Kaiju Recovery Operation

Liu's Kaiju Recovery Operation. 
See also: 
* Kaiju Remedy shop
* Kaiju Scavenging
==Kaiju and the Marketplace==
KAIJU AND THE MARKETPLACE
PREPARED FOR PAN-PACIFIC DEFENSE CORPS BY [REDACTED]
The worldwide market in kaiju parts is certainly a multibillion-dollar industry. Practitioners of traditional medicines have made unsupportable claims about the powers of kaiju organs to cure various afflictions. Among the remedies sold on the black market are the following:
* Bone/exoskeleton powder, sold as an aphrodisiac.
* Cytophlegm, a chemically cured form of kaiju mucal secretions, known for its powerful adhesive properties. Can be moistened to loosen, then rehardens to previous strength when heated.
* Flaky Cakes, from skin of reptilian kaiju, are said to cure fever and headache when dissolved as tea.
* Headchangers, a hallucinogenic substance derived from the fluids of the kaiju's tertiary pyramidal cortex.
* Totem jewelry made from shavings of kaiju teeth and claws.
* Cilia ropes, fibers often found in the aquatic portions of kaiju lung structures. Nearly unbreakable, these fibers can be woven together into personal armor.
Black-market applications, particularly Headchangers, are of course the most notorious uses of kaiju anatomical remains. However, a number of legitimate medical and scientific advances have also resulted from the study of kaiju anatomy and structure. Not least of these are the achievements of Kaiju Science, which routinely purchases kaiju parts as they become available. These kaiju tissues and cells, combined with Kaiju Science analysis of Anteverse energies and kaiju, have led to the development of more powerful anti-kaiju weapons systems for newer-generation Jaegers. Examples include the burrowing mechanism in the K-Stunner warhead and the adjusted plasma densities in the new generation of gauntlet-mounted I-22 energy weapons. Should funding for the Jaeger project be restored at some future date, these advances would likely accelerate. In the absence of new sources of funding, Jaeger command is advised to consider licensing Kaiju Science technological advances to responsible parties. (P 391)
==Chapter 20==
Once he'd decided not to kill Newt, Chau took him up a series of staircases and out onto a balcony overlooking the Boneslum. Under the lowering sky, it was an eerie scene, and one that jazzed Newt to the core of his being. Imagine the scale of a creature, that when it died they had to reconstruct the city it had tried to destroy around its bones. There was a little poetic justice in it, too. The Kowloon Boneslum was a testament to the will of humanity to survive, to adapt, to rebuild.
You could see exactly where the boundaries of the Exclusion Zone were. They formed a sort of teardrop shape, widest around the kaiju skeleton and trailing back southward, where only a narrow part of the Exclusion Zone reached the waterfront. It had been pricey hotel real estate before. Now the whole area had a different feel. Right up to the edge of the XZ, it was Hong Kong business as usual, packing everything as tightly as possible and steeping it in neon. Every square inch of every surface was designed for one purpose: to make money.
That all stopped at the Boneslum boundary. Inside the XZ, things were built the way Newt imagined they had been before things like building codes and effective local government came along. Streets vanished and reappeared randomly. Buildings rose and leaned against each other, seemingly made of the rubble left in the wake of the kaiju’s passage and the nuclear strikes. The area inside the XZ, except right around the skeleton itself, was like a vision of Hong Kong from a hundred years before, or maybe two hundred. Astonishing, he thought. His mind almost wanted to interpret it as a movie set, because he couldn’t quite believe that such a place still existed literally touching the gleaming steel and neon city that enclosed it.
Newt wondered what a good geneticist would find in a population that had spent the last ten years in the Boneslum. He was guessing a pretty high mutation rate, along with the occasional outright freak.
He had the uncomfortable thought that places like the Kowloon Boneslum were humanity’s versions of the spawning pool in the Anteverse. For a moment it looked like that to him, a teeming and turbulent lawless protozoan mass. His vision of the Anteverse superimposed over it, and Newt started to sweat. He tried to blink away the image. It worked, sort of, but Newt thought he might never view urban poverty the same way again.
Chau’s balcony looked right out over the ribs, with the skull facing toward them. Newt had a strong feeling that something still lived in those bones. Kaiju carried the entire memory of their species in each string of DNA. Who could know what information, what sentience or even will, still survived in those bones?
“That kaiju made land ten years ago,” Hannibal said. “Its blood burned the pavement for a mile around,— but look.” He pointed to the south, where work lights illuminated a group of trucks and a swarm of workers cutting, transporting, and loading. “We’re still mining the bones.” Hannibal grinned. “I’d say I got the best from Stacker on that deal.”
Pentecost probably felt the same way, thought Newt. His boss would do anything to keep the Jaegers battle-ready. Again he was struck by the way that humanity just got on with business. You couldn’t memorialize everything. You had to keep living; you had to survive. You did what you had to do. If that meant you rebuilt part of one of the world’s great cities over the radioactive bones of a dead monster from another dimension, well, so be it. Even as Chau’s men carved wealth from those bones, construction crews were welding together I-beams all around them. Kowloon had survived disasters before. It would always rebuild... as long as there was a world left to rebuild in.
Just this side of the work site was the kaiju’s immense skull. Over the decade since it fell, as the radiation grew less intense and the XZ population more reckless, the locals had made the skull into a temple. Candles, thousands of them, burned in and around it, flickering on the faces of the pilgrims who processed in and out in some kind of ritual. 
“You know, some believe the kaiju are sent from heaven,” Chau said. “They think the gods are displeased with our behavior.”
That’s because people are superstitious monkeys until they’re taught better, Newt thought. He remembered seeing some kind of documentary on kaiju worshippers, the Church of the Breach and others. Some of the names— Disciples of the Overlords of the Lands Below was one he remembered. There were prayers to the kaiju, people claiming that they were entitled to religious holidays during kaiju attacks, all that kind of bullshit.
Newt nodded and asked, “And you?”
Chau laughed. “I believe kaiju bone powder is five hundred bucks a pound. Why are you here? You’re not after powder to keep your girlfriend happy. A guy like you doesn’t have a girlfriend. You’re married to your lab.”
“Oh, I need access to a kaiju brain,” Newt said. The request was so ridiculous he had decided to just spit it out. “Intact if possible.”
Chau was already shaking his head.
“Seriously? No can do. Skull is plated so dense, by the time you drill in—”
“Yeah, yeah, it’s rotted away. I know. But there’s always the secondary brain,” Newt said.
That’s what he’d meant from the beginning. The main cranial brain would be too unwieldy to work with. How could you transport and Drift with something the size of a small whale? But the secondary brain...
“Like dinosaurs had the secondary brain back at the base of their spines, by the pelvis,” Newt continued, remembering when he’d been a little kid and first read that Stegosaurus had a second brain down by its hips. The idea had blown his mind, and maybe, as much as any single other thing, that had set him on the road to where he was today. “They’re—”
He almost told Chau that he thought the dinosaurs were an earlier, cruder version of the kaiju, but he just barely held himself back. Instead he started talking about different kinds of kaiju tissue and the way their silicon-based anatomy enhanced certain processes of neural activation, which let them move so fast and nimbly despite their immense size.
“That’s where they’re, um, different from dinosaurs,” he said, just to have some kind of conclusion. He knew he’d reached a point where he was supposed to stop and let Chau talk, but it was really, really hard.
One thing about the Drift hangover, Newt thought. It makes everything seems weirdly doubled. Secondary brains ... spawning pools ... controlled mutations ....
Hannibal said, “You really know your kaiju anatomy, don’t you, little guy?” He was thinking about something. “I can get that for you ... if I can have legal claim on every fallen kaiju in the Southern Hemisphere.”
This threw Newt off balance, but only for a moment. He hadn’t thought of himself as empowered to make deals on Pentecost’s behalf, but what the hell. Pentecost could complain later; he was the one who had sent Newt here. Also, considering that Newt had no power to enter into arrangements with Chau, he could say whatever he wanted and Chau would still have to get it through Pentecost later. 
“Considering the world is about to end, I’d say we have a deal,” Newt said. Then his inner kaiju-nerd self got the better of him and he added, “But can I at least keep a tooth?”
Hannibal Chau shook his head. “Nope.”
“What about a gland? A tiny gland?”
“Not a one,” Chau said.
Newt sighed. Hard bargain. But the primary objective, which was to get a kaiju brain, was met. The rest of it would have been gravy.
“Fine,” he said. “You got it.”
They shook hands, but in the middle of the grip Hannibal said, “Not so fast. What the hell do you want the lower brain for anyway? Every part of the kaiju sells. Cartilage, liver, spleen—even the crap. A cubic meter of kaiju poo has enough phosphorous to fertilize acres of field. But the brain—too much ammonia. Can’t consume it, can’t even process it into anything useful. It decays so fast that by the time I can figure out what I might use it for, it’s rotten mush.”
Chau loomed over Newt, the fires from the streets of Kowloon reflected in the lenses of his goggles, and even on the metalwork in his teeth.
“What do you think you know that I haven’t figured out yet?”
“Well, that’s classified,” Newt said. “But it’s pretty cool.”
Hannibal held onto his hand. It was part intimidation, part encouragement, and all calibrated to set Newt’s boastful-nerd side against his Kaiju Science responsibilities. This was a deadly combination.
Newt wrestled with himself and lost.
“Okay, okay. Here. I’ve worked out the parameters to Drift with a kaiju,” he said conspiratorially. “Only for a few minutes so far, and the handshake wasn’t perfect, but it was enough to figure a couple of things out. Only problem is, I was using an old bit of brain, just barely alive. Now I’m fresh out of brain tissue. That’s where you come in. Theoretically, if I can go in deeper, I might be able to understand the inner Breach ... and end the war.”
Hannibal’s face was slack and incredulous. His scar pulsed redder than the surrounding skin.
“I know, I know,” Newt said. “Full neural handshake with a kaiju.” He was pretty amazed by it himself. No wonder a non-scientist type like Chau couldn’t believe it.
“You did this?” Hannibal said.
“Yeah,” Newt said with a big grin. “Awesome, right? Their brains, they’re all linked. Like a common core, a hive brain--”
Chau exploded--“You goddamn moron!”
And all over Hong Kong, alarms started to blare.
Category:Main Pages
Category:Kaiju Recovery Operation
Category:Liu
Category:Novelization excerpts
Category:Reckoner (mention)
Category:Reckoner (description)