Kaiju Preservation Society(22)

I did a foolish thing this last tour: I decided my room would be nicer with some green in it, and brought a cutting home and put it in a pot on my windowsill. When it came to go, I realized I couldn’t take it with me. So I am leaving it to you, as a gift. I hope you will care for it like I did, and that it gives you joy as it did for me. And perhaps when you leave again in six months you will give it to the next occupant of this room, who might even be the person who replaces me.

Good luck and best wishes to you. Think of me from time to time, I who am back in our other world. I will think of you, too, whoever you are, and fondly.

Yours,

Sylvia Braithwhite

I set the letter down, picked up the small pot with the plant, and put it back on the windowsill.

“Whoever had my room last left a big pile of poopfruit on my desk,” Niamh yelled, from their room. “Seriously, what the actual fuck?”





CHAPTER

8




Brynn MacDonald pointed at Aparna. “Okay,” she said. “You’re the new biologist. Say it.”

“Say what?” Aparna asked.

“The thing that’s been bothering you since the moment you saw a kaiju.”

We were all in a (very) small conference room at the administrative building, and it was just after nine in the morning, and we were having, as promised, our orientation session. Brynn MacDonald, who we last saw a little bit drunk, was emphatically not so now, and as promised she remembered all our names and what we were at the base to do. We all sat at the (very) small wooden table, in (normal-size) wooden chairs, and I wondered if they had been made at the base. MacDonald stood, next to a bookcase. Right at the moment she was staring at Aparna in particular, waiting on an answer.

“All right, fine,” Aparna said. “These kaiju are too big. They shouldn’t exist.”

“Because of the square-cube law,” MacDonald prompted.

“For starters.”

“Everyone up on the square-cube law?” MacDonald asked. Nods all around; Niamh and Kahurangi were scientists and I was a nerd, we all knew that as things got bigger, their volume increased as a cube of the multiplier while the surface area increased as a square. MacDonald turned her attention back to Aparna. “So, the kaiju have far too much volume, their muscles would snap, their lungs couldn’t give them enough oxygen, they couldn’t feed themselves enough energy, their nervous systems would run too slowly to move them around, their bones would tear out of their bodies, and by all known physical laws, they would lie groaning in their own pile of meat until they died.”

“They wouldn’t groan because there’s no way they could inflate their lungs, but yes, I think that otherwise covers it,” Aparna said.

MacDonald nodded, turned, pulled a massive binder from the bookshelf, and dropped it in front of Aparna with a thud.

“What’s this?” Aparna asked.

“Your homework,” MacDonald said. “It’s a precis on all the biology of the kaiju that we understand so far.”

Aparna goggled at the massive binder. “This is a precis?”

“The short version, yes,” MacDonald said, and then looked at us other three. “You don’t have to read this, but you should, it’s fascinating. If you don’t look at it, all I ask for you to remember is that the kaiju have a biology that is utterly unlike anything we have back home. There is literally no analogue. The kaiju don’t break physics because you can’t break physics. The square-cube law applies to them just like it does to any creature. But their unique biology allows for their size and movement. Unique to us, I mean. Relatively common biology here.”

“Tom Stevens said yesterday we shouldn’t think of them as animals. That they’re systems or environments,” I said to MacDonald.

MacDonald pointed to the binder. “He’s quoting that,” she said. “And good for him, I thought he just skimmed it when I gave it to him. But even that is too limiting.” She pointed at me. “You are a system and an environment, after all—in terms of sheer numbers, there are as many nonhuman cells in and on your body than there are human cells. Bacteria, fungi, protists, even tiny parasitic mites that live in your face.”

“I could be happy never talking about tiny skin mites ever again,” I said.

“They come out when you sleep, you know.”

“I do now, thanks for that.”

“Wait until you see the kaiju parasites, they’re a trip,” MacDonald said. “My point here is that any of the metaphors that we use to understand animals or any creature back home don’t quite convey what we deal with when we talk about what kaiju are.”

“Give us an example,” Niamh said.

MacDonald squinted at Niamh. “Physics, right?”

“Physics and astronomy, yeah.”

MacDonald hefted another binder out of the bookshelf and thudded it down in front of Niamh. “Kaiju get their energy from nuclear reactors.”

Niamh stared at the massive binder, and then back up at MacDonald. “Excuse me, what?”

“Nuclear reactors,” MacDonald said.

“Where … do they get a nuclear reactor?”

“They grow them.”

“The actual fuck do they do that?”

Aparna pushed her biology binder over to Niamh. “You’re going to want this one,” she said.