“So, they’re what?” I asked. “Very angry plants? Vengeful fungi?”
“None of those things,” Tom said. “Their biology is different from anything we have back home. Very different. Don’t think of them in terms of kingdoms of life. Think of them as biological systems. Kind of ecosystems in themselves.” He turned to Aparna. “I can’t tell you more than that, I’m sad to say. It’s not what I do here.” Aparna looked very dissatisfied with this answer.
“What do you do here?” Kahurangi asked.
“My official title is base operations executive,” Tom said. “My unofficial title is ‘that guy who keeps schedules and has to fix shit when it goes wrong.’” He pointed to me. “Jamie here is going to be doing all my grunt work.”
“I lift things,” I confirmed.
“How long as this been going on?” Niamh asked.
“I started with KPS three years ago.”
“No, not you,” Niamh said, and gestured. “This.”
“Right, sorry. Well, if you want to go all the way back, it started when Godzilla showed up on our Earth.”
“What?” Aparna got to the “what” first, but we were all getting there.
“So, again, no scientist,” Tom warned.
“We’ve established that,” I said, impatiently.
“Nuclear fission and fusion do more than make energy. They also thin the barrier between universes.” All the scientists immediately drew up at this to raise objections. Tom raised his hand. “I know. Feels like bullshit, even to me. There is science behind it, I just don’t carry it around in my head. Point is, we started setting off nuclear bombs on our planet, and the kaiju on this planet sensed the detonations from here and started homing in on them.”
“Why would they do that?” asked Aparna.
“It looks like food to them.”
“What—” Aparna caught herself, when she remembered Tom wasn’t a scientist. “Go on,” she said, grimly.
Tom nodded. “In May 1951, the U.S. set off a prototype of a hydrogen bomb at a place called Enewetak Atoll. It’s in the Marshall Islands. Two days later, one of the kaiju crossed over at the detonation site.”
“The actual fucking Godzilla,” Kahurangi said.
“Which to be clear looked and acted nothing like the Godzilla of the movies,” Tom said. “It was just huge and hungry and stomped around for a bit looking for something to eat before the U.S. Navy spooked it and it took off into the ocean.”
“Then what happened?”
“It swam away from the navy for three days and then died and sank in the Japanese shipping lanes. That’s why we have Godzilla. Japanese sailors saw the U.S. Navy chasing something big, talked about it when they got back to Japan, and the story found its way to the filmmakers.”
“I’m officially skeptical about this Godzilla origin story,” I said.
“That’s fine,” Tom said. “The thing was, it kept happening. The U.S. had it happen four more times, once in the Nevada desert. The Soviets had it happen at least three times. The French and the United Kingdom at least once each. It was enough of a problem that in 1955 there was a secret meeting of the nuclear powers to try to figure out how to keep it from happening. Their solution was to fund a project that crossed over to here to keep the creatures from trying to come over to our world.”
“The Kaiju Preservation Society,” I said.
“Our predecessor organization, yes. Less concerned about preserving the kaiju than just keeping them on this side of the universal fence until the holes we tore through it with our bombs closed up again.”
“And how would they do that?” Kahurangi asked.
“Lots and lots of daisy cutters, is my understanding,” Tom said.
“We don’t do nuclear testing anymore, though,” I pointed out.
“No, we don’t,” Tom agreed. “And one reason—obviously not in any treaty—is that keeping the kaiju out was more of a hassle than the nuclear powers wanted to deal with. There was also the consid eration that the aftermath of a nuclear exchange would include fifty-story monsters coming through a multidimensional tear to wreak havoc on any survivors of the ICBMs.”
“That’s nice,” Niamh said. “It’s okay if we turned entire cities full of people into nuclear ash, but the idea of monsters having a nibble afterward was just too much.”
“My point is, there’s no threat of the kaiju crossing over today,” I said, and then motioned around. “So why this?”