Kaiju Agonistes

[Time Reference Unavailable]—August, 1946

The watchseed is planted in a watery hemisphere of a watery world. The place spins around a yellow star, wearing its magnetic field like a proud little hat. It’s ridiculous with life.

Hence, a watchseed, with the best of intentions. Let’s give the seed-planters that much. They mean well. Crawling from star to star at not-quite-c, they make their surveys, consult their charts, launch a seed now and then. Old thinkers, they make an endless circuit of the galaxy on behalf of young thinkers. Young thinkers are rare and precious and must be protected, particularly from themselves, because young thinkers are stupid as hell and prone to misadventures with anything they can dig out of their planetary crusts. Hydrocarbons, radioactives, anything.

This planet is rich in ingredients for misadventure. Down goes the seed.

Two hundred thousand solar orbits, more or less, pass quietly. Then the watchseed wakes up with the unmistakable taste of an atomic weapon in its mouth.

The explosion can’t have been close, but particles of strontium-90 (in the local parlance) must eventually drift down even into the saline blackness of the aphotic zone, twenty-four hundred feet (local parlance) beneath the Pacific Ocean (you get the idea). That isotope has no honest business in the natural world. Created as a fission byproduct, it’s as good as a signature on a confession.

Things begin to happen. Here’s some fine print: receptor polyps close on their activating specks of beta-emitting isotope like eyelids wincing shut over a piece of grit. Sleepy cellular machinery brews hormonal triggers. Pulses of neurochemical go-go-juice hit the ganglial centers of an organism that last twitched before the Great Pyramid was built. Clouds of polysaccharide mucous trickle into the lightless water, forming nutrient bubbles around expansion points. The dormant watchseed has long resembled twenty meters of undistinguished rocky pancake. Now it grows new mouths, strains at the sea, gains mass. The accumulation process will require some time. Then the mass will be used to get someone’s attention.

The seed-planters mean well. In the abstract, they love young thinkers. But young thinkers must be protected from their own worst impulses.

Protected good and hard.