Kaiju, Blue

It’s autumn again.

I know, you’re probably one of those people who loves the fall. Hot apple cider, back to school sales, warm sweaters, the crackle and crunch of the browning leaves beneath your shoes, that sort of thing. But then, you’re probably one of those people living on the coastline of the Atlantic Ocean. Out there, you have different issues. Europe, North America, you all have your own challenges, living around that stretch of water. But over here in the Pacific, well, you have…me.

You don’t really have a word in your language for what I am. I’m taller than most of your buildings, strong enough to bear the damage from nearly everything in your impressively industrious military, and, if left to my own devices, I’m fairly confident I could strike land and not stop until I reached the other shore, leaving nothing alive in my wake. That is how we do it, my family line and my species.

You have called us many things. There are names going back through your many languages, through your countless civilizations, and all of them mean one thing: monster.

We are terrible like the end of the world, and for many of you that is precisely what we are. We howl, we rage across your cities and what we do not destroy we terrify. But of all the names you have given us, I prefer the word coined among the Japanese: Kaiju.

Kaiju is a recent term, coming from your moving pictures, and while it simply means “strange creature,” more or less, it speaks enough to me of your own ignorance of that which lies beyond your perceptions that it both saddens me and makes me feel almost justified in my own impending journey which I shall soon take across your peopled lands.

Thing is, I’m tired. Tired of the stomping, roaring and blasting with my nuclear breath – or whatever it is you’re calling it, these days. I’m tired of the pointing and the screaming and the running, and I’m tired of watching the columns of smoke, blotting out the night sky.

I’m tired of being your monster.

I’m not really sure how long this has been going on. I know that there were monsters before me, and monsters before them. We have always been here, for as long as there have been humans, there have been creatures in the dark, waiting to destroy them. Monsters used to be as big as the moon, as terrible as winter, and as unending as the night sky. We became small, too small to see. Sometimes we even looked just like humans. Some monsters were fallen creatures from heaven or hell, but some came from the humans themselves.

And sometimes, even you humans are the monsters.

But here I am now, floating just beneath the surface of the waves, the flickering lights of your cities casting their ethereal glow even down into the frigid depths of the Pacific Ocean. I can feel the cold; feel the thousand vibrations of my aquatic neighbors reaching out in desperation to understand why I am here. They call, they hear, they flee. Most animals comprehend the proximity of a predator.

 The sounds are distorted, muffled. But even out here, deep beneath the roiling tide, I can hear you. Your trains, your automobiles, your loud music and television; I can even hear you all talking, though I usually can’t make anything out through all the cacophony. Which is a very funny thing, because the truth is that none of my kind is necessarily quiet – were you a bit less loud, perhaps you might hear us coming.

The truth is, you rarely do. And by the time you do, of course, it is far too late.

I am the youngest of my clutch. Only two siblings remain from the adults who created us, and, as is typical, we all look dramatically different from one another. My oldest brother is roughly the shape of that which you might call an archaeopteryx; a feathered dinosaur, only many times in length. Our middle brother is more like a giant tortoise, assuming there were such a thing that could generate extreme subzero winds from its mouth. I am, oddly enough, the tallest of the three, though a dozen appendages rarely support me at my full height. But my tendrils are long and powerful – for those of you who may have survived my powerful march across the Philippines, you will recall I was able to topple many of your buildings with relative ease before I got bored with the smell of burning flesh and returned to the comfort of the sea.

The first of my family to visit your shores was the brother of my great-grandfather. He was great and terrible, and his path across the land can still be seen to this day. Although our lineage had been large for our kind, the deep tissue application of new and powerful nuclear radiation had made its way down to our darkened depths, and mutation radically altered the DNA it discovered there. My grandfather was quite young at that time, but told us many stories about the great battles that were fought between the irradiated species at the ocean floor. Although we always managed to survive the skirmishes and battles we encountered – and in your defense, you humans do eventually put up quite a fight – in the end, one of us shows up again and you seem horrified and surprised to see us.

Honestly, how is it that a civilization can have such a short memory?

I asked my father once why it was so essential that we leave the safety and peace of our depths, and make our regular forays out across the populated masses of the relatively insignificant human species. We emerge, we stomp, we destroy, we kill; and we vanish once more into the briny deep too soon for the humans to organize an effective response. And yet there remains a risk, a chance that we might be met with sufficient military retaliation to strike against us. To harm us. To kill us.

My older brother perished in his time above the water. He took many wounds from the war machines, explosions and projectiles, but these were not the instruments of his demise. What killed him was the infections brought about by the increasingly toxic air and land upon which the virulent human masses have emanated and breathed out upon the face of the planet.

And this is not to infer that the temperature of the planet is in any way an issue – my kind adapts well to warmth and humidity. We once roamed the surface of the world, in point of fact, and would be more than content to rise up and claim it again, once the humans have gone. But the toxicity of the air, the water, the soil…these things have even begun to creep into the dark, forgotten and unknown corners of the planet we share.

So why do we rise, why do we destroy?

To push the humans back. To crush them. To drive them back from their comfort and tear away their illusions of safety and power, and to remind them that they are little more than grease beneath the wheels of the world. We smash them and lower their numbers. We wake them from their dreams of technological superiority and turn their minds back to the simple and essential purity of life: survival.

I am resting right now. As these words are written, and while they are read, I stand beneath the tide and hear your voices as if they are screaming in my ears.

I hear you, and your trifling, tinkling bell-like noises, while you bicker about nonsense, and become drunk upon quests for wealth and power. I hear you envy and writhe and growl like petulant and puking infants, and shake your collective fist to the universe as if you had hope of rebellion. Your rage is folly, like a rust-colored leaf angry at the tree which has cast it down.

When I come, my sheer presence would shock you into undeniable terror. Most of you will flood your streets in the feeble and pointless attempt to flee. You might hide in the perceived safety of your darkened corners, perhaps still genetically predisposed to adopting a ‘duck and cover’ effort at survival. You might even stand and fight, deciding that death on your feet and facing your enemy would be balanced in your favor in the moments of your demise.

My feet will strike the ground with an individual force of an earthquake. Each step will shatter roads, destroy infrastructure, cripple the delicate strands of your energy and communications web. Your utilities – your water and your sewage – will erupt into your streets and flood across your homes as my every step crushes the levels of your cities further and further down.

My tail – did I mention I have one? – will swing madly about, crumpling your towers and sending them crashing to rubble. My hands and claws will bat your pathetic weapons aside, not that I need do so. The scales upon my skin are thick and resilient, and you do not have the capacity to injure me. Your ability to mobilize a resistance will be useless, as I can cover hundreds of miles in a single day. I will travel from city to city to city until nothing is left standing. My teeth and hands and feet and tail will flatten and crush everything in my path.

And if that was the sum total of my might, you would already be hard pressed to hope to survive. But I also inherited the powerful white-hot breath from my mother. This will ravage your cities and farmlands, sending up great columns of broiling flame and acrid smoke. You will burn. You will choke. And you will die.

I grieve for the death of your millions. The thousands who will die in their beds, not even knowing that death comes for them. The thousands more who will stand, point and scream as I stand and stretch out my undeniable destruction over the sky. I mourn, in my fashion, for the thousands and thousands who will be crushed by the rubble of your own constructions, and then at last for the rest who will perish, slowly, as the balance rights itself again.

But as I said, I am tired. The thought of all the death, the pain and grief which you must inevitably feel should not have to occur. In a perfect and balanced world, you and I would never meet. Your people would learn to live with the land in harmony, and I would be permitted to swim and dwell with my kind, far from view.

You would never need experience the nightmare my presence must bring.

Never.

I say that, and yet… you cannot help yourself. You expand. You consume. You pollute. You expand further. You conquer, you pillage, you ravage, you destroy. You are aware of the risks you pose to yourselves, and yet you do precious little to stop yourselves from your inevitable race towards self-extinction. Oddly enough, I had never considered that in all my thoughts of world devastation, and in all the ways I have considered the threat I pose to you, perhaps my own emotional exhaustion is well founded. Perhaps I need not destroy you at all.

Perhaps…. If I simply wait a short while longer…

…you will do my work for me.

Perhaps.

For now, I shall wait. Right here, below the waves. Watching you. Waiting. And so, for now, you are spared. But know this, human beings: when you see my face – when you hear my unending roar….

It will be too late.