Chapter Text
It was a horrible tragedy. That was the phrase that kept getting repeated. Aziraphale had been very young, but he understood that something awful had happened a long way away to very many people, and since he wasn’t a sociopath, he was sad about it even though it didn’t affect him personally.
The west coast of America had been attacked first. The colossal monster had been plastered across worldwide news as it tore buildings and bridges and people to shreds. The bloated American military had thrown arsenals at it as it rampaged through thousands of casualties and destroyed everything in its path until it was finally brought down.
There were candlelit vigils and scientists with theories and so so so many dead. The American president gave a solemn speech and promised that there would be an annual national observance day to mourn. Other nations sent flowers and letters and supplies for the recovery.
There were op-eds and podcast episodes and radio programmes expressing profound sympathy at the damage that had been inflicted by some form of deep sea megafauna that had apparently avoided detection until now. There were conspiracy theories, but that was nothing new.
There was plenty of chatter on the internet about expanding resources to ocean exploration and research. The most that happened was a few halfhearted bills being introduced by minor officials, which were politely voted down as being of low priority and not directly applicable to the victims. Perhaps the subject could be brought up at a better time. It wouldn’t do to politicise the plight of the victims to fund the presumed beach vacations of out-of-touch scientists.
It was a tragedy on the scale of Krakatoa’s eruption or the Great Tsunami: a natural disaster that could not have been foreseen.
It was followed quickly by attacks on other coastal cities around the entire Pacific ring of fire.
Eventually the Pacific Rift was discovered; a massive crack in the seafloor from a parallel reality that spilled strange light and giant alien monsters which swam towards coastal cities and destroyed everything in reach. They were given names, like hurricanes, if a bit more descriptive: Knifehead, Leatherback, and others either poetic or insulting or both.
Up from the depths came monsters, and humanity rose to defend themselves and each other. Finland was the first. It wasn’t a powerful nation, and it hardly had any coastline, and it hadn’t yet lost any of its own citizens, but it offered up every scrap of information it had and opened its borders to refugees. Then standoffish Russia, wonder of wonders, quietly offered their vast resources and access to extensive ocean floor maps that no one had suspected they had. China had satellites and were willing to dedicate their manufacturing capability. Japan described previously top-secret technology for long-distance weaponry that made every other nation present wince. America declared that they were ‘all in’, whatever that meant.
Borders didn’t matter. Ideologies and religions and historical grudges did not matter. Survival was at stake, and bigotry was deadweight. To battle the invasion of alien kaiju beasts, humans created hunters. Eventually called jaegers, from the old German, humans engineered and built vast war machines.
The first few were directed remotely, just like smaller robots and drones from previous wars. Each was destroyed quickly. The kaiju were too fast, and better reaction times were needed.
Human pilots were needed, but traditional controls were still not in tune with what was necessary to direct the colossal size of each jaeger. These lasted slightly longer but were still torn to pieces, the pilots dying in agony.
Most of Japan was ravaged. Hawaii and Singapore were evacuated of all civilians. The city of Manila was destroyed. Ecuador lost almost a third of its population after a cluster of attacks from insectoid kaiju with armored exoskeletons.
Families mourned their dead and the military gave posthumous honors to fallen soldiers, but eventually there was a breakthrough.
By integrating the pilot’s mind with their jaeger via a neural link, the pilot could command thousands of tons of metal just as if they moved their own body. This link was so intricate that it seemed like magic. In interviews later, the pilots described themselves as floating or drifting into a new form of consciousness, in which they had always been humans, but also always been a towering edifice of weapons and engines and reactors the size of a city. The initial tests with the system were promising, but still had deaths due to the stress on the human brain. Eventually, to share the neural load, the system was adjusted and perfected. It was called the Drift, and it linked two or more pilots together into each other and their shared jaeger. Finding pilots who were compatible with each other was arduous, but when they found each other, they fought like a single being.
The new jaegers went out to face the incursions, where every prior pilot had died bravely, but for the first time, they won.
The kaiju kept coming, as they had for years, as they would for more years, but finally the jaegers were there to stop them.
Drift-compatible pilot pairs and trios were global treasures. They were idolized, and although there were still losses, humanity took a relieved breath.
The world governments poured funds into anything that might increase their warning windows to prepare for the attacks. Hollywood alone had funded several advances in machine learning, and A-list movie stars now tended to sponsor their own jaegers. (often emblazoned with the names of their actors and upcoming movies. Americans.)
To be fair, American cities still had a much higher incident rate than nearly anywhere else, so it was in rather poor taste to criticize them. The colonies were doing the best they could, the poor souls.
The costs were high, and kept rising. The kaiju grew bigger, came more often, and the jaegers began to fall. Vast coastal walls were built. They weren’t very effective, but public support was still high for them. Instead of expanding support for the jaegers, global councils devoted the prior funding to more walls, which still broke in a handful of minutes.
When Aziraphale was still a young man, a suicide mission had been planned by the last commanding officer, along with the support of the only remaining jaeger teams and two brilliant scientists. At great peril, the Pacific Rift had been destroyed with a perfectly-placed detonation.
The nightmare was over. The countdown clock until the next attack was set to zero. Humanity had succeeded in defending their home. Aziraphale distinctly remembered the celebrations in the streets and the fireworks.
Ten years later, there were several simultaneous earthquakes at every major seafloor subduction zone in every major ocean. Following the tsunamis, kaiju crawled and stampeded and flew once again, no longer constrained by a single point of entry, and each aperture closed behind them, leaving no weak points to be attacked.
The monsters had returned, and humanity wept.
Then they got back to work. New walls were constructed, retired scientists were cajoled into service again, militias began rescreening soldiers for tolerance for the neural system, and of those few who passed the tests, for drift compatibility with each other. Dr. Aziraphale Fell, who was no one at all, really, sat down at a computer and did his best.