一個寓意深沉的故事:某個遠處的莊生夢…… 

The Monster from Mars - by Jason Leung, Year 2 at college (2006) 

On an island off the Japanese coast, 20XX 

Dr. Serisawa was bored and lonely. At three in the morning, he was the only staff still working in this section of the secret research facility, a converted American base on an unnamed island in the Pacific Ocean. He toyed with the extant pile of administrative paperwork, his mind increasingly wandering back to when secret government work was still exciting to him. Even through the windowless concrete walls, he could hear another storm starting. The paperwork was still as tedious as back when it was actually made of paper. With the help of a Thermos of tea, he told himself that he didn’t need as much sleep as the younger employees, even with their new-fangled stimulant pills and ElectroArgus implants. Dr. Serisawa rubbed his eyes, ignoring the muffled sounds of rain and thunder as he tried to concentrate on the display in front of him. He couldn’t sleep yet, he told himself, but sleep insisted otherwise and his vision soon became a blur of blackness. 

He was wandering alone in a red world, where the ground was nothing but crimson desert. The sky was a shade of rust and the weak, cold sun barely shone through the haze. Spurs of bloody rock stabbed through the sand, little nubs, sharp pillars and enormous slabs the size of mountains, brooding in the distance. Every step he took raised little puffs of red dust, like dirt from a mausoleum. His head felt light. 

He realized that he shouldn’t be here, he should be dead. Then why was he walking here? The desert was not for your feet to tread upon, whispered the dead things beneath the sand. Abandon the trek and return to the safe place. Return. 

A set of cyclopean footprints stretched into the haze. All the time, he had been walking beside them. 

Dr. Serisawa peeled his face off the desk with an extended shudder. This was the real reason he didn’t want to sleep. Of late, his dreams were filled with alien landscapes filled with a pervasive sense of wrongness, in which he was a profoundly violating presence. While nothing outright terrifying ever pushed those dreams into the category of nightmare, they made him feel that somehow that his mere existence was an act of desecration. He decided to give up. A bit stiffly, Dr. Serisawa logged off his virtual terminal and stretched. 

He’d been working for more than thirty years on an island which couldn’t be found on a map. Decades of service has earned him a senior if redundant post in the facility’s small hierarchy, where each new young recruit pushed him further into obsolescence. He knew he was far from the most brilliant xenobiologist in the facility on the first day of the job, but now he had fallen even further behind the scientific curve. The younger researchers on the island today were all eccentric, blank-eyed types with wires poking from their necks and computers sewn into their lab coats. They could work equipment halfway across the facility just by thinking about it, but couldn’t make a decent cup of tea. They laughed at jokes he didn’t understand and radio-whispered to each other behind his back. 

Dr. Serisawa left his office for the access elevator, which put him through the requisite security checks before it could take him to the deepest security level. He went through the motions on automatic, keying his passwords, presenting his fingerprints and stood patiently in the little waiting chamber as hidden scanners confirmed his identity. The wireheads didn’t like the procedures because it interfered with their implants and gear, so they seldom visited the lowest levels at all, preferring to use the remote rigs to conduct their experiments. This was ironic, because the lowest levels hosted their research subject, the primary reason for the facility’s existence. The little bullet-shaped lift slid down the armored shaft as Dr. Serisawa checked his watch. There were still many hours before daybreak. 

The elevator doors opened into a low, wide cavern, the rock walls painted white. Dr. Serisawa walked down a suspended steel walkway to the heart of the chamber, past empty workstations, forests of sensor masts and robot-controlled gun batteries, all aimed inwards. Strings of electric lights provided a dim blue glow day and night. Eventually he reached where the walkway became a vast ring around a circular pit, in which was a vast, shadowed bulk. 

He beheld the Daikaiju everyone in the facility called Mordecai, the Monster from Mars. 

Mordecai had arrived on Earth riding a meteorite. It would have struck and obliterated the heart of Tokyo if the Americans hadn’t intervened, according to them. Dr. Serisawa didn’t even know SAC had some of the weapons they claimed to have used, but they had succeeded in diverting the meteorite’s impact into the Pacific Ocean. The media said a sudden earthquake caused the ensuring tsunami that lashed the coast of Japan, and Dr. Serisawa himself had to see to having his family evacuated. Such a claim would have raised questions in saner times, but the meteorite was only the least of the inexplicable things that happened those days. But the tsunami was not the end of it. A week later, a joint Japanese/American fleet intercepted the Daikaiju Mordecai en route to Japan, traveling underwater at incredible speeds. 

Its gigantic form was vaguely visible in the swirling, milky liquid which filled its containment pit, excavated twenty stories deep into the island’s bedrock. It was not only lined with lead and concrete but also crisscrossed with a web of metal girders inside and out, wrapping around the monster and impaling it in place. Quietly whirring pumps and snaking tubes fed unnatural substances into the beast, weakening it but sustaining its life. An intricate array of crystalline aerials hung over the center of the pit formed the Individual Memetic Interference System, one of the many strange devices the Americans have installed in the early days of the facility. They claimed it was critical to the security of the facility, but Dr. Serisawa could see no obvious function to it. 

Dr. Serisawa reached the fence at the rim of the pit. The milky liquid – or maybe it was the thing within – still gave off that sharp stench, something that reminded Dr. Serisawa of mold and rotting fish, a repulsive scent he could never get used to. He strained his gaze into the unlighted pit, at the hulk that lurked under the surface. He had studied the thing for more than thirty years and he ought to know everything the facility could find out about the monster. But progress has been frustratingly slow. Files were inexplicably misplaced, “freak accidents” destroyed equipment and massive security rearrangements dogged his work for decades. The security personnel on the island have rooted out spies and caught saboteurs in the ventilation system every few years, despite the remoteness of the installation. Dr. Serisawa has often wondered how many of the young, wired researchers would turn out to be working for another government and be escorted from the facility, to wherever the government took them. As far as Dr Serisawa knew, Mordecai was one of a kind on the entire planet, a unique specimen of an intelligent, non-microscopic species that could be demonstrably proven to be from Mars. The sheer exuberance of studying such a monster was a feeling Dr. Serisawa still felt sometimes, and it almost justified the intrusion attempts, the isolation and the thirty years of fruitless toil. 

He walked around the pit until he reached the terminal with the Daikaiju Psychic Communication System, another of the dubious pieces of technology the Americans had installed. Dr. Serisawa had no idea how they could have developed a device that could translate the brainwaves of an alien monster into clear Japanese, and in any case he had never made any sense out of the garbled noises the machine produced. Nevertheless, he sat down and put on the old, clunky headset, connecting his head to the dusty terminal. Maybe he was going senile, but he liked to pretend that he could communicate with the alien monster in the pit, chatting about trivialities of Martian culture and the mating habits of the planet’s lesser fauna. Taking off his spectacles, he sat down and closed his eyes to rest a bit after the long walk. 

Red sand wrapped around the landscape like a bloody cerement. The dust he was treading was thick enough to rise and choke a man to death, if there was enough air for wind to blow. He was still walking, his feet following the gargantuan tracks that led to the uncertain horizon.  

Time passed as he followed the footprints. The sun always shone weakly through the perpetual haze, hardly moving from where it hung. The looming red mountains must be far away, because he never noticed them shift position. But he was sure he was walking because when he looked back, he could see both sets of footprints receding back into the dust. He took another step forward and suddenly the haze parted, and he saw the massive, unmistakable shape squatting in the sand. The footprints ended under it. 

You.” Said Mordecai. 

“You talk!” Dr. Serisawa exclaimed delightedly. His cry sounded quiet in the dead landscape. 

The monster stirred. “I share your surprise.”  

Dr. Serisawa remembered when he first saw the Monster from Mars. He was one of the scientists on board the relief fleet, kept a hundred miles behind the main task force engaged with the operation to stop the monster. He had considered it unlikely that even the US navy could capture the monster alive, even with the multiplicity of “secret weapons” he had heard from rumors among the crew. For three days and nights the ship he was on had stayed a safe distance from the battles, but he did not miss the calamitous flashes of light that outshone the sun nor the underwater explosions that sent the hull shivering. 

At the dawn of the fourth day the relief fleet received the order to move in. Dr. Serisawa at first did not believe the immensity of the thing, battered and smoking as it was, with great holes gouged into its carapace by missiles and gunfire. It was floating inert on the brightening sea, its monstrous crab-shape looming over the wary vessels that encircled it. Irregular eye-apertures dotted the monster in all directions, and he wondered why most of them were shot out during the battle. (He knows the answer now. Mordecai’s eyes could fire energy rays that carved through steel like butter.) But what was more harrowing was the devastation wreaked on the joint fleet – over half the ships he had seen set off were burning or sinking, their smoke mingling with the monster’s in a pall that overshadowed the engagement zone. The fires reflected in the sea and the rising sun painted the whole world bright red, the color of blood and fire and dying suns. As his ship closed in on the floating hulk, Dr. Serisawa couldn’t help but think that a Ragnarok had just been won. 

The media later explained it as a terrorist nuclear attack on a joint naval exercise. 

On many nights like these, he’d take the elevator down to the containment pool and watch the thing’s increasingly feeble movements. Year by year, its limbs twitched less and less and its metabolism slowed. Despite the researchers’ best efforts to preserve their study subject, Mordecai was slowly rotting alive in its tank, dying of the same unhealed injuries from its battle in the Pacific. Now, Dr. Serisawa had sensed that its time was short. Just like him, really. 

In his idler moments, Dr. Serisawa had wondered if he could ever successfully communicate with it. There was little he hadn’t already found out about Mordecai itself from years of study, and he considered little about questions of sociology or culture, simply because of the sheer improbability that the monster was some average member of a tool-using civilization. Of course, he also knew the unlikeliness of such a creature existing in the first place, contravening all known theories of biology and astronomy. But he had touched the monster’s pitted carapace through the glove of a hazard suit, overseen its laborious vivisection operation and scrutinized its bio-tissues under the microscope. There was one thing he could not unravel with his tools and his laboratories – Mordecai’s vast and impenetrable mind. Dr. Serisawa had estimated that the monster’s brain was large and complex enough for sentient thought, but he could not even start to decipher the slow buzz of electricity and alien chemicals that percolated through it. The American-built D.P.C.S. had never worked, another avenue with a dead end out of the dozens he had taken. 

And here was Mordecai itself, in this red desert, strangely loquacious. Neither was it moldering silently in a tank of noxious chemicals nor was it wreaking destruction on the defenders of Earth. The creature’s original encounter was already something out of a cheesy kaiju film, and the situation Dr. Serisawa now found himself in merely piled absurdity on top of absurdity. But he had long dealt with absurdity – after all, he had lived for three decades on an island that officially didn’t exist, studying a monster that scientifically shouldn’t exist. So unlike other people, Dr. Serisawa wasn’t overly surprised.  

He had also long thought of the first question he would ask the thing. 

“So,” Dr. Serisawa said to the beast. “Why did you come here?” 

“I was meant to end the Earth.” 

He had also imagined what Mordecai’s answer might be. He didn’t expect it to be so… frank. 

“Destroy the world? Why?” 

“Not destroy, but end. I was only part of a larger plan. And I came because you wanted me to.” 

The conversation was becoming increasing unreal, even by Serisawa’s jaded standards. “I…did?” 

Mordecai shifted its bulk off its footprints and started moving. Dr. Serisawa followed it. 

“I once slept under these red sands, and I dreamed. These dreams were slow and pale things in the beginning, like wisps of mist wandering in starless space. Then I saw a vision, a vision of a blue planet and the small, quick things that were born on it.” 

Dr. Serisawa realized it was talking about Earth. 

“The small, quick things moved, and they divided, and they dreamt. They dreamt of passions, they dreamt of rules, they dreamt of things like themselves. Their dreams were many and they were small, but then they grew stronger and became one, wrapping around their planet like a glittering atmosphere. All this I watched as I dreamed. 

“The dreams of the blue planet did not stop growing. They spread outwards and engulfed the red planet on which I slept. Eventually the blue planet’s dream mingled with mine own and I could hear the voices that echo within. Most of these voices I listened to, but I could not understand them. In return, some of the small, quick things that dreamed came into contact with my dream, but I guess they could not understand it either.” 

Mordecai’s enormous legs carried its bulk across the red desert as smoothly as if it was swimming. Dr. Serisawa struggled to keep up, heart and mind both racing. 

“But I listened long to this discordant, alien dream, and soon I could discern patterns, rhythms.” It continued. “And these patterns and rhythms were broad enough, consistent enough for me to understand their message.” 

“And these dreams, they told you to end the Earth?” Dr. Serisawa queried. 

 The monster’s footfalls beat the ground softly, raising a small dust cloud that coated Dr. Serisawa to the thighs. Mordecai, not heeding, cut like a bow wave through the sea of red. 

“One pattern amongst them captured my attention. It tugged at my mind insistently and over uncounted nights, drew it across the void between worlds. I struggled to comprehend its purpose and the great effort soon changed me. My mind warped, condensed, forcing new elements into awareness that I had no words for. My dreams became brighter and shorter. For the first time, I awoke.” 

Mordecai sloughed to a stop. The wave of dust slowly settled behind him. 

“And my mind was filled with the purpose you described.” 

Dr. Serisawa finally caught up. “So you left Mars,” He said, hands on his knees, “And came to Earth as a meteorite.” 

“I shifted into a chrysalis form.” Mordecai replied indifferently. 

“But…wait.” Dr. Serisawa said breathlessly. “I don’t expect you to emphasize with the people you were willing to kill, or feel remorse with the deaths you have already caused, but why did you go to Earth and risk your destruction on the weight of nothing more than a suggestion?” 

“The suggestion was more persuasive to me than to you.” Mordecai replied simply. 

“What is the difference?” Dr. Serisawa demanded. 

“You do not understand the intensity of your dreams.” It said. “They surround your species and make the universe appear as it is. They are statements of absolute truth and meaning. Dim dreamer that I am, I cannot help but be persuaded. And secondly,” The monster continued, “I did not contemplate failure because they were not in your dreams. Your destruction was a wavering certainty but a certainty nevertheless. 

“When I arrived at the blue world I prepared accordingly. You hurled your most destructive bombs at me. You pitted giant, potent metal weapons built in your own shape against me. You even called upon forbidden forces greater than your own and unleashed them on me. But still I would not be stopped, because it was not meant to happen.” 

“So why did you lose? And why did you end up here?” 

Mordecai was still. 

“The dreams changed.” 

Dr. Serisawa found the old Thermos in the pocket of his lab coat. He twisted it open, withered hands squeaking against the pitted silver surface, and took a swig of cold, bitter tea, and then splashed some on his handkerchief, wiping the red grave-dust off his face. 

His isolation his career demanded, the confidentiality of the project, had driven him from his family. For all the letters he wrote and all the visits he made he had become as distant as a stranger to his wife and children. Quitting the job wouldn’t help because what he knew was far beyond the clearance of even mundane national secrets, and part of what he knew was he would never be let back into the outside world. Kept around the lab, his future held nothing but a long slide towards senility and obscurity. All this because of a sentient meteor.  

At least, looking up at Mordecai’s pitted flank, he wasn’t the one stuck in the containment pit. 

“One last question.” He dragged his aching bones and called up to the stationary beast. “What now? For you and… for us?” 

Mordecai settled further into the sand. A red mist rises around them. “I am broken and dying. Your dream has suffused my mind and it sustains my consciousness. I can no longer burrow beneath the red sands and sleep, to dream my slow, dim dreams. So I continue to watch your blue world, and wait.” 

“Wait for what?” 

“All dreams end, human. When yours end, mine will begin anew.” 

Dr. Serisawa jerked upright behind the D.P.C.S. console. 

Dim blue lights lit the lowest level of the research facility. The crisscrossing gangways lead empty in and out of the shadows. In the effulgent containment pit, Mordecai was quiescent. 

He checked his old, ticking analogue watch. It was almost an hour before dawn. The Doctor picked himself up and headed blearily for the access elevator.