Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters (45 page)

Carnacki grabbed St. Cyprian and gestured to the driver’s seat. “Charles, you’ve driven before,” he said.

“I took seventeenth in the 1913 French Grand Prix,” St. Cyprian said. “I was nearly taken out by a rogue patisserie in Amiens.”

“Well that thing’s no bakery, so try and be a bit more careful, eh?” Carnacki looked at Bass. “Help me with this.” He pointed to one of the guns. “We need to slow that brute down. If we’re lucky, we can distract it long enough so that someone with sense and access to a Sopwith Camel or Bristol Fighter from the 266 bloody Squadron RFC notices the ruddy great giant naturalist stomping towards them.”

“Just help me keep this sumbitch spitting lead,” Bass said, hefting the weapon up into the car’s round turret cupola. Carnacki kicked the back of St. Cyprian’s seat.

“In your own time, Charles,” he said.

St. Cyprian threw the armored car into gear. The six cylinder engine rumbled and the wheels spun in the mud for a moment before they caught traction and lurched forward. St. Cyprian’s teeth clicked together as the car bumped and rattled as it hurtled in pursuit of the colossus.

Despite the distance, and the lead the monster had on them, they caught up with it far too quickly for St. Cyprian’s liking. He pushed the car’s engine to its limit, until smoke was boiling out from under it, and his body was numb from the shaking. The car was racing parallel to the beast as it smashed aside trees and ruins both old and new in its stumbling scramble towards Vyones. Yellow smoke clung to it, oozing from its pores and even from a safe distance, the thought of it made St. Cyprian itch for a gas mask.

St. Cyprian cursed as a splintered tree trunk crashed down in front of the car and he jerked the wheel, narrowly avoiding it. He nearly crashed then and there, as a massive bloody foot stomped down, causing the car to bounce up and his head to crack against the roof. He tasted blood and spat.

“Any time you’d like to start shooting is fine by me!” he shouted over his shoulder.

A snarl sounded from the heavy machine gun in Bass’ hands a moment later. The American gave a screeching wail, like the cry of some angry hunting cat, as he depressed the trigger, stitching the colossus’ ankles and thighs with bullets.
Carnacki fed a steady stream of ammunition into the gun even as the floor was covered in spent casings. The colossus might have been immune to small arms fire, but it felt the machine gun and it stooped with a bone-rattling howl, its fingers digging trenches through the muddy road as it sought to scoop them up. Poison gas swept towards them, driven their way by the furious motion of the beast’s arm.

“Charles,” Carnacki shouted.

“I see it,” St. Cyprian said, spinning the wheel.

The car slewed sideways, narrowly avoiding the colossus’ clutching fingers. Bass fired, and the colossus jerked its hand back with an ululating bellow. The colossus roared in anger. St. Cyprian worked the gear. The armoured car’s engine gave a wheezing gurgle. Cursing steadily under his breath, he tried to get it to turn over. The road shook as the colossus stalked towards them, filling the air with poisonous smoke.
Pieces of it sloughed off, striking the ground like mudslides as it crouched over them.

Bass continued to fire, cursing and coughing as the first tendrils of gas reached the car. The engine gave a cough, a snort, and then a growl. St. Cyprian set it in reverse and skidded out of reach of the beast. He kept the car in reverse as the monster scrambled after them, groping, but
off balance and unable to catch them. Bass coughed and slumped down from the cupola. He dumped the machine gun, which had smoke curling from it. “Get me another gun,” he snarled. “This one’s done burnt out.”

“No need,” Carnacki said, “I found something even better.” He hefted a heavy flare gun. Without hesitation, he moved to the side of the car, threw open the door, and leaned out, taking aim at the creature closing in on them.

“Oh my giddy aunt—Thomas, what the devil are you doing?” St. Cyprian yelped.

“That solution it was bathing in and absorbing was made of pureed corpse, with a few chemicals added in,” Carnacki said, steadying himself on the side of the car. “It’s quite flammable, Charles, at least on the outside, especially given how it’s leaking. Now keep us steady, there’s a good chap. I’m only going to get one shot at this.”

Carnacki fired the flare gun, even as the monster thrust its bulbous head towards them, jaws sagging wide as if to take a bite out of the front of the car. The colossus jerked back, rearing to its full height. The flames spread across its raw flesh, and the monster screamed. It hunched forward and flailed blindly as it was consumed and transformed from a titan monster into a towering inferno.

St. Cyprian kept the car in reverse until they struck a fallen tree. As he fought with the gears, he heard the mosquito buzz of bi-planes overhead. He sat back. “I guess someone noticed,” he said. Neither Bass nor Carnacki replied. Their attentions were on the contorted, writhing shape of Ewer’s colossus as it burned and shrieked in a voice like thunder.

The colossus staggered forward, causing the ground to quake. It pawed at its fiery flesh, and bent forward. Smoke boiled off of it and washed across the road and choked the air. A trio of Sopwith Camels cut through the sky overhead, their shapes passing across the moon as they came in for an attack run. Machine guns chattered, and the colossus reared back, spreading its arms and tossing its head back.

“Good show chaps!” Carnacki shouted. The colossus was entirely aflame now, with not a single patch of flesh bare of fire. Chunks of its flesh struck the ground like comets. After the fourth pass by the Camels, the creature sagged, stumbled, and sank to one knee. A rumbling groan swept over them, like the voices of a hundred men raised in futile protest.

Bass leaned over St. Cyprian’s seat, rolling the bullet from around his neck between his fingers. “Back to the grave, you sad bastard,” the American murmured. It sounded almost like a prayer. “Just lie down and die.”

And then it did. The colossus toppled forward, smashing into the ground with a sound like an avalanche. The ground cracked and split as the weight of the gigantic corpse settled on it, smoke rising from its limbs.

St. Cyprian said nothing as the planes of the 266 circled the fallen monstrosity. It would burn where it had fallen, and the remains would be collected and sealed away somewhere, out of sight and memory, he knew. Reports would be filed, but no one would read them. No one ever read their reports.

“It was mad,” Carnacki said softly, “Just another mad thing let loose to drown in the red haze of war.”

“It was a monster,” Bass said.

Carnacki made to reply, when St. Cyprian interrupted him, “Thomas, so help me, if so say something about war making monsters of us all, or some other balderdash like that, I’ll shoot you.” He managed to get the car moving again. He gestured up at the planes, which were turning back towards Vyones. “It’s starting to rain again, and the 266 have the right idea. My cot and my cabaret singer are calling.”

Stormrise

Erin Hoffman

March 2154

The sky over the Pacific exploded with color, the kind of high neon pinks and indigo blues that never failed to tempt Alan to radio ops. The
Sea Hunter
’s forward radio station was mounted high on the drill floor, suspended over an endless expanse of ocean and sky. The radio was quiet as usual this time of morning, so he idly thumbed through mail, subject lines running pale green across his left peripheral vision, merging with the ascending sun.

Bill notification, thankfully small. An advertisement for Phuket clubs aimed at his upcoming shore leave. Another message from his mother complaining about the dangerousness of the rigs: a link to some article about malfunctioning monitor systems. Sure, the work was dangerous, stuff broke, HQ dragged ass on repairs, which was why it paid so well. It must have been nice to live in an age of affordable college tuition; today, Alan had the rig.

A smudge on the horizon held its position amidst drifting clouds, and Alan squinted into the yellow-white light. He shaded his eyes fruitlessly until a darker cloud drifted by. Against the wisp of vapor the flickering of a red call sign sent a chill down Alan’s neck: it was a CO
2
scrubber. By its size, it had lost too much altitude.

There were three scrubbers patrolling this part of the sky; assumedly the other two were still where they should be, harvesting the top of the troposphere. This one was three fingerwidths wide, meaning it was at least halfway through the trop — and falling fast.

He grabbed the radio and hailed across emergency frequencies. “LC-209, check your trajectory. This is the
ANC Sea Hunter
. We are a stationary drilling rig at 38.46° N, 28.4° W. Your current course intersects our position in approximately seven minutes.”

The scrubbers migrated according to cloud-crunched instructions, and occasionally something weird popped out. It was probably a temporary anomaly; the scrubber would veer awhile, then swing back to a proper course, following some projection about
CO
2
weather patterns.

But the scrubber wasn’t answering. Alan fired off an alert message to PACAREA and the Phillipine CG for good measure, copying his supes, and radioed
Hunter
’s control with the same.

“Copy,” Red answered promptly, betraying no concern, not that Alan expected any. Dude was a machine. “Maintain protocols, over,” he added, then clicked off, confirming Alan’s
assessment.

Protocols said forward radio maintained watch, and so Alan did. He continued to radio the unresponsive scrubber, continued to send updates as the minutes ticked away.

At approximately four minutes to impact, he realized it would take six, minimum, to climb down from the radio station. And the scrubber wasn’t going to redirect.

Alan’s voice shook as he fought to keep his words within the protocols. He worried, inexplicably, about the inevitable black box that would capture his voice. Part of him longed to declare something—some last cry of identity. But he said, “LC-209,
check your trajectory
. Loss of life imminent.”

Thousands of feet below, other techs were rocketing away from the rig in all directions, wakes frothing white jetstreams behind them.

The scrubber was huge, twice the size of the biggest carrier Alan had ever seen. It did not impact the
Hunter
, contrary to his guess. It struck the ocean a thousand yards in front of it, throwing a storm of sea in all directions, waves sweeping upward, swallowing all, an ocean that in sixty thousand years had learned sympathy for neither man nor machine.

~

August 2154

“You built it. You can fix it.”

Sandra fought the urge to drop her head into her hands. Her team had fed her to the regional manager for three reasons: she knew the MI’s systems better than anyone else in the company, if not as deeply; she had a talent for technological metaphor…and she and Helen had gone to college together.

“I told you. We didn’t build her.”

Helen brandished a projector drive like a steak knife and pointed it between them. A report from three months ago lit the empty air, headed by a list of names. “This is your damn project, Sandy.”

“She’s a self-modifying super-process,” Sandra said, beginning her fifth attempt at an explanation. “We built an algorithm that linked together dozens of arbitrary web-based systems into a heuristic net—”

Helen waved her to silence. “I need a message. Something PR can take to the public.”

“Maybe we should tell them the truth.” The words burst out in a pre-conscious rush of
frustration, followed immediately by regret.

Helen gave her a distinct 'you are twelve years old' look. “Tell them that we have no idea what it's going to do.”

“She wants to be referred to as Keto.”

“What the hell is that?”

“…Greek goddess of sea monsters.”

A pause. “Great.”

Sandra didn't answer.

“She’s your problem,” Helen said, flipping off the drive. “And you are my problem.”

“Great.” Sandra sighed.

~

May 2154

Airi shot through the stratosphere, driving the mayfly higher until its altimeter complained, its sensor array blinking yellow on the edge of the slender prow. The lights were annoying enough, but then—

“Airi…”

She growled, kind of ineffective when you were exhaling into a mask. “
What?
” she barked. “We’re nowhere near max alt.”

“We’re approaching a restricted zone.”

“It’s the middle of the bloody Pacific.”

In response, the mayfly flickered a sequence of news blasts across her hud, superimposed with a map of the restricted zone and their location. Some rig had blown up, and there were approximately eighty thousand conspiracy stories filling the media vacuum created by the responsible party’s PR suppression campaign.

“That was months ago. I’m sure it’s fine. Besides, we’re way the hell up here.”

“A carbon scrubber lost altitude without explanation. It doesn’t feel right out here.”

The widget didn’t
feel
right. “I rue the day I decided a talking board would be a great idea,” she muttered.

“Why did you, then?”

“I wanted the new sound seed features and they only came with your damn chatterbot function.”

“It hurts my feelings when you call me a chatterbot.”

"What do you prefer? Rushmore? Roomba? Come on. Tell me more about your feelings."

“…Really?”

“God no.”

~

By now they had drifted well into the restricted zone, and a hud alert was blinking a nagging orange at the bottom right corner of her vision.

“See?” she said. “We’re right in the middle, and there’s nothing—”

Then, very specifically to irritate her, there was something: a white-capped ripple in the tranquil waters below. A shudder bubbled up from Airi’s stomach as the ripple expanded, but there was no way some crashed scrubber could reach this altitude…

A great mass of metal hulked out of the ocean, starting with a long crane arm topped with a wide-range antenna. It was followed by a Frankensteinian hodgepodge of rivets and plates, all held together with masses of black cabling and wire. Glass, plastic, carbon, steel—all were bolted together indiscriminately. This was no crashed scrubber.

Movement rippled on the surface of the monstrosity, and as the whole of it continued to rise inexplicably higher, Airi picked out detail: a swarm of crab-sized robots, each lit with a single red LED, scrambling over the structure and tightening bolts, rearranging circuitry, wrangling cables.

She had unconsciously buzzed the mayfly to a halt as soon as the structure broke free of the waves, and now she was paralyzed. The mayfly made no comment, for once. Together they hovered there, stricken, consigned to whatever fate might be in store.

The tower stopped some few hundred feet below them, still staggeringly high for a semisubmersible. The robot crabs swarmed together now, swirling in a black haze—and then, all at once, their LEDs turned blue, forming two massive glowing eyes that regarded Airi and the mayfly with disturbing contemplation.

“My name is Keto.”
The words reverberated from the structure, formed by the vibration of hundreds of thousands of crab-bots.

“Okay,” was all Airi could manage, her throat taut with terror.

“You’re going to be my voice to humanity, Airi.”

“Okay.”

~

August 2154

Sandra’s heart picked up a beat as the cell doors sighed open, glass panels unfogging. Beyond the privacy haze was a shriveled man in a pale blue prison jumpsuit who shuffled through another reinforced door on the opposite side. The walls and floor responded to his mood instantly, cooling to a pale ice blue. The speed of the interface tickled the back of Sandra’s neck with a chill; his limbic system must be going crazy to elicit that kind of response speed.

“Thank you for meeting with me, Mr. Simms,” she said, crossing to the center of the room. A white cube seat, padded with synth-leather, rose soundlessly from the floor. She took it, crossing her ankles and hoped he’d follow suit.

Simms’s eyes darted left and right, then up and down, taking in all corners of the room. “What are you carrying?” he asked without looking at her.

“I’ve brought nothing, Mr. Simms,” Sandra said carefully. “I wasn’t allowed to bring anything in here.” She held her hands away from her sides in a gesture of openness.

“But you’re from
Dytel
,” he spat. “You people are always carrying little
listeners
.” The walls warmed to a soothing goldenrod; he was angry. “But your listeners couldn’t do anything about the
Sea Hunter
.”

“We’re in the process of investigating what happened, Mr. Simms—”

“I know you didn’t program her,” he cut in, then gestured, throwing an interface from his hud onto the left wall. It unfolded into a video feed that made Sandra wince; herself, standing in front of a microphone, crowded by journalists.

“You don't understand. None of us built her. We built her parts and her parts built her.”

“Those poor people have no idea what’s going on,” Simms said bitterly, flipping off the feed. “They don’t have any idea what Dytel has unleashed.”

Sandra fought to control herself, rattled by the memory of that dismal press conference. “Mr. Simms, why did you agree to meet me here if all we’re going to do is argue about Dytel?”

“Because you need to see this,” he said, and threw another interface onto the wall.

It was a mail application. The thread it was displaying had several exchanges. The wall tracked her eye movement, and every time she reached the bottom of one message it flipped to the next. As she paged through the messages, they moved faster and faster, detailing an indiscretion—not even his!—offering lurid proof, and—finally—instructions.

“Who sent this to you?” Sandra asked quietly. That Simms would be blackmailed into crashing the scrubber was not a fantastic surprise, but that he should disclose it to her…

“
She did
, don’t you get it?” He was shaking now, holding himself. Tears poured down his face, ignored with the disregard of a man who had cried so much he no longer realized when it was happening.

His hysteria prevented Sandra from understanding for several seconds. When she pieced it together, dread shot like acid through her heart. The systems linked together in her mind, a terrifying collaboration of behavioral analytics and personal security applications. Keto wasn’t hacking networks—she was hacking
people
.

When Sandra could speak again, she said: “Mr. Simms, I’m going to get you out of here. You can go home to your family again.”

“You
can’t
,” he moaned into his hands. “She’ll find me. She’ll destroy me and my family.”

“We’re going to make this right.”

He continued to talk into his hands, either not hearing or not listening, she wasn’t sure. “I’m safe in here because the world doesn’t want to see inside a prison. Prisoners have
rights
. I’m safe in here where she can’t hear me.”

~

Airi looked out across the sea from the balcony Keto had built her. A gentle sea breeze ruffled the plush collar of her coat, which
bong
ed softly and reconfigured, growing longer fur in response to the minute change in temperature. Her new glasses reminded her that Uki the pomeranioodle should be fed in approximately an hour. Airi knew all of these gifts—the condo, smartcoat, the glasses, the enge dog—were not so much for Airi’s pleasure as they were levers to demonstrate the power and luxury promised to those who pledged their data to the cloud, but that was a vague and abstract worry in the face of the very tangible comforts they delivered. No one Airi even knew could afford a limited edition SilkEx pomeranioodle. She planned to ride the cloud lifestyle for as long as it lasted. She clutched Uki to her chest, then lifted him and pressed her face into his fur.