Saturday, May 18, 2013

The Way the Wheel Turns

As the tagline for the latest Fast & Furious movie goes, "All roads lead to this." 

I should have seen this coming, should have adequately prepared for it, should have taken all possible measures to safeguard myself. Yet, when the first kaiju made landfall, I was wholly devastated by its sheer enormity, its terrible roar, its deadly appendages tearing everything that I knew and held dear totally asunder. 

And it happened again. And again. And again.

When a gigantic Cloverfield-like creature festooned with alien shards  flattened the metropolis, that was when I finally learnt that this was never going to stop. 

I had to find a way to fight back.

They counted on me to hide, to give up; they never imagined that I would rise to the challenge.

To fight monsters, I had to create monsters of my own: mental fortitude, determination and a deliberate hardening of the heart melding together to create a fearsome, intricate machine. I sent it into battle and for a while, the machine and I were winning, it seemed to be working.

But then, everything changed.

The monsters evolved, shed off their battered shells and emerged all dark, ominous and shrouded by an impenetrable black cloud. I could not make out their features from the dense disruption, much less find any weak spots to commence an attack. I got pounded into submission, my machine taking beating after beating, suffering irreparable damage to 80 percent of its heavily-battered frame. 

Now, I am on the edge of my hope, at the end of my time.

To fight these renewed creatures, I have to understand them once again, understand the vermin that they were aiming to eradicate by attacking population centers, understand the motivation for such indiscriminate genocide. To do that, I have to withdraw into my Shatterdome, to redraw the plans of battle and create another bigger, deadlier machine to face the monsters that are at my door. 

I hope that I will be able to cancel the apocalypse.

Feed the fishes.


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