From the notes of Dr. Houston Brooks
Two brothers, One Hunahpu and Seven Hunahpu, are invited to Xibalba, the Underworld, by the Lords of Death, who send very strange owls to guide them there. Some living Mayan informants claim to know where the entrance to Xibalba is, although no one has definitively nailed this down.
—H.B.
One Hunahpu and Seven Hunahpu left immediately, the messengers guiding them as they descended down the path to Xibalba, the Underworld. They traversed a steep slope until they came out on the banks of the canyons called Trembling Canyon and Murmuring Canyon. They passed through turbulent rivers. They passed through Scorpion River, filled with uncountable numbers of scorpions, but they were not stung. They came to Blood River, and were able to pass because they did not drink of it. Next they arrived at the River of Pus, which they passed, undefeated. Finally they came to the Crossroads, and there they were defeated.
From Popol Vuh: Sacred Book of the Quiché Maya,
written down circa 1554–8
Denham School of Theoretical Science, Philadelphia
“The seemingly unprovoked Godzilla attack on Pensacola has left the world in a state of shock. Monarch officials are scrambling for a response but as of now there is no official directive. Civilians are advised to shelter in place.”
Nathan Lind shook his head as he listened to the report on the radio. Shelter in place? What did that even mean when it came to the Titans? Hiding in an inner hallway or doing the old duck and cover was not going to offer much protection if Godzilla stepped on your house, even if your house was built to withstand a hurricane, which many in Pensacola were.
But then what did he know? Just enough to get his brother and two other pilots killed and himself thoroughly discredited. If he didn’t have tenure, he would have been out on his ass; instead the Denham School of Theoretical Science was content to let him rot away in this dark office, with a minimal workload of intro courses where they figured he couldn’t do any harm. He glanced around the cluttered, unkempt office at his diagrams of the Hollow Earth. The picture of his brother, as he had last seen him, in Monarch flight gear, his helmet with “Unto the Breach” written on it. The piles of manuscripts and books he hadn’t looked at in months.
He had dreams, almost every night. Everything happened as it had: their last drink together, the press briefing on the carrier, the planes entering the tunnel. And at every point in the dream he tried to stop it, make something else happen, say the right thing. But it always ended in that last moment, hearing Dave’s last words.
Everything had imploded after that. Monarch, already tender over how they were perceived by the public, left him to hang. No one blamed him by name. But there was a lot of talk of how the calculations had been wrong, that the Hollow Earth theory had not passed the verification test. Other academics reacted with predictable Schadenfreude, blasting him as a fringe theorist and holding him up as an example of a pseudoscientist whose nonsense had gotten people killed. There were still people at Monarch who knew better, but they weren’t talking. Houston Brooks had retired, and as far as Monarch was concerned, two major debacles on the Hollow Earth front were enough. Pure research for the sake of research was out, replaced by what they considered to be more “practical” projects. At that time the Titans were sleeping; why risk waking more of them up, as they had Camazotz? What if there were a thousand Titans below their feet, just waiting to be riled up like a nest of skyscraper-sized hornets?
He tried to fight it at first, to salvage what he could of his reputation. The fight hadn’t lasted long; he didn’t have the will or the stamina for it.
He heard a faint sound and turned. He was shocked to see a man standing in his office, a man in a very expensive-looking black suit. His dark hair was styled so it almost covered one eye, and he sported a thin mustache. He wasn’t looking at Nathan but was casually surveying the contents of the office. Like he belonged there and was taking inventory.
“Uh, can I help you?” Nathan asked.
The man didn’t answer but continued his review of the various news clippings, diagrams and photographs in the room.
“Look, if you need an appointment, my office hours are nine to five—”
“Oh, please, Dr. Lind,” another voice said. “Guys like us don’t do normal hours, do we?”
Nathan wondered if his jaw had literally dropped, or if it just felt that way. There was another guy sitting across the office—his office. From him. How had he come in within him noticing? Had he been that preoccupied?
And this guy wasn’t just anyone. He still didn’t know who the first man was, but the man who had just called him Dr. Lind was one of the most famous people in the world. There was no mistaking the widow’s peak, the salt-and-pepper beard, the slightly crooked smile. Inventor, entrepreneur, a man who thought so far out of the box that boxes were now all but obsolete: Walter Simmons, founder and CEO of Apex Industries. Nathan watched, struggling to understand what was going on, as Simmons approached his book, the one with the ungainly title Hollow Earth Gravity Paradox and Our New Frontier.
“I’ve been fixated on Hollow Earth as long as you have,” Simmons said. “Your theory that it’s the birthplace of all Titans is fascinating.”
“Your book was very impressive,” the other guy said, finally proving he could speak. “Brilliant ideas.”
“I’ve got about thirty unsold boxes in my apartment if you want some,” Nathan replied.
“Walt Simmons,” Simmons said. “Apex Industries.”
“Y-yeah, yes, sir,” Nathan stammered. “I know who you are. It’s an honor.”
“The honor is mine,” Simmons said. “As is the urgency. Godzilla has never attacked us unprovoked before. These are dangerous times, Dr. Lind. Allow me to introduce Apex’s Chief Technology Officer, Mr. Ren Serizawa. He has an … interesting thing to show you.”
Nathan watched as Serizawa pulled something up on a pad and then placed it on the table. A holographic globe appeared above the pad—the Earth but depicted in MRI imaging. As Nathan studied the digital globe, he began to pick out density representations, lines of magnetic force—and something else. An energy signature that was substantially different than anything else he had ever seen—but which was also oddly familiar. He had seen similar data before, but it hadn’t gone nearly as deep into the planet.
Oh, Lind thought.
“Magnetic imaging from one of our new satellites penetrated the Earth’s mantle,” Simmons said. “You know what this is.”
“Hollow Earth,” Nathan breathed, his gaze still picking over it, now identifying hollow spaces, some very large, others smaller but nevertheless distinct.
Simmons nodded. “An ecosystem as vast as any desert or ocean, beneath our very feet.”
Nathan continued tracing the contours of it, hardly believing what he was seeing. His theory predicted this, all of this, right down to the global electrostatic barrier, the boundary that certainly marked the gravitational reversal, the Swiss cheese nature of the interior of the world. Although that one central pocket was a little larger than he had imagined.
And that unknown energy represented … he couldn’t be sure what it was exactly, but the sheer power it signified agreed with his prediction that there must be some vital force to sustain life in lieu of sunlight and chemical outflow.
“This energy signal,” he said. “It’s enormous.”
“And almost identical to readings from Gojira,” Serizawa said.
“As our sun fuels the planet’s surface, this energy sustains the Hollow Earth,” Simmons said, “enabling life as powerful as our aggressive Titan friend. If we can harness this … life force … we’ll have a weapon that can defeat Godzilla.”
That was it. That made it all snap into place. Monarch scientists had been debating the nature of Godzilla’s metabolism since he had first reappeared in 2014. It was clearly linked to radiation—after all, Ishiro Serizawa had used a thermonuclear bomb to jump-start the Titan—but many speculated that Godzilla converted conventionally understood radiation into some other form of energy, which manifested into the beam of unknown energy he discharged from his mouth. Which did not closely resemble the nuclear particles and waves discharged by a fission or fusion reaction.
Here was the proof, another sort of energy, perhaps not nuclear in origin, but tied more closely to quantum states…
He noticed Serizawa and Simmons exchange a quick glance. Then, as if they had reached some tacit agreement, Simmons met Nathan’s gaze.
“I need your help to find it,” Simmons said.
Nathan’s first reaction was stunned disbelief, followed quickly by suspicion that they were mocking him. But that seemed like a weird thing for a billionaire tech giant to do, slum down to a basement office just to make fun of a has-been geologist. That left him with the possibility that they were—as impossible as it seemed—serious.
Hell, yes, Nathan wanted to say. What came out instead was a bitter laugh.
“I don’t know if I’m the right guy for the job,” he said. “Did you read the reviews?” He picked up one of his books. “‘A sci-fi quack trading in fringe physics,’” he quoted. Then he nodded at their surroundings. “Look where they put my office—I’m in the basement right across from the flute class. Besides, I’m not with Monarch anymore. And Hollow Earth entry is impossible. We tried.”
His throat caught on those last words. Simmons softened immediately and glanced at the news clipping about Dave.
“I’m sorry about your brother,” Simmons said. “He was a true pioneer.”
“Thank you,” Nathan said, trying to put on a polite smile, but it was, in fact, all he could do not to break down. He took a steadying breath. Simmons gave him a moment, then motioned toward the holographic globe.
“All forward scans suggested a habitable environment down there. So … what really went wrong? Your brother’s mission.”
Nathan took a moment to try to distance himself from the subject. To try to explain it dispassionately.
“When they tried to enter,” he finally said, “they hit a gravitational inversion. A whole planet’s worth of gravity reversed in a split second. Like flying a Volkswagen into a black hole, so … they were crushed in an instant.”
Simmons nodded, as if he’d just heard something he already knew. “What if I told you that we at Apex have developed a phenomenal craft that could sustain such an inversion?” He nodded at Serizawa. The technology officer pulled up something on the tablet that turned out to be specs for some sort of machine.
“The Hollow Earth anti-gravity vehicle,” Simmons said. “HEAV.”
“The right tool for the job,” Serizawa added.
Nathan stared at the specs, instantly overwhelmed by the design. This was his dream vehicle, the one he’d seen the possibility of but could never harness the technology to build.
And Simmons had built it.
“We can make the Hollow Earth entry possible,” Simmons said. “We just need you to lead the mission.” Simmons sat down next to him. “Help me,” he pressed. “Help everyone. Finding this needle in a haystack is our best shot against Godzilla.”
Nathan’s mind had already shifted into overdrive, something that hadn’t happened in a long time. He had theorized on an energy source in Hollow Earth, but it had not been the point of the expedition Dave had spearheaded. That had been pure science, a voyage of discovery.
But he could work with this. If Simmons’s objective was to find the energy source, that was okay. It was still a path that led to Hollow Earth, to everything he and Dave had been trying to accomplish. But it did present a bit of a problem—they would have to find it. And it wasn’t likely to be obvious to human senses or to the machines that they had created to enhance those senses.
A green plant, an anole lizard—most life on Earth had evolved to perceive the presence of the sun, to react to it. A plant bent toward the light, trying to maximize the energy it could draw from it. An anole warmed its blood in the sun, moved to shade when it was too hot, buried itself and hibernated when the luminary’s warmth was no longer enough to power it. Nocturnal animals reacted negatively to the sun, staying hidden when it was out, emerging when darkness came. But, as the surface world’s chief source of power, the sun was salient, and living things recognized that.
Even if you could not perceive the sun, you could use a sunflower to find where it was; the sunflower would turn toward it.
By that logic, what would turn toward the power source of Hollow Earth?
Nathan stood, walked over to a pile of papers and magazines, and dug out his copy of A Scientific Future magazine and the cover article “Kong: Genetic Memory and Species Origins” by Dr. Ilene Andrews.
“I have an idea,” he told Simmons. “But it’s crazy.”
“Love it!” Simmons said. “Crazy ideas made me rich.”
Nathan waved the magazine. “Are you guys familiar with the concept of genetic memory? It’s the theory that all Titans share an impulse to return to their evolutionary source.”
“Like spawning salmon,” Serizawa said.
“Exactly,” Nathan said. “Or a homing pigeon.” He pointed at the holographic globe. “So if this is the Titans’ home, and this … life force sustains them—”
“A Titan could show you the way to the energy source,” Serizawa said.
“Yes,” Nathan agreed. “With a little help from an old colleague.”
Skull Island
Ilene hadn’t seen Nathan Lind in almost a year. Back then, he had been sincere, energetic, charming in a clueless sort of way. He had come to Skull Island pursuing the same leprechaun that Houston Brooks and a half-dozen other scientists had come for in the last fifty years—a path from Skull Island to Hollow Earth. She had been caught up in it herself at the time; Iwi mythology suggested that much of the life of the island—including most of the people themselves—had come up from some ancient, mythic underworld. The biological reality of the island seemed to confirm the mythology. If you looked at a continent like Australia, which broke off from Pangaea before the dinosaurs became extinct, you could see that tens of millions of years of isolation had encouraged life to diverge quite radically from the rest of the world; marsupials dominated the megafauna instead of the placental mammals that ruled the other continents, for instance. Monotremes, egg-laying mammals once found everywhere, had survived and continued to evolve in Australia and New Guinea, but nowhere else, exemplified by that weirdest of creatures, the duck-billed platypus.
Biologists and geographers recognized a famous demarcation called the Wallace Line, separating Borneo and everything west of it from Sulawesi, New Guinea, and Australia—all of which had once been a part of or very near a Greater Australian continent known as Sahul that was now partly submerged. East of the Wallace Line was like an alternate universe, an alternative Earth. A place where things evolved differently. And yet, the genetic roots of everything in Australia could be found, both in the fossil record and in living species, on other continents, most notably South America and Antarctica, to which Sahul had been most recently connected.
You could trace a similar line around Skull Island. Call it the Lin Line, after the scientist who first formally described much of the island’s flora and fauna. But if the Wallace line seemed to mark a border between what was “normal” in most of the world and the weirdness that was Australia, the plants and animals of Skull Island were a whole different degree of strange. Some looked like odd, often gigantic versions of more widely known animals, but in most cases, these seemed to be cases of convergent evolution, superficial resemblance based on similar adaptations—the way that marsupial moles and placental moles resembled one another, although a placental mole was far more closely related to a whale or a giraffe than to any marsupial. Similarly, though a Skull Island leafwing might superficially resemble a bird, it most decidedly was not.
And unlike the fauna of Australia, it was sometimes difficult to find any close or even very distant relatives on other continents. Skullcrawlers were an excellent example. Genetic analysis suggested that they split off from the amniote line that led to modern reptiles, birds, and mammals before those groups diverged from one another. Yet besides that very distant reptiliomorph heritage, there were no other fossil or living relatives of the Skullcrawler lineage known from anywhere else on Earth. So how and where had they evolved?
One obvious answer, the one Ilene herself favored, was to take the Iwi at their word: they had come from beneath, along with the other animal and plant inhabitants of the island. Isolated, Skull Island had made its own, divergent way. Skull Island, she had famously claimed, was like the Hollow Earth brought to the surface.
When they discovered what was to be charmingly called the “Vile Vortex,” Brooks’s speculations—and her own—had been vindicated. Nathan’s older brother David Lind had become the spearhead of a Monarch expedition to enter Hollow Earth via the Vortex. Nathan, whose theories about Hollow Earth seemed to straddle the plausible and the avant-garde, and who had just published a popular book on the subject, was brought in to consult. It was Nathan who had identified and mathematically described the electrostatic barrier separating the surface of the Earth from the maze of chambers and tunnels underneath, as well as what he called the probability of a “gravity inversion.”
Things hadn’t gone as planned. Prior to the proposed expedition, the storms that surrounded and protected the island had intensified and begun to creep toward shore. At first, they thought this had something to do with the widespread environmental destruction wrought by Ghidorah, perhaps also linked with climate change, but in blasting the caverns beneath Skull Island—wide enough for planes to go through—they had inadvertently released Camazotz, a bat-like Titan who had apparently “called” the storm to shield it from the sunlight it abhorred. Kong and the pilots training for the Hollow Earth expedition had managed to defeat Camazotz, but the Vortex had been destabilized—and worse, Camazotz had drawn the tempest ashore and sustained it there.
In any case, Nathan’s dream of finding a path to Earth’s secret depths on Skull Island had been dashed when his brother and two other pilots lost their lives trying to enter the Vortex. Soon after that, Nathan had cut his ties with Monarch. Ilene had made a few attempts to check in on him and how he was doing. None had gotten past a few perfunctory comments, and finally he quit returning her calls and texts entirely. She hated to admit it, but it had been something of a relief; it was hard to watch someone she liked self-destruct.
And now, suddenly, here he was, requesting a video conference. She had agreed, and after working out their very different time zones, they had set up the call.
He looked thinner, hollow around the eyes. He’d grown a beard, and not a well-groomed one. His demeanor was more jaded, or perhaps he was simply exhausted.
“Nathan, you’re looking well,” she lied. “It’s been a long time.”
“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “It has. I’ve been, you know, busy. Becoming a laughingstock.”
She sighed. “I haven’t seen you since … well. I wanted to tell you, I think what happened to you was unfair.”
“I got three people killed,” he said. “One of them was my brother. I lost over a billion dollars in equipment, and I made Monarch look ridiculous. I can’t really blame them for pushing me off the cliff.”
“Priorities were changing,” she said. “Theoretical work like yours and mine got the shaft. I’m only here because of the investment they made—continue to make—in Kong.”
“How’s that going?” he asked.
“There’s a lot I can’t tell you,” she said.
“How about this?” Nathan said. “I’ll tell you what I already know, and we can go on from there.”
“Fair enough,” she said, cautiously.
“I know after the Vortex anchored the off-shore storm to the island, you built a containment facility for Kong.”
“It’s not a containment facility,” she said. “It’s a biodome. A haven.”
“So he hasn’t tried to get out?”
She hesitated, unsure what to say. Instead, she changed the topic.
“What’s this about, Nathan?”
“I’ve been offered a job,” he said. “By Walter Simmons. Apex. They want to fund an expedition to Hollow Earth.”
“Nathan—”
“I know what happened last time,” he said. “I know how to fix it. The aircraft we used before were not suited to the job. Apex has the goods.”
“And why are you telling me this, Nathan? You concluded Skull Island wasn’t a viable entry point. The Vortex is too unstable, not to mention the storm.”
“It isn’t viable,” he said. “But that’s not why I called you.”
She paused for a moment, trying to read his face.
“Tell me this doesn’t involve Kong,” she finally said.
“Do you remember what you wrote about genetic memory?”
She frowned, ran the sentence over in her mind.
“No,” she said.
“You haven’t heard—”
“I don’t have to,” she said. “The answer is no.”
Nathan paused and looked down at his desk. Then he looked back up, and she thought she saw some of his old energy there.
“It’s important,” he said. “Listen, I don’t want to discuss this anymore long-distance. Monarch and Apex are doing this as a joint operation, with Apex providing the equipment and expertise. Monarch has taken me back on, and, uh—I’m in charge. I’ll be flying out this evening to meet with you. All I ask is that you keep an open mind.”
“Is that an order?” she said.
“Look,” he said. “I understand. I’m not here to railroad you. But I do hope to convince you. Kong is your baby, I know that.”
“That’s right,” she said. “And as long as you keep that in mind…” She pursed her lips on the rest of the sentence, then nodded.
“I’ll see you when you get here,” she said.
“It was nice talking to you again, Ilene.”
“The same, I’m sure, Dr. Lind.”
* * *
Ilene had worked with several so-called “language apes” when she had been in graduate school, teaching and learning to communicate with them in sign language. One of them, a chimpanzee named Puck, had been a third-generation signer; another, a young gorilla named Fancy, was learning sign from the ground up.
As an anthropological linguist, Ilene had found Puck the most interesting. He had learned his sign vocabulary and grammar from his mother, who had learned it from her mother, and while humans were involved in the process, Ilene was certain she could see a unique language developing, something with striking differences in grammatical construction and semantics than the original language. The meaning of some words had shifted in three generations; the word order was different from English. In Puck’s pidgin sign language, she thought she might learn something about how humans invented language in the first place.
Fancy, on the other hand, had mostly been frustrating. With her, language use was still tied mostly to reward, and at times Ilene felt she was merely complicit in teaching an animal to do a fancy parlor trick.
When trying to teach Kong to sign, she wished that she could even get that far, but in more than a year she had not had the slightest of successes. She had begun the attempt when she noticed the Titan watching her and Jia communicate. He still did that; he seemed to be fascinated by their signing. He seemed less interested when she tried to teach him, but it did not stop her from trying. Intelligence was a messy, awkward thing to measure, but there could be little doubt that Kong was at least as intelligent as a chimpanzee. His brain was gigantic, of course, but to understand its capacity, you also had to factor in the size of his body. Intelligence, generally speaking, had to do with the relative size of brain and body. Chimp brains were not just absolutely smaller than human brains but were smaller in proportion to their body mass as well. Radar and sonar brain scans taken while he was unconscious suggested Kong’s brain was closer in relative size to that of a human than that of a chimp or a gorilla. Yet it wasn’t just about size alone, but about how the different parts of the brain were arranged, and Kong’s brain was … strange.
Today had not started out more hopeful than any other. But Ilene felt a touch of desperation. Nathan was on the way, and whatever he wanted—whatever Monarch wanted—it probably was not going to be good. Some part of her felt that she needed a breakthrough immediately. She needed to get into that huge head. To be able to talk to him.
And today, he was following her—she was sure of it. Watching her fingers, listening to her voice, amplified over the loudspeaker.
You: Kong, she signed. Me: Ilene. She: Jia.
His eyes shifted with the words.
Yes, she signed. Good. Can you talk with hands? Say “Kong”?
That was easy. All he really had to do was point to himself. Bonus if he made the sign Jia had made up for “Kong.”
At first, he didn’t do anything, so she went back through the whole rigmarole.
Then to her shock and delight, Kong lifted his hand. His lips parted, not threatening, not showing teeth. A convivial gesture, a greeting even.
Come on! she thought.
Kong then scratched his nose, let out an extended, windy yawn, and turned away.
She closed her eyes and sighed. When she opened them, Jia was there between them.
Ha, ha, she signed.
It’s not funny, she said. Jia, this could be important. If we could communicate with him, really talk to him—that could be huge.
Jia shrugged. He doesn’t talk, she said.
“Tell me about it.”