Godzilla vs. Kong by Greg Keyes (e books free to read TXT) 📗

of working at Apex was that you were exposed to a nearly constant barrage of propaganda about how great the company was, how essentially altruistic they were. Even in the employee locker room, where a television screen was running the latest company ad. It began with scenes of three years ago, after the Titans ravaged much of the planet, followed by scenes of Apex helping rebuild. The voice narrating the video was that of the company’s CEO, Walter Simmons.

When we started Apex cybernetics, he said, our dream was to extend the power of cutting-edge technology to everyone around the world. Then the world changed. We learned monsters are real. And we knew we had to dream even bigger. We dreamt of strengthening our cities against the Titan threat and making our homes safe. We dreamt of new ways to defend ourselves and keep the human race in full control of our destiny. Robotics, automation, artificial intelligence.

Images of wheat fields, next-generation windmills, robots playing chess, some dude in a helmet with wires, and the latest satellites were replaced by a new well in an impoverished African village. Nice touch.

Who knows what brave new future we’ll dream up next?

Then Bernie was looking at the man himself, Walter Simmons, surrounded by the happy children of the village, well-hydrated with disease-free water.

I’m Walter Simmons, he said. And it is my privilege to lead Apex into humanity’s bold new era. We’re not going anywhere, and neither are you.

The children cheered, Simmons laughed, and Bernie bit his tongue.

You knew, he thought angrily. You knew what was going to happen three years ago. And you capitalized on it.

That had been the subject of his third podcast: How Big Tech knew the Titans were coming. How Apex had the contract to supply certain elements for a secret weapon known as the “Oxygen Destroyer” and how the whole thing had been covered up after a failed attempt to use the weapon, an attempt that had directly resulted in Ghidorah’s reign of terror.

After being betrayed by one of their own, Emma Russell, and after losing more than half of their number to the Titans, there were plenty of disgruntled Monarch employees ready to talk, at least off the record. The picture some of them painted of Apex’s role in the disaster wasn’t pretty. But with Simmons’s money and influence, and with the government itself complicit in covering up their own screw-ups, the relationship between Apex and Monarch had been swept very far under a very deep shag rug.

Just wait, Simmons, you jackass, he thought. I’m gonna nail you. You think you’re immune, but nobody is immune to the truth.

For an instant, he was afraid he’d said it out loud, but, if he had, none of the other employees starting their days around him seemed to have heard him.

He clipped on his badge and fanny pack.

Just be cool, he thought. Just act like you know what you’re doing. Most people don’t ask questions, and especially not these people. It’s why Apex likes them.

Yeah. Of course, it was also why they got rid of anyone who was on to them. By whatever means necessary.

*   *   *

Horace pulled up the shipping manifest and the routing map. The logistics of this shipment were complicated, and this was going to take the better part of an hour to work out, but that was what he liked about the job. He got to work puzzles all night, and he got paid for it. He excelled at his work, and because he was so good at it, people generally left him alone, and they let him work the night shift, which was very quiet and exactly how he liked things.

Studying the manifest, he reached for the apple he’d brought to snack on.

“No!” someone said behind him, causing him to jump a little. “It’s incredibly unhealthy!”

Horace looked at the doorway of his Plexiglas cubicle and saw a stout African American fellow in coveralls and a tool belt staring at him as if he wasn’t even aware he was interrupting something. What was his name? Ernie? Bobby? No, Bernie, one of the guys from engineering.

“All those GMOs?” Bernie went on, obliviously. “Growing a second head could be useful, you’ll have to let me know. Myself? I can barely handle the one head I got.”

“Bernie,” Horace said, trying to smile politely, “you’re not supposed to be in here.” There, he thought, turning back to his screen. He figured that was the end of it.

It wasn’t.

“You ever wonder about what we’re doing here?” the guy blathered on. “What we’re really doing here? From what I hear they’ve inlaid nano-circuitry in a field of turnips in Idaho.”

Why one earth would anyone just walk up and start babbling like this? What was wrong with this guy? Horace was starting to feel crowded, with Bernie blocking the door like that. Not threatened, exactly, but extremely uncomfortable.

“Why are you here?” he asked. “This isn’t engineering.”

“Because, you know, they’re rendering these new specs which is going to take over…” Bernie paused and looked at his watch. “Oh, this is stuck in calendar mode,” he said. Then, before Horace could even flinch, Bernie reached out and grabbed his arm, twisting it so he could see his watch.

“Over an hour,” Bernie continued. “Maybe even more. So my foreman told me to take a walk, make some new friends.”

Oh, crap, Horace thought, as Bernie got even deeper into his already highly compromised personal space.

“Now that we’re friends,” Bernie pushed on, “I can share something with you, right? Okay, cool, you’re going to love this because when I found out, it blew my mind.”

Horace had been wondering if the nightmare could get any worse, and it immediately did. Bernie emptied his fanny pack onto Horace’s desk.

“Oh,” Bernie said. “Um, can you hold onto these things? They’re very important to me. This is hand sanitizer I made from my own garden, it’s really amazing. A compass because I get lost around here, it’s a big place. Do you have any oils on