Godzilla Revelations
Part 1
Prelude to Revelation: Erica's
Journey
by
D. A. Tindall
AKA The Quandary Man
Originally written
1997-1998. Transcribed and updated 2015.
Chapter 2 -
Singularity
Forgive you for damning me?
Erica thinks as an anger not entirely her own wells up inside her. You
selfish old man. An explosion has torn Erica from her living vessel a
second time. She can feel herself drifting apart with each passing moment, and
her missing fragments move with ambition. This time, however, the separation is
not permanent, for, unlike her frail human body, Erica’s physical being
allegedly cannot be killed or destroyed. It only can be broken down and
dismantled. A unique psychic bridge—created between the trinity of organisms
that combined to form Biollante—is the only thing that holds the disparate
masses of cells together now. When once they were a single, new organism, they
now struggle to pull apart from one another because one of their number thinks
it has found its true path.
The fragments of Godzilla cells in
Biollante’s body feel the vitality of the Godzilla cells on Mothra’s talons,
and they hunger for it. Erica feels it herself within the orange orb that contains
her very being. The pull is different this time. Erica does not know how much
has changed on Earth since her Godzilla cells were separated from their
original host. The Godzilla cells that Mothra carries are from a very different
Godzilla, a Godzilla torn free from time itself and mutated into something
larger and even more menacing than he was before. The machinations of time
travelers from the year 2204 had led to a new form of Godzilla whose cells were
nourished with modern nuclear energy instead of the primitive materials used in
the bomb tests of 1954.
If Erica knew of these changes,
then she would question why she herself even continues to exist. If Godzilla
had been transplanted from the time of his birth to another time just a year
ago in 1991, then her death—Biollante’s creation—never should have happened.
The race for the Godzilla cells. The explosion. Her father’s assassination. But
her memory, sketchy as it is at the moment, feels unaltered. Every moment that
flashes in her mind tells her there still was a Godzilla in 1984. Even if Erica
knew these questions were there to be asked, then they still would not matter
as much as the pull. The pull is the only thing that ever mattered, and it
beckons her in the opposite direction of her home. The large blue orb cluster
of Biollante’s cells continues to float into space, and Erica, controlling the
flight of the smaller orange orb, follows close behind it.
With no need for eyes or even a
concept of passing time, Erica does not know that she has been traveling in
space for an entire Earth year. She only follows a hazy string of light in the
darkness, never knowing how quickly she is moving. Passing between unseen
layers of dimensions as a combination of physical molecules and spiritual
consciousness, Erica would not know, even as a scientist, if any calculation
existed to explain how she covers her distance so quickly. The farther she
progresses, however, the stronger she can feel her physical being becoming. The
regenerative aspects of the rose in Biollante’s cells allow her to absorb
energy as she travels, providing her a seemingly endless food supply, but there
is more. Pure animal instinct has been driving the blue orb ahead of her for so
long, but its will alone is not enough as the psychic bridge between Erica’s
cells begins to weaken within its form. The orb has been shrinking, losing bits
of itself that Erica has picked up along the way, and she slowly draws closer
and closer to becoming whole again. Still, the shrunken blue cluster that remains
continues to elude her.
How can they avoid me? she
thinks. They are mine. Frustrated, Erica knows she is lying to herself.
She knows all too well that her body does not belong to her alone. She tries to
deny it, but she learned the truth in Lake Ashino, the truth that part of her
body once belonged to Godzilla. Her father’s creation was a beast with two
minds and two agendas, and its body was made of not one mass of cells but
three. The first two, widely known and accepted, were the rose and Godzilla, but
Erica was the third.
1989. The world was aghast to learn
that it had more than one monster. Photos appeared in newspapers in every
country of the enormous rosebud sitting in Lake Ashino. It didn’t move to
attack civilization. It only sat there, waiting and crying, but the plant’s
size and the toothy flytrap vines slithering around it evoked all the necessary
fear in the populace just days after the news broke that Godzilla still lived
within Mt. Mihara and might even be freed from his molten prison if avaricious
men’s demands were met. Dr. Shiragami stood on the edge of a pier in the lake,
overlooking his creation. He told the world that this giant rose was his
creation, the combination of Godzilla and plant cells, but he did not let on
that his belief in Erica’s spirit was far more science than supernatural. He
did not have to admit that there was a strand of human DNA from his own
daughter running through the creature’s form. The faith he had in Erica’s
earthbound spirit was enough, and Miki Saegusa was his prophet, proselytizing
that she could hear Erica’s voice within the creature… until she couldn’t.
Between layers of dimensions
separating life and death, Erica could see and move, but she could not feel or
be felt or touched. Her father’s presence on the dock stirred something within
her. Although she was connected again to a physical form, Erica could project
her consciousness outward, invisible to the living eye. The pull, ever-present,
drew her consciousness toward her father, and she felt his anguish. For that
moment, she forgot about how much she hated him for what he had done to her, or
so she thought. She could not make out the words as Dr. Shiragami argued on the
pier with reporters, but she could feel his anger. His anger quickly became her
anger, and her anger quickly became Biollante’s anger. A vine from beneath the
water lashed out, destroying the edge of the pier and just barely missing any
human life standing on it. Shocked that she could have taken her own father’s
life, she remembered lashing out in her father’s laboratory and killing the two
men that had attempted to steal her father’s work. She almost killed a third in
that same skirmish, but the Saradian agent escaped, causing the first pain she
experienced in her new form as he severed a young vine binding his legs. She
had taken human lives with new strength she could not control, and it weighed
heavily upon her. A part of her truly had wanted to lash out at her father, but
she was no longer her father’s child lashing out with tears and harsh words of
rebellion. She was something else, and her human anger brought with it the fury
of Godzilla and a mass of deadly tendrils.
Miki sensed that Biollante was
crying out to attract Godzilla, but she was psychically unaware that the cries
also carried Erica’s grief. Erica had separated her consciousness from
Biollante to try to reach her father, and she had unwittingly given the beast
time to take control. When Erica attempted to return to her living vessel, a
gigantic pair of ghostly red eyes met her gaze, and beneath it was a
disembodied, crocodilian smile of razor-sharp teeth. This was the manifestation
of Godzilla’s pure territorial instinct, but it did not look like Godzilla at
all. Regardless of the manifestation’s appearance, Erica had forgotten in her
momentary answer to the pull that they were constantly at odds. The raging
animal spirit opened its mouth and seemed to devour Erica whole, trapping her
at the core of its being as it waited for Godzilla to answer its call. Erica’s
mind struggled within the beast as the massive rose fought a futile battle
against the King of the Monsters in the waters of the lake. It had all of
Godzilla’s capacity, but it had none of Godzilla’s stamina in this early stage.
Biollante was defeated, but the two warring minds within her retained separate
agendas.
The blue orb is almost within Erica’s grasp, and she
feels herself almost whole again. But now the blue orb is still. Has it given
up its pursuit, or is it too weak to continue? All the orange orb has to do is
to reach out, but now, Erica realizes, both of them are still, unmoving. There
is a new pull, encompassing and inescapable, freezing the orbs in place. Erica
attempts to open her “eyes” to “see” her surroundings, but she sees only
darkness.
Could this be the afterlife
finally calling me to its radiance? Erica thought. It couldn’t. We…I’m
not finished… whole again. Not when I’m only this close… no. As Erica
struggles to break free of the tremendous pull, she feels bits of debris
surround her and stick to her cells. As the force grows stronger, Erica
realizes that she cannot, and will not, break free, for even light itself
cannot escape the power of a black hole. This dark power… a singularity…
this close to Earth? No… nowhere near Earth anymore. This could be anywhere.
How far have I traveled to die? As the pressure of the void pushes down
upon her, Erica can feel her consciousness slipping. In what she feels may be
her final moments, she prays, and she is surprised to discover that she does
not pray to die. She prays to live…
Theories abound of the creation of
black holes and effects on the space around them, but even Erica could not
comprehend what was happening. Some ideas suggest that even time itself can
become trapped in a black hole’s pull, freezing an object in place for hundreds
of years as it slowly swirls toward the center of the force. Some ideas suggest
that the tremendous pressure can destroy matter. Some ideas even suggest that a
black hole is a two-way phenomenon, drawing matter and energy into it from one
part of space and emptying it back out another through a white hole. Whatever
has happened, whatever time has passed, whatever matter has been destroyed or
compressed, Erica regains consciousness to find herself somewhere else. She can
see stars again in the distance, different from any constellation she knows,
and she can see the hole. It looks different somehow, a reversed image of the
dark power that sucked her in, and instead of feeling its pull, she feels it
pushing her away. Somewhere in the vast regions of space, this is where the
force of the singularity reverses itself. It is here, far from where the pull
of the black hole began but connected through a tear in space itself, where any
form of matter that survived the pull—and even that which did not—comes to
rest. The orange and blue orbs are so close to one another. Erica can feel it.
The blue orb gives off almost no signature, as if it is floating dead in space.
There is no more ambition left in it, no will of pursuit. Surrounding them is
nothing but powder-fine, glittery space debris, all that remains of any base
elements that were caught in the black hole’s power. Erica tries to move, but
even the orange orb merely drifts, so close to its quarry yet infinitely far
away.
All Erica can do is to rest. She
can feel the regeneration of the rose within her, still defying its mortality
as the orb synthesizes the light and debris around her to restore its energies.
Something, however, feels different this time. Erica senses a desire again. It is
infinitesimal and difficult to detect, but she can feel it around her. It does
not come from the blue orb. Erica can feel the orange orb rejecting its
nourishment. Something in the dust is incompatible and toxic, but attempts to
cling to the orb nonetheless. The field of psychic energy surrounding the
orange orb repels this strange dust, but the dust is continuously drawn to the
orb, displaying what appears to be a pattern of intelligence. Like a bright
orange bug zapper, the orange orb grows stronger with each spark, sending each
speck of space dust farther away from it. But the space dust keeps coming back,
and she begins to feel its desire growing.
What once was dust becomes several
fragments of a luminous white crystal. Each time they are repelled, they fuse
together into larger and larger fragments until, finally, a small crystalline
rock is all that remains, glowing with a blue aura and constantly changing its
polygonal shape as it seems ever-drawn to the energy of the orange orb but
never strong enough to penetrate it. Erica wonders what this strange structure
could be, but her human curiosity is a costly distraction. She has built up a
substantial charge of energy while repelling the debris, but she has ignored
the faint pull of the blue orb. In one final burst of psychic energy, she
repels the crystalline rock once more, and the rock changes its target, moving
toward the blue orb. The orange orb races to meet the blue orb, matching speed
with the crystalline fragment, and they collide in an explosion of silver light
as they fuse together.
Erica has absorbed the blue orb
into herself again, but something is wrong. The blue orb refuses to rejoin her.
The crystalline stone begins to envelope the blue sphere, feeding off
Biollante’s psychic energy and preventing her from excising it. Like millions
of needles, Erica feels the points of the crystals pierce the cells in the blue
orb, extending their reach outward in an attempt to impale every remaining cell
within the orange orb as well. Rather than to allow this malignant presence to
take her over completely, Erica chooses to do the last thing she ever sought to
do: she defies the pull, reversing it completely. After spending indeterminable
time to reconstitute herself, Erica uses her store of psychic energy to tear
her entire being asunder, and the orange orb shatters, sending glowing yellow
pollen in every direction. Where the orange orb used to be, the blue orb sinks
into the heart of the crystalline stone. The orange sphere slowly pulls itself
together, and Erica can feel that the cells within the blue orb are lost to her
forever. They have rejected the rose and rejected her, and they have bonded
with something extraterrestrial. Erica still feels the pull, but it is no
longer a desirable call. Instead, she feels a desperate and instinctive urge to
retreat from it. She can feel its greedy hunger and desire to consume her. The
blue orb pulsates from within the heart of the white crystalline stone, and it
begins to grow, still reaching out for the orange orb as Erica struggles to
elude its grasp. She fails, but the crystalline form does not succeed, either.
Its entire molecular structure has changed after absorbing the blue orb, and
its form is still mutating. A shock of red static electricity propels the orange
orb away from the crystalline stone, a powerful psychic backlash, and the stone
continues to grow.
The crystalline stone seems to feed
off the psychic reaction, and it begins to grow larger and larger as red
streaks of light dance across its blue aura. The mass expands, and its form is
no longer simply that of glowing white crystals. Between the jagged shards, a
form of skin emerges, blue and scaly. At the center of this mass of scales, the
psychic energy from the orange orb seem to split into their components,
painting the blue mass with a splash of yellow, red, and a peculiar green. A
long spear of blue flesh juts out from the bottom of the crystalline mass,
twisting and undulating as two more thick, trunk-like masses grow out from
either side of it. Legs and feet, each tipped with four pointed toes, and a
massive tail, startlingly familiar save for the small cluster of crystals that
come to rest at its tip. Two muscular arms emerge from the upper portion of the
blue mass, ending in hands with four razor-sharp claws each. Finally, two of
the crystals expand and protrude from fully-formed shoulders, and, between
those shoulders, a head begins to appear, its features blurred behind the
blinding red glow of its eyes. Erica is horrified as she begins to see the head
take shape. This is no longer a mass of cells and crystalline stone. It has
taken the shape of a creature, and that creature is Godzilla. The head and body
shape are unmistakable. On either side of the beast’s mouth, she can see
characteristics of Biollante in small, tooth-like tusks on its cheeks. She sees
the familiar rows of Godzilla’s teeth lining its maw. On its forehead,
something completely new, Erica sees an oddly-shaped horn. This creature is
Godzilla, and yet it is something else entirely. A Space Godzilla.
Within the creature, Erica feels
something that cannot be seen. It is a force of will unlike any she has sensed
before, and it is not the will of Godzilla. Whatever substance merged with the
blue orb to give birth to this abomination may have been damaged and weakened
from the force of the black hole, but it is something alive, intelligent, and
feeding off Godzilla’s rage and memories. Erica attempts to probe the Space
Godzilla’s mind telepathically for a better perspective, but all she sees are
cascades of color. Explosions. Strange structures and peaks collapsing. An
entire star going nova. Every image is of something dying, entire worlds
ending, but behind all of it, she feels something else. Erica feels the
creature’s delight. Whatever cruel fate could have led to the disasters that
landscape the creature’s memories, whatever ancient devastation brought its
remains to the black hole and laid them to rest here, the crystalline side of
this Space Godzilla revels with insane pleasure.
Space Godzilla tilts its head
toward the orange orb, letting out a shrieking roar. Erica’s intrusion into its
mind has not gone unnoticed, and the creature stares at her. It can see her
human spirit as if a living human were floating in front of it.
“What… are you?” Erica asks, not
expecting the beast to answer… but it does.
“We… are!” Space Godzilla seems to
shout into her mind. The two words repeat and overlap in ear-shattering
intensity as if a crowd of a thousand chants them. Whatever the crystalline
formation was before it merged with the Godzilla cells, it still had a voice.
The mental noise is silenced abruptly, and the creature closes its eyes, the
orange horn on its head radiating a blue light. Erica can feel it searching its
own mind—Godzilla’s mind—for something. The beast finds the images it seeks
quickly. It finds Godzilla. It finds Biollante. It finds Earth.
“No!” Erica shouts, and the orange
orb surges with power. Space Godzilla opens its eyes, surprised as the orb
begins to grow and change shape. The orange glow dims, disappearing into a
massive green bulb, but the Space Godzilla shares Erica’s memories. It knows
exactly what Erica is and what threat she poses. The gigantic crystals on the
creature’s shoulders and the horn on its head glow, and orange lightning erupts
from its maw, curving and twisting through space until it strikes the bulb.
Yellow lightning passes from the shoulder crystals to the bulb, and the beast
spins forward. Its tail moves with such ferocity that it cleaves the bulb in half,
and the abomination can hear Erica screaming. The ruptured bulb bursts into a
cloud of yellow mist, and Space Godzilla merely swims through it in the
direction of the white hole. But Erica is not defeated. A strand of the mist
encircles the creature’s tail, solidifying into a thick, green plant vine.
There is no gravity and no rooted soil to dictate its form in space, and
Biollante returns once again to the physical plane from the mist in a
nightmarish form, an almost shapeless mass of dark green plant matter covered
in vine tendrils. At the center of the mass, surrounded by enormous red petals,
is the faceless mouth of Biollante’s first form, snapping as the tendrils reach
out to grab the blue beast and entangle it.
As Space Godzilla nears the
singularity, it thrashes its tail violently, and bursts of electricity from its
crystals pour into the single vine that manages to hold onto it. But Biollante
does not let go. She cannot let go. Her frustration and rage—Erica’s emotions
combined with Godzilla’s—build within her, and Biollante’s form continues to
mutate. The petals around her mouth wither and fall away, and her oval flytrap
mouth expands, stretching into the familiar crocodilian shape that once tried
to swallow Godzilla’s head whole. The manifestation of Godzilla’s rage Erica
first saw in Lake Ashino, the enormous mouth has glowing red eyes and a
seemingly endless blanket of teeth leading into its black gullet. Toothy
flytraps sprout from several of her vine tendrils, and they lash out at the
crystal beast, burying their fangs into its blue flesh. Space Godzilla roars,
but Erica does not sense pain in the creature. An eerie tingle passes through
her entire being as she feels that insane delight again.
No… it wanted this, Erica
thinks as she feels the lightning energy coursing from the beast’s crystals
through her body… and back into Space Godzilla. What have I done? Space
Godzilla was not trying to escape. The crystalline beast had tricked Erica into
taking a physical form, and it was using her as a conduit to siphon off the
energy it could not consume from the orange orb. Now, Space Godzilla was an
unstoppable comet headed straight for the white hole, and Biollante was the
comet’s tail. Biollante tried to let go of Space Godzilla, but it was no use as
their bodies became encased in red flame. Erica could feel the pull. What
unimaginable power must have been flowing through their bodies to resist one of
the most powerful cosmic forces in the universe, but the singularity holds no
power over them. The creatures travel blindly through the void, and only in
charging against the tremendous force trying to crush them and push them back
do they know which way they are going. Space Godzilla and Biollante’s defiance
has upset the black hole’s entire gravitational balance, throwing it in
reverse, and the singularity begins to buckle under the weight of its own
failure, dissipating around them like a spent hurricane. The core of the
singularity begins to collapse, narrowing the tear between dimensions. Space
itself bends and narrows around Space Godzilla and Biollante, and their bodies
bend and narrow to match it, holding their velocity as if it still has no
effect on them.
When Space Godzilla and Biollante
emerge from the black hole, everything comes to a halt. Although they seemed to
have been traveling at infinite speed between the ribbon connecting the black
hole and the white hole, their speed in real space and time was no more than a
crawl. The warped space at the center of the black hole folds in on itself infinitely
until it disappears, and everything around it hovers in place for a moment as
if in shock that its phenomenal power has ceased to exist. Slowly, the flow of
electrons and debris in the vacuum begins to adhere to the new pull from every
direction of the stars and planets, and balance is restored.
Exhausted, Biollante’s entire form
goes limp, and the flytrap vines and tendrils finally, mercifully, detach from
Space Godzilla’s body. The red flame fades, and Space Godzilla’s floating
crystal mass turns an effortless one hundred and eighty degrees to face the
enormous plant mass. The crystals on its shoulders glow and hum with energy as
Space Godzilla opens its mouth to deliver a final blast of its weaving flame.
“No,” Erica whispers from within
Biollante.
As if to taunt Erica, a voice
responds from within Space Godzilla. “Yes,” it whispers.
Energy belches from Space
Godzilla’s maw, spinning and twirling through space as if it knows no
direction, but it strikes true, hitting Biollante directly in between her jaws.
Buried deep within the plant mass, invisible to the naked eye, the lightning
energy strikes her bulbous core. Like the invisible tapestry that once hovered
over Earth, a yellow, stained-glass pattern of cracks form on Biollante’s body,
stretching and growing until they consume her. Her body expands, and the cracks
pull her apart at the seams. Biollante explodes in a crackling flash like a
shattered mirror. There is no light. There is no floating yellow pollen. There
is no orb. Only microscopic dust remains, joining all of the other space dust
that makes up the dead vacuum of space.
Space Godzilla turns again, its back to its fallen “sister,” and
it closes its eyes again, smelling the trail of breadcrumbs. A faint trail of
psychic energy—the signature left behind when Erica pursued the blue orb—points
straight to Earth, and Space Godzilla only has to follow it. “Yes,” the voice
from within the creature whispers again, and Space Godzilla is gone.
A voice echoes in the dead space
where the singularity once churned. Help… me…
Preview of Chapter 3 - Responsible:
“Do you
hear that?
“Hear
what?”
“It… sounds
like a voice, as if someone were crying out for help. It is faint, but…”
“Wait. I
hear it, too. It sounds like a human voice, a woman’s. Impossible. No human has
traveled this distance.”
“It could
be some kind of trick, but it sounds like… she… needs help, our help.
“Only the
humans know that we are here, and they cannot follow us.”
“I was just
thinking about…”
“Even she
would not go out of her way to trap us in space, no matter what sort of
mischief it suited.”
“You know her
too well.”
Post-script:
I wonder who else could be having a
conversation out in space right now. It should be obvious, but all will be
revealed next chapter. Things are quickly drifting away from metaphysical
rehashes of Godzilla movies and into the meat of my original idea. While
Godzilla is on Earth battling the military’s new Mechagodzilla robot and
becoming a surrogate parent, this chapter opens the door to space, and Erica
unknowingly becomes the first deep-space astronaut. In the first “final” draft
of this story years ago, I dismissed a lot of singularity theory entirely,
paying no real attention to the science of black holes. This was more of a
paranormal fiction than science fiction, and I was creating a concept for my
story that would have to account naturally for the very unnatural passage of
time between the end of Godzilla vs. Mothra 1992 and the beginning of Godzilla
vs. Space Godzilla. This was only about two years, meaning that the key
players only had one year to travel into deep space and one year to come back.
From a science fiction perspective and taking into account light speed travel
theories, this didn’t seem possible. It didn’t seem like the cells that would
create Space Godzilla could reach a black hole, be pulled into it, and come out
to make the journey back to Earth in such a short time. Brilliant minds such as
Stephen Hawking perhaps would take issue with my ideas, and I don’t even have
an amateur-level understanding of quantum physics to explain in this story what
was intended to happen. I decided to go back and watch the Heisei series again,
and some of the issues and plot holes in the films forced me to make some
tweaks. I explained it so that their theory just happens to be the right
one, but they don’t have all of the details.
I did not want to reference Godzilla
vs. King Ghidorah at all because of how many discrepancies it creates in
the very existence of this story, but, as later Heisei films suggest, some
unknown something in the time stream happened that prevented Biollante from
being erased from history. Both Erica and I have to share the complete lack of
knowledge of what that something was because even a guess on my part would be a
completely different story. It did, however, have a positive impact on this
chapter because I realized that the Space Godzilla creation theory had two
distinctly different sets of Godzilla cells involved. The Godzilla cells Mothra
scratched off and carried with her were from the Godzilla that had been
“created” with modern nuclear energy in 1991 whereas the Godzilla cells used to
create Biollante were from 1985 and only had a little taste of what modern
nuclear energy was like. This taste of greater power became the motive for the
Godzilla cell fragments in Biollante’s body to pursue Mothra, but, for now, I
am just going to leave the plot hole that Toho left dangling themselves with
regard to time travel. I put “created” in parentheses because that time travel
mess is still giving me a headache, and something just isn’t right about it
considering Biollante and Gondo factor into Space Godzilla’s plot so
prominently, not to mention Space Godzilla’s cheek tusks and telekinetic powers
lean in the direction of the Biollante theory rather than the Mothra theory. In
reality, it is just a huge, paradoxical plot hole.
There must be an answer in story
form, but I don’t have it right now. If not for the presence of Mecha-King
Ghidorah’s remains being reverse-engineered to build Mechagodzilla, the entire Godzilla
vs. King Ghidorah film could be written out as non-canonical, so another
untold time travel story is the only way to explain it away. Even if I used a
parallel world theory and considered that the time travelers replaced Godzilla
with an alternate form of himself, then that still would not work. In fact, it
would unravel my story completely because it hinges on Biollante’s Godzilla
cells retaining a connection to their original host. Godzilla does look and
sound slightly different in Mothra 1992, so the simplest explanation for
me is that perhaps some descendants from even farther in the future pulled
Godzilla out of time again in 1991 after his battle with Mecha-King Ghidorah,
siphoning off the excess energy he had consumed and returning him to 1944 to
ensure his original creation… nope. It still doesn’t work, but I’d love to see
someone else explain how the events of Space Godzilla could have
happened at all if everything before King Ghidorah was erased from
history. It’s the references to Biollante and Gondo in Space Godzilla
that create the time travel plot hole in the first place, and I don’t think I’m
making it out to be a bigger paradox than it is. Something is missing. It
certainly is a lot of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff, and that is why I am
sticking to the metaphysical and biological material I wrote in the first
place. I have an origin story to tell.
Again, this is a sort of paranormal
fiction, and I am dealing with some imaginary ideas that split atoms. It wasn’t
my plan to combine metaphysics with biology and astrophysics, but the plot sort
of wrote itself. I did not account for Biollante’s physical make up in the
older draft, so it has been fun trying to come up with a more detailed
explanation of Biollante’s body on the cellular level as well as what happened
on either side of the black hole. The Biollante I portray in this story
eventually will be a Biollante that realizes the full potential of the film
version, and even the small list of things she could do in the film was
fantastic and unheard of. There will be some more scientific detail later in
the story, but this little taste should suffice for now.
The final scene of this chapter
took a completely new direction compared to the original story. I did not
intend to use “Space Godzilla” as a name at all until later in the story when
his name is established on Earth, but we all know who he is. I didn’t see the
point in using a dozen permutations of “blue crystalline beast” to describe
him. Even Erica could see that he was a “Space Godzilla” the moment she laid
eyes on him. His birth in this chapter is virtually identical to the original
draft, but the formation of the crystals and their magnetic and “intelligent”
attraction is completely new. I always had intended for there to be some alien
sentience within the crystalline rock that drew it to the Godzilla cells, but I
never gave a description to their behavior until now. About midway through
transcribing this chapter, I let it sit for a week. I watched the Shout Factory
Kaiju Movie Marathon as well as watching Godzilla vs. Space Godzilla and
a few other Toho films from both Show and Heisei eras. I won’t mention which
ones.
When I wrote it twenty years ago,
this story was designed to incorporate one idea from Toho’s Showa era into this
Heisei continuity, and that little connection will be revealed at the end of
the next chapter. Watching some selections of the Toho library again, however,
I discovered something about Space Godzilla that seemed familiar. I ended up
with a radical new theory and simply could not get it out of my head. That
won’t be revealed for at least three more chapters, but rest assured I will
come back to it. Depending on how much more complexity it adds to the story
later on, I might drop the new idea entirely to keep things from getting too
crowded. It is going to create some dramatic changes to the events of the final
chapter if I follow through with it. If I do decide to cut it out, don’t worry.
Each chapter from this point on will contain a post-script just like this as I
flesh out the details and origins of the story as it progresses and compares to
the original idea. I still think I am going to keep the new theory, though. It
just feels like it fits the underlying stories of Biollante and Space Godzilla
too well not to throw it in, and it is underexposed as a plot in existing films
just as the Biollante plot that inspired this story. I want to expand upon
their unrealized potential. It certainly will add a little extra incentive to
continue on to the stories I have yet to write beyond a brief synopsis. Two
Showa connections might be fun. We’ll see, but I’m pretty excited about it
right now.
I also did not intend for Biollante to make an
appearance in this chapter (other than in flashback memories) because Erica was
still weakened from her experiences. Her form in this chapter as it appeared
popped into my head about an hour before I wrote this sentence, and I just ran
with it. Years ago, I had a cutesy and silly idea of what form Biollante might
take while floating through space. As a plant, the first thing that came to
mind was a dandelion seed hanging from a cottony balloon. I never really wanted
Biollante herself to be the one traveling through space in a physical form. It
seemed more convenient and practical for the orange orb to do all of the work
because it seemed capable of a metaphysical faster-than-light travel, almost a
teleportation between physical and astral planes. Her physical and metaphysical
forms served their own distinct purposes, and Biollante just did not seem built
for space travel or even flight. The original draft saw Space Godzilla catch
Erica off guard and dispatch her before she could do anything. When it strikes
her with its tail, this was supposed to be the end of it. There was not even a
bulb to rend in two in the old draft, just the weakened orange orb, and Space
Godzilla was powerful enough to leave Erica behind and close the black hole
behind it with its own energy, leaving Erica trapped in unknown space on the
other side. There was a matter-of-fact description of Space Godzilla passing
freely through the singularity and collapsing it, and this seemed too
simplistic while making Space Godzilla seem a little too cosmically
overpowered. I think he has the potential to match the original King Ghidorah,
but collapsing black holes like pulling down a camping tent is a bit much.
Erica’s first encounter with Space Godzilla needed some more monster action,
and there needed to be a more reasonable, if fantastic, explanation for how
Space Godzilla and Biollante returned to the other side of the singularity. You
are getting a little peek into Biollante’s future early, but no regrets. There
are plenty of surprises and new interpretations of the Heisei Godzilla universe
to come, as well as a whole universe of ideas I put into motion that kept the
Heisei series going for a dozen more films in my head. There are more battles
coming up, and the next one is one of my favorites.
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