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Description
2026. The war is over…for now.

Most people don’t add that qualifier. The rift is closed, no more Kaiju are emerging: they do not wish to believe that it could start again.
The very few scientists who have Drifted with a Kaiju brain and survived sane and relatively non-brain damaged say the enemy had come before: they are either ignored, disbelieved, or dismissed with the fact that last time was supposedly 60 million years ago: what do we care if they invade again in the year 60,002,026?

The one scientist who claims to have perceived that the Kaiju Masters or Precursors (as they are variously known) had not so much waited 60 million years as chosen another spot on the four-dimensional sphere of our space-time to make a new breach is ignored real hard.

This rather unproductive attitude is rather worrying to the remaining members of the Pan Pacific Defense Force, who are pushing for the creation of a new generation of bigger, better, stronger railgun gun-totin’, plasma-snortin’ Jaegers. Governments, feeling that the war has been won, fail to see why probably trillions of dollars should be spent on the vague chance the enemy might return when the global economy is still deep in the doldrums.

These are, after all, the products of the same political system that came up with the “big wall” method of dealing with Kaiju.

People are currently far too interested (and outraged) about the Life Wall debacle to pay much attention to such disputes, now that details are coming out and people are talking. The most lively and controversial of stories is that the wall was never actually expected to work: it was (at least in the case of the US and Russia) merely meant to be a distraction from the government’s real plan: the abandonment of respectively the west coast states of North America and eastern Siberia, and the conversion of those areas into radioactive “death zones” where Kaiju would be immediately nuked on arrival, plumes of deadly carcinogens be damned.

A number of leaked documents have emerged which do seem to support the notion the US government had been examining such a notion: the administration hotly denies this was an actual plan, rather a theoretical worst-case exercise. After all, had the US not been making war plans for a theoretical invasion of Canada as late as the 1930s?

And in any event (the government went on) the US wall had never been tested: it had been built much stronger than the shoddy Australian wall, which hadn’t even had most of the planned railguns in place at the time of the attack (to which the Australians reply that the US wall is nowhere near as nice as the US claims it is, and in any event they could have made the wall a lot stronger if the Global Kaiju Fund had allocated resources to Australia with a better grasp of the length of their coastline…)

And how on earth were they supposed to predict flying Kaiju, anyway? (Well, OK, there was that one scientist, but she was raving mad after breaking contact with the Kaiju brain: she had spoken of bat-winged Kaiju circling overhead, but also of giant fanged lemons rising out of the earth).

Avraham Falk met with Jasper Schoenfeld in July of 2014.

Given how expensive it would be to pull them down, the walls stay up, for now. The Chinese are talking about using their walls as a framework to build new housing on, or maybe extending them a bit to act as a barrier to global-warming related sea rise. (The Talking Head crowds are finally back to arguing about it - dealing with global warming was on the back burner a bit during the war years, while the global economic crisis – particularly its impacts on China – had reduced growth in CO2 emissions better than any international conferences so far).

A few partially completed Jaegers remained in existence when the money dried up: a couple of these have been commandeered by national governments hoping to extract their ultimate secrets, much to the annoyance of the UN and other nations. In secret, there have been some talks within the Pan Pacific Defense Forces as to whether they should help them out: even an international Jaeger arms race would be an improvement over no Jaegers if the enemy returns.

The Pan Pacific Defense Force is currently suffering from something of a crisis of identity, as it tries to find alternate employment now that the main reason for its existence is (hopefully) gone. They don’t want to be disbanded in case the worst comes to the worst and the Kaiju come back, but they are a bit dubious about the ongoing push to make it into a sort of official military for the joint protection of the Pacific Rim nations. 1. A lot of its membership was in various giant-robot support positions not really applicable to most regular military jobs, and 2. Many more dislike the notion of maybe someday turning their skills against non-Rim human beings rather than monsters.

With no more Kaiju to harvest, a competition between various groups for Kaiju parts is setting in, with scientists and universities calling for an end to all “non-scientific” use of Kaiju bodies so that the maximum of research materials can be preserved. They are hampered by a lack of funds for obtaining, storing, and preserving Kaiju bits and pieces, though: with the end of the war funding has been cut sharply, although nowadays researchers at least don’t have to deal with continual pressure to come up with ways of killing Kaiju. Quite a load of stuff already sits in storage to be looked at “later”, and many institutions are under pressure to get rid of tons and tons of Kaiju remains that are not actively being studied rather than spending loads of money on the careful storage of what is still essentially toxic waste – this isn’t the British museum’s fossil sea-shell collection. Many museums of course will be keeping their Kaiju displays – Kaiju skulls, bones, claws, etc. make for popular if often outsized displays. (Many serious-minded researchers of stuff other than Kaiju grumble about how the Kaiju area steals space from their projects.)

Snark between nations is on the rise, as grievances largely hushed up during the Kaiju War reemerge. Particularly bitter are disagreements over the Kaiju fund: in principle, all nations would spend “according to their ability” for the common good, all mankind allied to stop the Kaiju menace. In practice, while those nations both technically advanced and sitting on the rim of the Pacific went to a full-time war economy during the decade of the Kaiju War, advanced nations further away, Europeans in particular, certainly applied themselves to the war effort, but did not press their economies till the rivets squeaked. Nor did they suffer the occasional devastation that the Pacific Rim nations did, the massive disruptions from tens of millions of people moving inland, the various wacky political/religious/general crackpot movements that plagued the Rim nations. (Well, mostly. Such things did happen in Europe – just at a rather lower intensity level).

Some nations, it is widely claimed, gained more in economic assistance (to expand their weapons-building capacity) then they actually spend on the war (Belgium in particular has been the target of accusations). Third-world countries with no capacity to build equipment or useful war materials often contributed very little. And some countries either couldn’t contribute or wouldn’t (most notoriously North Korea: many see a proof of the nonexistence of God in that of the nearly 50 Kaiju that launched attacks around the Pacific, not one came ashore in North Korea. )

The proof, as they say, is in the pudding, and the US sees a rather clear proof of the unbalanced nature of the war effort in that the US, which spent more on the war than any other nation, is now in an economic state not seen since the depths of the first Great Depression, with massive unemployment, millions of refugees living in often squalid conditions and huge debts both external and internal. Meanwhile, France and Germany, in spite of rationing and high taxes, are managing slow but steady growth (having picked up a few lessons from the 2008-2013 economic slump).

Avraham Falk’s ancestors had tried to stop a genocide before, but their materials were not strong enough.

United by their struggle, the leading nations of the Pan Pacific Defense Corps (founded October, 2014) – China, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the US, Mexico - have remained something of a block: smaller nations unable to afford or field their own Jaegers and forced to be dependent on Jaegers provided to them by wealthier nations (all of Central America had to share one Jaeger, with US-provided pilots, for defense) feel they are looked down on and are more ambivalent about the future of the so-called “Pacific rim community”. The Koreans and Chinese and Japanese still don’t really like eachother, but all recognize that economic recovery will depend on the continued close economic unity established during the war years (economic integration of the Pacific area had already been under way by 2013, but the crisis had substantially accelerated the process).

Of course, in the US the Usual Suspects are already grousing about the Internationalist Menace and threats to National Sovereignty. Still, the “Rimmers” (as some wags call them) generally feel they should stick together, and share a sense of aggravation towards those who did not sacrifice to the extent they did, Middle Easterners and Europeans in particular.

(The Arab oil countries contributed a lot of money towards the war effort, but little else came out of that part of the world, save for a lot of talk about the Kaiju being a punishment of God on the infidels – presumably the attacks on Indonesia were accidental friendly fire).

(This is really more perception than reality - most Middle Easterners knew damn well the Rim nations were fighting to save everyone's asses)

The Japanese are the one nation actually actively preparing for the possibility of a reopening of the Rift. They are continuing to extend and strengthen, slowly, their walls, building more and more underground, and slowly expanding their arsenal of hypervelocity projectile throwers and are working (in cooperation with the Canadians) on something called a “fusion torch.” They have been nuked twice, Kaiju-ravaged three times, and they intend to be ready for it if any further shit comes down the pipe.

Russia is a bit of an odd man out – with few major cities in the east, it was never as immediately threatened as the US, much less Japan and China. With close economic ties to Europe, and certain grudges towards the Chinese (as Russians put a few thousand miles between themselves and the Pacific, Russia east of lake Baikal has become Chinese-plurality, and there is a pervasive fear among Russians that China may try to regain its pre-1858 borders), Russia is not really interested in a closer Pacific Rim alliance. Russia is also considered the biggest suspect in diverting money from the war budget to economic investment – although still poor, it’s not worse off than it was before the Kaiju war costs really ramped up – to which Russians indignantly point out the high-quality Jaegers they built, which reputedly incorporate Cold War cybernetic design by some of the Soviet Union’s most brilliantly nutty scientists.

Europe is annoyed and a little frightened by the noise that is coming from the Pacific Rim nations. They spent plenty on the war (Britain, always trying to show its loyalty to Uncle Sam, ended up spending themselves almost as deep into a financial hole as the US) and are often angrily defensive. Germany, the birthplace of Schoenfeld and one of the biggest Jaeger-component manufacturers in the world, is particularly put out. (Given that both Schoenfeld and Gottlieb were German-born, even though Schoenfeld’s parents moved to America when he was eleven, some Germans occasionally note that this time around, two Germans saved the world).

Europe has been drawn somewhat closer by the conflict, the global economic crisis and the move of most industrial nations to a wartime economy leading to the creation of genuinely _effective_ pan-European economic institutions, although the Greeks still dropped out when they realized the global economy was so shot that leaving the Euro wouldn’t make things _worse_. (They have since cozied up with the Russians). Some politicians are talking of a “Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok” again, Europe partnered with a Russia detached from the Pacific Rim as a counterbalance against some sort of Sino-American “Co-Dominion.” In case Kaiju started roaming further abroad and the Jaegers failed to stop them, the UK and France have greatly enlarged their nuclear arsenals: there is no great rush to shrink them again. Research continues into why Jaegers undergoing final assembly by Pan Pacific Defense Force techs moved the way they do while the best experimental designs by European teams move like 90 year old arthritic grannies.

India, whose monetary and technological contributions to the war were by necessity fairly modest – only one (mostly) all-Indian Jaeger was built during the war, and it went down like a chump to the first Class IV it met – feels a bit put out that nobody seems to want them in their club. They’re keeping a close eye on Pakistan, which has managed to totter on for another decade somehow, but isn’t looking healthy at all.

Afghanistan, on the other hand, has managed to return to a degree of stability after a period in which the Taliban once again took over quite a bit of the country (the allied forces had gone home) – the present “president-protector for life” is a psychopathic bastard, but he’s his own man with no foreign ties, which, combined with atrocities against Taliban supporters and corrupt local thugs that would whiten Ivan the Terrible’s hair, has mostly reconciled the population to his rule.

Latin America is doing OK, given the world situation. Brazil is celebrating the end of the war with the most extravagant Fiesta in a decade, Argentina finds to its surprise that their economy is currently doing better than that of the US, and people are noticing that Cuba stopped being Communist sometime while people weren’t watching.

Some nations had population movements during the Kaiju wars, others did not. In spite of the period of successful Kaiju smashing, the US west coast states dropped in population by nearly 40%, with the shrinkage of Russian populations in eastern Siberia being even greater. Small and crowded island nations like Japan and Indonesia had no distant “Inland” to move to, so generally stayed tight, although quite a few Japanese relocated from the east to the west coast. (And the Filipinos had to move Manila). The importance both economic and agricultural of the coastal lowlands to China was such that the government put in place harsh new pass laws designed to prevent anyone from changing their place of residence without government permission. (Many moved in spite of this). Australians were distinctly short on places to move to, and short of money to build infrastructure in the desert. A lot of Peruvians moved to the mountains - Kaiju do not make good mountain climbers. Not due to lack of strength to pull themselves up, but due to the tendency of slopes to collapse under their weight. There were smaller-scale movements away from the seacoast worldwide, as people worried the Kaiju might change their behavior and swim out into the Indian or Atlantic oceans. (The cruise line industry was badly impacted even in the Mediterranean, and pretty much went extinct in the Pacific).

Their general helplessness during the Kaiju war having brought some shame to Arab leaders, the more democratic Arab nations, from Algeria to South Syria, have joined together to form a closer economic/political union in hopes of invigorating their impoverished economies and strengthening their international position. The new Arab Confederacy’s most recent members are the Islamic Republic of Palestine (Gaza) and the Republic of Palestine (West Bank, or more precisely the amount of it the Israelis hadn’t put behind a wall.) Israel has not been happy with this, but with economic aid from a troubled US sharply cut back, it has had its own problems, and having dumped rump West Bank and Gaza and walled them off, really has no business (say the Arabs) criticizing what happens to them. In any event, they have more to worry about nuclear-armed Iran - just in case any Kaiju make it west of SE Asia, they claim - and the new Islamicist government of Saudi Arabia, which is currently sinking into bloody scapegoat purging over their failure to provide either the jobs or the raised living standards the people (aside from the one-issue more-fundamentalists) initially revolted for (for one thing, it’s hard to raise oil prices in the midst of a global depression).

The global economic slump brought on by the Kaiju war combined with sharp cutbacks to foreign aid and investment in countries not actively contributing to the War plowed under many of the hopeful economic shoots that took hold in Africa in the 2000s. There are some hints of recovery, but Africa has generally suffered (another) lost decade, and there have been a fresh wave of coups and democracy failures, while less money to spend on healthcare has led to more deaths from AIDS.

Politics world-wide has taken a turn towards authoritarianism and economic dirigisme, with the market being somewhat unreliable in the midst of a war of uncertain outcome with giant monsters: the right wing is now calling for the reversal of many war-time measures, such as the government takeover of much of the US banking system (trying to leverage things so to maximize profits from the market effect of the next Kaiju attack was really the last straw) or the pan-European financial and government banking system put in place in a last-ditch method to prevent the Euro system from collapsing entirely.

Turkey has had a civil war, Russia absorbed Belarus when nobody was looking, and impoverished Pacific Islanders are trying to get the tourists to come back. Islamic terrorism is down, most unemployed young Muslim men feeling that if these are the End Times, blowing up American airliners is probably missing the point: the US has already pulled out of the Middle East, and what good has come of it?

Clay was not strong enough.

Religion is up, although the strange nature of the threat – and the response – has meant that oddball cults and religious offshoots have generally benefitted more than mainstream denomination. The Church of Scientology has undergone a violent schism due to disputes over the significance of the Kaiju and their relationship to Xenu. The Catholic Church is still undergoing mental gymnastics to find a way to fit the Precursors into doctrine, while many Protestant congregations continue to insist that the Apocalypse is still coming and the Kaiju were merely Signs and Portents. On the other hand, the population of pure atheists has also grown at the expense of the Fuzzy Center, and the Lovecraft-inspired Church of Cosmic Terror is doing surprisingly well for recruits.

In spite of all the international bickering and finger-pointing, and the generally rubble-strewn economic situation, there are hopeful signs for 2027 and beyond. There is the simple joy and relief that the war is finally over (ignoring those scientific nay-saying negative nellies) and that being trampled by monsters is on nobody’s insurance plan. Then there are the substantial technological advances of the last decade plus, including functional fusion power, a whole raft of super-strong new synthetic materials, great advances in robotics and cybernetics (the Bionic Man/Woman has arrived, although medical insurers generally won’t pay for limbs much stronger than the normal human being), power transmission, chemical synthesis and plasma garbage disposal. It’s a Brave New World of high-tech, if a bit hard on the High School dropout. Optimists looking ahead to an economic recovery see extraordinary new cities (after building the Wall, throwing up a few 2000-foot arcologies seems easy as pie), laboring armies of tele-operated robots, fusion powered industries sending productivity through the roof and bringing an era of plenty. The skeptics wonder whether the poorer and less educated global 80% will be able to afford said plenty.

Since the Kaiju War took priority, little was spent after 2013 on space travel and exploration, but right through the war there were those that claimed humanity could only survive in the long run if it expanded into space: with the end of the war, they are getting a bit more of a hearing, although the still battered economy means that nobody is rushing to them with great wads of cash. The universe is clearly a most dangerous place, and such disparate types as the mil-SF crowd, Muscular Christians, and the Church of Cosmic Horror agree mankind needs to be a less concentrated target, although the first two wouldn’t characterize the proper survival strategy as “breed fast, scatter wide, little insects.” Advances in fusion and plasma tech promise the possibility of round trips to Mars in a matter of months rather than years.

It was not long before the neural link became generalized, although most nations made it illegal to carry out neural linkages without the permission of all parties involved, and many banned its use for private purposes – or, in some cases, any non-Jaeger purposes. As yet the neural link has not become a party game even in those nations where its use is legal, since the cheapest portable version sells for something like $500,000 in 2013 dollars.

(Well, aside from among the youth of the 1%).

China initially jumped on the link as an interrogation device, until it became clear that 1. Unless both sides were actively working at it, a neural link mostly generated nightmare garbage, 2. There had to be some sort of mental compatibility to get any sort of stable link, 3. Out of the vast sea of random information, it was very hard to pick out and retain specific facts as desired, and 4. The interrogated was just as likely to get dirt on the interrogator, which cooled substantially their enthusiasm.

It _has_ been used by some warlords, old fashioned junta leaders, and people in jobs of dubious legality as a both a test and a means of loyalty: one can know for sure that the man you drift with can be trusted (at least at that moment in time) and they know you trust them with all their (current) secrets. (In macho societies, cases where one of the participants was in deep denial about their gayness usually do not end well).

Understanding of the Precursors remains elusive, with much information gained from scientists Drifting with Kaiju brains being fragmentary or tainted by the attempts of human minds to make sense of the alien, and data from the last couple years of the war was further limited by increasingly sophisticated mental attacks by the Precursors against human spies. (It is generally believed that Newton Giezler and Hermann Gottlieb’s highly successful final Drift was only due to the brain used being that of a newborn infant and thus only weakly perceived as yet by the collective consciousness). What is known is that the Kaiju and the Precursors are linked through a collective intelligence apparently not limited by space or time as we know it: some of the information gleaned seems to point to the possibility that the merely T-Rex sized Precursors are not so much masters of the Kaiju as much as another tool of a collective hive consciousness, although many humans have trouble with this concept and prefer to see them as the “boss aliens” (see, Borg Queen).

That they are as utterly merciless and relentless as any Austrian-accented Cyborg is something most scientists who have Drifted (those not too busy screaming OH GOD KEEP THEM OFF to chat) can agree on: what their ultimate motivations and aims are, what they do for a living when they aren’t invading other dimensions, etc. remains a lot less clear. Did they in fact kill off the dinosaurs, as several scientists have claimed to have “seen”? And why didn’t they remain? Why didn’t they come back for sixty million years? (One scientist says there was a “storm” or a “whirlwind” that broke contact between worlds: another occasionally babbles of something that ‘seeped down from the stars’ when it smelled the slaughter). They certainly appear to have successfully invaded more than one: by correlating the scattered impressions of different researchers, as many as a hundred “other worlds” have been identified, a majority of which seem to have been overrun by the Kaiju, and most feel this is merely a scattered sampling of a much greater total. Admittedly, many of these worlds are recalled in vague impressions and flashes which are confusing at best; many of them appear to have been like Earth (plants, animals, planets circling a sun, etc) but others gave such strange impressions and images that some people argue they represent Precursor mental conceptions or fantasies or fears rather than anything actual.

From what has been reported, there is apparently a whole Kaiju ecosystem on the other side: there apparently are Kaiju who are designed specifically to “clear” new worlds, Kaiju which are environmental modification machines, Kaiju who clean up after other Kaiju and recycle their bodies, Kaiju who either build or _are_ “housing” for other Kaiju, Kaiju who travel from (somewhere) to (somewhere) with offshoots of the hive in them… and there are some raving scientists that rave about their entire world being a monstrous thing, about suns made of jelly like eyes, of worlds that pulse and stars that crawl, of a universe which is like a cancer seeking to infect other universes with its cells – and the crazier ones can get really disturbing.

Very few people know what the elderly man with the metal engraving tools does inside the bodies of the Jaegers before they are fully activated.

And none outside his family know the seven true, unspeakable Names of God.

Description
2026. The war is over…for now.

Most people don’t add that qualifier. The rift is closed, no more Kaiju are emerging: they do not wish to believe that it could start again.
The very few scientists who have Drifted with a Kaiju brain and survived sane and relatively non-brain damaged say the enemy had come before: they are either ignored, disbelieved, or dismissed with the fact that last time was supposedly 60 million years ago: what do we care if they invade again in the year 60,002,026?

The one scientist who claims to have perceived that the Kaiju Masters or Precursors (as they are variously known) had not so much waited 60 million years as chosen another spot on the four-dimensional sphere of our space-time to make a new breach is ignored real hard.

This rather unproductive attitude is rather worrying to the remaining members of the Pan Pacific Defense Force, who are pushing for the creation of a new generation of bigger, better, stronger railgun gun-totin’, plasma-snortin’ Jaegers. Governments, feeling that the war has been won, fail to see why probably trillions of dollars should be spent on the vague chance the enemy might return when the global economy is still deep in the doldrums.

These are, after all, the products of the same political system that came up with the “big wall” method of dealing with Kaiju.

People are currently far too interested (and outraged) about the Life Wall debacle to pay much attention to such disputes, now that details are coming out and people are talking. The most lively and controversial of stories is that the wall was never actually expected to work: it was (at least in the case of the US and Russia) merely meant to be a distraction from the government’s real plan: the abandonment of respectively the west coast states of North America and eastern Siberia, and the conversion of those areas into radioactive “death zones” where Kaiju would be immediately nuked on arrival, plumes of deadly carcinogens be damned.

A number of leaked documents have emerged which do seem to support the notion the US government had been examining such a notion: the administration hotly denies this was an actual plan, rather a theoretical worst-case exercise. After all, had the US not been making war plans for a theoretical invasion of Canada as late as the 1930s?

And in any event (the government went on) the US wall had never been tested: it had been built much stronger than the shoddy Australian wall, which hadn’t even had most of the planned railguns in place at the time of the attack (to which the Australians reply that the US wall is nowhere near as nice as the US claims it is, and in any event they could have made the wall a lot stronger if the Global Kaiju Fund had allocated resources to Australia with a better grasp of the length of their coastline…)

And how on earth were they supposed to predict flying Kaiju, anyway? (Well, OK, there was that one scientist, but she was raving mad after breaking contact with the Kaiju brain: she had spoken of bat-winged Kaiju circling overhead, but also of giant fanged lemons rising out of the earth).

Avraham Falk met with Jasper Schoenfeld in July of 2014.

Given how expensive it would be to pull them down, the walls stay up, for now. The Chinese are talking about using their walls as a framework to build new housing on, or maybe extending them a bit to act as a barrier to global-warming related sea rise. (The Talking Head crowds are finally back to arguing about it - dealing with global warming was on the back burner a bit during the war years, while the global economic crisis – particularly its impacts on China – had reduced growth in CO2 emissions better than any international conferences so far).

A few partially completed Jaegers remained in existence when the money dried up: a couple of these have been commandeered by national governments hoping to extract their ultimate secrets, much to the annoyance of the UN and other nations. In secret, there have been some talks within the Pan Pacific Defense Forces as to whether they should help them out: even an international Jaeger arms race would be an improvement over no Jaegers if the enemy returns.

The Pan Pacific Defense Force is currently suffering from something of a crisis of identity, as it tries to find alternate employment now that the main reason for its existence is (hopefully) gone. They don’t want to be disbanded in case the worst comes to the worst and the Kaiju come back, but they are a bit dubious about the ongoing push to make it into a sort of official military for the joint protection of the Pacific Rim nations. 1. A lot of its membership was in various giant-robot support positions not really applicable to most regular military jobs, and 2. Many more dislike the notion of maybe someday turning their skills against non-Rim human beings rather than monsters.

With no more Kaiju to harvest, a competition between various groups for Kaiju parts is setting in, with scientists and universities calling for an end to all “non-scientific” use of Kaiju bodies so that the maximum of research materials can be preserved. They are hampered by a lack of funds for obtaining, storing, and preserving Kaiju bits and pieces, though: with the end of the war funding has been cut sharply, although nowadays researchers at least don’t have to deal with continual pressure to come up with ways of killing Kaiju. Quite a load of stuff already sits in storage to be looked at “later”, and many institutions are under pressure to get rid of tons and tons of Kaiju remains that are not actively being studied rather than spending loads of money on the careful storage of what is still essentially toxic waste – this isn’t the British museum’s fossil sea-shell collection. Many museums of course will be keeping their Kaiju displays – Kaiju skulls, bones, claws, etc. make for popular if often outsized displays. (Many serious-minded researchers of stuff other than Kaiju grumble about how the Kaiju area steals space from their projects.)

Snark between nations is on the rise, as grievances largely hushed up during the Kaiju War reemerge. Particularly bitter are disagreements over the Kaiju fund: in principle, all nations would spend “according to their ability” for the common good, all mankind allied to stop the Kaiju menace. In practice, while those nations both technically advanced and sitting on the rim of the Pacific went to a full-time war economy during the decade of the Kaiju War, advanced nations further away, Europeans in particular, certainly applied themselves to the war effort, but did not press their economies till the rivets squeaked. Nor did they suffer the occasional devastation that the Pacific Rim nations did, the massive disruptions from tens of millions of people moving inland, the various wacky political/religious/general crackpot movements that plagued the Rim nations. (Well, mostly. Such things did happen in Europe – just at a rather lower intensity level).

Some nations, it is widely claimed, gained more in economic assistance (to expand their weapons-building capacity) then they actually spend on the war (Belgium in particular has been the target of accusations). Third-world countries with no capacity to build equipment or useful war materials often contributed very little. And some countries either couldn’t contribute or wouldn’t (most notoriously North Korea: many see a proof of the nonexistence of God in that of the nearly 50 Kaiju that launched attacks around the Pacific, not one came ashore in North Korea. )

The proof, as they say, is in the pudding, and the US sees a rather clear proof of the unbalanced nature of the war effort in that the US, which spent more on the war than any other nation, is now in an economic state not seen since the depths of the first Great Depression, with massive unemployment, millions of refugees living in often squalid conditions and huge debts both external and internal. Meanwhile, France and Germany, in spite of rationing and high taxes, are managing slow but steady growth (having picked up a few lessons from the 2008-2013 economic slump).

Avraham Falk’s ancestors had tried to stop a genocide before, but their materials were not strong enough.

United by their struggle, the leading nations of the Pan Pacific Defense Corps (founded October, 2014) – China, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the US, Mexico - have remained something of a block: smaller nations unable to afford or field their own Jaegers and forced to be dependent on Jaegers provided to them by wealthier nations (all of Central America had to share one Jaeger, with US-provided pilots, for defense) feel they are looked down on and are more ambivalent about the future of the so-called “Pacific rim community”. The Koreans and Chinese and Japanese still don’t really like eachother, but all recognize that economic recovery will depend on the continued close economic unity established during the war years (economic integration of the Pacific area had already been under way by 2013, but the crisis had substantially accelerated the process).

Of course, in the US the Usual Suspects are already grousing about the Internationalist Menace and threats to National Sovereignty. Still, the “Rimmers” (as some wags call them) generally feel they should stick together, and share a sense of aggravation towards those who did not sacrifice to the extent they did, Middle Easterners and Europeans in particular.

(The Arab oil countries contributed a lot of money towards the war effort, but little else came out of that part of the world, save for a lot of talk about the Kaiju being a punishment of God on the infidels – presumably the attacks on Indonesia were accidental friendly fire).

(This is really more perception than reality - most Middle Easterners knew damn well the Rim nations were fighting to save everyone's asses)

The Japanese are the one nation actually actively preparing for the possibility of a reopening of the Rift. They are continuing to extend and strengthen, slowly, their walls, building more and more underground, and slowly expanding their arsenal of hypervelocity projectile throwers and are working (in cooperation with the Canadians) on something called a “fusion torch.” They have been nuked twice, Kaiju-ravaged three times, and they intend to be ready for it if any further shit comes down the pipe.

Russia is a bit of an odd man out – with few major cities in the east, it was never as immediately threatened as the US, much less Japan and China. With close economic ties to Europe, and certain grudges towards the Chinese (as Russians put a few thousand miles between themselves and the Pacific, Russia east of lake Baikal has become Chinese-plurality, and there is a pervasive fear among Russians that China may try to regain its pre-1858 borders), Russia is not really interested in a closer Pacific Rim alliance. Russia is also considered the biggest suspect in diverting money from the war budget to economic investment – although still poor, it’s not worse off than it was before the Kaiju war costs really ramped up – to which Russians indignantly point out the high-quality Jaegers they built, which reputedly incorporate Cold War cybernetic design by some of the Soviet Union’s most brilliantly nutty scientists.

Europe is annoyed and a little frightened by the noise that is coming from the Pacific Rim nations. They spent plenty on the war (Britain, always trying to show its loyalty to Uncle Sam, ended up spending themselves almost as deep into a financial hole as the US) and are often angrily defensive. Germany, the birthplace of Schoenfeld and one of the biggest Jaeger-component manufacturers in the world, is particularly put out. (Given that both Schoenfeld and Gottlieb were German-born, even though Schoenfeld’s parents moved to America when he was eleven, some Germans occasionally note that this time around, two Germans saved the world).

Europe has been drawn somewhat closer by the conflict, the global economic crisis and the move of most industrial nations to a wartime economy leading to the creation of genuinely _effective_ pan-European economic institutions, although the Greeks still dropped out when they realized the global economy was so shot that leaving the Euro wouldn’t make things _worse_. (They have since cozied up with the Russians). Some politicians are talking of a “Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok” again, Europe partnered with a Russia detached from the Pacific Rim as a counterbalance against some sort of Sino-American “Co-Dominion.” In case Kaiju started roaming further abroad and the Jaegers failed to stop them, the UK and France have greatly enlarged their nuclear arsenals: there is no great rush to shrink them again. Research continues into why Jaegers undergoing final assembly by Pan Pacific Defense Force techs moved the way they do while the best experimental designs by European teams move like 90 year old arthritic grannies.

India, whose monetary and technological contributions to the war were by necessity fairly modest – only one (mostly) all-Indian Jaeger was built during the war, and it went down like a chump to the first Class IV it met – feels a bit put out that nobody seems to want them in their club. They’re keeping a close eye on Pakistan, which has managed to totter on for another decade somehow, but isn’t looking healthy at all.

Afghanistan, on the other hand, has managed to return to a degree of stability after a period in which the Taliban once again took over quite a bit of the country (the allied forces had gone home) – the present “president-protector for life” is a psychopathic bastard, but he’s his own man with no foreign ties, which, combined with atrocities against Taliban supporters and corrupt local thugs that would whiten Ivan the Terrible’s hair, has mostly reconciled the population to his rule.

Latin America is doing OK, given the world situation. Brazil is celebrating the end of the war with the most extravagant Fiesta in a decade, Argentina finds to its surprise that their economy is currently doing better than that of the US, and people are noticing that Cuba stopped being Communist sometime while people weren’t watching.

Some nations had population movements during the Kaiju wars, others did not. In spite of the period of successful Kaiju smashing, the US west coast states dropped in population by nearly 40%, with the shrinkage of Russian populations in eastern Siberia being even greater. Small and crowded island nations like Japan and Indonesia had no distant “Inland” to move to, so generally stayed tight, although quite a few Japanese relocated from the east to the west coast. (And the Filipinos had to move Manila). The importance both economic and agricultural of the coastal lowlands to China was such that the government put in place harsh new pass laws designed to prevent anyone from changing their place of residence without government permission. (Many moved in spite of this). Australians were distinctly short on places to move to, and short of money to build infrastructure in the desert. A lot of Peruvians moved to the mountains - Kaiju do not make good mountain climbers. Not due to lack of strength to pull themselves up, but due to the tendency of slopes to collapse under their weight. There were smaller-scale movements away from the seacoast worldwide, as people worried the Kaiju might change their behavior and swim out into the Indian or Atlantic oceans. (The cruise line industry was badly impacted even in the Mediterranean, and pretty much went extinct in the Pacific).

Their general helplessness during the Kaiju war having brought some shame to Arab leaders, the more democratic Arab nations, from Algeria to South Syria, have joined together to form a closer economic/political union in hopes of invigorating their impoverished economies and strengthening their international position. The new Arab Confederacy’s most recent members are the Islamic Republic of Palestine (Gaza) and the Republic of Palestine (West Bank, or more precisely the amount of it the Israelis hadn’t put behind a wall.) Israel has not been happy with this, but with economic aid from a troubled US sharply cut back, it has had its own problems, and having dumped rump West Bank and Gaza and walled them off, really has no business (say the Arabs) criticizing what happens to them. In any event, they have more to worry about nuclear-armed Iran - just in case any Kaiju make it west of SE Asia, they claim - and the new Islamicist government of Saudi Arabia, which is currently sinking into bloody scapegoat purging over their failure to provide either the jobs or the raised living standards the people (aside from the one-issue more-fundamentalists) initially revolted for (for one thing, it’s hard to raise oil prices in the midst of a global depression).

The global economic slump brought on by the Kaiju war combined with sharp cutbacks to foreign aid and investment in countries not actively contributing to the War plowed under many of the hopeful economic shoots that took hold in Africa in the 2000s. There are some hints of recovery, but Africa has generally suffered (another) lost decade, and there have been a fresh wave of coups and democracy failures, while less money to spend on healthcare has led to more deaths from AIDS.

Politics world-wide has taken a turn towards authoritarianism and economic dirigisme, with the market being somewhat unreliable in the midst of a war of uncertain outcome with giant monsters: the right wing is now calling for the reversal of many war-time measures, such as the government takeover of much of the US banking system (trying to leverage things so to maximize profits from the market effect of the next Kaiju attack was really the last straw) or the pan-European financial and government banking system put in place in a last-ditch method to prevent the Euro system from collapsing entirely.

Turkey has had a civil war, Russia absorbed Belarus when nobody was looking, and impoverished Pacific Islanders are trying to get the tourists to come back. Islamic terrorism is down, most unemployed young Muslim men feeling that if these are the End Times, blowing up American airliners is probably missing the point: the US has already pulled out of the Middle East, and what good has come of it?

Clay was not strong enough.

Religion is up, although the strange nature of the threat – and the response – has meant that oddball cults and religious offshoots have generally benefitted more than mainstream denomination. The Church of Scientology has undergone a violent schism due to disputes over the significance of the Kaiju and their relationship to Xenu. The Catholic Church is still undergoing mental gymnastics to find a way to fit the Precursors into doctrine, while many Protestant congregations continue to insist that the Apocalypse is still coming and the Kaiju were merely Signs and Portents. On the other hand, the population of pure atheists has also grown at the expense of the Fuzzy Center, and the Lovecraft-inspired Church of Cosmic Terror is doing surprisingly well for recruits.

In spite of all the international bickering and finger-pointing, and the generally rubble-strewn economic situation, there are hopeful signs for 2027 and beyond. There is the simple joy and relief that the war is finally over (ignoring those scientific nay-saying negative nellies) and that being trampled by monsters is on nobody’s insurance plan. Then there are the substantial technological advances of the last decade plus, including functional fusion power, a whole raft of super-strong new synthetic materials, great advances in robotics and cybernetics (the Bionic Man/Woman has arrived, although medical insurers generally won’t pay for limbs much stronger than the normal human being), power transmission, chemical synthesis and plasma garbage disposal. It’s a Brave New World of high-tech, if a bit hard on the High School dropout. Optimists looking ahead to an economic recovery see extraordinary new cities (after building the Wall, throwing up a few 2000-foot arcologies seems easy as pie), laboring armies of tele-operated robots, fusion powered industries sending productivity through the roof and bringing an era of plenty. The skeptics wonder whether the poorer and less educated global 80% will be able to afford said plenty.

Since the Kaiju War took priority, little was spent after 2013 on space travel and exploration, but right through the war there were those that claimed humanity could only survive in the long run if it expanded into space: with the end of the war, they are getting a bit more of a hearing, although the still battered economy means that nobody is rushing to them with great wads of cash. The universe is clearly a most dangerous place, and such disparate types as the mil-SF crowd, Muscular Christians, and the Church of Cosmic Horror agree mankind needs to be a less concentrated target, although the first two wouldn’t characterize the proper survival strategy as “breed fast, scatter wide, little insects.” Advances in fusion and plasma tech promise the possibility of round trips to Mars in a matter of months rather than years.

It was not long before the neural link became generalized, although most nations made it illegal to carry out neural linkages without the permission of all parties involved, and many banned its use for private purposes – or, in some cases, any non-Jaeger purposes. As yet the neural link has not become a party game even in those nations where its use is legal, since the cheapest portable version sells for something like $500,000 in 2013 dollars.

(Well, aside from among the youth of the 1%).

China initially jumped on the link as an interrogation device, until it became clear that 1. Unless both sides were actively working at it, a neural link mostly generated nightmare garbage, 2. There had to be some sort of mental compatibility to get any sort of stable link, 3. Out of the vast sea of random information, it was very hard to pick out and retain specific facts as desired, and 4. The interrogated was just as likely to get dirt on the interrogator, which cooled substantially their enthusiasm.

It _has_ been used by some warlords, old fashioned junta leaders, and people in jobs of dubious legality as a both a test and a means of loyalty: one can know for sure that the man you drift with can be trusted (at least at that moment in time) and they know you trust them with all their (current) secrets. (In macho societies, cases where one of the participants was in deep denial about their gayness usually do not end well).

Understanding of the Precursors remains elusive, with much information gained from scientists Drifting with Kaiju brains being fragmentary or tainted by the attempts of human minds to make sense of the alien, and data from the last couple years of the war was further limited by increasingly sophisticated mental attacks by the Precursors against human spies. (It is generally believed that Newton Giezler and Hermann Gottlieb’s highly successful final Drift was only due to the brain used being that of a newborn infant and thus only weakly perceived as yet by the collective consciousness). What is known is that the Kaiju and the Precursors are linked through a collective intelligence apparently not limited by space or time as we know it: some of the information gleaned seems to point to the possibility that the merely T-Rex sized Precursors are not so much masters of the Kaiju as much as another tool of a collective hive consciousness, although many humans have trouble with this concept and prefer to see them as the “boss aliens” (see, Borg Queen).

That they are as utterly merciless and relentless as any Austrian-accented Cyborg is something most scientists who have Drifted (those not too busy screaming OH GOD KEEP THEM OFF to chat) can agree on: what their ultimate motivations and aims are, what they do for a living when they aren’t invading other dimensions, etc. remains a lot less clear. Did they in fact kill off the dinosaurs, as several scientists have claimed to have “seen”? And why didn’t they remain? Why didn’t they come back for sixty million years? (One scientist says there was a “storm” or a “whirlwind” that broke contact between worlds: another occasionally babbles of something that ‘seeped down from the stars’ when it smelled the slaughter). They certainly appear to have successfully invaded more than one: by correlating the scattered impressions of different researchers, as many as a hundred “other worlds” have been identified, a majority of which seem to have been overrun by the Kaiju, and most feel this is merely a scattered sampling of a much greater total. Admittedly, many of these worlds are recalled in vague impressions and flashes which are confusing at best; many of them appear to have been like Earth (plants, animals, planets circling a sun, etc) but others gave such strange impressions and images that some people argue they represent Precursor mental conceptions or fantasies or fears rather than anything actual.

From what has been reported, there is apparently a whole Kaiju ecosystem on the other side: there apparently are Kaiju who are designed specifically to “clear” new worlds, Kaiju which are environmental modification machines, Kaiju who clean up after other Kaiju and recycle their bodies, Kaiju who either build or _are_ “housing” for other Kaiju, Kaiju who travel from (somewhere) to (somewhere) with offshoots of the hive in them… and there are some raving scientists that rave about their entire world being a monstrous thing, about suns made of jelly like eyes, of worlds that pulse and stars that crawl, of a universe which is like a cancer seeking to infect other universes with its cells – and the crazier ones can get really disturbing.

Very few people know what the elderly man with the metal engraving tools does inside the bodies of the Jaegers before they are fully activated.

And none outside his family know the seven true, unspeakable Names of God.