Symphony of the Iron Underbelly, Movement No. I– A Tale of Strange Beasts
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[The Now]
I trace the glowing web for just a solitary moment; marvelling at a snapshot of superheated mortar my autonomic nervous system has managed to capture. The gap widens fractionally, brickwork beginning to bulge outwards under incredible positive pressure. The orange deepens, blooming in petals that lick around the crumbling edifice, swirling and twisting and where it sweeps it leaves radial soot shapes like clusters of stars. The web expands, shining strands reaching for each other on driving jets of superheated gas. Flecks of dust transit across the face of the bloating brightness, making a million, infinitesimal sunspots.
I cannot really watch this – it all happens too quickly for any living thing to witness in such intricate detail. Perhaps I see whatever the panicking meat behind my widening eyes produces in those milliseconds of conscious reactivity. Maybe the devastating power being unleashed takes control of these primordial moments and stretches them out to savour. I do not know. I am just a witness, about to become a victim.
With nothing else left to throw blindly into my waking consciousness as primitive, animalistic reflexes reach the hard stop of their instinctual trigger – or satisfied with some independent intent of its own making – the wall explodes out. Time resumes control of the situation. She does not like to be interfered with or made to play spectator.
The blast takes me off my feet. Acrid sulphur dioxides swirl past in racing clouds shaped like spears and take my ability to breathe, reinflating collapsing lungs with poison. Blinding light takes my sight, and I lose the beautiful pseudo-sunrise. It all happens in absolute silence, thanks to a supersonic pressure wave which has already blown out my eardrums before the sound carrying its power can boil the fluid inside them.
Brick broken up into razor-sharp flechettes streak past, tearing through clothes and tracing their chaotic spin through toxic air, using a map made with red trails sliced deep into my flesh.
Finally, blessedly, the pressure differential snaps my head backwards and the recoil crushes grey matter against hard. For just another beautiful, treasured quarter-second, I balance perfectly between consciousness and oblivion, arms out to either side of a tripwire that dissolves in from each imaginary end. This dreamscape collapses in on itself, like the physical world all around me.
I do not remember anything after I lost this balance, but I woke up screaming. Begging for help.
I think I cried for my Mother.
Enough.
The mask digs back into the angry red contour it left, and I am sure if the straps stayed loose it would cling on with composite spite alone. Tapered edges bite into a fleshy furrow running the perimeter of my face. The ratchet clasp behind my head tightens, each click-click-click forcing the plastic and porcelain in against my skin. Constraining and calming. Memories of screaming, weeping, recede and when I breathe in the stink of high explosives, phosphor and atomised mortar is gone. Control reasserts and the past slinks away for a spell. Banished.
In that singular moment I reach for the folded gloves on the desktop nearby, attention elsewhere, still lingering in the eddies of a waking dream. Contentment catches me out. You have forgotten. The bulbous stump of what used to be my right hand hovers in midair, phantom fingers clutching reflexively, impossibly, for something real. Not until the bulb of scar tissue dumbly raps against the dark oak in a blind grope do I look up. Remember. Pain explodes for just a second, as my mind tries to reconcile feeling those questing fingertips with seeing a twisted, truncated forearm. Neurons enter discussion, firing violently against each other, disagreeing. Angry. It settles, as always, and with the other hand I reach for my prosthetic. The weight of it is comforting.
I work the plastic fingers gently with my own, listening to the soft whine of integrated actuators as they almost imperceptibly resist the movements, without power to support them. Lifting the prosthetic up, I let the extended forefinger trail down the nape of my neck. For a moment, I feel it – in my wrist, the one that ends in an ugly soft-silver post clustered by thick ropes of scar tissue. The feeling passes, because it is not really there. A psychosomatic response; my body’s map desperately trying to brute-force back the missing connection.
Someone taps softly at the door, and I take the plastic away. “Come in, Cassiopeia."
A setting sun picks out parts of the wider room. It paints twisting shafts made broken by the prism of the misshapen glass it lenses through, and dirty with the century-old effluence of a city. Smeared and filthy, making it hard to see the jagged cityscape pulsing with anti-collision lights and thankless late-night office workers beyond. Hubris and ruin. Even with her head bowed, her beautiful bruises shine brightly, and the cut above her downcast eyes glints in the last effort of the day. Perfection in suffering. There is a lurch in her step, probably a moderate hip flexor strain, perhaps a sub-dermal haematoma with significant fluid buildup …
Stop. The training preempts my conscious control and I continue to diagnose. Analyse. Evaluate a treatment option or two. Almost two decades of study and practice try to pick off where circumstances and choices last made that impossible. How long has it been?
The memories feel like external recordings, provided by some third-party. They are mine, it is me, but somehow everything is saturated like a bad copy. A facsimile. My eyes dart down at my prosthetic. Is this psychosomatic too?
She does not interrupt my musing. No cough of distraction, or gentle inquisition. A meek statue in a scarlet-red business suit, clutching a clipboard so tightly it turns her knuckles emaciated white. A Possible sign of anemia? Enough.
Control reasserts. To the topic at hand, singularly. “How are you feeling?” I ask, forced back to the matter. Broken, evidently.
Something writhes across her face. It is quick, but powerful. Not serpentine, that suggests subterfuge; this is too aggressive. It is actively restrained, held back and pulled down into the pit of the gut where it languishes with all the braver things she should have said and shown. I did not think she had the capacity. Fight? Good. She will need it.
“I’m well,” She replies, still not looking up.
“When is your next appointment?”
For just a moment her chin tilts and, for an all-too-brief further second, that reflex to make eye contact with someone whose question you do not quite understand seems about to break through. So close. Instead, the clipboard becomes a new raft to cling to.
This is proving to be a difficult lesson. She is a difficult pupil. Under the ceramic composite, my lips curl upwards slightly. The best lessons are always the hardest. They nick and then deform the recipient, leaving a permanent impression at best or a plunging wound at worst. The injuries on display have already made this the latter. A painful but necessary reminder. She will listen or she will feel.
“I’m due back at SCW in an hour,” Cassieopia read with all the variation of a text-to-speech device. “Talent relations meeting.”
“Then you have up to an hour to find it in yourself to look at my porcelain-painted face, before you are late.”
She does not move, except to burn a hole in the clipboard looking for some instruction or inspiration that never comes. Salvation in that particular raft will come from the sky above, not the sea below. She is looking in the wrong place.
This is tedious. “Why are you frightened of me?”
Cassieopia flinches, I continue. “Did I put those bruises on your face?”
“No, Ma’am.”
I stand, prosthetic held in its biological other, she flinches again. “Did I fracture your skull?”
“No, Ma’am.”
I fractured their skulls. Memories swirl, of the dockyards and my intervention a few weeks previously. Unlike before, these feel real. Authentic. This is me. I remember their lumbering swings, choreographed so clearly and plainly, overextending to offer me an opening and then taking everything from them. Their livelihoods, their health – everything except their lives. You cannot learn a lesson if you are dead, after all. And there are so many more things worse than death. The suffering they will see.
Circling the desk, she watches me come closer with the benefit of peripheral vision. She does not step back – good, progress. She is still virtuous. Precious. She shrinks down a little, shoulders hunching. Submissive and cowed. Unnecessary. She is not a prisoner, and her role in the wonderful things we will do is of the utmost importance.
Gently, the upturned fingers of the prosthetic in my hand guide her chin higher and her eyes dart hurriedly to either side seeking something, anything …
… But she cannot look anywhere else, and so she finally looks at me. Transfixed. Held. Close now, only a few inches separate us and the gentle tingle of flowers wafts effortlessly across the short distance to fill my single lung. It tickles my nose. Her breathing quickens, nostrils flare. Swallowing. The flesh around her bruised mouth flushes to match her suit. The star burns a little hotter.
My voice is gentle, soft. There is no-one else here meant for it. “Do you want to go? I will not stop you.”
Almost immediately, she shakes her head but her eyes never leave mine. “No … I … It’s just …”
So close. Her lips flex looking for words and Cassieopia grimaces in discomfort, as the wire locking clamping her jaws together cuts into the soft palate. Such pain brings clarity, as miseries often do and the truth struggling to be free of the weight of expectation finally, blessedly, tears free and clear. Suffering is so very good for the soul. “I’m scared …”
At last. We are here. “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear …” I begin, and something behind her shimmering eyes grows bright. Walk into the light with me. “For fear has to do with punishment–”
“ … And whoever fears has not been perfected in love,” She interrupts. She is mine. “Gospel of John, Book One, Chapter Four, Verse Eighteen.”
Her hand reaches upwards and curls around the upturned, ceramic-white fingers of my prosthetic. Bolder now. I can feel her squeeze the pliant, flexing plastic through its flesh-and-blood facsimile. You shall be perfected in love. “All you need, Cassieopia, is faith. And you have so very much. It is your virtue and strength. I would not have rescued you that night, near the dockyards, if I thought you were weak.” A virtuousness to feed a living weapon. “I need your strength. She needs your strength. You cannot leave us alone …”
With a gesture towards the window behind, I continue. “This city, and all the awful things perpetrated inside it …”
For a second, Cassieopia’s eyes lose focus and I can tell she is recalling the particularly intense feeling of having her jaw broken in multiple places. The best lessons are the hardest. Or perhaps the fracture in her head. Or the creeping fear that makes her whole body shake whenever someone rushing to catch a taxi brushes too closely past in their hurry.
She nods, blinking through hot tears that track pink, meandering curls across her bruises and make the skin sting. She looks down at the prosthetic in her fingers and tugs on it, the slightest pressure. I let go, and she brings it close in against her chest, cradling it protectively inside cupped palms. For a while Cassieopia traces the inset black ribbons running around each digit in swirling, twisting bands.
Eventually, she holds my prosthetic up and out into the short distance between us. An offering. “Can I?”
Nodding, I present her with the stump of my wrist and she carefully tugs a harness loosely tied around the remaining forearm into position. Do you smell the flowers? “Your paperwork’s completed,” She says. “Filed it myself before I left. You’ve been given your first slot at Inception. Another new competitor … Hold on …”
She holds my wrist up in the air over her head, awkwardly squatting as far as her tender hip will allow until she can read the clipboard thrown onto the carpet below. “ … Kaiju Rainbow.”
A beautiful and mighty name. With all the care she can manage, a flower girl named after the stars pushes my prosthetic onto its titanium post, cemented deep into the remains of my ulna. Despite her gentleness, the bone flexes under the load. It was never meant to float, swaying inside the soft meat of my forearm, tethered by tendons splayed out like guidewires. She rotates the hand locked and the added weight makes something animalistic, autonomic click live in the deepest recesses of my head. Some constant, low-voltage warning signal cuts off, and my body’s image of itself feels a little closer to the divine plan. Focus now.
“You will help save her,” I say, as she traces a path back to the signal input port puncturing my skin a few inches back from the stump. “She cannot be reborn from the dark without a light to guide the way a while. She will need your virtue.” To draw out morality and hold in her corruption.
You are my canary. Cassieopia nodded and pushed the jack into place. A Lamb of God in the truest sense. “She saved me – I have to repay it.”
You will, and it will cost everything you cherish. My plastic fingers spasm, and it hurts. Transient imperfection. For a few moments my mind makes no sense of the artificial impulses pretending to be something they are not – pretending to be part of me. Imposters. It passes, eventually, and they splay out to lie flat in line with the texture-imprinted palm. She takes my facsimile in her god-given hand.
She squeezes it. Behind us the sun sinks, trading burnt orange for washed-out red; made all the more bleary by dirty glass. “I’m ready.”
“We will do such wonderful things,” I tell her. Welcome to the Rapture.
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[The Rapture]
There is such a lot to a name. Everything. A designation by default, a more attractive label for meatbags that think clever thoughts instead of chewing cud. A useful mechanism for anthropomorphising things that should be used like the mere tools they are. A name, but usually also a story. Sometimes an epic, if the owner goes to their long rest a good while after. That story is sometimes heartening, always tragic. Nobody spends significant time down here in the mud, head craned up at the black and twinkling, without the wounds of just existing. It is so hard. Suffering, after all, is so very good for the soul. Nothing worth having ever came for free and even where so, it is a mathematical certainty, as replicable and reliable as fractals, that someone suffered to make or break it before ever coming into your possession. Someone hurt for it, somewhere.
Kaiju, I know so little about you, and nothing beyond the page or so the company hosts online for those curious enough to look at you and wonder. Who are you? Even this biography, scant and sparse in detail, is data entry by someone else. A stranger’s interpretation. I am far more interested in learning about you from you.
Still, we have never met and so I cannot. Soon, but not yet. So I must approximate; work within the bounds of the known … And all I know is your name. What does it say? I think it has a story. Would you like me to tell it?
The power and the threat and the glory are all bound in your first name; a sweeping creature of unknowable power, smashing asunder with impunity. Oh, how it excites me to think about. Cries that rattle cities. Made in tall tales and on silver screens, given life through Human grit and perseverance. A vehicle, maybe, for revisiting on the world all the tragedies and hardships and miseries piled on you? A Kaiju – a strange beast in the English translation from the original Japanese – a walking metaphor, iron-hard scales and sweeping, raking claws. Titanic and colossal. It stirs my soul to think of you. Crashing through downtown metropolises, oblivious to the steel rain from screaming gunships. A mighty creature accompanied by an urban symphony, made from the bassy booming of main battle tanks, and the ear-splitting shriek of afternburning jets.
These vast, ordered ranks of violence delivered by land and sea and air to stop you delivering a reckoning for their wickedness, their indifference. Now, you can see them feel. Express something beyond glassy apathy. They cry with dry faces. Screaming in the streets below, panicked. Directionless. Hurt. They will come harder for you yet. It will not make a difference.
Twisting, cavorting missiles burning hard and burying thousands of pounds of concentrated explosive into the freeways and expressways; hurling fractured concrete and blackened, twisted trussing high into the smoke-choked skies. They try to stop you with the sum arsenal of all the terrible things we do to each other, but you are untouched. Untouchable. They destroy everything surrounding you but you.
Names are rarely metaphors – we do not get to choose them for ourselves, usually. But yours is, and I wonder … Did you? If so, we have something in common, and a link I treasure very much. A chain. Kaiju were faceless, incredible metaphors for the terrible things we do to each other given a magnificent, monstrous form drawn from imagination and flavoured with malice. Living embodiments of topics too complex for the common man to articulate made relatable, so long as the vehicle of interaction and required conclusion was fear. It is easy to be scared.
An atomic age, where cutting-edge science broke apart the stuff of matter and our perceived reality, rending apart with the power of laboratory-orchestrated suns to vapourise entire cities. Legitimate war-making targets and families. From weapons potent enough to poison an entire planet, to powering your car and your home girt by white-picket fences. Such cognitive dissonance, to trust the same principles that burnt the silhouettes of the dead into walls but might give you electricity too cheap to meter! A new American Age. Difficult to truly fear something which concurrently protects children and threatens to turn them to ash in a nuclear hellfire. Ring-a-ring-a-rosies …
The most famous Kaiju of them all gave an outlet to that dissonance. A nuclear test, an irradiated island, and a mighty lizard to terrorise and destroy. A powerful warning for the all-too-familiar consequences of science run amok, where the head leads the heart until the latter is broken in the burning streets of downtown Tokyo, crushed by the might and fury of Godzilla.
You are not nine hundred and eighty four feet of fury. Your skin cannot repel high-calibre, armour-piercing rounds. You cannot cleave skyscrapers in half with a wicked whip of your spined tail … And yet, I do not expect any less a challenge when Inception provides a suitable venue for us to get to know each other more intimately. More hurtfully.
What role then, should I play? All of them. Am I to just survive Kaiju Rainbow, in the hopes that when the sun rolls around the world and climbs up to look at the destruction from a late evening’s work in Reno, Nevada, you will be screaming at the scrambling helicopters in the sky somewhere else, and I will still be alive? Perched on the roadside rubble, wrapped in a shining foil thermal blanket while Tokyo burns all around me?
Maybe, I can play a hunter. Slay the beast, save the girl and the world. Damn her. I would make such a very dashing heroine …
Or, perhaps, I could be your keeper. Master. After all, strange beasts exist as teaching instruments – warnings to heed, made for murder, and lessons to learn regarding who is in charge, wielding these powerful creatures, and who is not. Between the bouts of violence, who will keep you fed and watered? Protected from the elements? Nothing exists in isolation, not even monsters. Loneliness breeds them.
Something has brought you to SCW. Leave now. I wonder what that is? Primal instinct, the pure potential to hurt and slay? Something more cerebral, deliberate. Planned. Are you on a directionless, eternal hunt or is this a flight from someplace … Or some prison?
Less concrete-poured toilets and an hour in an empty swimming pool masquerading as exercise, more a gilded cage. Civilised captivity. Bread and Water and a Faberge Egg? Maybe even something more metaphorical? Fear is a powerful restraint, but there are other feelings which can be just as potent a weapon in the right applications. Fear is so blunt and brutish … I prefer something with more finesse. Too much love kills every time. Used carefully, gently like a delicate blade, love can be the most inescapable prison of them all.
It is remarkable how much more it hurts when the pain is inflicted by the act of leaving, and not in being forced to stay. Leaving is by choice. You could always stay and die. Such deep cuts. Your past accomplishments make me wonder if you have scars to match. Tell me … Why did you leave AFCW?
For so much still to do there, you seemed to leave so quickly.
Whatever role I play – prey, gamekeeper or warden – I will move softly and carry a powerful anti-tank weapon. Finesse has its place, but a scalpel versus a Strange Beast is a zero-sum game I do not want to play.
After all, you are still Kaiju and you are mighty and I will not die weeping on the broken streets of an urban wasteland. Not easily. Not at a price you are willing to pay.
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[The Past]
Atlantic City watched Cassieopia lie on the rain-slicked concrete with her back to the business district, and waited for her to die. With a pained gasp, cut short by the irresistible hyperventilating urge to draw in more air before her lungs had even filled all the way, she rolled onto her side and retched. A greasy mix of bile, blood and saliva congealed as it thickened and hung halfway clear of her chin, swinging in a gentle breeze blowing in from the sea and the nearby dockyards.
Her fingers prodded uselessly at the mobile phone resting in the palm of her slack hand. The screen flickered, disturbed from idle with every uncoordinated mash.
“Hu …. Hu …” She rasped, trying for words her broken jaw hung too loose to help shape. Something hot and slick rolled down the back of her skull and autonomously, groggily, she roughly pressed a free hand against the matted hair. It came back red and strange. She forgot the phone for a second, glassy eyes focusing on the clear fluid sitting on top of that all-too-familiar blood …
A vibration in her other palm stole her attention away and Cassie dragged the phone into her body as it shook and flashed. The bright pixel screen was too brilliant to look at, and more pain lanced through her head as she forced herself to focus.
MAC CALLING
With the sum will left after refusing to give Atlantic City its show, Cassie stabbed a thumb on the green indent and connected.
An urgent voice struggled through a tinny speaker, too far away without hands’ free. “Mah …” She tried and the agony made itself an order of magnitude worse; threatening to dissolve everything in front of her into nothingness. “Am … Amber …”
Cassie retched again, with nothing left in her gut but blood to splash in the rain. She pressed her clammy forehead into the concrete. “Huh … Help … Her …”
Eyes flickered closed, and the phone slipped out from numb fingers. As her conscious mind stalled, jerking and screeching as the neural processes which gave it the gift of sentience and self-awareness came to a halt, she prayed. Split lips worked silently as far as her shattered mandible would permit, and she begged something altogether greater than her for an intervention. A miracle. Anything.
Cassie’s urgent pleading was interrupted, long before it could reach its intended recipient. In fact, it never even got out of Atlantic City.
She was dimly aware that the falling rain had stopped falling on her. Then, that embryonic awareness took a gamble and expanded enough to realise someone was standing in its way. They came closer, stooping, and she felt soft fingers brush tangled hair out from her red-rimmed eyes. Cassie watched them reach for the phone nearby, end the call and take it out of her blurry sight.
“Do not be afraid,” A voice whispered in her ear, making the skin prickle and her body shiver. “I will save her, and you.”
She tried to raise her head up, to see the face of her saviour, but there was no spare capacity in such a fevered mind to issue orders to aching, spent muscles. The stranger dropped to their knees, and before the last of her useful consciousness was taken from her, Cassie watched ceramic-white fingers interlock with hers. They felt hard, but warm. She squeezed them, coughed, and fell into nothingness.
The Stranger traced the blotchy line of swollen bruises joining the edge of Cassie’s mouth and ear with a black-gloved hand. “Welcome to the Rapture,” She said, turning the painted mask over her face up towards the rainstorm. “We will do such wonderful things.”
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[The Rapture]
Close the Compendium Of Strange Beasts and How To Slay Them. It cannot help us any more. We must go deeper beyond the book and towards its author. Take their name, and think … What might be behind it? Who are you? Deeper. Allegories tell stories, teach lessons and act as buoys warning against moral hazards in the deep waters and while those stories make people mighty, they are white soaring turrets picked out in smooth stonework. Sweeping buttresses carved in angels, with marble palms turned up to support multi-storey corners on busy office blocks. Whatever gets you through the day.
These are just accoutrements and flourishes, woodwind trilling somewhere in the shining metal and polished wood of the symphony, resting on – relying on – strong foundations. An underpinning strength, on which the sum total of a life rises in pyramidal thrust. Chasing an apex that will never be completed, a personal Sagrada Família began under one vision and continued under another. For the love of the work.
How do we build something to meet our vision, when by virtue of still being alive we are not the same architect who laid the keystone so long ago? Changed by experiences, things we should have done; things we should never have done …
No. We were always meant to do them. They are still mistakes.
We build on these foundations with our experiences, fashioned into new towers and spires that make glories or memorials. Celebrate or mourn, remember and ruminate on what was and might be.
It is a curiosity. We are such wonderful things, to spend so much time building many of these memorials to things that could never have been. We mourn losses that were never ours to lose. Permutations, what-if, hypotheticals. Imaginings. I wonder why we spend all our life wishing it away? We were built to dream.
To understand you, Kaiju, I must look past this pseudo-cityscape and the skyline-of-the-soul, of sorts, made by all the terrible things you have seen and done and, perhaps, something of selflessness. We are all made in his image, after all. Even the most irredeemable have at some point done something laudable. Not every blade finds skin.
Past the fortress, past the projection of you, at where you are strongest. The very anchor of everything you are, on which it all rests – all the trials, tribulations, victories, failures. Within which, we will find the real Kaiju Rainbow. The heart of you. There, at the source of greatest strength must be the most tremendous load. We can deny ourselves, others, but not simple physics. Not force, pressure or area. It is so much to hold up.
What do your foundations look like? Thick slabs of pitted angled stone, made wet by rain and furred by moss? Twelve hundred years in the making? Scoured clear and shiny in brilliant, twenty-first century reflective alloy? Structural. Weighty. Physical. Impassable. Safe.
No. That feels too cold, too aloof. You are not a castle to repel a siege. You are not trying to keep the world out, with barriers, but maybe trying to keep something altogether harder and stronger in. Not the metal, but the fire that forges it. A swirling vortex of dazzling, lashing, violence kept trapped, contained by the weight of all your life built over the top. A soul. A reactor of feeling, powering the conscious and careful mind while ever-probing for weaknesses in that containment, ready to tear through and out. Stretch and see the sky.
There are many names for it, many stories, probably. But it is you. The core, the reactor. It is the heart of you.
I think I would like to meet the blazing sun you carry inside, Kaiju. Wander in the brightness for a while. I would stand in front of its radiance, your magnificence, and feel my skin blister. Die a little to know a little better how you live. Know you.
And then, I would take its light and make it mine. Give it purpose, pleasure. Change it to new forms that please me, serve me. Corrupt it. What use is such power, without careful application? Reach for the Compendium one final time and think: wanton destruction, like a monster lumbering from downtown Tokyo and into myth and legend, is worthless without finesse. Without control. Without reigns and a yoke.
Oh my Strange Beast, I will give you the lesson you are to teach unto others, that has until now been missing and which makes all of this that you have made before our meeting meaningless. Obsolete. Defunct and ready for change. Ready for destruction.
You are potential without application. Pure promise. A powerhouse used to keep the library lights on instead of feeding mighty engines of war. All of this – everything you have built in sweeping spires and soulscapes without a rhyme or reason – needs to be torn down and rebuilt. Made cohesive and fit, in accordance with a plan. A grand design.
I have a plan for you, Kaiju. Rebirth. Let me help you find yourself. Let me show you that suffering will be so very good for your soul, by making you suffer so very much to redeem it. Lose it. There is a grand design of such careful misery, one we will embark on together. It will be difficult, and those glories and monuments you built in your ignorance and accidental-life will fall hard and suddenly, but on the other side of the long night that awaits you in Reno, Nevada, a new woman will emerge. Reshaped. Renewed. Resplendent in the image I have made for you. A terrible and vengeful thing.
There will be nothing left except that swirling vortex, released for a while and wounded. Hurt. She will be such a sight unleashed. I will let you rail a while, hurt me, maybe; hurt others? Without hesitation. Make them feel. Then, you will be sealed away. Weaponised. Part of the arsenal I will come to rely on to deliver my grand design to all of this company and, eventually, beyond. I cannot do any of this without you. It is not a choice.
And when you are not called to war, but raging and crashing against this beautiful prison I have made for you to stay in, you will soothe and comfort me. Trapped and made a toy. Through a chink in smooth, polished, impenetrable armour I have chosen to cut, you will see a slither of the outside world from inside. A looking glass back the way you came.
From outside and with your tamed light, I will make you a rainbow, Kaiju. All the spectrum, all of you, made discrete and split into bands of thoughts and feelings through me. Cut into parts. I will be your prism, refracting everything you are into myriad colours that amuse and entertain me. A living kaleidoscope.
You must resist this with all your heart and the proxy, violent vortex it represents – you must be a difficult pupil, or the lesson will not take effect. It will be worse this way. Exert the greatest pressure, so that your foundations burst and everything leaves you. My Strange Beast, you must promise to do your utmost to stop me so that when you are welcomed into my grand design, it is to be rebuilt utterly and completely. Made almost brand new and terrible.
You will be my first miracle, here in SCW. You will be my reason to believe that there is a chance to remake and remould, instead of reducing everything to ruin. Destruction is so very time-consuming, and it is better to twist and warp and watch it grow into something new than uproot, salt, scour and start again.
I cannot wait to welcome you. I feel as if I have always known you, somehow before we ever trade such beautiful violence in Reno. Only the lights will refuse to look away. We shall do such wonderful things together. There is a path here that I have made for you; walk it with me and cut yourself on these ruby-red thorns and when the way has taken its toll, I will be there to save you. Scrape your palms on the fall to the ground. Remake you. Do not get up. Please.
That beautiful violence we visit on each other will be more than the product served for some seedy, bourgeois cause of filling corporate coffers or the supply against thirsty, baying, whooping, gibbering demand. The feckless and the ignorant will wear away more paint on the handrails, but that is the most they will achieve in advancing anything forward. What they think they have paid to see but are actually blessed to do so, is an offering, something sacred that we will make, together.
It will be a whirlwind and it will be terrible and it will be wounding. Only the lights will refuse to look away. We shall spin and we shall weave and our dance will be the start of a glorious procession, the path laid out for you to find your salvation.
I will save you with ruby-red thorns in Reno and when you lay still in the aftermath, I will bind the weeping cuts that mark your path through them. Each one will kiss you with a painful flourish, a chord of hurt which read across their totality makes your flesh a songbook. From such wonderful music we will sing together.
A crescendo, a rolling wave of all the rage and fury held under impossible pressure for too long, fashioned into song with the most wonderful of all instruments — the Human Body. I think you will sing so sweetly, when we finally meet.
Welcome to the Rapture, Kaiju Rainbow.
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[The Now]
Freeing the ratchet and letting its straps slip free to dangle loosely, I slip my fingers underneath the edges and lift the mask away from my face. Warm air rushes in and soothes the engorged line of angry flesh, where the composite plastic always bites so hard. Tonight, it will fade and be gone and tomorrow, it will be cut in new.
Cassieopia stands immediately behind me, holding my long hair bunched up in the air and out of the way. She does not make any effort to lean forward, to crane her neck. To see my face. Instead, she sets about untangling and brushing.
I can smell flowers, and the sweetness tickles my nose.
Through cracked lips, I manage a few shallow breaths but something tight presses down on me and when my head shifts a little to blindly follow the flowers, my cheek scratches deep against brickwork. Reflexively, a shoulder rises up and hits hard against something else. Squeezed tight, my heart wrestles and strains inside its pericardial blanket and crashes against the ribs pushed in so close. It twists and bucks and thumps, beating too quickly, making my whole body feel numb. Lips spread further, seeking more air, but it tastes of mortar and dust and my lungs will not take any more. Cannot.
Sweetness in my snatched breaths turns sour and becomes wet. Something hot and metallic makes a riverbed out of my face as it spills into my gasping mouth, thick and congealed with plaster collected from my grey skin. I splutter, but there is not enough air in my labouring, crumpled chest to power the cough. Blood flows now in rivulets, pouring in faster than my frantic gargling can clear it.
Deep inside my skull, buried in overlapping ribbons of panicked neurons, something primordial ignites and assumes immediate control, throwing aside rising panic. Adrenal glands fire, twisting themselves almost in half in spasm as they dump the biological equivalent of rocket fuel into my veins. Already frustrated, my heart works itself into a frenzy as if it could lift the heavy weight on my chest by palpitation and pulsing alone.
Scrambling in the dirt and broken brickwork, skin slicing on each sharp spur, fingers manage to work themselves free from a furrow ploughed in the mud until I can put my palm up against something and push. It creaks, I groan in agony, sending thick red ropes of bloody spit up into the air and onto my cheeks. My heart beats faster. I push, it shifts. I beg – try to reason with myself – for a second to rest. I cannot breathe. Please.
No. My heart beats faster. Again.
Panting, a sheen of sweat mixes with the plaster coating my face to make a paste that slides down and oozes into my eyes, blinding me until I blink it away. My voice, wordless, howling, rises as the weight teeters at the full reach of my left arm, on the edge of spinning away. With one last effort I push back up from the ground. Something in my shoulder snaps and everything from the bicep down loses strength, just as the mass tumbles away and into the gloom.
Now illuminated by a sickly yellow disc in the sky, made pale white by thick reams of billowing smoke, I kick at the remains of the overturned concrete pillar. Petulantly.
When I move to sit up, cradling an aching arm in my lap, something pulls me back hard. The recoil is agonising and the back of my skull cracks against debris and rubble. As the remaining adrenaline burns itself out, leaving my senses with nothing to fuel them, everything becomes dim, washed out. With all the effort left in my flagging spirit, I roll over right and come face to face with the remains of a large, perforated tank. A string of embossed serial numbers run across its burst front, splattered with pink spit and grit.
A fat trail of something thick like molasses spills from a fist-sized hole punched in its nearside, coloured bright orange by the corrosion it carries along the way. At the apex of a buckled plate it gathers together enough to drip down to the mud but instead, it spills onto and over my right forearm, buried under the base of the tank.
Panic grips me. I tug, and then I pull and then I thrash but it stays stuck. Trapped. I try to move my fingers but I cannot feel them. My exhausted heart finally slows and something heavier than the concrete crushing me a few moments earlier settles over. My cracked, slack lips quiver.
It is absolutely silent all around. Fluid from my ruptured eardrums dries in bloodied flecks sprayed across my neck and absurdly, I am glad. It is peaceful. Everything slows down. My fight is exhausted, my flight cut-off and that primordial something buried deep inside disengages, handing back non-existent control to my conscious, rapidly spiralling mind.
I think this is where …
Reaching up, I pull the small curves of warm metal out from behind each ear and set the hearing aids down on the tabletop, next to my mask. The sound of Cassieopia’s brushing, her breathing, my breathing – everything – is instantly cut off. Only the gentle tap of my ever-faithful heart, its resting effort transmitted through my bones, stays with me.
Letting my eyes roll closed, I float in a beautiful sensory limbo. All except one. Rolling my shoulders back, I fill the one, lonely lung in my chest. I can still smell flowers. Cassieopia continues her work. If she wanted to, she could reach over and bring any number of heavy objects down against my defenceless form, step over my bleeding body, and leave.
This is her twelfth such opportunity, but she has not, will not, because she is not my prisoner.
I press my prosthetic hand against my chest, and the plastic digs into fabric and the skin underneath. It comes to me in full recollection and vivid, swirling brightness. Instantaneously, I know the truth and the memory reasserts itself, almost casually, into the meat inside my skull. Yes, I did. I remember now.
I did cry for my Mother.
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