Mm9, p.6
MM9, page 6
“No, he’s with the Public Security Intelligence Agency. A Mr. Azekura. It’s about this incident.”
“Azekura?” Chief Kurihama swiveled his chair. “Taichi Azekura? With the PSIA?”
“Y-yes, sir.”
“What’s he doing here?”
Kurihama pinched his lips together and squeezed the ballpoint pen in his hand.
Taichi Azekura, a plain-looking middle-aged man, could have been mistaken for a homeowners insurance salesman. He was nothing like the steely-eyed secret agent the movies led Yuri to expect from a special agent with the Intelligence Agency.
He walked into the meeting room and gave the chief and Yuri an affable grin. “Hey, Kurihama, long time no see. And you must be Ms. Anno. Nice to meet you.”
With a sour expression, Chief Kurihama plopped down on the sofa. “I hoped never to meet you again.”
“Come now, don’t be like that. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t my job. Half of why I’m here is to ask some questions. The other half, to give you some information.”
“To give us information?”
“It’s like this,” Azekura said. “If we held on to what we know, kept it our secret, then you wouldn’t be able to see the whole picture, which might be trouble for you.”
“And I should be thankful?”
“Well, yeah. About a half a year ago, we started tracking this group calling themselves CCI.”
“What, leftists?”
“No. CCI stands for the Creative Cosmology Institute—a legitimate-sounding name, but in truth, they’re a cult, suckering people in with nonsense about some super-ancient civilization of gods in Japan.”
“So the PSIA’s finally paying attention to destructive cults?”
Azekura easily parried Kurihama’s sarcasm. “We don’t want a repeat of the incident ten years ago.”
A cult called the Zeta Transcendents secretly raised a kaiju underground and unleashed it beneath Tokyo. It was an act that rocked Japan, the first instance of kaiju terrorism—and the Intelligence Agency had failed to see it coming. Even though some among the press and the police had held the Zetas in suspicion, the PSIA was focused entirely on left-wing extremist groups and North Korean spies, and paid little attention to cult formations. The agency, having utterly lost face, began to put efforts into watching cult activity.
“This CCI,” Azekura said, “is quite dangerous. We’ve had unconfirmed reports indicating they are importing machine guns and antitank missiles from Russia. And that’s not all. We received intelligence that they are raising a kaiju.”
Kurihama’s face went pale. “A kaiju?”
“Yes. We found one of their internal writings. But we weren’t able to find out anything about the kaiju itself. In the document, they only called it ‘X’—nothing about its real name or what it looks like.”
Yuri said, “Kaiju X . . .”
“But we were able to find out, roughly, its location. Around Kagamigahara City, Gifu Prefecture, there are still several air-raid shelters left over from the Pacific War. We believe it is—or was—inside one of them. In truth, we were already in talks with the prefectural police to search the shelters when this happened.”
Kurihama said, “You’re saying this incident is . . .”
“There’s a high chance this may be another Zeta Incident.”
Yuri shuddered. One after another, the images of victims being carried out of the subways flashed vividly through her mind. Could that innocent-looking child be carrying a terrible destructive power? She looked at Azekura. “But what does this have to do with me?”
“Yeah, about that. Do you know a Mikio Izuno?”
Now that was a name she hadn’t heard in a while. “Yes. He’s an astrophysicist. He was a pupil of my father’s. My dad took a liking to him, and back when he was a student, he often came over to our house.”
Fragments of her childhood replayed in her mind.
Mikio, who always picked her up and said, “Hey, little Yuri, how are you?”
Mikio, whose interests and manner of speaking were older than his age.
Mikio, who loved sukiyaki.
Mikio, who gave her a book for Christmas.
At some point unbeknownst to her, her little heart had started to flutter every time he came over. The last time Yuri saw him, she had just entered high school. She still remembered how hot her cheeks felt when he looked at her and said, “To think little Yuri’s grown into such a woman.”
It was a distant memory. Even now, she didn’t know if that budding feeling had been love.
Keeping her tone professional, she said, “But twenty years ago he suddenly went missing. I haven’t heard from him since.”
“Did he ever talk about anything . . . unorthodox?” Azekura asked.
“You mean the parallel anthropic principle? An English physicist named Asprin came up with the idea in 1983, but back then, few took him seriously. Mikio was the first in Japan to draw attention to his work.”
“Do you think he could have been cast out of academia because of it?”
Yuri laughed. “Cast out of academia? That’s something out of fiction. The real world doesn’t work like that. And even though the parallel anthropic principle had few backers back then, it’s only gained support in the field of physics.”
“Then why did he disappear?”
“I don’t know. He put all his affairs in order before he went, so it must have been of his own volition. Back then, I worried that he’d gotten involved with something.”
“I see. Now, I have a few questions about this.” Azekura pulled a small tape recorder from his pocket and placed it on the coffee table. “It’s a wiretap recording of a CCI phone call from three days ago.”
Kurihama broke in. “The Intelligence Agency doesn’t have the right to do that.”
Azekura laughed it off. “Yeah, well, it’s a little more complicated than that. Anyway, Mikio’s name comes up in the recording—his last name, actually. And the analysts were clear on this—the voice says ‘Izuno,’ which is a fairly rare name—not ‘Mizuno’ or some other common one. Since few share that name, we have a high degree of certainty that it’s the same man. We just need you to confirm it. Of course, this recording is all off the record, so please, you didn’t hear any of it from me.”
He pushed the play button.
A man was talking. “. . . don’t know why you keep that thing alive. You have to take care of it. Now!”
The other speaker, also male, said, “Mr. Umemiya, please, compose yourself. This project is my responsibility. Why are you interfering with the plan we decided on?”
Yuri’s heart jumped. It was the same voice that twenty years earlier had said, “Little Yuri, look how you’ve grown.”
The first voice came back. “Mr. Izuno, you haven’t grown fond of Princess after raising her all these years, have you? Maybe that’s why you don’t want to kill her.”
“You’re wrong.” Mikio’s sneer was practically audible. “She’s just a valuable specimen, nothing more.”
“Then there shouldn’t be a problem. We have One, it should be enough. That was the purpose of the project, wasn’t it? Princess’s power is too dangerous. If she got free—”
“I know that better than anyone.”
“So why are you being like this? Why are you endangering our plans?”
“How many times do I have to explain it? She’s insurance. She’s a card up our sleeve in case something happens. We need to keep her.”
“But—”
“One’s just as dangerous, isn’t it? Come now, Mr. Umemiya, surely you don’t think it will always act exactly according to our expectations? If it were that easy to control, we wouldn’t have needed the project in the first place.”
“But the Intelligence Agency is starting to sniff around!”
“They don’t have the slightest clue of her purpose.”
The recording stopped. “How about it?” Azekura asked. “Is that the voice of Mikio Izuno?”
Yuri softly nodded. “Yes. It is.”
“Do you have any recordings of his voice? Maybe an old videotape with him speaking? If you did, we could run audio fingerprinting.”
“No, I don’t think so. But what would Mikio be doing in a cult?” Yuri said.
“I don’t know. We don’t have him on any of the membership lists. He might be using a false name. But we’ve been led to believe that he is in charge of the group raising Kaiju X.”
Yuri couldn’t believe it. The Mikio she knew was rational, intelligent—not the sort of person she could see connected with a cult.
“This Princess they were talking about,” she said, “is it the girl, Kaiju Six?”
“That’s a valid assumption. Maybe this Umemiya guy, or someone else, noticed our investigation, panicked, and set her free. Maybe they thought it would be better to let her rampage than to have her captured by the police.”
Kurihama frowned, deep in thought. “They also used the term ‘One.’ Could that be the name of another kaiju?”
“Could be. There were several occurrences of the number in documents we obtained. We’re still looking into it.”
“Like Yuri, I’m also having trouble understanding why a physicist would raise a kaiju for a cult.”
“The problem is not why, but how.” Azekura raised a finger. “That kaiju—Princess—couldn’t always have been that size. First of all, the air-raid shelters don’t have that much space to hide her in. Moreover, she’d require over one ton of food every day. It would be too obvious. She must have become a giant in the past few days at most.”
“So you’re saying . . .”
“Yes. That physicist, Mikio, has developed a technique to radically increase the size of living creatures. That’s the only explanation. Possibly utilizing, somehow, the parallel anthropic principle.”
When they came back into the main office, Yojiro got on the remote feed with his findings from the damaged mountainside.
“This was an old air-raid shelter,” he said. “And it wasn’t just destroyed. It burst out from within. The dirt’s been scattered outward, away from the site. I think it’s safe to conclude this is where Kaiju Six emerged.”
Chief Kurihama asked, “Are there any other signs of activity?”
“Yes. The locals say this place was off-limits, but there are empty bowls of cup ramen and plastic sacks from convenience stores all over the place. No doubt about it, this place was in use. I did find something I feel to be particularly interesting.”
Yojiro lifted up his hand. Dangling at the end of a heavy, dirt-encrusted chain was a belt made of thick black leather. “It’s set up to lock like a pair of handcuffs. The inside is well worn. It’s clearly been in use for quite some time. The problem is its size.”
He put his arm through the closed loop. It was more than twice the size of an adult wrist. “This wasn’t made for a wrist or an ankle. But I couldn’t fit it around my neck, either. It must be for a dog, or—”
Yuri cut in, her voice soft and her gaze distant. “A child’s neck.”
The bruise on the girl’s neck was the same width as the belt, only fourteen times wider. She felt sick as she recalled the voice from the tape.
“. . . raising her all these years.”
What horrific experiments had Mikio been performing in the darkness of the old bunker?
The news from the home office struck the members of the Mobile Unit hard.
Sakura asked, “So . . . that child is human?”
Ryo’s expression went dark. “I think we have to think of it that way. The reason she can’t speak might be simply because she’s been held in captivity for years, and not because she’s a kaiju.”
“But could it really be possible? To turn a person into a giant?”
“It’s not unheard of,” Ryo said. “The Nazis are said to have run experiments in an attempt to create giant super-soldiers. They used radiation or something. Supposedly the Americans used the Nazis’ knowledge to run similar programs in the fifties.”
Asaya added, “Some say that’s why they’ve kept the data on Glen a secret, even half a century later. He was a failed experiment.”
“I’ve heard that,” Ryo said. “They certainly seem to have run tests on animals, at least. That giant tarantula—what was its name, Arnold? Apparently that was an escaped test subject. Whether that’s true or not, the US and the Soviets both tried to weaponize kaiju during the Cold War. We can be sure of that much. Of course, none of it panned out.”
“Why not?” Sakura asked.
Asaya answered. “ ’Cause they couldn’t control ’em. Sure, you hear all the time how radiation turned one animal or another into a kaiju, but most of the time, when you throw a ton of radiation at something, it just dies. Nobody knows what conditions will make them grow. And even if you managed to come up with a process, the giant creatures just destroy whatever’s around them. You can’t predict where they’ll go. They might attack your allies. That wouldn’t make for a very good weapon, would it?”
“So nobody’s doing that kind of research anymore?”
“Pretty much. There are too many humanitarian concerns over doing those kinds of tests on human subjects.”
Ryo thought about it. “Humanitarian problems . . . Maybe that’s their aim.”
“What do you mean?” Sakura asked.
“I mean Kaiju Six. If she were a typical kaiju, the SDF would handily take her out. But because she looks like a girl, they can’t attack her so easily. If they kill her, the government and the armed forces will face a great deal of criticism. So while they’re struggling to decide how to deal with her, she goes about destroying things. What if they turned that child into a kaiju for precisely that reason?”
“That’s—” Sakura was astonished. “You’re saying they’d use a child for that kind of terrorism? That’s too cruel! Too low! Too wicked!”
“You’re telling me. I’m just as disgusted as you.” He paced in a circle. “Even so, I don’t see how we can let her be, with her that size. It’s a pity, but we might not have any choice but to kill her.”
“I won’t accept it! Isn’t she the victim here? Why does she have to die?” Sakura grabbed Ryo by the shoulder. “We should protect her. We can’t allow her to be killed.”
“Yeah, but how? It’s not like she’s a lost puppy. Do you know how much it would cost just to feed her?”
Asaya pulled a calculator out of his pocket. “Let’s see, if she eats 2,700 times more than a typical child . . . Even if we only fed her once a day, that’s food for nine hundred people.”
“See?” Sakura objected. “That’s just as much as one grade school spends.”
“How do you figure that?” Ryo asked. “Do you know how many millions that costs in a year? And who will deal with her waste? And where is there space to keep her?”
“How about Minamidaito Island?”
Minamidaito was a solitary island to the east of Okinawa where several kaiju were kept for study.
“The biggest kaiju there is an MM3.5. She’s four times that size. How would we make a cage big enough? How would we capture her? How much anesthesia would we need to make her sleep? And even if we got her to sleep, how would we transport her? She’s too big for a semitrailer.”
“We could make her walk,” Sakura said.
“To Nagoya Port? Do you think she’ll behave the entire way? She doesn’t know language. You saw how fast she moves. Children are fickle. If she ignored our instructions and ran off, what would we do? If she ran through a crowd of onlookers, it would be a disaster.”
Sakura had nothing to say.
“Not only that, it would take time. We’d need a budget of billions—the Meteorological Agency wouldn’t be able to allocate that kind of money on their own. The Diet would have to debate it. How many weeks would that take? Even if we decided to protect her, it would be an enormous undertaking. Minamidaito Island would have to prepare for her, we’d have to requisition a cargo ship, we’d have to evacuate people all along the highway from here to Nagoya . . . How long will that all take?” Ryo released a helpless sigh. “Will the girl wait for us until then? She seems not to be hungry yet, but it’s only a matter of time before she goes off in search of food.”
“Do you really want her dead that badly?”
“I don’t want her dead! But I can’t think of an alternative,” Ryo said.
Sergeant Kashihara had been listening to the whole conversation. Softly, sadly, he said, “I have a daughter her age.” He looked down at the Carl Gustav in his hands. “I don’t want to shoot her if I don’t have to.”
What else could Sakura say?
At that same time, Kurihama was talking with Yojiro.
“I’ve decided on a name for Kaiju Six,” the chief said. “Princess. From this point, Kaiju Six will be called Princess. We’ve also just calculated her size. Ninety-six tons. MM4.9.”
“Not a five?”
“No. Until there’s a possibility of her endangering lives, the use of deadly force is not authorized.”
“Is that a good thing?”
“Can’t say for sure.”
Kurihama’s feelings were mixed. Yojiro, Yuri, and the rest of the MMD all shared the same sentiment. For the moment, Princess’s life had been extended. But they could see a bitter end awaiting in the not too distant future—a thought that weighed heavily upon them.
Do we really have to kill this completely innocent child?
The chief spoke. “There’s one other piece of information that’s bothering me. It seems some civilians have snuck back into the evacuation zone.”
“Civilians?”
“Yeah. The police spotted three suspicious men prowling the streets near the Takashimaya department store. The officers gave chase but lost them.”
