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“I’m telling you,” Arturo said excitedly, looking up from the screen he was monitoring. “Ghidorah’s making a radio. I did one of those make-an-AM-radio kits as a kid? He’s making the, the wire coil and everything.”
Nobody was listening to him. Everyone else in the Outpost 56-B trailer was crowded around Xochitl’s computer, watching Rodan sculpt a world globe. Big deal. They’d already figured out he was sculpting a globe. That was last hour’s news. The new mind-blowing titan activity was making a radio.
Nobody cared.
“How’s he doing that? How's—what’s the melting point of glass?”
“I’m looking it up, it’s like fifteen hundred degrees? We’ve measured the Nest at twelve hundred degrees, right?”
“No, no, that's—that’s window glass. Pure sand is even worse, it’s like seventeen hundred degrees. How’s he making up the difference?”
“I bet he’s breathing fire. I bet he’s got, like, flamethrower breath—”
“Guys.” Arturo leaned back, gesturing at his screen. “Radio.”
Dante waved him off. “Man, he’s wrapping wire around a tree, that doesn’t prove anything.”
“He’s got two speakers!”
“He’s not doing anything with them.”
Arturo threw his hands up and turned back to his computer.
The door banged open and the Dr. Zareen Jangir hurried into the trailer, dragging a luggage bag still bearing international travel tags. The Dr. Jangir had transferred from Antarctic Outpost 32 to Isla de Mara after Ghidorah’s awakening, gone back to 32-B while Rodan and Ghidorah had been visiting, and only just today finally returned to Isla de Mara. “Hey.” She tossed her luggage in one corner. “What’s going on?” (She asked the same question every time she arrived; she wasn’t terribly fluent in Spanish yet. They let her get away with English sometimes, but only because she was trying.)
Two different people answered, “Rodan’s making a globe!”
The Dr. Jangir had transferred from Antarctic Outpost 32 to Isla de Mara to 32-B to Isla de Mara again for one reason and one reason alone. That reason was not Rodan. “What else is going on?”
Arturo had an ally. “Ghidorah’s making a radio!”
“No way.” She pulled a folding chair out of the stack by the wall and sat next to Arturo, already enthralled.
###
“It’s gonna be a geography lesson,” Xochitl said breathlessly. “I knew it. We’re going to learn place names.”
By now, there were eleven people crammed into the trailer—all five of the full-time Monarch 56-B employees currently on Isla de Mara and another six of the part-timers who’d come in just to for the show—all watching fascinated as Ghidorah inspected Rodan’s handiwork. Xochitl gestured vaguely with one hand to catch the others’ attention and pointed at the screen. “Can we—can we get a drone up there? I want to see what Rodan’s pointing at when he starts giving names. If we keep the drone far enough—”
She cut off as Ghidorah claimed the globe from Rodan, bunted his forehead, and retreated down the volcano to inspect his new prize. Half of the crowd in the trailer—which was by and large made up of the kind of people who worked for Monarch because at one time they’d watched Jurassic Park and felt overwhelming affection for the T-rex—cooed, “Aww.” Zareen popped open a window and leaned out to look up at Ghidorah, who had settled down hardly the length of a soccer field away from 56-B’s trailers.
“Just for the record,” Xochitl said, tapping her headphones, “that word we took a vote on and we’re like, eighty percent sure it means something like ‘love’ or ‘like’ or 'fuck’? Ghidorah used it to describe the globe.”
There were another couple of odd coos. Dante muttered, “I really hope it doesn’t mean 'fuck.’”
“This is absolutely going on Twitter.” Arturo opened a second screen next to his live feeds of Ghidorah and started scrolling through their collected footage, looking for a good shot of the bunt.
The crowd gathered around the other computer started chattering excitedly. “Hey, you know what would drive HQ crazy? If we make a big fuss about the gift giving but don’t even mention that Rodan made a globe. Just use a shot where it’s obvious what it is but don’t say anything about it.”
“Hah! God, just go 'apparently Ghidorah’s impressed by Rodan’s glassblowing technique,’ like we already knew Rodan could—”
“They’ll send us fifty emails going 'Rodan's what?!’”
“Do you think they can send us a scanner? Like a 3D scanner? I wanna compare his globe to the real Earth for accuracy.”
“Did you see it’s got Hawaii wrong? It’s missing the big island. How old is the big island?”
“HQ probably already knows about the globe, someone else on the island’s probably taken a picture and put it online by now—”
“Yeah but—will they know it’s a globe? Will the details show up on a phone camera?”
“I mean it’s fifty meters across—”
“—would be blowing up our phones by now if they already knew—”
The trailer fell silent as a burst of static came through their tinny speakers and the open window. After a moment, the noise resolved into, of all the improbable sounds, “Nada Nuevo” by Christian Nodal.
Arturo was on his feet. “Yeah! RADIO! I knew it! I told you!” He high fived Zareen.
And then the rest of the trailer was screaming and grabbing each other. They were still trying to shout simultaneously about the implications of Ghidorah building a radio when Rodan came down the volcano to join him. Someone shouted over the din, “Hold on, hold on! What are they saying to each other?”
“Ghidorah’s asking if Rodan understands the music,” Zareen said, still leaning half out the window. “Rodan says no.”
Xochitl applauded. “You’re keeping up with your language lessons!”
“I barely get any of it. 'Do you understand’ is just the most common question Rodan asks.”
“I know that station, they’re listening to 1050 AM,” Arturo announced, listening to the station identification bumper as it switched from music to commercials. “I didn’t know they were still going. When’s the last time any of you listened to AM radio?”
“Can you believe it?” Zareen asked, in that The-Dr.-Jangir-Is-Talking-About-Ghidorah voice that they were all beginning to recognize. “He can make electronics. He knew about radios. He didn’t learn that here.”
“Fuck, right, are there aliens with radio?” Dante asked. “There must be, right? You guys ever stop and think about how Ghidorah proves that there’s actual alien life out there? Like, we’ve made contact with extraterrestrial life. And it tried to kill us, but—still. We’re so busy going 'Oh, that’s a titan,’ but no, he’s an alien—”
“And how advanced is he?” Zareen asked. “If he makes radios, what else is he capable of? Has he worked with computers? Alien computers?”
Xochitl waved to get the trailer’s attention again. “Guys, guys look—” Everyone huddled around the various screens with camera feeds. Zareen leaned outside to watch them up close again.
The radio had switched back from commercials to music. Crackling through the speaker was the waltz-time accordion line of an Intocable song.
Rodan had started headbanging along with it.
The entire trailer cheered.