Kaiju Agonistes полностью

“Mr. President, you know my client will target you personally in retaliation. Stop pretending you don’t speak English.”

“You cannot threaten me, ma’am!”

“Can,” says Eugenia Aldrich-Haines. “Am. Get a space monster of your own if you don’t want to play ball, Dick.” She pulls a sheaf of papers out of her gleaming black bag (God, thinks the president before he can help himself, a literal Messenger bag) and tosses them onto his desk. “Here’s the basic structure of how we’re going to run things. Page one is your eyes only, for the moment.”

“Jesus.” As he reads, the president feels every individual blood vessel in his eyeballs preparing to burst. “Jesus, lady!”

“Just so you understand that we don’t want to have to resort to physical violence, no matter how easy it would be. You know Messenger can manipulate the electromagnetic spectrum. If you don’t start convening the meetings we require, my client will jam every radio broadcast on the Eastern seaboard, and on those frequencies it will broadcast the words ‘Dick Nixon can’t get it up’ twenty-four hours a day until the election. That’ll go into the history books, Mr. President.”

“This is unseemly. No matter what sort of personal humiliation you concoct, you turncoat bitch, my position on that monster’s demands must remain immutable!”

“Well, I have good news. Messenger wants to cease operating primarily through demands. Starting immediately, we’re going to put down the stick and offer the whole world a tasty bite of carrot.”

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.”

It’s a balmy morning in Miami Beach and the sky is a washed-out haze of pink. On an arc of pale sand, four thousand of the great and good await the coming of the space monster. Upright citizens, all. Well, mostly. A lot of connected guys, and a lot of congressmen, and the overlap of those demographics is…let’s just say it’s America. Bankers, brokers, agents, advisors, senators, Elks, Knights of Columbus, mayors, aldermen. Cubans, of both the asset-nationalizing and the asset-stripped persuasions. Some of the CIA’s friends from South America are here, and if some of those guys look a bit Teutonic, well, heh, water under the bridge, you know. All the European neutrals and satellite people are here, the ones the Soviets definitely don’t use to maintain investment portfolios. The Saudis are clustered at one end of the crowd. The Shah’s people are here. Egyptians and Israelis are studiously pretending not to see one another, as are the Japanese and the Chinese, Nigerians and Ghanaians, Indians and Pakistanis. The waves lap gently against everyone’s feet, since furniture isn’t part of the deal this morning, but nobody wants to be seen cowering from the water’s edge. A very human pile of humans.