ゴジラ

I’m going to warn you right up front. I wake up in hospital beds a lot in this story. Actually only two times, but anyway, it’s not a lazy plot device. It’s just what happens.

Maybe I should get you up to speed if you are not familiar with my circumstances. I currently live in Spiral City, have lived here since 2001, give or take. Spiral City is on a peninsula fronting a bay on the western edge of the biggest continent of the planet Alterra. Alterra, and its moons Algemina and Sessus, circle a G2 star about midway inside a spiral galaxy two hundred and fifty million light years from Earth. Back on Earth, if you look up at the nighttime sky, we would be in the constellation of Hercules, if that helps. 

I rent space in one of the downtown frontier strip malls. I have a corner shop there. It's not very big, but doesn't need to be for my line of work. I'm a peranoscopist. 'Soothsayer' in the common use, 'Magic Eightball' to skeptics and snobs. 

The rest of the strip mall is owned and occupied by my landlord Aaron Willis. Yes, that Aaron Willis. Trillionaire owner of the entire freaking planet Aaron Willis. This is his world and the rest of us just live on it.

=============================

This first time before I end up in hospital? I am tutoring Aaron’s daughter Camilla about universal quantum solutions to Kerr-Godel-Everett bridges, and Jonbar hinges as one interpretation. (Jonbar hinges are a science fiction term for those forks in the road of history where things go all different).
I'm up at the chalkboard when the door opens, and the Jussinniemis walk in, followed by the Bundy boys.

"Um" I look up at the visitors, none looking particularly friendly, turn to Camilla and say "You know what? We'll continue the lesson later. I gotta take this call".

If you get the impression I might be in trouble, you are right. 

The Bundy boys I'm not too worried about. But the Jussinniemis? Brothers Aabel and Heikki, freelance muscle, are big hulking bruisers. Worst of all is little sister Johanna. Johanna is not little, but not hulking thank goodness. Actually pretty much of a stunner, blonde, tall, slim, muscular. Johanna leans forward, elbows on my counter.

"Hi Hanna" I start, "are we finally going to go out on a date?" I, as casually as possible, start to reach for the shotgun under the counter.

"Don't" grins Hanna.

I talk past Hanna towards the Bundys. "Hi Aamon. I think I know why you are here".

"Eightball gets something right for a change", snorts Aamon. "Too bad you didn't do ba etter job warning us about that avalanche".

"I told you not to take your expedition over that mountain pass. Wait one extra week, I said, or take the long way to the further pass, I said". I receive a glower in response.

I sigh. "No refunds, Aamon", "It's in the contract".

"Oh, we don't expect a refund, "Aamon actually looks a little sad. "But we got to do right by those that didn't come back, so..." he nods.

I try to reach the shotgun, but Hanna puts a thumb in my eye and a finger in my ear. Blinded by tears, I hear a commotion of big bodies in a rush towards me. Someone is thumping on a drum. 

=============================

I wake up in a hospital bed. I moan for a little bit, shifting and stretching without really being quite awake. I'm sore, but not in pain. They must have doped me up.

My neighbor Aaron sits next to me leafing through a National Geographic. Seeing I'm awake, he starts in.

“You’re fucking up way too much Johnny! Getting stoned too often, man. You’re fucking up. I'm telling you!”


“Okay okay”. I stretch and shift and, realizing I am just sore, sit up. "They must gone easy on me". 

“Hey, yeah" Aaron eyes me coldly. "Hey, here’s a question for you. How do you feel?"

He doesn't wait for an answer.  "Sore?" he sneers, "A little sore. You know you should be mangled, you dumb fucker. Every one of your bones broken! What those goons did? That was gruesome.”

“You saw it?"

“The tail end. Who all do you think kept you alive? Camilla got me, but we would have heard anyway. Your place is trashed."

I rubbed my face. No bumps. No swelling. 

"Hey, here’s another question. The doc did a full body scan on you. Guess what?"

"What?" I got out of bed, moved my limbs experimentally.

"The x-ray of your skull? That titanium nail driven into your skull? It’s gone”.

(About a decade ago, I'd had a titanium nail driven into my skull by alien monsters).

“What do you mean gone? Like it got knocked out? They knocked it out?”

“No, stupid. Like it ain't there in your head anymore. That nail dissolved into you”. Aaron looked at me expectantly.

“Dissolved? Oh. Full body scan you said?" I frown in thought. "Is that why I have no broken bones?"

"Why those aliens picked you to augment and enhance is a mystery. You got it, ace. Some kind of fascial enhancements. Skeletal and muscular enhancements, too".

"I got superpowers?" 

“No, not superman. More like industrial strength human. Elephant skin and bones of, well, titanium. You don't appear to be any stronger, but I'll let someone else find that out"

"Well this is stupid! It fucking hurt! When they beat me? It fucking hurt a lot! Enough to make me pass out. What kind of a stupid superpower is that?_

"Yeah, Fucking Furry Octopussies, man! You're even more creepy! Classified suspect alien technology you sure as hell are now".

"What do mean?"

"I mean the Furries are here for you. And NATO".

Apparently, while my place was getting trashed and I was having the living shit beat out of me, a giant neon circus which is a Furry Octopoid space station appeared in orbit above Spiral City. 

=============================

The Furry Octopoids, otherwise known as Furries, Teuthids, Kraken, Cthulhunoids, Octopussies, etc. are a billion years ahead of us humans, and the known universe their realm. Or so they claim. I don't know how we could fact check that. I'm not even sure that giant furry octopus is their true and actual form. They could be drones for all I know, a chosen shape to interact with us. 

=============================

"The Teuthids say they want to see the hatchling, meaning you" a nameless sergeant is telling me, as we weave through Conex boxes and quonset huts towards the wormhole station at the center of the base. 

NATO has had an outpost on Alterra since the colony was first seeded, but they've never seen fit to trick it out any better. The base on Sessus, the other end of this base's wormhole, is much nicer, and more up-to-date. I suppose if you want a moon base on a desolate airless moon, you want it to be comfortable.

We get to the wormhole station, which is a big geodesic dome, once painted white. This was a bad color choice. Accumulated grime and detritus in the joints and on faces, looks cheesy.  We pass through a series of airlocks to get to the staging area. And there it is, my coffin. It's not a coffin. It's an airtight cylinder just large enough for one person. I fucking hate these coffins, but that's how individuals travel through wormholes. A guy in green fatigues helps me in, and then, after a few bumps and what feels like a ride though a vacuum tube, the lid of the coffin is opened by a set of taloned tentacles.

I'm greeted by thin sheets and sprays of expelled furry octopus snot. It's how they smile.

=============================

"You finally hatched!" hiss/spit/growls the krake that showered me with mucus. "How delightful! You're a little slow, a little retarded, but that's okay!"

The krake steers me away from the coffin with it's tentacles, little pin sharp talons digging into my skin, but not, I note, drawing blood like the last time I met one.

It snorts a little wad of mucus, right in my ear. "Oh, this is very good! We can begin the training immediately!"

"Training? Training for what?" I ask.

Another spray of snot. "Oh, so cute, even though you are hideously ugly with two legs! Hatchlings are always so cute! Otherwise we'd eat you! Training to rescue a lost colony, silly! You are going to be a hero!"

By this point, other krakes have arrived and are copiously coating me with snot as well.

"Do you guys have any wet wipes? Or towels?"

"Delightful! Yes! Terry cloth towels for the ugly two legs please! What do want us to call you?"

"John is fine".

"Johnny! Johnny! Hey Johnny! Johnny! Johnny! We have found one of your lost colonies! They are from Asia! Japan! Um, a 1976 colony? yes. One of the earliest. We are surprised by this. We did not think the Japanese would be so adventurous. So, still, we have found them! They are in big trouble!"

"What kind of trouble?"

"A space creature! It's a very bad one! Very big! Very mean! But you will rescue them while there is time! There's not much time! We can entangle them for maybe a week. No more! But you will be ready! You will see! Can you swallow air? Into your stomach? How loud can you belch?"

=============================

Three days later, doing nothing but practicing belching, hopping, squatting, and towards the last, wretching, the octopussies declared me ready.

I had asked exactly what kind of very big very bad space creature it was, how belching and wretching was going to be of use, and how I was going to be of help. They ignored all my questions. We poofed into existence over a single solitary planet next to an immense nebula almost as colorful and flamboyant as the teuthid station.

A swirling tentacular tip indicated the nebula. "That's where the creature is! It will come soon come It's here to lay eggs! You must go down to the planet and protect them. We will help!"

=============================

I am disoriented for a bit, dizzy, a little vertigo, things not quite in focus. I hear... air raid sirens. Strange. Yeah, blaring sirens. I look around and, hmm, rooftops. Rooftops of buildings. I must be way up someplace in a building. And everything is... black and white. No color. I'm a bit unsteady on my feet. I look down, and - 

What the fuck?

I've got clawed feet. Reptile feet. I look over my body, and I'm a lizard. And judging from the buildings around me, I'm a giant lizard. Maybe 160 feet tall, I'm guessing. 

"Johnny! Can you hear me? The monster is coming!"

"What? What the hell? Hey! What's going on? Did you slip me some LSD or something?'

“You are no hallucination. You are a daikaiju! A giant monster. The space creature that is plaguing these people is coming! You must destroy it!”

I looked behind me. There was a path of destruction leading back to a harbor.

“I didn’t do that!”


“No that was you. You were groggy, but that was you”.


“Why is everything in black and white?”


“You are a giant lizard!. They don't need color! Listen! The space creature is here to lay eggs. If the eggs hatch this planet will be eaten alive. You have to stop it!”

I start hearing a high pitched electric whine in the air. I know that sound. 

“Dude, am I fucking Godzilla?”

“Of course!”

"Wha? How?"

"It's coming! Get ready!"

If this is what I think it is, the space creature, the monster, I know it. It's called Mothra.

"Where? Where is the fucker?” I ask, just as it sails in and smacks me in the back of my head. I see stars.

"Ow! Fuck!'

Mothra turns in mid-air, and slams up against me, knocking to the ground. It’s hard carapace untouched, and now it starts digging at my belly with these nasty little razor sharp pincers, while beating me with its wings. Hyper hurricane winds are knocking buildings down around me.

"Ow! FUCK!" 

The pincers are digging in to my belly hide. I instinctively grab a wing by the root and twist. Mothra emits a loud screeching electronic tone which deafens me. It breaks free and wheels up into the air.

"Use your atomic vomit!"

"My what?"

Mothra turns again and 15,000 metric tons of space moth hits me square in the belly. I get slammed into a skyscraper, and then another behind, rubble and steel landing everywhere.

“Goddamn it! This fucking thing is beating the shit out of me!”

"Use your atomic vomit! Swallow air and belch and puke!"

“I - okay".

Just as I swallow air and start to belch, Mothra hits me in the belly again. I gag and cough. I almost choke on atomic vomit. 

"Dude, I got the hic- I got the hic- I got the hiccups!"

"Hold your breath, Johnny! HEY! BOO! Did that scare you, Johnny?"  

"I - " just then, I start hearing music, little tinny women's voices. "I hear singing. I hear singing in my head."

“Oh... SHIT! The Shobijin! They are pure fucking evil! Don't listen to them! They will try to hypnotize you. Get a song in your head! Green Acres! I Dream of Jeanie! Girl From Ipanema!”


"They're in my head! There’s two little Japanese fairy women singing at me in my head. Get out of my head! Jesus Christ they’re like twisted little kernels of evil energy!”

“That’s what I’m telling you! That's what they are! Twisted little kernel of evil energies. Mothra is their slave! Keep ‘em out of your head!”

I glance down, and somehow I spot. Two tiny little fairies.  "I see them! Should I stomp them?"

"No, they indestructible. Get Mothra!”

The pain in my head is excruciating. I wrack my brain for a song and finally pick a John Phillip Souza march. 

 “Good! Good!”

Holding my breath seems to have cured the hiccups, but Mothra bowls me over again. I recover, get on my feet, and, swallowing a big gulp of air, belch a huge atomic blast as it recedes. It singes its carapace a little, the wings smoking some, which I hope is good. I've got to crank the volume on the Souza march to cancel out the evil songs of the Shobijin.

Mothra turns again, and slams into me, but this time, I grab it, and twist a wing, and use my tail to deflect it in almost a judo move. My tail. Holy shit. My tail. I have a tail. I use my tail to whip around fast before Mothra can get up, blast it good. Again, a little smoldering, but really Mothra is unfazed. It takes off again for another pass.

“It's just bouncing off it like a garden hose!”

“Well yeah, it’s a giant space moth attracted to stars. It can fly next to stars and not get burned!"


Oh, Great! Mothra flits around the surface of stars, and thus invulnerable to my atomic vomit. This thing is going to win if I don't think of something. It has to have a weakness. Weak spots in the carapace.  “-here to lay eggs”, I remember.

“Hey what about the ovipositor? Is that protected?”

“Oh! Yes. Disgusting! Clever! That could work!”


I flail my tail. Judging from the surge of strength I feel, I bet I can lift myself with this tail. I crouch down, wait for the big giant moth to come at me. It swerves to pass by me, keeping its wings away out of my reach. I launch myself onto Mothra using my tail. I grab hard and hold on. Mothra continues flying through the air carrying me. I shift my hold and manage to clamber into a very undignified 69 position with Mother.

Hanging on with my back claws digging into abdomen, I scrabble at Mothra's ovipositor WA like a bear digging into a beehive.

Mothra gets distressed, trying to shake me off, and the melodies of black pain from the Shobijin are knifing me into my forebrain. 

I pry open the lips of her egg chamber and shoot down a giant projectile puke of atomic plasma vomit.

The atomic blast into Mothra’s egg chamber  jiffy-pops her carapace. Mothra's corpse makes a tremendous gash in the crust of the earth.

Wow, we’re done. The city erupts in celebration. Ships horns, car horns, trolly horns, bells, even the faint tinny roar of cheering humans.

“Well played. And just in time. The knot of entanglement is loosening. This region of the cosmos is lost to us once again. We have to go!"

=============================

I wake up in a hospital bed. Aaron is sitting to next me thumbing through a National Geographic.

"Oh, that was some fucking dream".

He puts the magazine down.

"They must have really knocked me around. I had a dream I was Godzilla, in a fight with Mothra!"

"That wasn't a dream. We watched you on TV. It was on all the channels. Hey, there's someone been waiting for you".

The door opened, and a gorgeous blonde stuck her head in the room. Johanna Jussinniemi.

"Hey hero!" She grinned, "You still want to go on a date with me?"

Lucky #7

Earth Day was first celebrated April 22, 1970. America also started dumping toxic and radioactive waste out into the intergalactic voids on that day. 

By cosmic irony, or justice, on April 22, 1994, President Richard Nixon and his staff disappeared down a black hole, when their wormhole collapsed and evaporated in a flash of gamma rays and neutrinos. 

Nixon was in a foul fucking mood that day. He was back from the Soviet colony world of Moon #7. Luna No-mer See-yem. Lucky #7.  His last stop before Earth was here on Alterra.

“I go from the fucking Russian Jetsons to this shithole granola planet? Nixon said, “Somebody get me a drink”.

And they did.

=======================

“You were there?” I asked Claire.

“Nixon's accident? No. How do you think I got the station master’s job?” replied Claire.

“Oh.”

Claire, Aaron and I were seated in the alien quarantine section of Sam's Pub, which was packed. Ever since Sam installed the robot bartender in there, everyone wanted to be served by a robot. It kind of defeated the purpose of the alien quarantine, as that section of the bar had been partitioned off to protect Sam's human patrons from the occasionally hostile or exuberant alien. I could see perhaps a dozen people in the humans-only part, though hard to discern through all the alien graffiti and obscene pictures scratched into the 4-inch-thick bulletproof plexiglass.

We were celebrating the end of the dimming of the wormhole network. All the wormhole apertures had grown back from sullen little cherry-red bee-bees to nice big blue-glowing soap bubbles. Traffic between worlds was restored, and everybody was back to their normal jobs and happy. There had been some tough and primitive times for a while, with all available electrical power used up just to keep the damned things from collapsing. The colony had been forced back to circa-1830s lifestyle.

“We were at the banquet,” Aaron volunteered. I gestured a suggestion for a refill. They shook their heads no.

“You met Nixon?”

“Oh yeah” Claire smiled. “He was like a drunken werewolf that could talk. Filthy. Foul-mouthed. Pretty horrible.”

“God, I wish I could have been there.”

“No, you don’t, man” Aaron said with raised eyebrows. "He was abusive, just a very unpleasant motherfucker". 

=======================

Lucky Number Seven. Lu-na No-mer See-yem. Moon Number Seven. Earth satellite of a warm gas giant orbiting a G-type star. Colonized by the USSR in 1974, it’s some 4.784 billion light years from Earth, in the direction of the Pleiades. 

The Russkies poured their heart, blood, soul into this world. They practically moved the entire Soviet Union there, with basically just paint shadows and abandoned furniture left on old Earth. And, of course, an operating power and wormhole station in the Urals, and eventually Moscow, Leningrad, Vladivostok. Smart fuckers, with only a minimal military budget, they devoted their time and energies to science and engineering. 

They leapt ahead a good generation or two ahead of Earth in technology. They even colonized the Earth world in closer orbit to their star with their nuclear rockets. Out of 19 Earth worlds in the universe, two of them were in the same system the Soviets found, so Lucky #7.

Ah, but progress is not without it's price. They managed to trash the environment and kill off nearly half the plants and animals with all of their development. Not to mention the nuclear and industrial accidents. They probably wouldn't have made it all had it not been for the Kraken.

======================

"You know why Nixon was so sour about the Soviets?" Aaron asked. 

"Yes and no. I assume the whole triumph of collective central planning over free market capitalism had a lot to do with it. Plus, Nixon just hating Russians in general."

"That's part, but no. It was his fault the Russians managed to succeed, and that just gnawed at him. You remember the disclosure of how the chemical and nuclear industries were paying big bucks to dump all their crap out into the big voids?"

"Sure. That was big news when it broke". 

"Yeah, well. Turns out there were Things out in the voids that really liked our waste product. They contacted the Kraken, who in turn contacted Earth with the message 'More please'."

"Things? What kind of things? I've never heard of these things."

"Yeah, well, there's Things out there with a capital T. And the Kraken regularly supplied them with toxic wastes and stuff, but apparently ours was, what, gourmet? Fresh and new? So, when Nixon and Kissinger craft a number of deals with the Kraken, news broke about all the disasters on Moon #7. Place was just trashed and they were looking at an extinction event. Nixon, kind of half joking, informed the Kraken about their predicament. Next thing, you know, place is all cleaned up, and the Russkies get the same Kraken tech as we got. Lucky #7!"

"Oh man! That must have stuck in his grisly old craw".

"For ten years." laughed Claire "we always figured the wormhole aperture collapsed from an overload of bile!" And we all laughed and drank to that.

Happy Earth Day from all of us on Alterra!

The Rescue Of A Dixie Warbot

The first time I met Aaron - my first day on Alterra - I walked into the store next to mine in the frontier strip mall. It was a hundred times the size of my corner space. I saw outdoor gear, clothes, tents, ropes, sleeping bags, survival accessories, cook stoves, cook wear, lanterns, hand tools, motors, generators, power tools, knives, machetes, axes, explosives, guns. Guns. Lots and lots of guns.

"Sporting goods?" I asked at the counter, shaking hands. “ Wilderness experience?”

"Estate management", Aaron answered.

=======================

Meat is how Alterra makes money. 

Alterra is a world about like the Earth back in the Miocene. Big mammals. Big. Pretty much everything elephant-sized big. And so? Big predators! Lions the size of rhinos. Wolves the size of bears.  Bears the size of, well you get the idea. Humanity found itself about halfway up the food chain. Again. 

But all the money is in the meat harvest. Those delicious mammoth steaks and giant ribs and meat bits aplenty are what Earth wants. If you are on Alterra, being a cowboy, hunter, trapper, herder, zoo worker, or manager thereof, is what you want to be about. 

=======================

“So when Nixon allowed Texas to secede, the state of Texas emigrated to the planet Texas?” asked Mr. Merkin.

“That’s right. Through the Houston Astrodome Portal” I answered. “30 million of them at least.”

(I’m teaching a class in consistent histories because the wormhole network is preternaturally dimmed down and I can’t earn without it. This teaching gig is charity from the colony, and a college credit class for my fellow unemployed).

“A good part of the South went along.” I continued, and swept my hand across the map of the continental United States of America. 

“Basically? The Confederacy. Henry Kissinger negotiated an amicable divorce. Most every berg from the Mason-Dixon line on south was now chocolate city.”

They stared at me.

“All the white people left. Most of them. There was still a big waiting line, when Houston lost power. Wormhole collapsed. When contact was regained, there was nothing there. Empty space.”

Ms. Murka raised her hand. “A Lost Colony?”

“The first! Of many. Lesson there? Don’t turn the wormhole off!”

Laughter.

“So, but then we get in contact with them again! But, you know, spooky action at an instance, and the Confederacy is 10,000 years in the future.”

“And that’s why the giant Texan warbot terrorizes us and tries to infest us with mechanical bacteria??” asked Ms. Murka.

Yes, Nancy” I sigh. “and I’m sorry, but we are working on that”. 

=======================

Aaron and Claire Willis are my next store neighbors in Spiral City, on the planet Alterra, galaxy NGC 6264, almost half a billion light years from Earth. 

I think it’s unusual to love your neighbors, but I do love them.

Claire is the station master at the wormhole. Everyone loves Claire. She’s gorgeous. Vivacious. Superlative. 

Claire and Aaron have three children. Craig, out East, carving out the meat empire. Aaron Jr. studying on Earth. Cory, the baby, captured me from the start. She might as well be my daughter. Aaron is, well, what isn’t he? Scrounger? Fixer? Hustler? Mayor?

Did I mention they are black? Is it important? It shouldn’t be, but now it is.

“You two do realize you are both black, right?” I asked. “The only black people out here? On this here uberweisse planet?” 

They looked at me and smiled... and continued to smile. I frowned...finally I figured it out. 

Willis. Brontoburgers Willis. Dinoburgers. The Willis Clan owned the best quarter of this here uberweisse planet. My new neighbors are trillionaires.

=======================

Edward Hopper, the giant robot from the Empire of Texas, had tried to infest Alterra with miniscule mechanical creatures. 

The plan was to give him - and by proxy the Intergalactic Empire of Dixie - total control over every living thing on the planet. 

It didn’t quite work out because of the Kraken. The Kraken are big furry alien octopus monsters that are a billion years ahead of humanity. The Kraken had unleashed a virus on Alterra months before Edward Hopper unleashed his mechanical plague. The virus disabled the mechanicules as they were spawned. 

Why the Kraken didn’t just stop Ed from doing all that shit to begin with, I don’t know.

 =======================

It was all that President Nixon had hoped, but not how he planned. It wasn’t the inner cities and rural poverty districts that depopulated. It was the Great White Flight into the cosmos. 

The last, and greatest, liberal welfare project ever.

Nixon did what he could to steer folks he wanted gone. Along with the Northern Cities, wormhole stations were set up in Knoxville, Baltimore, Birmingham, Baton Rouge, St. Louis, New Orleans. The black and brown folk did not leave. They took jobs instead. 

It was the biggest economic boom in American history. Huntsville was and will be Rocket City, but Detroit became Nuclear Rocket City. KC, Mo? What don’t they do there? Oakland, Memphis, Cleveland, Toledo humming on government war production budgets, cranking out yolk for all those interstellar zygotes.

Ah, but then things went sour.  The start was a news leak of wormhole dumping, toxic garbage and radioactive waste dropped into deep space. Almost cost Nixon the reelection. Well, that, and the lost colonies, and the space deaths, and Spiro Agnew, and country club black markets and profiteering, and... but you know, cosmic irony, Nixon gets a second term.

=======================

It got on week twenty of the wormholes all dimmed down. The colony had broken into the warehouses: older technology pulled out that did not use electricity. I used the darkened store for sleeping between odd jobs. It was a sloppy mess. Aaron walked in, looked about with a smirk.

“Bachelor Man!” he sang out.

“Hi Aaron.”

"Are you still in contact with Ed Hopper?"

"Not recently. But as a matter of fact, he came to me in a dream last night."

“So? Well! Meteor Bay? South-east shore thereof?”

“Si?”

“Jimmy Mungo was down there yesterday. He tells me he saw something weird.”

“When can we go?”

Aaron smiled a million watts. “Now!”

=======================

Jimmy Mungo’s name wasn’t Jimmy Mungo. Jimmy Mungo was Howard Pogue, originally from Melbourne, Australia.

 =======================

The Convergence is that entendu of superpositions of the universe where humanity survives.

The Convergence is abstracted out of a very shaky holographic gestalt, but there are set points.

Contact with the Kraken is one. It gets the Convergence rolling.

Only Nixon can meet the Kraken.

=======================

Jimmy Mungo piloted the electric airplane over Meteor Bay.

Aaron’s daughter Cory was his co-pilot apprentice. Aaron and I sat in back with drinks. Aaron poked me and pointed down.

“Gorgeous!” I nodded.

It was gorgeous. Meteor Bay seen from its north cape, the green water to the west tracing to the thinnest of arcs. To the south, the water turned blue again, and it looked like a new sea off to the east, but no, its the bay. The crater.

We hugged the coast turning east, flew over sandy islands and reefs, approached the shore of a peninsula. The blue water turned green again.

“HEY!!”

“WOW!”

“Cool!” cried Cory.

“Fuck” I said.

Down below us was a city of giant fungi. Square miles of skyscraper sized mushrooms. A forest of nickel clad toadstools below this canopy. Stalks of liquid metal. Pearlescent and oily white superellipsoids floating or perched about like bird blimps and popcorn. Surfaces of fine china and soot carpet the floor of this rain forest, this factory, this rain forest, fading east and up to a monotone.

In the center, big red brick smokestacks a quarter mile high, gills and stone veils crawling down them. Once belching out billions of tons of mechanicules, now quiet. And wouldn’t you know, a speck of gold tinsel waving at us, a tinkerbell on shore. Edward Hopper. 

Jimmy Mungo pressed the plane close to shore and landed on pontoons. We cast up on a spit less sparse of the eldritch living machine growths. Edward Hopper, resplendent in gold imperial, waded over to tower above us. 

I was scared, in front of this giant mechanical war god, his vast citadel arrayed around me. I feared for my life, but I was also very angry.

“You! Asshole! I shouted “Fucking! Asshole! Cocksucking! Motherfucker! This is bullshit! Bullshit! This ends today! Okay? You prick? All this shit! Just leave us the fuck alone! Please!”

“Mr. Hopper?” Aaron asked, holding his palms up. “What do you want?”

“Well, it’s more what you need.”

“I get it.” Aaron turned to me “He is a dick, isn’t he?” He shouted slowly to Hopper, “What do you want?” 

“Respite. Healing. In case you haven’t noticed...” Ed Hopper indicated his golden body. Up close, Ed Hopper was not so resplendent. The gash on his thigh, received from Kraken claw, had not healed. 

“Jesus Ed!” I commiserated, turned to Aaron and muttered “This is a limited time offer”.

“He is correct.” Ed said, “I am slowly rotting from the inside out, and this citadel as well. Only a week at best before we die.”

Aaron grunted. “And what bargaining chip do we have? How can we help you?”

Hopper pointed at me. “He can call off this curse.”

Aaron frowned.  “Why should he? You’re a bully. You’re a monster. You’ve terrified everybody with your antics. Everyone.”

“I was only trying to help.”

"Oh, easy, then” Aaron laughed. “Go die!”

“Okay, hang on” Ed Hopper held up his hands. “You need electricity, Mr. Mayor. I can’t build transmission lines now. I can send batteries up to Spiral City right now”. 

He clapped his hands. Five cold iron things lurched forward. They were 55 gallon drums with dunce caps on top and four War of the Worlds tentacle legs attached. They stumbled in a drunken walk, leaning and swaying side to side.

“What are those tipsy things? I asked.

“Those are.. tipsies. Each can pump out ten megawatts per hour for two weeks. Plug and play, or hack away. It gets you back on the network today.”

“Well. I don’t trust you, babycakes. We sure as hell don’t trust your freaks” Aaron replied. 

“I can do more. I can build more animals. Mineral or elemental refinement. Mining robots. Transportation. Warriors. To protect you from the big predators.”

“It still sounds like an army you want to build, Ed."

"I really mean well. I'm trying to help.

"No. No, thank you.”

Ed Hopper slumped down dejectedly.

=======================

“...Ah, son of a-!” I caved, old softie that I am. “If I can heal him, I have to try.”

Aaron stared hard at me. “Whatever, man.”

“Edward Hopper, do you renounce Satan and all his works?”

“ I do.”

“Heh. OK. Edward Hopper! Do you want to be healed? Do you want to rejoin the bliss of You robot brethren and sestren? Do you?  Get on your knees! Get on your knees and pray to the furry octopussies with me!”

Edward Hopper got upon his knees, and clasped his hands, and I did likewise, and we prayed. We prayed to the furry octopussies that my friend Edward Hopper and all his servants and all his works be healed.

 And it was so.

=======================

We’d found some wood and set it alight. Dinner followed. We settled down around the merry fire, Cory leaned against her dad. Jimmy tossed logs and poked the fire. I drank heavily. Edward Hopper a seated statue, nickel plate handsome in the firelight. 

"If this were a story?” observed Cory “This is all just stupid."

“Oh, don’t just say stupid. How is it stupid?”

“Nothing has really changed. Right? Mr. Hopper started out terrorizing you guys. Now he’s indispensably terrorizing you guys. And the other stuff?” smiled Cory, 

“Yeah?”

“There is no point to it. And what was with that praying to the aliens miracle? Really?” 

I thought a bit, and said, “In this boundless universe, there are bound to be beings that are like gods to us... That doesn’t mean we should worship them. Prayer isn’t the same as worship, hon”. 

“I know that.”

“Really?”

“Yeah!”  

“Well then, on to the next story.” 

That Titanium Nail

It's not right for an alien monster to have such sexy eyes. That's what creepy about the Kraken, their beautiful eyes. Eyes that are invariably beautiful, soulful, with a clear white sclera, fantastically colored irises, the most gorgeous human eyes I've ever seen. 

Now, I'd seen the Kraken on television, going back to 1978 when one of their city-plus-sized, lit-up-like-Vegas-neon starships first appeared in orbit above our heads. But meeting them in person, that's a whole different thing, considering they are real alien monsters, and not the cartoon everyone is used to seeing.

Clark The Kraken was an '80's children's cartoon involving two children named Becky and Josh and their alien monster friend Clark the Kraken. The premise of the show was that Clark would get the children involved in off-world adventures that invariably put them in danger. Clark (who was responsible for putting them in harm's way) would find some clever way of saving them. Clark was depicted as manic and maniacal. He could perform miracles, but rarely did. Clark was really just out for fun, fun, fun. In other words, he was completely insane. There were some diplomatic worries about the character, but the Kraken loved the show. They paid for it's revival in syndication when it was cancelled. 

Except for having eight tentacular limbs, Clark the Kraken really didn't look anything like a real kraken. At first glance, you'd think a kraken was a fur coat - a really big fur coat, like what maybe a big barbarian Viking would wear. 

The fur is typically a rich golden brown, and you are tempted to stroke the fur. But you realize no one is wearing the coat. The coat is standing on its own, and has six extra arms, which aren't arms, but tentacles. Peaking out from the underside of the tentacles are rows of black talons. The incongruity of this soft, fuzzy, furry creature with tentacles and nightmare features, a slavering vagina dentata of a mouth filled with rows of sharp, black fangs makes your brain say, yup, this is an alien monster

My first very up close and personal meeting involved about thirty of the monster bastards constraining my limbs as they pierced my skull with a titanium nail.  

Did I not tell you about the titanium nail embedded in my brain? Ah, well, let me start back on Earth.

There I was, 1980, fresh out of college, with a BFA and no job prospects. Not that there weren’t jobs aplenty to be had. Humanity was in the midst of the great migrations to the far-flung stars. Detroit - nuclear rocket city - was booming. They couldn't build housing fast enough. The wormhole transport centers: Houston, San Diego, Las Vegas, Newark, Knoxville, were begging for workers - skilled and unskilled. Plenty of jobs for all, unless you were a painter that favored a garish fantasy genre, or a poet, or a musician. I was the slacker prototype, or stereotype, literally living in my parent’s basement, smoking a lot of pot and dabbling with alcoholism.

At the insistent urging of my father, who wanted his basement back, I took the emigrant aptitude tests for a colony berth, and an evaluation for NATO’s peranoscopy program as well. Rejected on the former, accepted for the latter, to everyone’s respective expectation and surprise. The emigrant tests were based upon NATO selection criteria, where you basically had to be able to rebuild Western civilization with your bare hands. It was assumed that the peranoscopy tests were for those that made the emigrant cut, the best of the best, but were actually Kraken-developed tests, measuring... what? No one knew. 

So, shipped off to Lemont, IL to live for six months in a shit-box apartment with a truly awful roommate. Some called the training "hippie boot-camp", if sitting in cubicles in a strip mall office, practicing lucid dreaming and meditation skills, writing out counterfactual stories, reading texts on everything, doing crosswords, word problems, Scrabble on hallucinogens, having your brain remotely manipulated via transcranial magnetic stimulation, being harassed by lab-coated pricks for reasons not entirely clear, is your idea of hippie boot camp.

I came out the other end a trainee peranoscopist. Which is basically someone who can pierce the veils of space and time to scry the reality on the other side. Want another term? How about oracle, or seer, auger, sage? Or soothsayer, provided, the soothsayer wears an electromagnetic cap seated over their visual cortex, being fed data from the averaged-out Planck areas from the Gödel boundary of an Everett wormhole aperture.

Then I was stationed at Nellis, outside of Vegas, a civilian in name and title and in nothing else. I spent  twelve hour shifts in an air-conditioned trailer, ‘scoping the heavens for candidate worlds and smelling other people's farts. 

The depressing majority of earthlike worlds (or superearths, as they are known) are too massive to be habitable. Of the less massive worlds, most are venus worlds, hellish and waterless. The remainder are waterworlds, with hundred kilometer-deep oceans covering them. It seems that, despite the common abundance of superearths, very few have just the right amount of water, mass, and distance from their star. Of those, only a tiny percentage have evolved life, and a tiny percentage of those have evolved life compatible with ours - life that won’t eat your skin off after a few minutes of exposure, or cause a hyper-allergic reaction, or induce permanent psychotic states, or any of a thousand other grisly ways to die. 

It turns out, within the particle horizon of the local universe, some 96 billion light years in diameter, or some 13.7 billion years back into the past, there are only nineteen worlds suitable for human colonization.

Only nineteen.

We did not know that. The Kraken eventually informed us of this. I do not know why they waited until some twenty million of us were forever lost to the universe to tell us, but... before the Kraken revealed this fact, I found one of those nineteen worlds, which is why you are reading about me. When I did find that world, I was informed by my unpleasant Navy captain boss that I was invited to have an super-advanced alien device implanted in my brain. A super-advanced alien device that was, in every way, indistinguishable from a three-penny nail made of titanium.

Actually, the way unpleasant captain put it was: "Eight Ball, you got lucky. You get a chance not to be a fucking magic eight ball stuck on this base for another five years. You want to go to the stars, visit other worlds? Go get the nail in your brain".

I accepted. I was immediately whisked down to the Las Vegas transport dome in a helicopter no less, pretty cool. I was taken inside the dome through a warren of neutral-toned office corridors under fluorescent lights. The walls of the corridors were occasionally adorned with pictures and plaques. 

Many pictures were of the EGERbridge tower site at Argonne National Laboratory - the very first wormhole aperture, now a World Heritage site.  In one picture, Pat Nixon, a beaming Dick Nixon beside her, cuts the ribbon for the power-up ceremony.  In other pictures, astronauts, or the ships used in exploring the other side of a wormhole aperture. Many pictures were of The Five: (Lovell, Mitchell, Roosa, Mattingly, and Haise), standing in front of a scale model of their nuclear-powered ship Columbia. Ship and all hands lost now, disappeared down an Everett/Gödel wormhole throat, never to be seen again. Lost to the Cosmos But Not Forgotten. 

(It is a historical irony that two of the most miserable miscreants in American history, Richard Nixon and Hugh Everett III, gave humanity the stars. My own peranoscopery studies of the past tell me it was John Archibald Wheeler who was the linchpin. Had Wheeler not gotten Kurt Gödel to read Everett's many worlds paper, none of this would have happened. When the technology caught up to E/G theory in 1968, Nixon cancelled the Vietnam War and the Apollo Moon Program, and the rest is history).

I ended up in a fake wood-paneled waiting room with a metal green door. The green metal door opened, and a guy in a white boiler suit said "You're next". 

Beyond the green door was a prep room with a big airlock door opposite. Beyond the airlock, the wormhole dome itself. The airlock door was windowless, a disappointment. There’s not even a view of the wormhole aperture, which, I’m told, looks like a 100 foot round glowing molten metal droplet hovering in mid-air (except it’s vacuum) above and below two giant metal cylinder heads. 
  
In the middle of the prep room was a stainless steel box, lid open, looking like a coffin. 

"Get in", ordered white boiler suit. I din't really think about it, I just got in. But then I thought wait, airtight coffin for the vacuum, no air tank for me. 

"Hang on, no air supply?" I asked.

"You got thirty minutes of air in there, you big baby. If you're not out before then, you got bigger problems than suffocation!" sneered white boiler suit. 

"But I still suffocate!" The lid was closed and dogged secure on this protest.

And then I was on the planet Gnomon, somewhere in the Horologium supercluster. (get it? Horologium? Gnomon?)

The Kraken chose Gnomon as an enclave for human contact, surrounded by countless trillions upon trillions of Kraken-inhabited worlds within the Horologium supercluster. We humans, in our arrogance, assumed this world to be the homeworld of the Kraken, only to find out that their planet of origin was swallowed by its sun some half a billion years ago, and some 300 vigintillion light years away from Earth. 

Gnomon is where you go to get a super-advanced alien artifact that looks like a titanium nail driven into your skull. 

It was local dawn when I am decanted and let out of the admin building, the sky turned from black tar to a sullen cherry, the color of a cooling branding iron.  Above, at the zenith, was a gigantic Halloween moon - the gas giant Gnomon orbits, a hot jupiter circling a red dwarf star. 

(The palette of the planet Gnomon is limited. Red light kills color. It turns yellows and oranges into a uniform red hue, and makes green and blue look black. Even red is not immune. Yellow-reds turn into blue-reds; dark reds turn into brown). 

The admin building was a pre-fab pole-barn structure that houses the wormhole aperture, and looked slightly more permanent than the other buildings in the human town. Hardly a town, and more of a joke, a trailer park really. The majority of the structures were trailers and intermodal containers, limited by the size of the wormhole aperture. Here and there streetlights provided a half-hearted attempt to produce yellow sunlight, but did little to relieve the gloom. Beyond these lonely, humble structures were low black hummocks and hills that clumped to the horizon. I had not much time to "admire" the view before an army sergeant in a jeep pulled up to meet me.

"Get in" he said, which I assumed I would hear until after the insertion procedure, after which it would be "Get out".

"What, no ID check? No paperwork to fill out? I just get in the jeep and we go?"

"Are you Kurman?" I nodded. "Get in! And this is not a jeep. This is a MUTT, an M151 Military Utility Tactical Truck. Got it? Not a jeep".

"And you are?" I asked as I climbed in.

"Camarena. Sgt. Camarena. We don't have far to go". 

We took off with a lurch towards the low hills. After about a half hour on a gravel road, we passed over a gloomy ridge, I thought I spotted a brightly lit area, and it was green. Vivid green.

"Is that where we are going?" I asked, but just then, over the next rise, appeared a huge square of vivid green, a bright day-lit field as if we were back on Earth. I looked up in the charcoal sky, and there were no lights to account for it. Taken against the color of Gnomon, or rather the lack of it, the field was a riot of florescent green, impossibly green, all verdant green grass and scattered bush. Animals grazed within this hallucinatory field of green. Some animals I did not recognize or know. Giant lumbering shaggy things, droves of deer-and-elk-sized things, shoals of small quick things that browsed upon the grassy fields. Other animals I did know - cows, sheep, goats, possibly a giraffe in the distance. 

Interspersed among the animals, shaggy octopus forms wheeled about lazily. These were the callows, the Kraken young. Around this magical plot of land was a barb-wired fence, homely and worn wooden posts spaced out to suspend the rusting wire.

“You’d think, a billion years ahead of us, they’d have something more than a barb wire fence? I guess you go with what works." observed Camarena, and nodded. "There’s your reception committee.”

Behind a section of fence were three adult kraken. One motioned me forward with a disturbingly human finger crook with the end of its tentacle. The barbed-wire drooped down to let me pass, then snapped back into position behind me.

"Greetings! Welcome!" exclaimed the middle kraken in a shower of spit. It's English pronunciation, naturally, was flawless. "We will begin in a moment, but first, observe!"

With this cue, a kraken callow climbed upon the back of a nearby cow. It quickly wrapped a tentacle about the cow’s neck, and then, as if pull starting the cow like a lawnmower engine, whipped the tentacle hard and backwards. The cow’s severed head dropped to the ground. An impressive gush of blood issued from the neck. Within seconds, dozens of callows swarmed over the headless standing cow, and it disappeared beneath a mass of squirming fur and writhing tentacles. Soon, only a spot of crimson remained. The callows stood about at attention.

“And now your turn!"

“Jesus! Wait!” but the callows were upon me. I struggled and thrashed, kicked and punched, but the horrid little fuckers pinioned my arms, immobilized my legs, wrapped their tentacles around my limbs and torso, and then I felt sharp little talon stings when a tentacle slithered around my neck.

"Don't struggle", I heard one of the adult kraken say. "You'll just get cut to pieces if you do".

I froze then, surrendered. All I saw were sharp black talons and fur, and an eye that peered at me. A beautiful eye.  All I heard was the chatter of the kraken in, I supposed, their natural tongue: bronx cheers, shrieks, hisses, screaming gargles. All I smelled was a horrible marine stench, the kind of stink you smell when you dig into the anoxic ooze layer of a tidal flat.

I heard a cheerful "Here we go!". A seering pain in the top of my head cancelled out the thousand or so pinpricks and razor cuts I felt over the rest of my body, and then...  

and then.. 
and then,
and then... I felt vertigo, then nausea. I heard air raid sirens, saw black and white static. The sirens were replaced by a whistling tea kettle on a stove that circled around me. I saw pieces of color in the static, sometimes resolved into little fractal dragonettes or spinning mandelbulbs, and then dissolved, replaced by geometric shapes, lines and lace, mandalas, cartoons, mechanical elves, each image fleet and meshed into the next. 

My eyes felt as if they had swiveled backwards in their sockets. The nausea returned. Space inverted itself, the nausea and vertigo passed. Cold purple spaces and stars appeared. Jittery little borders surrounded the stars, pieces jinked and flitted around in orbits. The stars swam away in a whirlpool, an armageddon, an apocalypse of fireworks, a receding pyrotechnic snowstorm. I beheld the entire universe, each and every star expanded into a sun, tiny detailed worlds about them. 

The tea kettle sound became louder, almost unbearable. I'd have stopped up my ears with my fingers had I had hands, but I don't think I did.  Overwhelmed, I managed to shout for it to all stop, but all that came out of my mouth was hissing, spitting, screaming gargle.

And then I was laid out upon the grass. Kraken and callows stood and stared at me as if I were making an embarrassing scene, or had had a seizure, which I had been. And ah, of course, I realized, the titanium nail was in my brain.

"We never tire of watching that", said one of the kraken, ejecting oozing snot from spiricules in appreciation.

"You made it," noted Sgt. Camarena, as he held out a hand to help me up. "Congratulations".

I swayed on my feet a little and then said "Thank you, Sergeant".

"Call me Ernie. You ready to go?"

I looked down at myself and saw I my clothes torn and covered in blood. "Jesus, I'm a mess", I observed.

"Superficial cuts. We'll clean you up back in town".  

The kraken and callows let out kind of a soft-palate squawk or screech, which I recognized as "See you later!",  and I got back into the jeep with Ernie.

"What was that crack about I made it?" I asked him, as we turned around on the gravel road and back over the rise.

"Oh come on, Eight Ball. You would have chickened out had we told you there was 20% survival rate", Ernie pulled a clipboard from under his seat. "Now's the time for paperwork. Uh, and, just so you know, once we are all done here? You can't go back to Earth."

"What? Why not?"

"Look you got a alien device in your head now. We can't be sure of your loyalty to the species. You may now be naturally beholden to the Kraken, and so can never be fully trusted ever again". He held up his hand in anticipation of my protests, and continued "yeah, the Kraken have acted all benign and beneficent and given us some kickass technologies and advice, but, for all we know, they may be grooming us for cannon fodder".

"... or smallpox blankets" I returned. 

Sergeant Earnest Camarena turned and stared very hard at me. "Would you have thought of that before you had a nail in your head?" he asked.

"...probably not" I admitted.

"and that's why you can't come back to Earth. But we got a nice place set up for you on Alterra. It's in galaxy NGC6264 out Hercules way, some 450 million light years from Earth".

"I know where it is" I said.

"I know you do" he said, pointed at his head, and nodded slowly.