Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters (21 page)

“Look,” I said. “I didn't come up with the system. I just fight. If you want to have some Leviathan come take a shit on this city, just so everyone can remember it clearly, then that's your priority.”

A mass inhalation of breath. The presenter's elegantly plucked eyebrow rose.

“Not a popular opinion,” she ventured.

“Oh screw you,” I spat. “We all know how this works. We messed up the earth, now we pay the toll. Four memories at a time. You don't want to be a proxy, get on the council and dodge the lottery. You want to be able to sleep at night, too, become a pilot. It's worked out for me just fine.”

Not an inhalation this time. A hesitation.

There was a time when I loved these things. When audiences cheered me. It was as big a high as the drugs.

Even the drugs didn't do much for me by then.

~

Then darkness descending, a gaping hole of memory. And then, on the far side:

Lila woke me. I didn't recognize her at first. Later, when I saw myself in a mirror, I was surprised she recognized me.

“Three days this time,” she told me once I'd washed the vomit, and blood, and shit off myself. She didn't cry. She never cried. Just that same frustrated look she'd given me in the bleachers all those years ago.

“It was those assholes on that TV show,” I said. I was full of excuses back then.

“You missed a fight, Tyler.”

I was at the closet door, hand on a shirt. Something I could wear to my dealers. And that stopped me. The whole system shut down around those words. I tried to form a response. A question. A denial. An excuse.

I had nothing.

“They sent Lowry,” she said. I pictured him. Young kid. Scrappy. He was good. He would have fought and won. The city wasn't in ruins. Of course he'd won.

But no thanks to me.

I still wanted to be a pilot. Beneath everything, beneath even the want for the drugs, there has always been that. Ever since I saw
Janin 's Mech go critical and wipe out the horizon that has been the underlying, undeniable truth of my existence.

“It's time to get clean, Tyler,” Lila said. “No more bullshit. No more excuses or you'll never pilot again. You get that right?”

I did. I got clean.

~

Swimming back to the present. Back to the slums, car parked, water swirling, a lottery ticket in my hand:

I picked a bar at random. The place was crowded, the music loud. People partied with a sense of desperation. Drinking until they could forget that tomorrow was coming—implacable as any sea monster.

I stood in the center of the room. It took a minute before someone recognized me. He stared, pointed. The woman he was with turned and looked. Soon they were all looking.

Apparently I wasn't popular at that bar. Not in many bars, I suspected. I couldn't even blame them.

But I didn't need to be popular. I just needed to be rich.

I held up the ticket.

“How much?” I asked, clear and loud, finally putting all the media training crap they'd sat me through to some use. “How much do I have to pay one of you to take my wife's place on the lottery?”

From the look I got, my popularity wasn't going up.

“Five million,” I said. “I'm good for it. Five million and get you and your family out of this life.” I nodded at the water currently ruining my socks and shoes.

The room was very quiet. The music had died. Grim faces all around me. Folded arms. The smell of the wooden bar slowly rotting away.

One man, shorter than me, wider though, tattoos up his arms and neck, maybe in his fifties—he walked towards me. A few rumbling paces. “I think you want to get out of here.”

“Ten million.” Just one greedy soul. Just one. That's all I needed.

“You ain't listening.”

“Twenty million.” It would leave me with a pittance, I would have to move, but it'd be worth it. “You won't care what you forget with twenty million.”

It was the wrong thing to say. Adam Grant had been right. The lottery was a tipping point.

I didn't recognize the signal, but suddenly eight of them rushed me. More than one held a beer bottle in his hand.

I remembered Adam saying I don't fight as well now I'm sober. He was right. Still, I can hold my own.

I ducked the first blow, jabbed a fist up under the guy's jaw, into the soft part of the palette. I spun as I did it, slammed my foot into another man's groin, sent him crashing to the floor. I came out of the spin, put my fist into another man's nose, dodged a bottle, clotheslined his friend, then slammed my elbow back into the neck of the idiot trying to sneak up behind me.

Three left. One got in a good blow to my kidney, sent me to my knees, spitting a curse. Another lined up a blow to my jaw. I snatched his arm, slammed a palm into his elbow and watched the joint snap.

The kidney puncher, grabbed me behind the arms. I swung my head back, shattered his nose. Then I crushed his kneecap for good measure.

One left.

But the crowd was not cowed. I was breathing hard, and my hands hurt. The pain in my kidney was like a lance of fire. And then they went from one to forty-one.

I got lost in the violence. I took men down with short efficient blows, but for every six or seven I landed, they landed one of their own. A bottle shattered over my skull, blood ran into my eyes. An elbow crashed into my ribs.

I needed to get out. I recognized my actions as a mistake too late. I stopped fighting to win. Started fighting to escape.

It cost me. Two ribs. And I couldn't lift my left arm above my shoulder any more. But I made it out. It took me two blocks before I realized no one was chasing me.

I remember that fight. For a moment the pain in my side makes sense. And then it drifts away again. Just is. Then something else swims up.

~

After the fight:

Lila fetched a fresh ice pack for my ribs.

“You're an idiot.” The way she said it made it sound like a compliment.

“I have to fight,” I told her. “It's who I am.”

She smiled. “There's no winning this, Tyler. It is what it is. You fight that Leviathan. You bring me home. And I get to meet you again. Fall in love with you again.”

I swallowed. “What if you don't?”

She shook her head. “All the shit you've done, I've stuck with you. You really doubt me now?”

She almost managed to make me laugh. The moment passed. “Maybe afterward you'll be smarter,” I said.

She kissed me on the forehead. Snuggled in beside me.

They showed the Leviathan on the news that night. It had destroyed three townsteads on its way south. Casualties in the thousands. They said it would be visible from the seawall in two days. They said it might be the biggest in a decade.

They questioned whether I could stop it. For the first time in a long time, I did too.

~

A
lmost here. Almost at this moment:

In a vast hangar near the seawall, I stood before my Mech. The Behemoth II—named after Janin 's machine. But I had always been safe in the knowledge it outranked its predecessor in every regard. It could tear a Leviathan apart. The original could only explode.

It still demanded the proxies to operate, though.
Janin, who thought up a way to win an unfair fight, couldn't think her way out of that. Her proxies all died when her Mech blew.

If I went out there without proxies the sensory overload would wipe out my memory. I would forget to fight. The Leviathan would tear me apart first, then the city.

Then, staring up, up, up at the distant cockpit, almost hidden beyond the curve of the reactor in the machine's chest…the faintest stirrings of an idea.

The Behemoth II. The clue was in the name.

All Janin could do was explode.

The Leviathans always initiate the fights. A walking bomb doesn't need to know how to fight. It just needs to go off.

But would I remember what I was doing for long enough to get clear of the city?

Maybe…

I would die. There was that.

But the auto-eject… No,
Janin died.

Hadn't they improved the radiation seals? Some distant memory of joking with Adam Grant after some tech demo where they talked about it. Not really believing it because when would that ever be an issue?

When would any other pilot be that desperate again?

When…

Now. Now is exactly when a pilot would be that desperate.

~

An elevator ride up to a door in the Mech's midriff marked with a radiation warning. I remember that sign clearly:

The failsafe mechanisms are well designed. There are backup systems of backup systems. All are carefully programmed.

They are beyond my understanding. I was not a careful student at school. I was never a jock, never quite a geek, but that awkward middle position of being nobody in particular.

But then Lila.

It wasn't a revolution. There was no astonishing makeover. It was simply that being nobody to everybody else didn't matter if I was somebody to her.

Love is a slow creature. It isn't like a Leviathan. There is no sudden violence. Rather it wraps its tendrils around you slowly. By the time you are aware of it, it has already won.

Or maybe I was as slow at grasping the concept of love as I was at understanding the complexities of a programming language.

In the end, I reprogrammed the machine with a ballpoint hammer. That seemed to suffice.

~

The cockpit. Closer to the now:

Mech's aren't meant to work without proxies. Some inputs require needles pressing deep into muscle. They sample DNA. They demand diversity.

But I remember once: a proxy, an older woman, she had a heart attack on the elevator ride up to cockpit. The Leviathan was already visible. There was no time to call in a backup.

Adam Grant showed me the trick.

“Give me that damn thing.” He'd grabbed the needle from a panicked technician. “DNA is everywhere.” He wiped the needle along the crevices of the seat. Dirt, lint, and hair clinging to it. They never really cleaned the cockpits.

Grant rammed the filthy needle into the arm of a proxy already getting input from other sensors. The technician looked appalled

Grant shrugged. “He's a proxy. He won't remember.”

It worked. That proxy took input from two sensors. I don't know what happened to him. Maybe nothing. Maybe he was fine. Maybe the poor bastard died of septic shock.

It was harder jamming the dirty needles into my own flesh. But, I reasoned, it wasn't like I'd remember.

~

Closer
:

They tried to stop me leaving. They sealed the city gates against me. I could hear someone raging through my headset but her voice was overwhelmed by the data pouring into me. Heat readings, pressure sensors, gyrostabilizations, revolutions per minute.

I fired missiles. I felt them leaving my body. I felt the heat of their burning fuel burn inside of me. And worse. I could feel pieces of me leaking out with each projectile. The taste of strawberries carried away in a burst of flame. My father's name. What I'd eaten last night. All the inconsequential minutia that we're made of.

But I had sabotaged a nuclear reactor. I had re-engineered hardwired failsafes. Mere doors and words couldn't stop me. I blew my way out of the city. I marched on, marched out. I went to face my Leviathan.

~

One final memory:

“What do you think?”

Lila on the doorstep of our apartment. She had redecorated. Repainted. New furniture. New art on the walls.

They'd not allowed her to go to the rehab facility to pick me up. A driver had dropped me off at the curb. She'd been waiting when the penthouse elevator doors opened. She looked perfect and anxious in equal measures.

I hesitated, trying to work why she was worried. I was the one who should be worried.

But she misread my hesitation, thought I didn't like her work. And I could see how much she had wanted me to like it. But she just nodded and bore it. She didn't bend, didn't break.

All I had done to her. And she thought I was doing it again, but she remained undefeated. All the monsters I had beaten, but she was the one thing I could never conquer. I loved her for that. So deep and so strong.

“You made it beautiful,” I said.

She smiled. The sun banishing clouds. “Good.”

~

Now
:

Ankle deep in water, my Mech stumbles. I try to correct, overcook it. Massive, clumsy, the machine goes down on one knee. Around me, flat-bottomed fishing boats are swamped, sink with viscous gurgles. Gulls shriek angrily, billow around the Mech's knees.