Godzilla: An Explosion Over Sixty-Eight Years (Patreon)

Dretin Jokdru remembered the atomic bomb. And he remembered what came after.

Even now—years, decades later—he could remember it all. Everything as precise and orderly as a well-timed clock. He recalled the degree of excitement they all had felt, him included, at so many soldiers coming to their tiny island. The frisson of being evacuated by those strange invaders… so inconvenient the treatment, so brusque their handling… and yet, wasn’t it something?

Something of the airplanes that streamed overhead and something of the mighty metal ships that dotted the horizon. Come here, to the Bikini Atoll, including them in some of the wildness that was sweeping the world.

They’d heard of the great war, of the crimes of the Japanese empire, huge blows struck back and forth. Pearl Harbor destroyed, Tokyo bombed. Finally, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, wiped off the map. These were times worthy of the end of days. But how could they ever reach one mote of an island in the middle of the ocean?

Every story, secondhand though it was, sounded like the feats of gods and monsters. So it seemed inevitable, with such epic events unfolding, that eventually even Bikini would be reached.

And so, even though it seemed like something from the four-color comics that sailors sometimes handed out to the uncomprehending but amazed youths of his tribe… reality managed to intersect with dreams. They were all taken away, to avoid being harmed by the incredible experiment the Americans were set on performing.

Even the preliminaries seemed legendary—something Dretin and his friends would gladly exaggerate in the telling, only how could such a thing be enlarged more than it already was? Ships filled the lagoon—captured German and Japanese battleships, but more than that. Samples of what seemed like anything that met the water.

The Americans had a bomb so big that they wanted to see how many of those ships could survive its detonation.

Dretin went with the others to Rongerik Atoll. It was a small, unlivable island… smaller still than Bikini and with a reputation for being cursed, though few gave it much credence in these days, when the mighty Americans came in such numbers and with such strength. What power could a curse hold when simple men could grow so powerful?

The Americans did what they could to make Rongerik inhabitable, but while it might not be cursed, it was also not destined to be anyone’s home. Little grew there and the sea gave up only begrudgingly to the fishermen. The Americans gave them food; they wondered if it would be enough to last until the experiment was over and they could return to where they belonged.

All this, Dretin could remember coolly, a calm progression of events with emotions few and far between. Even at the time, it had all seemed unreal. Something that must complete itself before it could be reacted to. Like a dream that could only be understood upon waking, because then it would be clear that it was not meant to be the reality it was mistaken for.

But the rest he could only speak of with tremors running through his body.

He was quick to give up on fishing enough to compensate for how little Rongerik could provide. The Americans will supply us, he told himself, or we will go back to Bikini and resume our lives as, yes, one would wake from a dream. No matter how bizarre the dream was, the morning came with crushing regularity and showed that the sands, the waves, the trees… all went on as they always had.

So Dretin sailed out, nearly to the horizon, until he could see this surreal graveyard of ships that the Americans had made of his home. He’d been told that it would be dangerous to return, to even look upon the island when the test was performed. So he did not look, but laid upon his raft and stared up at the sky. He did not want this experiment to be one more thing he heard about—not when it was taking place at his home. He wanted to taste something of what would certainly be the only intrusion of the world into little Bikini.

He was lying on his back, staring up at the clouds and the blue and the moon that he knew was there if he could strain his eyes hard enough. Then, at his side, the sun appeared. It had never really been up in the sky at all. The Americans had had it, all along.

He looked.

White and red comets filled the air, or perhaps they were the colors behind his eyelids, now dancing in his corneas, given form. There was a great bell of flame climbing into the air, becoming a cloud that stayed the same crimson color as though air could be red hot. It was a mile wide, tens of thousands of feet tall, jumping up into the atmosphere to tower over even the clouds.

But that wasn’t what Dretin saw.

There was something inside the cloud… within the boiling, striated pillar of water… it was a mountain, it was a skyscraper, it was a statue bigger than any made by man. The reality of it staggering, even only seeing the outline of it, silhouetted in the aerial froth of the bomb-blast.

It was in the shape of a man, something like a man, something alive, for it moved. This gargantuan thing, this giant to dwarf all other giants, it lived! The explosion hadn’t killed it, even as it vaporized ten million tons of water, even as it threw battleships about like children’s toys… it could not kill the thing that moved, the thing that lived.

Dretin traveled far and wide after that day. Rongerik could not support life and the Americans forgot about it, so busy with their modern age of wonders that they couldn’t attend to the aftermath of their last miracle. So Dretin went from place to place, looking for work, looking for some peace with what he had witnessed. But there wasn’t any to be had; only the forgetfulness of the bottle.

Everyone wanted to talk about the atomic age, the nuclear bomb, but Dretin knew it was nothing. There was something bigger than all that, bigger than all of mankind, and Dretin retold the story as a man would rub at an aching bruise.

It was only in Japan that he found some who would believe him.

He was telling the story again… it was the only thing he could talk about when the drink had dulled his mind and something needed to occupy his tongue so he couldn’t imbibe too quickly. But he didn’t encounter the usual skepticism or mockery. The Japanese he was drinking with… simple, superstitious fishermen of the outer islands… listened raptly as he described the saurian head, the great armored plates it bore on its back, the tail that slashed the air, and the claws that looked like they could carve canyons in the earth.

“Gojira,” they said when he had finished his story.

***

Ishirō Serizawa was a man denied oneness.

Not that he considered himself a warrior, a samurai, or anything so ostentatious. Only a man, of some modest intellect, and fortunate enough for education to come easily to him where his peers found their lessons slow or frustrating.

Once, he’d taken a kind of pride, if not smugness, in his intelligence and it had become an end unto itself. He gathered knowledge for the sake of it, trusting that the gods would not have given him such an inquisitive mind if it were not key to the purpose meant for him.

Then he had encountered actual gods… or at least, beings so titanic and powerful as to be far enough above humanity that deities could scarcely be more distant. And Serizawa saw that, quite contrary to the self-aggrandizing of most religions, that mankind was far away from purpose, from destiny, from all the lofty vestments they claimed for themselves in an effort to assert their importance.

At the time, it had sunk him into a deep depression. Was all his intelligence really meant only so he could have a firm grasp of his own insignificance? But with time, meditation, and some modest amount of sake, Serizawa saw beyond impressions of both importance and insignificance. Both were equally an illusion.

Mankind was important, holistically, as a great biome. Itself a part of the Earth’s grandeur and all of it, perhaps, a refutation of the cold emptiness of the cosmos.

Serizawa was individually unimportant, but as part of a herd… or a school, as he preferred to think of it… he was significant. And so he must commit to his purpose, small though it might be.

Go to the ant, you sluggard, the Bible said. Consider its ways and be wise! It has no commander, no overseer or ruler, yet it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest.

And as the ant, the vulture, the salmon, and every other plant and animal of the world attended to its purpose, Serizawa sought to devote himself to his small role in life. To study, to understand, and to dispel mankind’s ignorance. To make of the mystery of Gojira and his fellow Titans… something less of a mystery. While always conceding that he did not think it was possible to fully understand their nature.

Serizawa recalled another quotation from his Western neighbors: There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know.

He sought to turn Godzilla… as the principally Occidental MONARCH had come to refer to him… into a known unknown.

So this was his oneness. His purpose, his north star. And every encounter with a Titan was another brick placed in his life’s work.

And at the same time, he dreaded these encounters. A Titan was dangerous like nothing else. In interacting with humanity, disaster and calamity and destruction was all but inevitable. Every bit of knowledge he gleamed brought with it blood and sorrow.

So he looked forward to confirming the truth of the reports that had brought him to Luzon in the Philippines. And he would give anything for it to turn out to be false.

Serizawa slipped his watch from his pocket, feeling his way along the worn old bronze as he once more sought a join between the two halves of his soul. He knew he wouldn’t find it. But the cold metal felt good in his hands and he could see from the tower of billowing smoke ahead that the helicopter ride which was playing such havoc with his stomach was almost over.

Though perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps there was a kind of oneness which he might find. Because now that he could see for himself the disaster zone he was headed into, he no longer wished for it to be a hoax or misinformation. Now he only wished that he might learn something from all this death.

Deciding that was as good a point to end his musing as any—before he became neurotic—Serizawa focused on the feel of the watch in his hands and the view of the Philippine jungle out the window of the helicopter. The green of the hills curved like the crook of a mother’s arm as she cuddled her child.

“Trying to decide whether you’re more scared or excited?” his colleague, Vivienne Graham, asked.

Serizawa’s pride would rather he be characterized as nervous than scared, but he wasn’t petty enough to insist on it. “Yes.”

“And what’s your verdict?”

“That in our line of work, there’s little difference between the two.”

Graham rolled her shoulders contemplatively. “Ah so.”

“And you?”

“Oh, I don’t figure there’s any point in either. We’re as likely to crash in this death-trap as anything else.”

Serizawa felt his stomach reel as a bout of turbulence—the latest in a string—buffeted the chopper about before letting it go back to its relatively calm progress. “There is always that,” he allowed.

It was little wonder that the air currents were so rough. Through the window, he could see the natural topography of the island had literally given way to man’s influence. The jungle dropped away in a massive pit, with ring after ring of terraces descending to the final bottom of the excavation. Serizawa thought ungenerously that none of the creatures he’d encountered could accomplish the kind of destruction that man was capable of in his numbers and his intelligence… then he squelched the nihilistic thought. It would not be a useful attitude.

The helicopter descended, their pilot skillfully easing them into the depression in the earth without letting the change in air flow destabilize them. Finally, they were landed; Serizawa looked to Graham to see an exaggeratedly relieved look on her face. Then, she was all business, mirroring the look Serizawa knew held on his own face.

The rotors had barely begun to slow when the helicopter was swarmed. The rescue crew was eager to commandeer the vehicle for medical evacuation. Serizawa barely had time to make sure he had taken all his things with his before he’d stepped out onto solid ground with Dr. Graham.

As they pulled away from the helicopter to allow it to take off, Serizawa found Dr. Stabler in their midst—MONARCH’s agent in this area of the world. He belatedly traded handshakes with Serizawa and Graham.

“Apologizes for the not-so-warm welcome. We’ve caught a live one here. A real disaster area.”

There was little disputing that. A mega-dozer had been violently rammed into the side of the pit, burying or destroying half its mass. Large-diameter drill bores… each thick enough that it would take a man’s whole arm to wrap it up… were snapped like twigs, the twisted metal of them jutting from the disturbed earth as if nature was giving itself a porcupine’s quills. The mountainous piles of shale produced by the mining looked as if a tornado had run through them, though Serizawa doubted any earthly amount of wind could lift minerals that heavy. And corpses recovered by the rescue effort were already lining a corrugated hangar, itself dented like a tin can trodden underfoot.

“Has any new information come to light?” Graham asked.

“All we’ve managed to do so far is confirm the initial call,” Stabler said, leading them deeper into the chaos. “The mining company was looking for uranium ore and detected radiation. They started digging, but then the ground collapsed. We don’t know what happened after that. Just that forty miners are missing and we’re still detecting radiation.”

“But no uranium,” Serizawa said, and it wasn’t a question.

“No uranium,” Stabler confirmed.

***

Serizawa abseiled down into the cavern underlying the excavation, grateful for the powered ascender that trickled him down the line. He wouldn’t have wanted to do a manual rappel while clad in a radiation suit.

The subterranean chamber was vast. For several seconds, all he could see was the light from above, the flares burning hundreds of feet below on the chamber floor, and his own rope catching the light from his helmet-mounted flashlight. Down, down, down he went, with only the buzz of the powered ascender for company. Stabler and Graham, wearing their own orange radiation suits, were silent. Keeping the radio channels clear for anyone wishing to call for help. It gave Serizawa the feeling that they were ghosts, haunting the same blighted spot as him.

At last the flares swam up to fill their view. They were in the oasis of light the burning chemicals generated, so far below the collapsed ceiling that the sunlight trickled away into a sort of visual background noise. By straining his eyes, Serizawa could see something of the sunlight glinting off his surroundings, but it was only trace elements of vision. He had to turn on his halide flashlight to see anything.

This was unlike any cave Serizawa had ever been in. Hardened secretions… old enough to be all but fossilized… covered the rocky surfaces of the chamber. Twisting the stalagmites and stalactites in disturbingly organic ways. We’re in the belly of the beast, Serizawa thought, and didn’t know if he was being metaphorical or not.

“We’re going to need more flares,” Graham said.

“And an excavation crew,” Serizawa said. “Our people. This whole site needs to be processed.”

“A MUTO, do you think?”

“Almost certainly.”

“But is it still here or did it leave?”

“Dr. Serizawa!” Stabler called, and Serizawa turned—his flashlight beam leaping with Graham’s to where Stabler stood before a wall. His flashlight was trained on a set of deep grooves in the rock. Joined by the flashlights of the other two scientists, they quickly followed the markings upward… all the way to the hole made in the chamber ceiling.

“Claw marks,” Serizawa said. “It’s loose.”

***

At that same moment, one sea away in Janjira, Japan, the Brodys were spending their last evening together as a family.

They lived in a traditional fusuma house on a quiet street lined with cherry blossoms. Even the cooling and reactor towers of the nuclear power plant where the family’s patriarch and matriarch worked, some miles away, seemed somehow quaint, traditional.

A long-time afficionado of Japanese culture, Joseph Brody treated living in a house with shoji doors as one long vacation as well as a career opportunity. His wife, Sandra, herself a nuclear engineer, indulged her husband and relished that they could make the best of such a necessary careerist move. There were vanishingly small opportunities for people in the field of nuclear power. It was good that making a living had taken them somewhere Joseph could enjoy himself so much.

Their son, Ford, had put up his sports posters on the shoji panels. He didn’t care to have light streaming in to glare on the television while he played on his Dreamcast.

Joseph spoke fluent Japanese, while Sandra knew some basics from a past honeymoon there and other vacations. She took great advantage of the fact that, as with the majority of the scientific world, the realm of nuclear power had English as the lingua franca.

Ford, though, was entirely gaijin… sticking out his family’s experiment with multiculturalism until his graduation from high school. Then—this was a year and change off—he would move back to the States and happily live on-campus at UCLA.

And if his parents never took him out to eat in Nihonmachi, like they had back when they all lived in San Francisco and had been trying to get him hyped for the move… well, he’d be able to take it.

He couldn’t even have a sandwich at home. His mom had insisted on trying to conquer Japanese cuisine. As if they weren’t living on top of the motherlode of rice and miso soup. Ford found Japanese cooking funny-tasting even when done by the Japanese. When his mom cooked it, it made him think of a far-future civilization trying to recreate the fabled ‘silly putty’ of yore.

Joseph had the right idea. He was on the phone, his plate’s contents cooling, trying to pull together something at the Hokkaido plant.

As athletic as he was, Ford was a smart kid. He could hardly fail to be, with two nuclear physicists contributing his DNA. And so he’d picked up enough Japanese to understand that his father was arguing about the reactor. Something about the sensors warning of tremors—the kind of seismic events that could endanger even the safest nuclear plant—while the man on the other end of the phone insisted that there were no earthquakes, no tremors, nothing that could threaten the reactor.

“Ford, clean your plate,” his mother told him.

Ford scooped up a spoonful. It was enough to make him wish his parents still insisted on him using chopsticks. They couldn’t blame him for not eating if the food wiggled away from his mouth…

He tried another tact: “What’s going on at the power plant? Is everything okay?”

Sandra was quick to assure him and quick to forget about his nutrition. “Everything’s fine. We’re just trying to sort out what’s going on so we can fix it before it’s any real trouble. It’s probably just a sensor malfunction, so it’s a good thing, because now we can get them working right when it’s no big deal.”

Joseph pressed his cell phone to his breast. “It’s not a sensor malfunction. That would just give us random noise. This is a consistent increase in seismic readings, starting yesterday evening in the Philippines and steadily increasing. The sensors are picking something up, it’s just…” His free hand flexed as if trying and failing to grasp a proper metaphor. “The something is refusing to be something we’ve ever seen before.”

“Tell them that,” Sandra said, and Joseph remembered the cell phone muffled against his chest, hurriedly returning it to his ear and trying to figure out where he was in the series of honorifics that constituted a Japanese argument.

“We’re talking about shutting down? Who’s talking about—me? No, I never said that, just that it’s an option.” Joseph managed a small smile as Sandra filled a serving spoon with udon and added it to Ford’s plate. “With all due respect, that’s why we have the sensors, so they can tell us when to shut down. And they’re very close to… no, don’t tell me the readings again, I know my readings are accurate, I don’t know what yours are… okay. Alright. I’m not going to listen to you read me out the readings like we’re doing a radio show. Give me ten minutes, I’ll be there in person, we’ll double-check the readings together and decide what to do then. Maybe by then they’ll have calmed down and we’ll know for sure it’s a sensor issue. Oh yes, then the drinks will most definitely be on me.”

He hung up, then quickly drained his glass of water. A born academic, Joseph wasn’t much for tough talk, most especially not the oddly measured kind that marked Japanese disputes. It made his mouth dry as a desert.

“I swear, it’s like they pay me to know when to panic, then when I panic, they tell me I’m panicking.”

“You’re not panicking, dear,” Sandra said.

“No, I’m… I’m saying that if the smoke alarm is going off, you leave the building, even if you can’t see the fire!”

“Did you tell him that?” Ford asked.

“No.” Joseph wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I save my best stuff for you guys, you know that. I have to go, this can’t wait until morning.”

“Want me to come with you?” Sandra asked. “If I could check the sensors personally, that would rule out half the things you’re about to argue over.”

“Yeah, would you?” Joseph turned to Ford. “You’ll be okay on your own?”

“Worried I’ll sneak out and go to some wild kegger?” Ford said, and it was hard to tell how much was him being funny and how much was bitterness.

Ford was a bit old for a bedtime, even if he did have school in the morning, so Joseph only said “If you’re going to stay up, try to do it while lying in bed. And don’t microwave a bunch of corndogs or something. There’s plenty of leftovers in the fridge.”

“You can have fruits or vegetables,” Sandra amended.

“Are you sure? I thought all the fruits and vegetables that grew around here ended up with eyes or tentacles.”

“That’s not funny,” Joseph told him.