Kaiju Agonistes

July, 1947—September, 1954

The watchseed drifts across a hazy boundary of self-awareness and realizes it can think.

The seed-planters designed its consciousness to grow slowly, adjusting gently to each new unfolding of comprehension. Two hundred thousand local years would be a long time for any living thing to cling to an undersea ledge, let alone something with the power to wreak planetary havoc. Psychological stability must be assured in a monstrous visitation from the stars.

Marine snow fuels physical growth. Its mouths are like a field of gray flowers pulsing open and closed, sifting the detritus of plankton and scraps drifting down from the light-touched layers above. At a certain body mass, enzymes crack the seals on ancient biomolecular databases. Suddenly it understands why it has been given this bulk, this power of thought. When it weighs about twenty tons, it detaches itself and swims upward. The things it plucks from the top layer of ocean are interesting—the locals would be able to identify several dolphins, an equal number of sharks, a dozen flavors of fish, and a single surprised saltwater crocodile.

The seed studies these meals, copies their useful features. Back in the darkness, it spins some of its new mass off into a remote espionage bureau. Snake-like fragments of itself wriggle out, bearing all the mundane senses as well as organs for scanning the electromagnetic spectrum. After a few weeks hidden in kelp or a mangrove swamp or a garbage patch, a fragment will swim back, carrying its recorded data in the form of DNA strands, ready to be literally digested.

More detonations are detected, including a thermonuclear event. Urgency is required. The seed learns rapidly. It identifies the local young thinkers, the idiots with the atomic weapons. It catalogs their settlements, radio signals, watercraft, flying machines. Biological factories churn, stretching the watchseed’s body into an aggressor configuration, generating overlapping scaled surfaces harder and lighter than steel.

This is a place of islands and atolls, this area nearest the seed’s original resting place. There is much native traffic here, by sea and by air, but no major industrial facilities. An ideal place for a demonstration; here the prized technology of the natives can be challenged and defeated without threatening their population centers. Seven solar cycles after waking up, the watchseed weighs eight hundred tons and is finally fit for duty. It adjusts its thinking one more time. It names itself.

Messenger.

The first attack is a food-gathering vessel. Messenger pulls it around by its nets, yanks its cranes out of their housings, shatters its hull with a tail-lash, and finally towers threateningly over the ruptured, listing vessel as terrified natives jump into the sea. It gives them a lingering look before roaring and plunging back into the depths. Next, Messenger finds a war-vessel, striking it from beneath. As it rolls over, water rushes in to douse the hot machinery that drives the ship. A great column of white steam rises from the wreck. Messenger stands wreathed in the mist, holding the upper half of its body twenty meters above the waves, before turning away and vanishing. It has a stage magician’s sense of timing; its creators have imbued it with razzle-dazzle from beyond the stars.

Messenger swims to and fro in the warm saline sea. It smashes another food-gathering vessel, then a couple of cargo haulers, and then another sort of war-vessel, one designed to sink beneath the waves. Messenger helps it with that.

The seed-planters resigned themselves to the impossibility of personally standing watch across millions of years and hundreds of thousands of light-years. The seeds are their solution. First, identify likely young thinkers in the dawn of their development. Then hide monsters under their beds and scare the little pinheads nearly to death if they start experimenting with civilization-destroying forces.

Messenger is programmed to operate in escalating stages, with generous intervals of time to allow for the locals to reflect. The seed-planters desire to inspire a sense of awe rather than desperate panic; to provide a focal point for a moment of pause in the face of a power beyond primitive conception. A rampant watchseed is meant to inspire philosophical development and social unity. That it does this by breaking things and killing people is regrettable, but the fates of worlds and species are in question.

Messenger carries out its orders with placid self-confidence, tearing ships open, swatting helicopters from the sky, posing for the little flashes of cameras whenever it notices them.

Several local months into its intimidation cycle, Messenger notes that the natives have withdrawn their battle-vessels some distance. Perhaps the message is already sinking in. Perhaps the locals, as is the case in 62 percent of all watchseed awakenings, are already re-assessing their presumed mastery of the universe in a healthier fashion.

Then Messenger, while submerged and drifting quietly, detects a fresh atomic explosion. The center of the blast is approximately six hundred feet directly above its head.