First Day

            In Mark’s “bum years,” before he met Cassidy and she whipped him into shape, he had been something of an adrenaline junkie.

Cassidy would joke that he was her “plus-size Tom Cruise,” and not just because he was conventionally handsome and chubby.  The young Mark captured in photographs was a wild man, strapped to a zipline in Costa Rica, speeding down a mountain slope on a dirtbike, a blur as he fell from a plane into the blue yonder below.  The one thing all the pictures had in common was the dazed, exhilarated grin on Mark’s face in every single picture.  It was just a reflex of Mark’s, something that crept up on him whenever he was terrified and enthused all at the same time.  Before he met Cassidy, before she got him that job in the embassy, that sensation was what he thought happiness was.  He didn’t grin that way so much anymore.

            But as the bullet train emerged from the tunnel, revealing the Tokyo skyline, that grin was plastered on Mark’s face.  “Holy Hell…” he muttered.

            Giant monster attacks were a universal fact of life; since they began in 1944 every country had slowly realized that the situation wasn’t going to change and adopted a series of countermeasures.  Every country had its variants of CLEAN and DAMN, from New Zealand to the Netherlands, from Guam to Germany.  But some locations were definitely more at risk than others, and none more so than Japan.  Japan had the same number of monster attacks in one month that the rest of the world had in a year.  Over sixty percent of all double monster attacks in recorded history were in Tokyo, as were ninety percent of all triple attacks.  With Garganturex and Queen Hydrafina taking turns stomping on their rubble, the people of Japan had two choices: flee their homeland, or adapt to the bedlam of the new world.

            They chose the second option.

            Mark stood, gaping in awe, as shimmering monolith after shimmering monolith zipped by the train.  By night, the warning systems and emergency fallback shields that invisibly guarded each building manifested in swirls of blue and red energy, but by day all anyone could see were the two-hundred-percent efficiency solar panels that coated almost every surface of every structure.  That wasn’t what impressed Mark.  The train slowed, having reached the south Tokyo stop, and Mark lurched, just catching himself on an adjacent pole.  “Skyscrapers,” he said, in response to the confused stares of the Japanese passengers.  “You have buildings more than three floors.  I’ve never seen one before.”

            Nobody understood Mark.  He sighed. As the American ambassador to Japan and a member of the Pan Pacific Monster Task Force, he shouldn’t be dense enough to assume that the random Japanese person speaks English.  Serving in Germany and Denmark gives unreasonable expectations on that front.  Ironically, English seemed to compose the entire world outside of the train—the train station was covered in mysterious slogans, some simple posters and some flashing neon signs.  People walked past the train wearing shirts saying BUTTER LATE THAN NADER and ORANGE YOU GLAP I DOES NOT ORANGE?  Mark chuckled at a few of these, but was mostly busy watching the holograms flicker out of the floors and walls.  A blue, unusually cheerful business woman walked onto the tracks and exploded into virtual gore in an infinite loop, while three feet away the same woman calmly mimed waiting for the doors to open before stepping onto the train.  The illusion was shattered a bit when a teenager phased through her on his hoverboard, his orange Mohawk neatly dividing her head in two.  He was spraying some graffiti on the train as he zipped past.  Mark tried to get a peek, but small robots had emerged from hidden compartments on the train’s exterior and were already cleaning off the paint.  He’d heard Japan’s technology was a few centuries ahead of the curve, but seeing it in front of him was something to behold.

            Silently, the train lurched forward, and this time Mark had a grip; he was free to gawk without falling facedown on the floor of the train.  Unfortunately, all the windows had suddenly gone dark.  Mark heard a sequence of very regular clanging, and realized that metal shutters were covering the entirety of the train.  “Oh no.”

            Suddenly, the cheerful hologram was inside the train, relaying instructions in Japanese.  Mark looked around, panicked, as everyone else on the train started shifting their positions.  “What’s happening?” he yelped.  “I’m, I don’t speak Japanese.  What do I do?”

            Mark felt a tug on his sleeve and turned around.  A little girl, maybe four years old, was pointing towards the floor, where yellow LEDs had created a hexagonal grid.  “Go,” she said, “kaiju.”  The girl’s mother casually took her hand and led her back to their hexagon, slightly larger than most others.  “Well,” Mark said to himself, “if a child thinks it’s a good idea…”  He stepped into one of the glowing hexagons, struggling to keep his balance as the train moved.  Everybody else looked bored.  A salaryman looked at his watch.

            Then the tubes descended from the ceiling.  Mark screamed as glass closed in on him from all sides, and screamed louder when a warm, clear fluid started filling the tube.  “I’m going to drown!” he yelled, pounding on the glass as the fluid reached his waist.  “I’m going to drown in a giant test tube!” I’m…” Mark trailed off as he realized two very important things.  Firstly, shouting wouldn’t do any good.  He could see other people in their tubes, people talking on their phones, the mother talking to her child, but he couldn’t hear them.  They were soundproof.

            Secondly, the tube was full of the liquid, but Mark could still breathe just fine.  A little better than usual, actually.  He sniffed, surprised at how decongested he was.  Surprise turned into anxiety as a small metal tube descended from the ceiling; a microphone.  In the voice of the holographic woman, it said something in Japanese and started cycling through languages.  “Nihongo? Idioma? Hányǔ? English?”

            “English!”

            “Hello.  Train destruction imminent, estimated time of impact forty-three seconds.  Where is your destination?”

            “Um,” Mark said, struggling to remember the address, “do you need a street number?”

            “That is preferable, but not mandatory,” the voice said.  “Where is your destination?”

            “The American Embassy!”

            “Calculating.  Calculations complete, coordinates locked in.  Your building submerges in three minutes.  You will be on time.”  The train was suddenly a whole lot brighter.  Holes were opening in the ceiling above each tube.  A grin crept across Mark’s face as he realized what was about to happen.

            “Oh SHIT!” he roared over the sudden boom of his tube’s rockets turning on.  He was airborne, hundreds of feet off the ground and at least as fast as the train.  During his flight, he could only pick a few details out of the blur: skyscrapers folding down and descending underground, blast doors sealing them in, lightening tearing up the street, a dull boom and orange rush behind the tube, possibly the train going off.  But none were as vivid as the last thing Mark picked out before the tube reached the top of its parabola.  A hand, scaly, jet-black, each of its four fingers dwarfing the length and width of Mark’s tube, rushed past the tube, just missing it.  Mark could only grin as he watched hundreds of meters of behemoth arm stretch out behind him, and that grin stayed with him as he careened, head first, downwards, towards a skyscraper that had almost gone under.  He shuddered as his tube came to a halt, caught by a massive robotic arm that had sprung from the roof seconds before his arrival.  The arm dragged him inside the building, through a chute, just as it dipped underground, into blackness.

            Mark was in total darkness for a total of seventeen seconds before his tube was lifted off of him.  The fluid inside seemed to evaporate immediately, and Mark realized he wasn’t even wet.  Soothing blue LEDs lit the darkness, guiding Mark in a line towards a doorway.  He opened it and broke out into a smile; waiting for him was Cassidy, dark, clean-cut, and beaming in her officer’s fatigues.  “You made it,” she said, trapping Mark in a running hug.  “Welcome to Japan, baby.  C’mon, we have a meeting to get to.”

            Mark blinked.  “Garganturex blew up my train,” he said.  “He’s attacking the city.”

            “Did your tube print out a form indicating you were delayed from reaching your destination?”

            “No.”

            Cassidy laughed.  “Then you’ll be in trouble if we’re late.  Come on!”

            Mark, like ninety-seven percent of Tokyo’s population, had reached shelter completely unscathed during the attack.  He was no longer gaping at skyscrapers, he was no longer watching holographic PSAs, and he wasn’t trapped in a rocket-propelled tube hurtling through the air.  The only sign that anything was amiss was the pitch-black view through the window, proving they were safely underground.

            And yet, Mark couldn’t stop grinning.