“Come in please, Mr. Brody. Come in and we will show you.”

Ford stepped deeper into the cabin. Graham shut the door behind him.

* * *

Flickering images played upon the wall of the cabin. Hooked into Graham’s laptop, a portable digital projector provided relevant visuals as Serizawa attempted to explain.

“In 1954,” he began, “the first time a nuclear submarine ever reached the lowest depths, it awakened something.”

“The Americans first thought it was the Russians,” Graham added. “The Russians thought that it was the Americans. All those nuclear tests in the Pacific? Not tests…”

“They were trying to kill it.” Serizawa indicated the ancient film footage from the 1950s. “Him.”

Ford’s jaw dropped. Breaking eye contact with Serizawa, he looked more closely at the projected images of the 1954 A-bomb detonation, the bomb with the cartoon lizard inscribed on its cone, a mushroom cloud rising over the once-tranquil Pacific Ocean, and, finally, impossibly, the grainy silhouette of a titanic beast rising up from the sea, a row of jagged fins dimly visible along its spine.

“An ancient alpha predator,” Serizawa explained.

“Millions of years older than mankind,” Graham said, “from a time when the Earth was ten times more radioactive than it is today. The animal—and others like it—consumed that radiation as a food source. But as radiation levels on the surface naturally subsided, these creatures adapted to live deeper in the oceans, farther underground, absorbing radiation from the planet’s core. The organization we work for, Monarch, was established in the wake of this discovery. A multinational organization, formed in secrecy, to search for him, study him, learn everything we could.”

Ford stared at the footage. The images were blurry, but the creature’s gargantuan proportions and general outline were clear.

“We call him Godzilla,” Serizawa said.

The name was derived from a legend of the islands: a mythical king of monsters known as Gojira. The name had been Americanized by the U.S. Military during their initial attempts to bomb the newly discovered behemoth out of existence.

“The top of a primordial ecosystem,” Graham elaborated. “A god for all intents and purposes.”

Ford gaped at the images, struggling to process what he was hearing and seeing. “Monsters…”

“That is one word for them,” Serizawa agreed. He used a handheld remote to call up images of the “cavern” in the Philippines. “Fifteen years ago, we found the fossil of another giant animal in the Philippines. Like Godzilla, but this creature died long ago, killed by these…” Close-ups of the MUTO spores appeared on the wall.

“Parasitic organisms,” Graham said. “One dormant, but the other hatched. Catalyzed when a mining company unknowingly drilled into its tomb. The hatchling burrowed straight for the nearest source of radiation, your father’s power plant in Janjira, and cocooned there. Absorbing the radioactive fuel to gestate, grow.”

“Until it hatched like a butterfly into the creature you saw,” Serizawa. “We call it a MUTO.”