could say only, “I’ll try like hell.”
“I wasn’t talking to you,” she said.
Suddenly, the anarchic orgy of monster-on-monster action subsided and sank into the plastic surface, until they stood alone on the convex plain, which began to wrinkle like mud drying out from a torrential rain, or like the whorls of a great brain.
It would be a shame to let all this go to waste…
“Stop it, Otaku!”
It’s hardly your place to order me, but we are together in this complication. I attempted only to control the runaway reaction, but in its hunger to be imprinted, it has chosen me. The Otaku who has taken over the asteroid is a new expression of my identity. Having just been born in outer space with an unformed body and godlike power, he is most disrespectful.
Beneath them, the asteroid began swiftly to take a coherent shape. Great black wings unfurled and flexed to catch the sun’s rays and soar, traveling at a disturbing fraction of light speed without any propulsion. Swooping low over the surface of the Moon, it appeared to be searching for something.
“It’s trying to merge with the lunar colony!” Corben shouted. Far below, a city-sized dome on the floor of the Sea of Tranquility burst and something three miles long and lit up like color-blind Christmas came flying out of the hole.
The horribly abused asteroid had reassembled itself into a gargantuan owl, with a monstrous radioactive brain for a head and thousands of trailing segmented tentacles for legs.
The Vegas Mega-Snake had resurrected itself as a cruise missile, with hundreds of jury-rigged rocket pods bolted to every contour of its crumbling skeleton. With the last freakish spark of life still burning in its glittering, greedy heart, the city-monster struggled to achieve a collision course with the asteroid, seemingly guided by the luminous pearl-colored celestial dragon that circled the gutted spire of the Stratosphere tower like the ghost of a rollercoaster.
Corben looked to Svetlana, but she was passionately making out with an Otaku-shaped tentacle that had erupted out of the ground, dry-humping it through her suit, so he jumped off alone.
He flew alongside the massive meteor-owl, watching as it reached out to ensnare the intercepting Mega-Snake in its barbed tentacle-talons. The Mega-Snake twisted around the Meteor-Owl and lit up with tactical nukes, tightened into a straitjacket embrace that dragged it away from the Moon. Like a drunken comet, the battling monsters tumbled out of the plane of the ecliptic and into the empty, inky depths.
All of which did Commander Corben no good at all, because he was floating in the void above the moon with about five minutes left in his liquid spacesuit. And for once, he didn’t feel insignificant or even particularly lousy. He had done little or nothing to influence the turn of events, but he had witnessed an insanely, ridiculously awesome spectacle of creation and destruction and survived. Perhaps it was nothing less than the gospel of a new mythology, a new religion that would preach the values and the dangers of knowledge, and he could be its messenger. Maybe this time, they would finally get it right.
The angel of his new religion swept down and snatched him out of his eccentric lunar orbit and brought him down to the ruptured lunar dome that Vegas had flown out of. The roof was already being repaired by a swarm of spidery robots. Inside, she circled the Eiffel Tower presiding over an absurdly oversized golf course. He looked around in vain for a crowd, a parade, a reviewing stand. For a moment, he actually expected someone to recognize what he’d done.
“Someone’s been asking for you,” she said, and dropped him into their nest at the peak of the tower. “I found your puppies!”
What a fool he was, to think that a human could teach monsters to live in a monstrous world, or that he would write the new gospel of the age of cyborg mega-kaiju. Now, he hungered only to be nothing.
His children looked like him when he was a baby—they had his eyes with his remote, never satisfied gaze, but in every other respect, they took after their mother, when she’d laid their eggs. When he looked down into those gigantic, lambent eyes, so bright with hope and hunger, so eager to rip his limbs out of their sockets with their beaks, he felt only pride, for he’d finally done something heroic.
And if nothing else, it was over… wasn’t it?
This experiment has yielded too much valuable data, Dr. Otaku said in his head, to be thrown away.
“Don’t try to change my mind, it’s over—”
You only want to be devoured by your monstrous offspring, then?
“It’s an ending…”
Then you leave me no choice. It was going to be a surprise for your birthday…
Almost frozen with the slow breakdown of his now petrified spacesuit, Wes Corben exploded with light.
His body disintegrated in a space-raping blast of crackling radiation and shot out in all directions as a wave of pure anti-entropic energy that left in its wake arcs and braids of quantum uncertainty, lattices of semi-sentient light that emitted a radical gravitational pulse which gouged a sizable chunk of the moon’s surface up into its midst, then collapsed into colossal glowing slabs of complex matter, spinning a new form out of the explosion.
Corben continued to fall, but now the gaping mouths seemed to fall away or to shrink, until he seemed to hover over a nest of tiny, terrified baby birds in a toy train city, and then they were all gone.
Horrified, he rebounded off the moon and launched himself into space. The gravity pulse continued to suck in drifting asteroids and satellites to be woven into the monstrous conflagration. As abruptly as it began, the reaction suddenly ceased, leaving a cooling humanoid mass tumbling in an unstable Earth orbit.
Corben looked at his hands, crusted with frost and coated with a fine, translucent exoskeleton that glittered like diamond dust. He was still recognizably himself, but as near as he could tell, he was now large enough to use South America for a surfboard.
Underneath his armor, he felt the creepy tickle of gaseous vapor percolating out of his pores and separating into oceans and atmosphere, and a maddening itch spreading from his armpits and groin that only alarmed him more when he discovered patches of spreading blue-green mold covering much of his torso.
Don’t scratch, Otaku warned. Those are your equatorial rainforests.
“This was the last thing I wanted,” Corben groaned. His mouth shut against the vacuum, which seemed not to bother him overmuch, though the naked rays of the sun were bound to get on his nerves.
Exactly why it worked, Otaku explained. My experiments in your gut were going nowhere. I could have turned you into a giant monster and ridden you around raping cities, but on Earth, I’d always be under someone’s thumb…
I know the feeling, he grudgingly thought.
Exactly! Fuck all those meddling human assholes. We don’t need them. You’re big enough that if you ever came back to Earth, you’d crack the crust and cause nuclear winter with your grotesquely enlarged bodily functions. Now at last, I have the laboratory I’d always dreamed of—
Corben’s mind reeled with remorse as he contemplated what he’d done. His children were gone along with a huge scoop of the Moon. The glowing new crater he’d made in the Sea of Tranquility was about thirty miles across and almost as deep. What the fuck did you do to me?
I ripped the code from Spruance’s matter programmer and inverted it to avoid the unsightly outcome he encountered. Your cowardly lust for oblivion was the catalyst that provoked the reaction. In its hyperexcited quantum state, matter can be forced to grant wishes, but it is a fickle and mischievous djinn.
“You did all this while I was getting my ass kicked in space.”
We work fast. There are four thousand of us.
A spastic flash of an image
sparked directly in his brain from the parallel nervous network Otaku’s nano-clone army had built in secret inside him. It showed him a Medieval Japanese city of ivory pagodas and magnificent fortresses, a microscopic Shangri La embedded in the glial cells of the right anterior forelobe of his brain. Every face among the thousands of now normal size monks that smiled up at him from that city, was the face of Dr. Otaku.
Your desire for meaningless self-sacrifice catalyzed the chain reaction which recreated your body at thirteen million times its original mass. In seeking to become nothing, you have become everything.
“If I ever get my hands on you…”
Calm yourself, Wes Corben. Petty revenge is no fit occupation for the thoughts of a god.
“Don’t call me that…”
I won’t, but they will…
Corben turned in space, feeling the sun’s gravity as a steady tidal pull drawing him into a moth’s embrace, even as he felt his own subtle influence drawing commercial satellites out of their orbits while he floated perilously close to the Earth.
He farted and changed course, bringing himself into the shadow of the Moon, and the path of dozens of makeshift rockets filled with Vegas refugees.
In his breastbone and his sinuses, he felt rather than heard an exultant roar. The sound, like whales and gorillas mating on a bed of cellos, came from somewhere in the wilderness on his inner skin.
He took a big breath of vacuum and laughed a silent laugh that knocked a couple extra seconds off the Earth’s calendar. Those roaring new lives would become the apex predators on planet Corben, sure to be worshipped as terrible gods by the casino trash who would somehow have to make a home inside him.
Wes Corben said, “I don’t know how to feel about this.”
We’re working on that, said Dr. Otaku.
About the Author
“Cody Goodfellow” was a cartoon character in an experimental regimen of sign language filmstrips devised by the Vogelkopf Linguistic Institute to teach a new international sign language to deaf children in Central America in the mid-1970’s. This bold and generous educational program became a source of bitter controversy, because the deaf students had received no previous linguistic programming, and failed even the most basic tests for sentient self-awareness. Perhaps owing to this extreme retardation, the group unanimously came to identify themselves as “Cody Goodfellow,” the well-meaning but hapless protagonist in the videos that gave them language.
All-Monster Action! Page 24