Work Text:
A. Cells
“And if you’d sign here, this is the disclosure form so we can use your image on our show.”
“Do you want me to say anything?” Idolia Vazquez printed her name on the form and scribbled in her signature with a pen that barely worked.
“No, we just need a single shot. Pictures of people on the factory floor. Just act natural, like you’re working.”
“Okay.” Idolia glanced at the camera nervously and stood before her station as the news crew got into position. The camera panned from her face to that of the woman next to her, and on down the assembly line stretching the massive length of the facility. The field reporter—perfect hair, perfect skin, perfectly coifed—stood in front of Idolia’s station and beamed at the camera. Behind her, with grease smudges on her face and her hair bound into a messy braid, Idolia was also smiling.
“We’re here in Seattle, at one of more than twenty factories devoted solely to building one of humanity’s newest weapons against the kaiju menace…”
Her children found it thrilling. Her friends and family saw her as representing the Jaeger Program as a whole, for some inane reason, and were compelled to give her their every thought on the pros and cons of it. As if she had some control over the matter. Idolia generally offered the line that it was ‘just a job’, that she had no emotional attachment to what she was doing…but that stopped being true after the first few months.
No matter how many tiny parts went through her hands she couldn’t begin to comprehend how they could form something the size of a kaiju. In her mind she broke Romeo Blue down into pieces—his arms the height of her apartment building, his feet as big as city buses. His pieces of circuitry tiny enough to fit into the palm of her hand as they passed by her station in the factory. It didn’t add up.
Her oldest son Rodolfo was a budding scientist that soaked up every bit of information you gave him and rattled it off in long lectures after school. Her husband Jorge read the paper and occasional agreeable noises without looking up but Idolia pretended to listen. Or actually did listen, when his eager voice reached a fever pitch.
“And everything living is made up of cells. The tiniest ones are just one cell but we’re made up of so many cells. 10 trillion cells!” Rodolfo threw his arms wide to demonstrate how big the number was, barely pausing to breath in the middle of his rant. She found it endearing. At that age education had been nothing but a bore for her. “So an elephant has even more cells, and a kaiju has even more cells. And they aren’t bigger just because a kaiju is bigger. Everything has the exact same size cells!”
“That’s really something, Rodolfo.”
The next day Idolia wondered how many cells were in something as big as a Jaeger. What made cells, anyway? Other cells? It had been so long since elementary school that she couldn’t even remember if she’d learned the answer. Rodolfo was happy to give her a long rambling response when she got home.
“Cells divide! So you have one cell—” He put two fists together, then pulled them apart. “And it becomes two cells. And then those cells divide, and those cells, until you have cells everywhere!” His hands waved in big circles to encompass the space of cells.
“Do the cells get smaller when they divide?”
“Uh-uh. They’re all the same size.”
“How do they make two things the same size as the first thing?”
Rodolfo shrugged. “I dunno. They just do.”
At work Idolia pictured each piece of circuit board budding off her body, pulling from her substance but never reducing her. It seemed an impossible miracle. Rodolfo’s schoolbook didn’t explain the matter either, being directed at a young and less educated audience. It was something he was expected to accept by rote until he was old enough to understand better.
One night after work she fell asleep with little Julio on top of her, and woke to find his head resting in the curve of her throat. His breath was warm against her skin. With her hands unmoving against his skin she could barely feel where he stopped and her own body began. In that moment they felt like parts of the same whole.
That was when Idolia understood cells.
When the second kaiju fell to Romeo Blue the family gathered to watch the victory parade on television. There were two men on the platform in front of the Jaeger, his pilots, but they seemed small and irrelevant compared to the towering mass of metal. Julio straddled Idiolia’s knee, watching the coverage with his wide and uncomprehending eyes. Henry, all scruffy hair and lanky limbs, was leaning against Jorge and Rodolfo was crouched on the floor with his knees huddled up to his chest.
“Did you make all that at your job, Momma?” asked Henry. “That whole big thing?”
Idiolia thought about the pieces of circuitry that had passed through her hands. Her thumb touched one of the welding scars on her third finger and she thought of the other scar down the length of her belly, only a few months older than K-Day and a few minutes older than the child in her lap. She leaned over and stroked the hair of the collection of cells named Henry, her arm tight around the cells of Julio.
“Yeah. I made that.”
B. Statistics
Most of the Vladivostok Shatterdome crew had pinups of pouting women and stretching men on the inside of their lockers, depending on the sort of thing they were into. Harold Fuhrmann didn’t really care for either (he did like them, he just didn’t like-like them…look, it was complicated), but that didn’t mean there weren’t things he found attractive. His locker (#132, combination 33-11-25) was covered in Jaeger schematics and his bunk (D45-2) had Jaeger photographs taped to the bedposts. He knew the Jaegers as well as he knew his own family, more so when it came to second cousins.
Yes, every single one. Every single statistic. Launched August 22, 2018 from the Hong Kong Shatterdome, piloted by Cheung, Jin and Hu Wei. 76 meters tall, 1,722 tons, Tri-Sun Horizon Gate OS, Midnight Orb energy core, 11X Triples Control Device allows for the tri-pilot system that allows the Wei Triplets’ trademark ‘Thundercloud Formation’ maneuver. Every. Single. One.
Each Jaeger had its own team of technicians, of course, but Harold’s group worked for the Shatterdome as a whole. The maintained the launching bays and the machinery that repaired the massive, beautiful Jaegers that nestled within its reinforced walls. They tended to Nova Hyperion, Eden Assassin, ‘Mama’ Cherno Alpha, all the brave Russians who defended the Motherland’s coastline and the occasional foreigner they deigned to let stay in their guest rooms. Harold wasn’t Russian by birth, nor had he ever bothered to go get himself citizenship, but he considered himself a Vladivostok Shatterdome native all the same. He’d never felt more at home than he did under the grey and brown steel ceilings.
Harold waited for each kaiju attack with breathless anticipation, for the chance it would give them to swarm over a damaged Jaeger and nurture it back to full health with their delicate fingers and powerful tools.
They’d relay conversations up and down the length of the Jaeger, dangling from their safety lines as they cleaned bits of flesh from between the narrow gaps in the armor and painstakingly repaired the damage caused by massive claws. Russian, English, Japanese, and the occasional fragment of German or Yiddish merged into a joyful pidgin that was uniquely Dome. It was the language you spoke if you really understood what it meant to have a purpose.
On one occasion Harold had even been daring enough to steal a piece of Eden Assassin’s cast-off armor and sneak it back to his room to be wrapped carefully in clean rags. He pictured it as a souvenir for when he was old and children would sit around his feet asking him to tell them stories about the magnificent old days of the first Jaegers and how lucky he’d been to have witnessed them.
“They’re shutting down the Dome. We have until December.”
“That’s not funny, Mager.”
“Good. It’s not a joke.”
He’d faked a laugh, then a scowl, and then shouted at them to stop trying to fool him with such a horrific prank. They’d had to pry him off Mager before he’d believe it. The losses of their Jaegers were bad blows but there was always danger in fighting kaiju. You drank, you mourned, you moved on. No one had expected the brass would pull the plug on the entire program.
On December 8, 2024 the Vladivostok Shatterdome vibrated with enough bass to fell a category II kaiju. Dubstep and hardhouse blared from every speaker the team could get their hands on. In the shadow of Cherno Alpha they passed around vodka bottles and bags of candy that left colored stains on their sticky, filthy fingers. A few members of the crew had tears running down their faces. Some screamed curses to the foul politicians who were dooming them all to a slow death. A wall? Good, let’s have a wall! We’ll build it 200 feet tall and then we’ll throw off every son-of-a-bitch who thinks they know how to deal with kaiju better than we do!
Harold sat off to the side on a crate of spare wiring. His head was already buzzing, and in a short while he’d be drinking his way down to the floor with the rest of them.
A wall wouldn’t stop a kaiju. A wall couldn’t move. It didn’t have Z-14 Tesla fists or a VP-1 Energy Caster, or a WMB2x90 AKM Chest Launcher. A wall didn’t have a horde of worshippers constantly loving on it, imbuing it with life and soul.
They’d see. There wasn’t anything left without the Jaegers watching over them. Not for Harold. Not for the world.
C. Sand
Every time Earl Hendricks saw the statistics for the mortality rate of Wall of Life construction he wondered how many of them were due to people just uncoupling their safety harnesses and doing a backflip off one of the top level I-beams. Accidents happened, of course—people fell, things fell on people, people fell on people, safety laws were ignored and their results ignored as well. On one occasion he’d heard the sound of a scream and watched in child-like confusion as a severed limb fell past him and bounced off the lower scaffolding, taking several seconds to reach the ground. The scene had felt so surreal, like a cartoon, and it was several hours later before his brain even registered the horror of the sight.
Earl didn’t want to die, but he didn’t particularly want to live either. Like the Wall he was just…there. Welding, hammering, riding the pulleys up and down the massive wall, eating, sleeping, doing it again. Like a little machine that went through its daily functions with no inner thoughts of its own.
From the bottom of the wall the workers on top looked like flies running around the top of a soda bottle, and from the top the rest of the population looked like ants nibbling at a picnic lunch. Less people, more like mindless dots going about their pointless business. The Wall was so massive and went up so slowly that Earl could barely see where the crew had made any progress compared to last month’s status. It wasn’t like the projects he’d worked on back when he built things like office buildings and hospitals, where you saw it from start to finish and then saw it put to a proper use. Those were buildings with a purpose to them. The purpose of the Wall, as far as Earl was concerned, was to be built.
Every morning he passed by the chipper sign that told them what patriots they were for supporting the Wall of Life Project, and its constantly-changing decal of when it would supposedly be completed. The sign had to be repainted or replaced on a regular basis because people kept vandalizing it with dirty pictures or letters blacked out to turn the morale-builder into a set of badly spelled insults against the government. Earl couldn’t blame them. They had to get the aggression out somehow. For himself he’d worn out his aggression a long time ago and all he had left was a persistent sense of weariness.
He was halfway through a microwaved mini-pizza when the news from Australia interrupted the Vancouver-BC soccer match. A kaiju nicknamed Mutavore (who the hell was naming these things?) had punched through the Wall down in Australia. One of the Australian Jaegers had finally taken it down, but the destruction was still massive. The promised protector had failed humanity as badly as the Jaegers people used to hail as their saviors.
Earl watched the news silently as countless months and lost lives worth of labor crumbled into powder beneath the kaiju’s feet. The Wall was entirely useless. Their work was entirely useless. The knowledge bizarrely came as a relief…a validation of what he’d already known.
The foreman was yelling for everyone to calm down, they’d get this figured out, one wall failing didn’t mean they’d all fail and the Aussies were much worse at construction than good solid Canadian workmen. No one was buying it. Harnesses and soda cans were flung at the foreman, bouncing off his helmet. The guy next to Earl was screaming. ‘What’s the goddamn point’ over and over, as if the wall itself was going to rumble back an excuse for its existence. Earl didn’t need to ask.
It wasn’t a wall to keep out the kaiju. It was a wall to keep out the feelings of hopelessness and helplessness, to keep them all busy so they felt like they were doing something important. Here came this giant thing knocking it over as if it wasn’t there to begin with. It probably hadn’t even noticed the wall at all, the way a wave didn’t notice the sand castles a little kid had so carefully constructed just hours before. Just like their cities and their Jaegers and the god-damn Golden Gate Bridge sinking into the ocean under the feet of another kaiju who didn’t give a rat’s ass what great constructs humans took pride in. They walked all over humans like the tide crashing over the beach, and they were going to keep walking all over them until there wasn’t anything left but little grass huts. And then they would step on those too.
Behind him a riot was starting. Dollies were being shoved over and the foreman had already taken shelter in his office, whose window was smashed by a flying hammer.
Earl picked up his welding mask and headed back to work.
D. Insects
For Cou Oi-lin there had never been a world without kaiju. Her grandparents and parents often spoke of it, but she had no memories without the shadow of Reckoner’s sprawling rib cage.
Oi-lin sold trinkets from her pushcart, same as she’d done since she was eleven. Good luck charms, plastic toys, that kind of thing. The rest of her siblings did the same with their own little carts, carrying with them the siblings too old to stay at home with Grandmother and too young to do their own marketing.
Like every child in Hong Kong she knew the location of the closest kaiju shelter as reflexively as she knew the location of her feet in relation to the rest of her body. It was strange to think of a time where one didn’t have shelters at all. When the alarms went off she grabbed what she could and ran for the shelters, her skinny body crushed between the bodies of the adults. The doors would slam closed and everything would go quiet. They’d huddle together, like her and her sisters during storms back when they were too young to distinguish thunder from the footsteps of a kaiju.
And nothing ever happened. The Jaegers would always stop them, or the kaiju would wander off towards a more populated area. To Oi-lin the sirens were more annoyance than stressful—she lost most of the day’s business when the kaiju came around. The bunkers always reeked of piss and sweat. If she was really unlucky there would be a bawling child locked inside and no way of escaping the horrific noise.
One day she didn’t go to the bunker. She stayed by her little cart and watched from the shoreline as Crimson Typhoon struggled with a monstrous wall of flesh whose massive eyes flashed in the light of the setting sun. From this far away the little glow of the Jaeger’s cockpit looked like one of the fireflies Grandmother talked about in her stories from the countryside.
The sound of chanting reached her ears as she perched on the pier, legs swinging above the dark water. She’d heard their voices before. They were the cultists who made their nest in Reckoner’s brain case and called themselves the Church of the Breach. Idiots, her mother said, crazy people who thought the kaiju were messengers of God, and she hoped they all got stepped on by the monsters they worshipped. The veiled cultists lifted their hands to the sky, then out to the sea, crying out in joy at the arrival of their angel. Oi-lin felt a little envious. The people in the bunkers had needless fear. These crazy people, for all their craziness, had joy.
The next time the alarm sounded she pressed herself against the wall until they were gone and she could race up the barren streets to the pier with her pushcart rattling behind her. She made it almost before the cultists did, and they bowed briefly to each other before turning to watch the show. After that she didn’t go to the bunkers at all. She’d sit at the pier and watch the kaiju, a little smile on her face while the water splashed at her shoes.
Sometimes the cultists would speak with her but usually had nothing interesting to say, beyond the usual proselytizing. It was better than sobbing, stuttering breath in her ears. One of them flirted with her when the others weren’t paying attention, and promised one day to take her to the church their sister-branch had set up in California.
In the back of her mind Oi-lin remembered the stories of the horrific destruction wrought by the kaiju upon the old Hong Kong. The Cou family’s battered television would show the smoking rubble of cities where the kaiju had made it past the Jaegers to the land, but none of it seemed real. The Bone Slums, the old women buying charms from her pushcart, the black market dealers smoking in the alleyways, that was her world. The constant background roar of life pressed into a tiny space, insects running around the bones of a giant as they went about their paltry business, only to flee when something larger than themselves dared to happen.
The Jaeger and kaiju battling in the surf, water spraying across their bodies as they pounded each other into oblivion, that was real too. One would eventually fall, slowly, their glimmering lights disappearing beneath the water, and the other would stomp away. The cultists would hang their head in mourning and shuffle back to their church to beg forgiveness for humanity’s transgression. Below ground the people would nervously raise their heads, waiting to hear the all clear sign before they spilled out into the streets again.
In the lingering moment between kaiju and humanity, there would be silence in the Bone Slums.