DP FICTION #111A: “Ketchōkuma” by Mason Yeater

edited by Ziv Wities

My name is Yasuko Nagamine and I work for the employment bureau. There’s a monster destroying the city. It used to be the mascot for the organ rental service, Sensation. I guess it still is but I don’t think it’s doing much for their bottom line anymore.

Today I’m filing electronic papers, which is what I always do. Someone new registers with the bureau every day and I look at their job history. Then I send them back a form if there’s an opening that matches their file. Or I send them back a form that says, Sorry, there are no openings.

The city getting destroyed is also the whole world, so a lot of people might say it’s bad that something is stomping on it. But almost no one is saying that. They’re all just working. After people figured out they didn’t need plants or oceans or ducks, they made the whole world silver. It’s just buildings and server farms. That’s what happens when people figure out how to turn themselves into machines.

I have one screen with a list of bright dots, one for each opening. And the other screen has a list of bright dots for each person that needs a job. The longer they’ve been without a job or the longer the job is open, the brighter the dot gets.

I can see that big yellow bear Ketchōkuma through my window. He’s at least two miles away but he’s so big his ears almost touch the clouds. He’s holding a parasol made of shiny pink guts, just the way Sensation drew him up: an intestine swirled like a bun at the top. The way he used to look in all the ads, reaching toward the screen with a stomach or a heart in his paw. Well, almost like that. Now the parasol is sagging a little. But he’s still smiling with teeth. When he was regular-sized he had a dance where he bent on one leg and spun around and waved his arms and a jingle came out of his mouth. Now that he’s bigger, he still dances sometimes when he moves. You can almost hear something from his teeth.

Today my boss said I have to hire someone for the Tamentai Plaza opening. He said if they don’t have a general manager, people will start building homes in the dressing rooms and writing on the food court walls with chem paint. I look at the brightest dots but their files are all wrong. Everyone has experience with point of sale, but no one’s been a manager. I scroll down the dots until I get to the duller ones. They’re the same brightness as my eyes. My eyes are a dark paper brown that glows a little. Everyone I know has eyes like that but it’s how you move them around that matters.

I click on one of the dots. This person worked point of sale for twenty years. But they were never a manager. They have a pretty nose but that isn’t good enough. My eyes keep falling down the screen. I’m not supposed to look at the grey dots even though they’re there.

When I was born, the hospital uploaded my mind to the megaserver and threw my body in the waste system. Then they gave me the body I have now. It’s what happens to everyone. I wear a grey suit and keep my hair in a ponytail with a melon-pink tie. Girl stuff. Everyone is cloud-based, so our brains are always ready on the megaserver. That way, if something happens to our body, we can get a new one, and resync our mind when it’s over.

The bear is looking at me through the glass. He can’t see me. He’s too far away. But his eyes are turned this way and he’s not moving. That happens sometimes. Like he’s scared or broken.

I don’t think about my body anymore. The thing is there’s only so much space on the megaserver (it’s different than the servers they use for money and traffic records and the employment bureau), and it turns out a person’s brain takes up way more space than you’d think, so we each get the same amount of time before our brains are deleted and they recycle our plastic bodies. It’s fair, I guess.

Someone’s file just came in. It fills up the whole screen and the dot spins like a Ferris wheel. There’s her face. No smile. That’s good, I think. She doesn’t take nonsense. Her collar is the color of a pearl and comes all the way up to her jaw in lace. It makes her look like a beautiful singer. Experience: Fourteen years in library science. Director of collections at a nearby branch for eight years. Recognition of excellence in radio archival. She’s perfect.

But her dot is barely even grey. It just got here. It’s impossible. My boss would never approve it. He hates breaking rules, and I do too.

They said Ketchōkuma got loose and found a hatch in the waste system. He found where they put all the bodies, all our tiny bodies that aren’t plastic. He started sucking them up. On the news, they said, He siphoned all the neonates. That’s how he got so big and no one knows how he did it. I wish I could be that big, and golden. Like the sign on the casino where every letter is huge. They’re all glowing and you want to hug them and feel how warm they are.

Ketchōkuma is winding up to dance. You can tell by the way his parasol drops below his knees.

I keep the woman’s dot on my screen. The mall needs a manager. It’s a good mall. I’ve been there and I like to shop for outfits and look at all the pets in their habitats. Someone has to run the mall and there’s only so much time left before people start breaking windows and looting power cells and painting rude words on the walls.

The big bear finishes his dance. I almost clap but my boss sits at the desk in front of me. When Ketchōkuma stops, he loses his balance and sways into an office building. It’s far away, so I barely hear it. His legs disappear in the puff of smoke that comes up. His original fur is so stretched out that he isn’t really yellow anymore if you look up close, only from far away. If you look up close, like the drone cameras do on the news, you can see all the tears and gaps. Underneath it’s pink and white and red and wet.

I still have the woman on my screen. It says she knows seven languages. That would be good if random people caused trouble at the mall and she had to tell them where to go to be reprimanded. Or if someone moved in from a faraway part of the city and wanted to open a new store in the mall.

Ketchōkuma is singing now. I can definitely hear it, but maybe it’s my imagination. They said all his wires must be stretched as far as they can go, but his chip still plays his theme song. Only now it’s really slow and deep. Wa di-di. Ka da to ma di-di. It’s baby talk. It doesn’t mean anything. I still like hearing it, even though it sounds weird now.

As soon as I graduated I spent all my gift money on an organ from Sensation. It was a lung. The most beautiful organ. Everyone’s plastic body has a cavity around the tummy if you press hard enough in the right places. That pocket’s where Sensation hooks in, so most people rent a stomach. I knew it wasn’t right to have a lung down there but they hooked it up and once I took a breath it was all I could think about. But that was only for six hours. Then I ran out of money. I miss it. Our lungs always work but they’re just plastic and they don’t feel like anything.

I send the file for the woman with the tall collar to my boss. She’s the right person, I know she is, so it doesn’t matter if the dot is grey.

Ketchōkuma is closer now, but he’s quiet again. I can kind of see the tears in his fur. His parasol is gone, or maybe he’s dragging it on the ground below the skyline. How many weeks now, and he never has anything to say. If he could talk, I don’t know what he’d tell me. It’s like that. All of the best things you can tell someone don’t need words.

My boss hates her. He says no. He says even if she were the maestro of management she would be horrible because her dot is grey. And grey means there are other people besides her who need to get back to work first, so society doesn’t fall apart. He says find someone else, there’s plenty of people.

Now I have money for an organ, but Sensation stopped taking orders. After Ketchōkuma got loose, they dropped everything. Like it never mattered in the first place. They went on the news and said sorry, it won’t happen again. They said everybody who’s upset gets a refund. They said, actually, we’ve been working on something new, and instead of a refund we’ll put your money towards that—it’s all digital, it’ll last forever. Then everybody started talking about organs. They said what was the point of something that makes you feel sweaty? Sometimes they stink. They’re overpriced and we shouldn’t have cavities in our bellies anyway, let’s take those out for the next generation.

The floor rumbles. Through the window I watch König Schellen’s golden sign cracking in two, flattening each floor until it all disappears under the other buildings. The biggest casino in the whole city, gone. My monitor shakes and so do I. I see a big shape in the dust, but it slips behind the hotels.

Then the opera house starts to move. Its big red arches lean forward, so slow I don’t see it at first. It looks like it’s going to sleep. Then the lights spark, and they pop one by one, and then all at once like fireworks. It falls, and there’s the shape again before the dust covers it up.

I try to focus on my job. I need to choose someone who can be the manager of Tamentai Plaza. It’s a really important place and someone people like needs to protect it. Someone who can make business good for everybody, even the pets.

I try. I really try, but my eyes won’t stay on the screen. The racetrack that circles all the restaurants flies up and hangs in the air. It’s floating over everything for the longest second I can remember. Then it whips down into the hotels. The whole row gets smashed, and they’re half as tall now. And other buildings start falling too, big ones nearby. Everything’s falling down.

I have to look at my screen. There’s nothing I can do about anything outside, but I can help Tamentai Plaza.

It’s no good. There’s the parasol. The pink canopy pounds through the Super Stadium toward me, through the silver dome that’s as big as the sky, and stuff is flying everywhere. The parasol comes back up through the dome and drops down again like a hammer, and the noise is so loud even my manager looks up for a second. A big cloud blooms where the stadium used to be. 

I sit for a long time, until it all clears. Ketchōkuma is standing in the smoke behind everything. He’s wet and glittering. His fur is almost gone now. It’s frayed to nothing. He’s not even yellow anymore. He’s red and blotchy with shadows.

Then something cool happens. I look at my screen and it’s almost empty. All those dots. All those people are gone and the woman with the beautiful collar and no smile is the very first dot and it’s brighter than anything, even the casino sign. And the rest of the dots are people I’ve never seen before because they’re new, because—I know what happened. I send her file to my boss again without even thinking.

I look out the window. He’s there. His eyes are big, dark holes in his face, big enough to fall into. He’s quiet. His mouth is lumpy and red.

Hi, big bear.

He did it.

You knew, didn’t you.

There was a server farm behind the hotels. I forgot all about it. All the older files must have been stored there. And the ones that came in today started up in a different server. He knew somehow.

You knew, didn’t you?

Why else would he come this way?

Thank you.

I liked him even before he did it.

Thank you. I really mean it.

My boss says the woman is hired. He already called her. He says she’s the best file I’ve picked since I started. He doesn’t know.

He doesn’t know, big bear.

He doesn’t even realize what happened.

My screen refreshes and all the old dots come online again, rerouted from some other server. But it’s too late. They already hired her.

Ketchōkuma is looking at me. He’s really looking at me this time, through the window. I think about that silly lung that’s probably rotten now. It was good, even if it isn’t around anymore. I think about my body. I think about the whole thing: the inside, the outside, the hair tie. I think about my body, even if it is plastic. And I close my eyes.

Thank you, toes.

I peek for a second. I close them again.

Thank you, toes. I feel your weight. I appreciate that you’re a part of me.

I keep my eyes closed.

Thank you, legs. You may not carry blood, but you carry me.

I open them one more time.

Thank you, eyes. Because of you, the whole world is inside me. Because of you, I see a bear.

I lay my fingers on the desk and watch them work, and Ketchōkuma takes the city into his paws.


© 2024 by Mason Yeater

2377 words

Author’s Note: Mainly I just wanted to create my own kaiju. Obviously they lend themselves to metaphor, so there’s always the action and the threat, but also some deeper ideas if you’re in that mindset. With the monster design, I was pulling from Japanese mascots, and I guess giving this one the old body-horror treatment. The ending, weirdly enough (or maybe not), was inspired by some Thích Nhất Hạnh affirmations. I have an office job and often forget about my own body.

Mason Yeater writes speculative fiction near the Great Lakes. Previously, his work has been published in TL;DR Press’s Curios anthology. He can be found sometimes @snow_leeks on Twitter.


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