Pt I, Chapter II: Float

"..e? ..ir… Ca…. er… me? Sir can you hear me?"

The voice was insistent but calm. The man opened his eyes.

The world was sterile and white. He turned his head to the side and saw a long line of beds. Part of his mind registered hospital though he wasn't quite sure what put that information there.

"You've been injured in a Kaiju attack. Can you tell me what you remember?"

The man looked up, bewildered. It was true, he could feel pain wracking every part of his body, but he could not recall why he was in such poor straights. He tried to sit up, but the movement sent shooting pain all the way down his side.

"Sir, please, we've had to do extensive surgery. You had multiple broken ribs, and numerous puncture wounds. A few hours ago we weren't sure you would live. Do you remember the Kaiju attack?"

Doctor, the person speaking to him must be a doctor, the man decided. And a Kaiju? What the hell was that?
"K-kaiju?" the man asked.

"You don't remember the attack," the doctor sighed. "We were hoping you could tell us why you look like a Kaiju chewed you up and spat you back out, but I suppose it's normal for a patient to block out the trauma. Unfortunately, the Kaiju have left quite a mark on many."
The man was silent for a moment, processing.

He looked up with wide hazel eyes.

"Wh-what's a Kaiju?" He asked.

The doctor pursed his lips in shock, but recovered quickly.

"Sir, can you tell me what the last thing you do remember is?"

The man thought, and part of him knew he had to have had a life before waking up in this hospital, but it was all dark, out of focus, and foggy. He couldn't think of anything that he could call a memory, couldn't bring up a single detail about his life.

"How about your name?" the doctor asked. "Can you remember that?"

The man opened his mouth, something on the tip of his tongue, but nothing came out.

He couldn't.

He couldn't remember his own name.

The man stared up at the doctor with wide, frightened eyes, and the doctor adjusted his glasses sympathetically.

"Oh dear."


They called him Sam.

He was littered with scars and cuts he couldn't explain. He could chalk most of them down to the Kaiju attack that supposedly left him nearly dead and without a single memory of who he was.

But with the apocalypse creeping up on humanity, there was little in the way of cohesive networks he could use to try and find out who he was, or where he came from. A basic DNA and fingerprinting test brought up nothing, not in the archives in Osaka, anyway.

"Sam" was the only tattoo he had that had made it out in one piece, three letters spelled out in plain font on his right shoulder. There was another name on his left, but that one had been all but destroyed when the Kaiju nearly ripped his arm off. He would have been incredibly lucky to just have use of his arm at all, but nearly five years after the attack, he had a full range of motion back. The only thing that remained of the tattoo were a few lines of ink, and what might have been part of a D and possibly an N. He wasn't sure.

The tattoo between them, in the middle of his back, was another name, and it was mostly wiped out by scars as well. He thought maybe the latter half of the word said "pda," or something close. The ink was smudged and the skin had been ripped open by careless Kaiju teeth and resealed with stiches and scars that had not cared to preserve the ink. There was the faint hint of lines that suggested that some kind of design had been inked around the word but Sam tired pretty quickly of trying to strain over his injured shoulders to try and see his back. The extensive scarring was in itself not pretty to look at, and Sam preferred not to think about it if he could.

His life before waking up in the hospital remained an impenetrable question mark as well, but Sam had resigned himself to never having the answers to the questions he wanted.

What he did know was what life had been like after.

He'd been told and shown about life before the Kaiju attacks. He'd been informed that there was a point when humanity didn't live under constant threat of attack and maybe he believed it, but everything about the world he knew was shaped by fear. The sirens would blare and if you had any desire to live, you ran for shelter.

It seemed like more and more recently, the attacks would come, though Sam rarely concerned himself. He tried to stay safe.

Perhaps it was repressed memories from his own attack, but the massive monsters scared the ever-loving shit out of him. He had no desire to test his luck against their mighty jaws again.

Sam remembered the initial confusion and blurry awareness from his time in the makeshift hospital. He'd spent six weeks in a bed recovering.

The doctors had placed his picture and description on multiple sites set up for survivors of various attacks. He was listed as a survivor of an attack on Osaka. Clearly, he wasn't Japanese, though he understood the language. He spoke English as proficiently as Japanese, but hadn't had the opportunity to discover why that was, or whether there were other languages he knew that he wasn't aware of. It was weird to think of himself, perhaps sitting down to books of Japanese characters to learn the language as an adult, or maybe learning it as a child, living in Japan. He wondered what other hard won skills he had that had been torn away in the Kaiju attack that had devastated his body and wiped his mind clear.

Those days in the hospital remained a haze of boredom and drug induced fog. Sam couldn't think of a single part of his body that didn't hurt.

The final tally of his injuries was as horrific as it was impressive; he'd broken both legs and nearly all of his ribs. That was in addition to the extensive damage done to his left arm.

When Sam worked up the courage to check beneath the dressings on his torso, he could see ragged teeth marks stretching from his collarbone done to his thigh, each one as far around as his arm. He'd needed multiple blood transfusions, and most of his liver and parts of his intestines had to be removed.

Most of the skin running down the left side of his body looked like someone had tried to feed him through a meat grinder.

Sitting up hurt. Flipping through the pages on a book about Kaiju that a helpful nurse had gotten for him hurt. Signing his name on the forms listing himself as a survivor of a Kaiju attack hurt. Even breathing hurt.

Sam did a lot of reading in those early days.

Everything was new, everything was completely shocking and incredible to him. He read everything he could get his hands on – classic literature recommended by one of the patients next to him and trashy romance novels smuggled in by the nurses, and he even worked his way through six volumes on computer maintenance and coding that had been left in a back room somewhere. Computers fascinated Sam – almost as much as Kaiju did.

Newspapers and medical pamphlets on the Kaiju and their rampages were easily available, and slowly, Sam built up a reasonable understanding of what was going on in the world around them.

Six weeks after first waking up on the hospital, Sam was set to start physical therapy.

His muscles, unused for so long after his injuries, protested extensively.

He hurt constantly. Even walking a few steps left him breathless and frustrated with his broken body and his weakened lungs.

"You have to be patient," he was told more than once.

But Sam didn't want to be patient.

He wanted to be healthy, he wanted to be out of the damn hospital.

He wanted his memory back.

Christ, he wanted to be able to walk three steps without collapsing.

He wanted a lot of things, but no matter what he wanted, he knew the only thing on that list within even conceivable reach was getting out of this hospital. So he threw himself into his physical therapy with a single minded determination.

Slowly, he improved.

Three consecutive steps became five. Five became eleven.

There were days when pain locked his muscles up so bad he couldn't even sit up, but with every passing week, those too became less frequent, even though they were thoroughly disheartening when they did occur.

It appeared that Sam's amnesia only affected his past – there was nothing wrong with his short or long term memory, except for the obvious twenty some year blackout before waking up in the hospital.

It meant that he could be released to find regular housing and a job, and try and live life as normally as possible with a gaping black hole in his past. Perhaps, meant he could get out of the hospital and start trying to fill in the missing pieces of his memories.

From the ward, he applied for an apartment and a job, with the help of one of the nurses.

He found a job doing tech support he could manage over the phone and for extended periods of time without wearing out his still healing body.

It also meant he had worked out a place where he could live once he left the hospital. Luckily, the costs of care for victims of Kaiju attacks were being subsidized by the state, as part of the international initiative to fight off the monsters, which meant that Sam was only left with the puzzle of how to start off a new life, Tabula Rasa.

Several weeks after the start of his physical therapy, Sam was finally cleared to leave the hospital, with the strict injunction that he take it easy, like the nursing staff thought he was about to go running into the ocean shaking a spear, yelling for some Kaiju to emerge to fight him.

Sam assured his doctor he had no intentions of being anywhere near another Kaiju in his entire life.

More than anything else, he wanted answers.

So the day he left, he moved into his new apartment, a small prefurnished one bedroom place Sam could afford on his teleworking salary. His office paid for his phone line and internet connection, though he didn't have a computer (just one very clever phone – and how clever it was, Sam mused, that he could access any piece of information he wanted with just a few touches of a screen!).

He found a list of contacts from the international survivors registry, and began making calls of his own – this time not for work, but to try and find someone – anyone – out there who knew him.

But every single call ended with dead ends.

This family didn't speak a word of English (making them unlikely suspects for Sam's original family), that family had found a few body parts (and unless Sam's doctors were lying about something major, Sam was pretty sure he had all of his), and another wasn't interested in talking to him at all.

Most were able to rule out having a connection to Sam in any way – the brother or son or husband they were missing couldn't be as tall as Sam, or had blonde hair, or certain birthmarks Sam was definitively able to rule out.

It took him less than a week to run through the contact information of every single family with a family member that was missing with no leads on the registry.

He didn't know what else to do, other than try to carry on as best he could.

He needed funds, a source of income so he could feed himself and regroup. It had been several months since the attack at this point, so a few more days or weeks wouldn't make much of a difference anymore.

At this point he was just hoping someone recognized "White, 6"4, male, 20-25 years old, brown hair, tattoo with "SAM" on right shoulder."

Sam didn't make a habit of watching the news, though the reports of Kaiju attacks were impossible to avoid. He heard the gossip all over work, during the few occasions he had to come in and work from the physical office, on the street, wherever he went.

It seemed like the attacks were coming more frequently, though the giant robots he'd been told were called Jaegers seemed to do a good job of keeping them back. Only rarely did Kaiju make it to shore, and usually only because every other Jaeger was under repairs, or one got passed the Jaeger in its way.

Sam checked in with the international registry with decreasing frequency, loosing faith that the single listing might be able to help him find his family. What if the hospital had been wrong, and he'd been injured in a different attack?

What if his family was looking for him but thought he was dead because he wasn't listed in the right place?

He had to find answers. He had to know for sure, to try and discover who he had been before.

To do that, he needed to leave Osaka.

He'd just come to the point where he was comfortable where he lived. He worked from home three days a week, and from the office the other two. He had – well, not friends, but people he knew well and saw regularly. He had a place to live, and moving would be starting all over again.

"You're going to have a hard time leaving by plane," one of his coworkers told him, when Sam raised the issue with him in the breakroom. "That is, unless you've got a fortune you weren't telling us about."

Sam hummed noncommittally, tapping on the side of the coffee mug he was holding. The truth was he could never have afforded a plane ticket out of Japan, not away from the Pacific Rim. As it was, he was barely affording his apartment and food costs.

He didn't have a fortune. What he did have was an able and mostly healed (if horrifically scared and occasionally aching) body, and the desperate need to discover the truth about what had happened to him.

That left only one option, one Sam didn't want to consider.

He'd have to cross the pacific rim somehow.

"Know any ship crews that are hiring?"

His coworker looked at Sam like he was insane.

"Look, that kind of work is bad news, you're just as likely to die by Kaiju as you are to make it where you want to go."

"I just want to find out what happened to me," Sam said. It was common knowledge around his office that the quiet giant of a man that had started working there several months ago had been attacked by a Kaiju and lived – as evidenced by the sling he still wore holding his left arm, and the scars just visible above the collar of his shirt. It was only less commonly known – but certainly no less interesting to the more dedicated gosspis at work – that he had no memory of his life before the attack. That fact had to come out, because there was no other way Sam could explain away a lack of basic competency with regards to photocopiers or pencils, but could still run lines of code when needed.

"I need answers," Sam said, gesturing with his left arm, still bent in its sling. He would have to wait for the arm to fully heal if he were going to go through with his wild plan anyway.

While he was in a hurry to find answers, Sam wasn't exactly in a rush to go up against another Kaiju.

His coworker sighed heavily.

"I'll ask around."

The steamer was a twenty-person cargo ship, and offered four times what Sam's salary in construction was as hazard pay.

There were very few people in the world who were suicidal, brave, or desperate enough to sign onto a trip across the Pacific Rim by boat. Even ignoring the possibility of storms, poor sailing conditions, and the length of the journey, these days there was the additional obvious danger that at any moment, a giant fucking monster could come up out of the ocean and swallow your entire crew whole, boat and all.

Ladies and gentlemen, enter Sam. A man with nothing but his desperation to his name.

The ship was run by a man named Brady, who was vague on the actual content of the cargo they were transporting. He seemed nice enough, though he looked like he'd never worked a day of manual labor in his life. Brady cheerfully informed Sam that his immediate superior on board the ship would be the one to issue his explicit orders, relayed through radio by Brady himself.

To be honest, if his need weren't desperate, Sam would have never wanted to uproot his life like this. He was damn terrified of the Kaiju, and there was a very real possibility he could die in yet another Kaiju attack at sea.

After signing on for the voyage, his nightmares came back full force. Every night, without fail, he dreamed of choppy seas and screaming wind and crashing rain, all accompanying the shadowy form of a monstrous, screeching Kaiju bent on finishing what one of it's predecessors had already started with Sam.

He woke shaking and sweating every night.

"How exactly did you meet this guy?" Sam asked his coworker again after signing his employment papers. He was in the office for the last time, delivering his resignation to his boss.

"We were in the same frat together," the man shrugged. "He had a job opening, I passed it on. You gonna take the work?"

Sam nodded.

"I've already signed on," he said. "I'm leaving next week."

"Are you sure you want to do this? I mean, with everything-"

Sam shrugged, his posture tightening in determination.

"I'm not sure of anything," he admitted. "But I don't think my past is in Osaka, and I need to find out who I am. I need the truth."

Sam's coworker clapped him on the shoulder, his face grim.

"Watch out for Kaiju," he said seriously. "I hear they bite."

Despite himself, Sam smiled a little.

"Yeah," he said. "Thanks, I'll keep it in mind."

He turned away, leaving his office for the very last time.

Sam hoped with everything he had that he was right, and that somewhere on the other side of the ocean, he really could find the truth.

If he was wrong, he'd be risking his life for nothing.

More than that, he hoped he wouldn't die before he got the chance to find out.