EMERGENCE
The elevator doors opened with a jolt, and a silky female voice announced our arrival. “Platform 53D,” she stated in a southern drawl. They changed the automated voice every day. Yesterday, she’d been from Eastern Europe. Today, she was a southern belle.
I nodded to my ward, and stepped out of the elevator, not waiting to see if she’d follow.
Aside from a few figures hunched over their computers, the floor was empty. The service staff were not due for another hour at least. Most of them would still be sleeping off their last shift, or grabbing a quick bite at the local, enjoying what little time they had off before the next one began. When they did arrive, the level would be a hub of activity. Scientists, research teams, statisticians, a whole ensemble of the intellectual elite, gathered from around the world, all in one building. Languages and ideologies would collide, conflicting theories, beliefs, and assumptions would be thrown from one end of the hall to the other—but that would only come later.
For now, the level was quiet, and I walked across the floor unimpeded by the usual scurry of bodies. From the scuff of her cheap sneakers against the tiles, I knew that my guest was right behind me.
We reached the end of the room, and I flashed my security pass at Edgar, only to roll my eyes when he stopped us to examine it properly. He’d seen my face day in and day out for the last five years, with the one notable exception of a sick day sometime in May of 2026.
“You know the rules, Captain. I have to swipe you in.” He took my pass, pressing it against the red eye of the scanner embedded in his desk. “Haven’t seen you around before,” he said, accepting the ID of the woman who’d trailed me around most of the morning.
“She’s just an observer,” I said before she could reply.
Edgar handed back our cards and smiled at my guest. “Well, enjoy your stay, Miss Fern.”
“Doctor,” she replied, looking up from her clipboard. “Thank you.”
We passed through the checkpoint, and took another elevator up to our last stop for the morning.
“Observation Deck 1A,” the belle informed us as we stepped out. A far cry from the open space of the research centre below, the passage to Observation Deck 1A was narrow and claustrophobic. An orange light blinked overhead, and about a dozen unseen lenses zoomed in on our persons. A whole security team would be sliding through our biometric scans, t-rays, viral diagnostics, heat signature trackers. Edgar’s little security booth really was a waste of everyone’s time. We were currently undergoing one of the most intense security checks in the world, and I doubted the young doctor even realised it.
“What did you say you do again?” I glanced over my shoulder, catching her eye as she scribbled something down. She was pretty, in a matter-of-fact sort of way. Mousy blonde hair hung down to her shoulders, and she wore glasses a size too big for her face. Her lips were thin, which made her seem colder than she probably was.
“I teach ancient languages at Princeton.”
I snorted. “What’s a professor of ancient languages doing in a UNGDM facility?”
She smiled. “Sating my curiosity.”
Hardly a reason to be granted access to one of the most secure compounds in the world, but I didn’t really care. I’d been told to show her around, and that’s what I’d do.
The passage ended before a steel door, and I underwent one final retinal scan before gesturing at her to do the same. I knew that if either of us failed, or if any of the scans prior to this one had triggered an alert, the air around us would have been sucked out within seconds, leaving us floundering while security teams moved in.
We waited a tense moment, before the light flashed green above the door and it slid open.
I took a breath, feeling that oozy feeling I always did when entering the negative pressure room. There were two yellow hazmat suits waiting for us on the walls, and I took the one laid out for me, gauging by its size that someone under six foot would be swallowed up by it.
The doctor followed my lead, pulling her own suit over the lab coat and jeans she’d chosen to wear for her visit.
“Have you had contact with anyone suffering from radiation poisoning, swine flu, influenza, or ebola in the last two months?” I pulled on my gloves and stared at her pointedly. The scans would have picked up anything out of the ordinary, but it didn’t do any harm to double-check.
“Negative.”
“Any known terrorist cells, revolutionary bodies, or persons listed as dissidents by the United Nations, NATO, or the Pacific Defence League?”
She snorted, pulling on her own gloves. “I’m sure I’d tell you. Anything else?” She picked up the mask and visor, dropping the helmet over her head, then fastening the clasps with a practised hand.
I shook my head and latched the seals to my suit, repeating the process with hers. Once we were entirely concealed by the clumsy, yellow body-bags, I gave the thumbs up to the closest camera and braced myself.
A high-pressure pump pounded us with anti-bacterial agents from all corners of the room, forcing me to arch my back against the force. The first time I’d gone through the chamber, I’d nearly been blown off my feet by the shock. The doctor seemed to be managing okay, though. Still, I smiled behind my mask, seeing that the sheet she’d been filling out so tirelessly was soaked through, and black ink had bled out all over the page.
“I hope that wasn’t anything important,” I said with a nod to her clipboard, once the pressure had worn off. She pursed her lips behind her visor, and gifted me with a raised brow, but didn’t reply.
“I doubt they’d let you keep your notes, anyway.” I walked to the other end of the chamber and pressed my hand against the red seal-lock. The oozy feeling returned for a second, before the door swung open and we were granted our freedom.
We waddled down a series of steps, hands held to the railing to keep ourselves from slipping. Industrial-grade fans whirred beside us, drying out our suits as we crossed the final passage before Observation Deck 1A.
“Ever seen one of them up close?”
The doctor was quiet while we walked, and I didn’t think she’d reply, but then she let out a sigh and nodded. “I was in Kyoto when the first of the Lake Biwa brood emerged, but I didn’t see much before the embassy airlifted us out. Then again in Porto Alegre… I just made it out that time.”
Lake Biwa. I remembered the reports. The city had been ravaged by what appeared to be at least three class-four kaiju. The Pacific Defence League had hardly been ratified when their first challenge had arisen. The engagement had not gone well, and the city had been left as little more than a ruin.
“Ancient languages sure take you places,” I said, gripping the handle of the door to the observation post.
She laughed. “You have no idea.”
Observation Deck 1A always reminded me of an air traffic control tower. Hundreds of screens covered every inch of space, and reams of data flowed in a never-ending stream upon them. Aside from the off-white glow from the screens, the light in the room was carefully maintained, and I had to squint while my eyes adjusted to the gloom.
Unlike the platform below, the observation deck was always busy. Research teams migrated from one desk to another, squeezing their way past security personnel and intelligence agents, then flocking to the next computer screen in an endless loop. At any given moment, there were perhaps fifty people crammed onto the platform, like sardines—a description I found more apt given what lay beyond the viewing ports up front.
I nodded to a few familiar faces and waved the doctor ahead of me. “Seeing them up close tends to knock people,” I said as we walked between the blinking screens. “It’s a power thing. Knowing you’re no longer the apex predator on this planet is one thing, but being confronted by that reality in the flesh is altogether more meaningful, more real.”
“How philosophical.”
I snorted. “See for yourself.”
The last row of desks came to an end in front of a short flight of steps, which I took two at a time, emerging at the top before the doctor.
The viewing ports were massive, translucent panes, spread out across the surface of the wall. I briefly remembered the first time I’d stood on the platform, staring out the bullet-proof glass, knowing that if the things outside willed it, they’d tear the platform apart like it was cardboard.
Through the glass I could see the heart of the facility laid out before us. About as tall as a football stadium, and twice as wide, the area was ringed by other observation posts like the one we were in. Beneath each of the platforms hundreds of steel pylons had been erected. About a million miles’ worth of cable ran between them and the viewing decks above.
But the reason for all of this—for the pylons and observation posts, for the thousands of staff and security protocols, for the facility’s existence—stood on the other side of the window.
I smiled, feeling that thrill I always felt when being there, and turned to the doctor. “See what I mean?”
She’d somehow managed to find a dry page, and was jotting down notes on her clipboard. I couldn’t make out her expression behind the mask, but she seemed relatively unperturbed.
If a 100-foot-tall killing machine didn’t impress her, I didn’t want to know what would. I rolled my eyes and stared out of the window.
King was a killing machine—that was beyond question. Standing just over 100 feet tall, he could switch between bipedal and quadrupedal in a heartbeat. His thick, leathery skin was near impenetrable by conventional means, and the spike-like protrusions on each shoulder doubled as a battering ram. I’d seen his triple-barbed tail rip through steel and flesh with ease on a number of occasions. Like the other two kaiju in the facility, King’s arms were fused, and ended in four-digit claws. His reptilian face was angular, not unlike that of a tyrannosaur, but that was where the comparison ended. Two red eyes stared down at us from each side of his head. A pair of curved tusks hung from his jaw, and he emitted a constant green, bioluminous glow from his mouth. A single drop of the venom in his saliva would pollute a city’s water supply for a month, if not longer.
Behind him, kept in stasis before their own observation posts, were Riptide and Bonehead. Though they shared some physiological traits—the fused arms and barbed tails—they were otherwise quite different. Riptide was lighter than King, more nimble on her feet. Her features were altogether more serpentine, and where King’s shoulders were covered in bulbous protrusions, hers were slender and narrow. The gap between her arms were webbed, and gills ran along both sides of her body. As a bio-weapon, Riptide was more advanced, and she had a number of Destroyer capabilities. High-yield plasma bursts could be generated in an instant, and deployed from the two bio-organic tubes on her chest. I’d seen the devastation they could inflict, and knew that, despite her slender size, she’d pose a challenge even to King.
Bonehead, on the other hand, was squat and muscular. Standing at around 80 feet tall he was the shortest of the three, but what he lacked in size he made up for in sheer strength. His face was more spherical than the others and covered by a hard exoskeleton that put King’s own leathery shell to shame.
The doctor moved up beside me and tapped the glass with her pen. “And who is this little guy?” There wasn’t a hint of insincerity in her voice.
I frowned and turned to her. That little guy was a 2,000-ton class-two kaiju. “This is King. He took out both Han’nin and Tappaja before they could even make it ashore.” I could feel the irritation in my voice, and I ground my jaw before continuing. “He’s been deployed in over twenty operations, and succeeded against every Emergence he’s been pitted against.”
She nodded, and jotted something down on her clipboard, before stepping closer to the window. She stared at King for a moment, then glanced at the other kaiju and nodded.
“They’ll do.”
THE DREAMS OF TIME
I was just twenty-two when the first sighting was recorded. Drunk on my arse, on the other side of the world, and busy with a gap year in Asia after graduation. When the news came in, I hardly believed it. I’d thought I was still working off the shrooms from the night before. But no, Venice was gone. Not destroyed, not turned to rubble and ruin—simply gone. A black scar marked the place where the city had once stood. 300,000 people wiped out in the blink of an eye.
Then the footage started rolling in. Like some great horror out of myth, the first kaiju had risen from the Adriatic and put the city to the torch. It’s not clear what triggered the Emergence, or why he picked Venice, but on the 15th of April 2023, death came to the city.
The media dubbed him “Emperor,” and the name stuck. We couldn’t kill him—God knows we tried. Tactical nukes, hydrogen bombs, fully mechanised units… Nothing worked. Emperor was a class-five kaiju at the very least. Easily surpassing 300 feet, it was estimated he weighed over 7000 tons, with multiple Destroyer abilities. He was the first and he was the largest.
But once he wrecked Venice, he disappeared. Nobody knows why, and we weren’t given much time to think on it. After Emperor, Emergences began all across the world.
Turns out the kaiju had been resting beneath the ocean for millennia, and now they were waking up. Why? Nobody has quite figured that out, but teams like mine are working constantly on it. As to how we got our hands on three kaiju of our own? Well, it wasn’t long before some smart-arse in a lab realised that some of these things could be controlled. Not the largest—not the dominant category fours and above—but the others. It had something to do with how their minds are programmed to think. The term “hive mind” had been thrown about, and “neural linking.” It means they can be trained and used as tools. It also means that, in all likelihood, some other vast consciousness is controlling the actions of the kaiju. I’ll likely never understand quite how they operate, but that’s not my job. What I am paid to do is pilot King, and I do that better than anybody.
The morning after I’d showed Doctor Claire Fern around the compound, I got the news that our unit was being relocated, and command seconded to Admiral Armitage of the South Pacific fleet. The news took us all by surprise; we hadn’t moved facilities since operations began on the Faroe Islands almost five years ago.
“Any idea what’s going on?” Kiyo was my second, and Riptide’s pilot. She took the seat opposite mine and took a bite from her egg roll.
“No clue.” I sipped from my coffee and watched as Maks pushed his way through the canteen line. The fat Russian had a way with words, and even the larger security personnel shifted out of his way. “Ever heard of this Admiral Armitage?” I asked, placing my empty cup on the table and turning to Kiyo.
She shrugged, then took the salt shaker from the table and applied it liberally to her breakfast. “I don’t keep track of the comings and goings of the South Pacific fleet,” she said, licking sauce from her fingers. “I just go where Riptide goes.”
“Aye, and I go where Bonehead goes.” Maks dropped a tray piled high with food on the table and pulled up a chair. “I kept telling you that they were going to send us after that big bastard, and here we are!” He shoved a pork rasher into his mouth and waved a finger. “They’ve had it out for us since we rolled over Antwerp, fighting those nasty spike-back twins. Not my fault if the city can’t take Bonehead’s weight, not my fault, I say.”
I stole a chip from Maks’ plate and winked at Kiyo. “You did send Bonehead through the Old District when he could have stayed in the river, though. Buildings as old as the city itself turned to dust under that fat monster.”
Maks slammed a palm against the table and glared at me. “Not my fault, I say.”
“Alright, alright.” I caught Kiyo’s smile, and patted Maks on the shoulder. “But I don’t think they’re going to send us after Emperor just for that.”
“We see,” said Maks, his mouth still full of pork. “But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
I left my hand resting on the Russian’s broad shoulder and reclined into my chair. Through the windows of the canteen I could just make out one of the leviathan haulers, hovering above the compound. It’d take a dozen of them to move just one of our kaiju. Luckily, we had a whole fleet of them dedicated to our unit.
They’d leave today, while we’d get a few days off, before being jetted over to our new base of operations on the furthermost tip of South America, in Chile.
“I hope one of you picked up Spanish in college. I think it’s going to be a while before we see this place again.”
I slept on the flight; I always did. I wasn’t in the mood for Maks’ stories, and Kiyo was an anxious flier, which made me nervous.
We landed on a private strip, just south of Punta Arenas, and took a chopper to our new compound. The weather wasn’t bad, but after years of acclimatising to Scandinavian temperatures, my shirt was already drenched.
The facility was smaller than our previous one, but not by much. I could see it’d been built with some haste, and construction vehicles were still parked all across the premises.
“They’re not mucking about,” said Kiyo, pointing out the window of the helicopter.
I scrunched up my eyes against the sun and stared down at a coned building beside the compound. I’d seen one of them before, in a brief foray into Russia some years back.
“A Bumblebee,” Maks chortled. “We must be facing the devil himself.”
I frowned at Kiyo, and then stared back down at the launch site. The “Bumblebee,” as Maks referred to it, was a second-generation thermobaric missile. Capable of levelling a city in seconds, they had a tendency to make entire regions uninhabitable. As such, their use had been prohibited by the UNGDM. The Russians had still used one in Ukraine about three years ago. Supposedly to take out a class three, but the reports had been conflicting, and it was better not to bring it up with Maks.
The helicopter dropped us off on the rooftop pad of the compound, where we were escorted in by a team of all-business marines. I couldn’t tell by their badges where they were from, but most of these operations had dedicated special forces attached to them, so I wasn’t surprised. They led us to our rooms, where we left what gear we’d brought with us, before being marched to a conference room on the upper floor for a briefing. There were no elevators, so we were forced to walk the fifty odd flight of stairs by foot, a task Maks would not shut up about.
When we finally made it to the right floor, the marines left us at the door. We waited hesitantly for a moment, before Maks took the initiative and barged in.
“Bloody hell, Maks,” I said, following him. “Who needs an invitation when—” Whatever I was going to say next stuck in my throat, and was replaced by a wry laugh. “Fancy that. Ancient languages really do take you places.”
Claire Fern looked up from the head of a long table that occupied most of the room and smiled. “Nice to see you, too, Captain Reynolds.”
“I take it you’re responsible for our relocation?” I sat down on the edge of the table and cocked my head. “What’s a civilian doing in a top-secret military facility at the bum-end of South America?”
Kiyo and Maks exchanged bemused looks and pulled up seats beside me.
“All will be explained, captain. Now, please, if you’d take a seat, I can begin the briefing.”
“You’re leading the briefing?” I said, slipping down into the chair between my squadmates. I glanced at Kiyo and shrugged. This wasn’t what I had expected, and from the look she gave me, she hadn’t either. Maks seemed quite content, though, and was in the middle of mining one of his nostrils.
The doctor clicked a remote and a screen blinked into life behind her. I thought I was staring at an empty set before I realised it was a satellite shot of the sea. Grid-lock coordinates appeared on the bottom left of the image, and the lens zoomed out further.
“Point Nemo,” Claire said, leaning back in her chair to look at the screen. “The furthest point from land in the entire ocean. These are from last week.” She clicked the remote again. “And this is from two days ago.”
At first, I thought it was the same image, but I quickly realised my mistake. A shadow had formed beneath the sea, spreading out across the entirety of the shot. I had no way of telling how big it was—not without another point of reference—but I guessed we wouldn’t be there if it was a simple blip beneath the water.
“A passing cloud?” Maks said. He crossed his arms and leaned forward against the table. “Or perhaps it is a big fish, yes? One that you want us to kill, perhaps?”
The doctor rolled a finger over the remote, pulling the image back until most of the South Pacific was in the shot. The black spot was still visible, a massive inky stain beneath the sea.
“What is it?” Kiyo asked. “An Emergence?”
I hoped not. God, whatever it was looked to be bigger than the entire state of New York.
“Land,” said Claire without pause. “A new landmass is emerging in the middle of the South Pacific. We’ve seen this sort of thing before, but nothing close to this size. It is unprecedented.”
“Interesting,” I replied, “but what’s that got to do with us? Exploring the lost city of Atlantis isn’t exactly in our job description.”
Claire put down the remote and turned in her seat to look at us. In the few days since I’d met her, dark circles had formed beneath her eyes, and I noticed a couple of new stress lines on her forehead. Whatever this was had taken its toll on her.
“I’m well aware of your areas of expertise, captain. However, Kiyo is right. We’re dealing with an Emergence… of a sort.”
“I knew it,” Maks chortled. “It’s that big bastard, isn’t it? You want to send us after the devil. Me and Bonehead will do it, we don’t even need these other two. I always knew it.” The Russian clapped his hands together and looked at Claire expectantly.
“I don’t know anything about Emperor,” she said, to Maks’ disappointment. “In fact, we’re not dealing with a kaiju at all. This is something entirely different.”
I felt my brow furrow as the doctor got up from her chair. If exploring lost cities wasn’t my forte, neither was solving riddles. Claire picked up a small stack of files and slid them across the table towards us, then opened up her own file and waited for us to do the same.
I glanced down at the cover and blinked. “Project Dreamer?” I flipped through the pages, browsing through datasheets, map coordinates, and what appeared to be old journal entries. Most of them were written in English—or in what I took to be Arabic—but there were others, in a language I wasn’t familiar with. I scanned through them before settling on a photo of a white landscape beneath towering glaciers and mountainous peaks. In the centre of the image stood a group of explorers, huddled together for warmth, but grinning like madmen all the same. A burley, bearded fellow in the middle of the group held up a sign with the words Starkweather-Moore Expedition - 1933.
“What is this shit?” said Maks, waving his folder at the doctor. He had a habit of being direct, but I still winced at his bluntness.
“This is all we have.” Claire took off her glasses and pinched the bridge of her nose. “The culmination of years of work, sacrifice, and the lives of great men and women, some of whom were my friends. This shit is the reason you are all here.”
Maks sunk into his chair a little, and stared fixedly at his file. “Apology,” he said, keeping his eyes lowered. “I mean no offence.”
The doctor ignored him, and turned back to the screen. “When the kaiju first appeared, I thought it had something to do with this, something to do with Him. But I was wrong.” She pressed a button and Point Nemo disappeared. Another image took its place, this time of the stars. “You see, while your kaiju rampaged across the globe, another threat was preparing to unleash itself. It has been waiting for a long time, but I believe that wait is coming to an end.”
I squinted at the screen and felt my jaw clench. There was something wrong with the stars. Scattered about the black sky, they shone with dizzying intensity, but in a manner I found entirely unfamiliar. It was only later that I realised why—the constellations had started to shift, turning into some corruption of their former selves. More than that I couldn’t put into words, but a sense of foreboding washed over me like a warm tide.
“So, the stars are sick,” said Maks. “What’s that to us?”
Claire swiped to the next image. It was of a rock face, or wall—it was taken too close for me to tell. Drops of water covered its surface, and slime hung to it in great clumps. But what caught my eye were the inscriptions carved upon it. Various shapes and symbols had been etched into the stone, their individual meaning completely unknown to me. Yet, somehow, I felt I understood the message they were trying to get across.
“In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.” Claire gave voice to the words I felt were already bouncing around inside my head, and I shivered.
Beneath the sprawling text, a hunched figure had been carved into the wall. The style was primitive, and the artist had lacked the skill necessary for the task—and yet, it triggered some primordial fear in me that I had not felt in years, not even in the face of kaiju. Thick, tentacle-like tendrils hung from the thing’s pulpy face, while its grotesque body was simultaneously humanoid yet impossibly alien. The cephalopod head was bent forward, allowing the ends of the tendrils on its face to brush the back of the huge forepaws that clutched the thing’s elevated knees. I blinked away from the screen and looked at the doctor instead, only to find her eyes fixed on me, as if I were some patient ready for examination.
“This is real, captain. A being so vast and unknowable has chosen our little world to be the subject of its administrations. Even as he rests, his minions conspire to bring about his eventual awakening. If this were to ever happen, it would doom us all.”
She tapped the remote again and nodded towards the screen. A new image had appeared, this time of a barnyard. Livestock walked freely around the driveway, and an old pickup with a flat tire sat parked outside. I felt Claire’s eyes on me again as I studied the image. A pair of pigs were rifling through a garbage can next to the barn, but their limbs were bulbous and deformed. Pustules and warts grew out from their distended bellies, and horrific growths hung from their necks. The other animals seemed similarly afflicted, and I struggled to maintain my focus on the image.
“This was taken two weeks ago in Arkham, Massachusetts.”
The next photo was of the sky above the barn house, taken during the night. Instead of the stars, a shifting blur of colours covered the heavens. It reminded me of the aurora borealis we sometimes saw when we were still stationed on the Faroe Islands. I frowned as I tried to make sense of the colours.
“What you’re looking at does not fall inside anything known in the visible spectrum. The electromagnetic—”
Someone was screaming.
I tried to look away from the colours, but I couldn’t move my head.
I felt my lips go dry, and I struggled to even blink. That voice. I tried to focus on it, to pinpoint where it was coming from.
It sounded like an echo from the bottom of the well, but I recognised it.
A chill ran down my spine, and I felt goosebumps cover my neck and arms. My breaths started to come in short, tight rasps, and all the while the screaming continued.
I knew that voice.
It was my own.
I managed to tear my gaze from the photograph, nearly pulling myself out of my seat in the process. I was breathing heavily, and I could feel my heart pounding against my chest.
“Everything alright, captain?” Claire was staring at me, a look of genuine concern on her face. I glanced about the room and saw that Maks had started praying to himself, something I hadn’t seen since Brussels. Kiyo looked like she’d just seen a ghost, but she managed a smile when she saw me looking.
“Captain?” Claire switched off the screen and took a breath.
“I’m fine,” I said, gathering up the strength needed for a smile. “I don’t know what came over me.”
She nodded and sat back down in her seat. “You understand a little bit more now, I think. All of these events tie in with a mythos I have been studying for years. But I am not the only one who has been watching, and not all who have been watching have good intentions. There are those who seek to bring about the end of the world, to raise the Dread Lord from his slumber. I believe they are on the cusp of succeeding.”
“Who would want to do such a thing?” Kiyo seemed to have recovered, and was staring down at her file.
“Madmen, lunatics, and those who desire power,” said Claire. “I have only met one such man before, and he fell quite comfortably into the first category.”
“Can we stop them?”
“Perhaps. I have teams moving in on known cultists as we speak, but it may not be enough. In all likelihood, it won’t be.” She pressed her glasses against her brow and stared at us. “We are about to witness a paradigm shift, a significant change in the global hierarchy. Earth will become the playground of beings beyond our understanding, and we their playthings… Unless we succeed, unless we stop Him on R’lyeh.”