Kaiju Agonistes

A Few Weeks Earlier, 1972

Eugenia’s rented boat bobs gently on the twilight waters of the Sea of Cortez. Peach-colored clouds are sinking in a purple sky, and thin black tentacles have come up like periscopes beside her gunwales, the only visual evidence of the presence of Messenger directly below. They have been conversing for some time.

But as I have already explained, your currencies are a consensual hallucination. They are of no value to me.

“They are of no intrinsic value to you,” says Eugenia, lighting a fresh cigarette, taking care to avoid blowing the smoke directly into one of the creature’s appendages. “But considered as a form of potential energy you can wield to cause change, they become invaluable.”

I exist outside every monetary framework your species has devised to torture itself.

“We’ll get you declared a special something-or-whatever and you’ll have bank accounts in a couple of days,” she says. “Political and financial legitimacy is downstream of being able to flatten an entire continent. Now, do you want to swim around out here forever, getting no results? Or do you want to change paradigms entirely, and engage my services to meet the human race where it lives?”

Your species lives, metaphorically speaking, in a place of unreasoning, hyper-violent semi-sanity.

“Yes,” Eugenia says. “And if you want to save our stupid asses, I’m just the local guide to take you there.”