Chapter 1: A Product of Our Time The screen in our ops room showed a man in a lab coat who looked like he was about to have a terrible day. His name was Dr. Aris Alenko, and he was standing at a podium in front of a blue curtain that had the logos of about a dozen different international science foundations printed on it. We were in a sanitized white room somewhere in the anonymous sprawl of Chicago’s industrial outskirts. The air smelled of ozone from the servers lining one wall. Anya sat cross-legged on the floor, a tablet in her lap that mirrored the broadcast but with a dozen diagnostic overlays running along the edges. Silas was leaning against the far wall, arms crossed, looking bored. He always looked bored right before a job. The broadcast was live from Geneva. It was supposed to be an emergency press conference from a global coalition of scientists. The world had been holding its breath for three days, ever since the news broke. Mister Godzilla, the big guy himself, had been successfully sedated in the South Pacific after he’d made an unscheduled detour toward a major shipping lane. That was a big enough story on its own. The sedation part was a monumental feat of bio-engineering and tranquilizer darts the size of telephone poles. But that wasn’t why we were watching. It was what they found on him after he was put to sleep that had everyone’s attention. “As you can see from the preliminary data,” Alenko was saying, but his voice was thin and shaky. He kept adjusting his microphone as if the problem was technical and not the sheer weight of what he was about to show everyone. The room he was in was a chaotic mess of flashing cameras and reporters shouting over one another. “Just get to it, pal,” Silas muttered from his corner. “The suspense is not exactly killing me.” Anya didn’t look up from her tablet. “His cortisol levels must be through the roof. I’m surprised he hasn’t passed out.” She traced a finger over a waveform on her screen that was probably tracking the audio frequencies of Alenko’s speech. She finds patterns in everything. I just watched the screen. My job is to wait for the signal, and then to execute the plan. The Curator pays us for our patience as much as for our skills. Waiting is part of the process. Alenko finally gave up trying to quiet the room. He just nodded to someone off-screen. “Please, if I could direct your attention to the main display.” The massive screen behind him, which had been showing the coalition logo, flickered to life. The image was grainy at first, a close-up of dark, reptilian skin. It was textured like ancient leather, each scale the size of a dinner plate. The camera zoomed out slowly, and the scale of it became clear. We were looking at a section of Mister Godzilla’s flank, just below his dorsal fins. The image resolved into stunning high-definition. And there it was. The room we were in was silent. Even Silas took a step forward. It was a barcode. It wasn't a sticker or a brand. It looked like it was part of him, the black lines and the string of numbers beneath them integrated into his flesh as if he’d been born with it. The skin that made up the lines was smoother and darker than the surrounding hide. The numbers were perfectly formed, an alphanumeric sequence that was crisp and clear. 100-G-MJ-777. The press conference erupted. The sound coming from our speakers was just a wall of noise, a hundred people shouting at once. Dr. Alenko stood there, looking small and helpless. “What does it mean, Doctor?” one voice cut through the chaos. “Is he a clone?” yelled another. “Who owns Godzilla?” shouted a third, and that was the question that hung in the air. “That’s not a standard UPC or a GS1-128,” Anya said, her fingers flying across her tablet. She was already running the sequence against every database she could access. “The structure is proprietary. The hyphenation is unusual. The ‘G’ likely stands for Godzilla, but the ‘MJ’… that’s not a country or a manufacturer code I recognize.” “Maybe it’s a joke,” Silas offered, though he didn’t sound convinced. He was staring at the barcode on the screen. “Someone’s idea of a prank.” “To tattoo a two-hundred-meter-tall radioactive lizard as a prank?” I asked. “That’s a pretty dedicated prankster.” Silas just shrugged. He doesn’t deal in hypotheticals. He deals in what’s in front of him. Right now, what was in front of him was a television screen that was changing the world. On the screen, Alenko was trying to regain control. “Please, please! We do not have answers to these questions yet. Our purpose today is simply to present the discovery. This is a matter of global significance, and we believe in full transparency.” A reporter from a German news agency stood up. “Dr. Alenko, the sequence contains the number 777. In many cultures, this has numerological significance. Some are already suggesting this is proof of divine or, conversely, demonic intervention. Can you comment on the theories of alien creation?” Alenko looked like he wanted the floor to swallow him whole. He was a biologist, a man of facts and figures. He was not equipped to deal with questions about aliens and demons. “We are approaching this from a purely scientific perspective. The marking appears to be a form of biological pigmentation, not an external brand. The cellular structure within the marked area is different. It’s… grown, not applied. As for its meaning, we cannot speculate.” He was a terrible liar. Of course they were speculating. They were probably doing nothing but speculating. But they couldn’t admit that, because admitting they had no idea what they were looking at would cause a global panic bigger than the one already brewing. “MJ,” Anya said quietly, still focused on her work. “There are no registered corporations, holding companies, or sovereign entities with that primary designator. It’s a ghost.” The Curator’s entire philosophy is built on the idea that history is a commodity. Not just the dusty artifacts in museums, but the living, breathing stories that shape our culture. Value is determined by narrative. A simple clay pot is worthless. A simple clay pot from which Socrates drank hemlock is priceless. The object is the same; the story is different. Mister Godzilla had just become the most valuable object on the planet. He was no longer just a force of nature, a monster that rose from the depths to occasionally flatten a city. He was a product. He had a serial number. A product has a purpose, a creator, and an owner. And anything that has an owner can be stolen. I watched the chaos on the screen and thought about the logistics. How do you steal a monster? You don’t. You steal what the monster represents. You steal the key to its origin. You steal the story. The questions from the press were getting more frantic. “What does this mean for international law? Who has jurisdiction over him now?” “Have you made any attempts to scan the barcode?” “Is he one of many? Are there more ‘products’ like him out there?” Alenko was just shaking his head, muttering, “We don’t have that information,” over and over again. The other scientists on the stage with him were doing their best to look stoic and professional, but they were all glancing at each other. The united front was cracking. My own tablet, a ruggedized piece of hardware connected to The Curator’s secure network, remained dark. The screen was black. I had it sitting on the console next to me. It only ever did one thing: deliver orders. Sometimes weeks would go by without a flicker. Sometimes, like today, I expected it at any moment. Anya finally looked up from her tablet. “It’s not just the code, Jax. It’s the font. The typeface used for the numbers and letters doesn’t match any known typographical standard. It’s custom. Someone designed this. This wasn’t an accident.” “Nothing The Curator is interested in is ever an accident,” I said. Silas pushed himself off the wall and walked over to the small kitchenette in the corner of the room to pour a coffee. He moved with a quiet economy of motion that always seemed out of place with his large frame. He was a man built for breaking things, but he did it with the precision of a watchmaker. “So, what’s the play? We grabbing a scientist? Stealing their research?” He took a sip of his coffee. “Or are we going after the big guy himself?” “We wait for instructions,” I said. It was the only answer I ever had for him until the moment came. He was good with that. He trusted me, and I trusted The Curator. It was a simple, effective system. We were a team of specialists who came together for a specific purpose, and The Curator was the one who defined that purpose. I was the point man, the one who translated the objective into a concrete plan. Anya was our digital ghost, capable of getting us into any system and covering our tracks on the way out. Silas was our physical problem-solver. If a door was locked and Anya couldn’t open it electronically, Silas would make a new door. The press conference was completely off the rails now. A woman in the front row was holding up a photo of the Sphinx and shouting about ancient astronauts. A man in the back was demanding to know if Godzilla was a registered trademark. Alenko’s face was pale. He was just a scientist who had made the discovery of a lifetime, and it was going to ruin his life. That’s when my tablet lit up. It didn’t make a sound. The screen just glowed with a soft white light. On it were three lines of simple, black text. There was no sender, no subject line, no time stamp. Just the message. Phase 2 is a go. The King of Pop is next. 100-G-MJ-777. I read the message twice. Phase 1, then, had been the observation. This was the call to action. The King of Pop. It took me a second to make the connection. It was so absurd, so far out of left field, that my brain initially refused to process it. Michael Jackson. MJ. I looked at the barcode sequence The Curator had included at the bottom of the message. 100-G-MJ-777. Godzilla. Michael Jackson. The numbers, I had no idea. But the letters were no longer a mystery. “Anya,” I said. My voice was calm. It had to be. She was already looking at me. She had seen my tablet light up. “We have an objective?” I nodded slowly, my eyes still on the message. The Curator’s logic was a strange and winding road, but it always led somewhere. Godzilla was an icon, a manufactured legend for the nuclear age. Michael Jackson was an icon of a different sort, a man who had remade himself so completely that he became a global myth. Both were kings in their own right. The King of the Monsters and the King of Pop. Both larger than life, both products of a world obsessed with spectacle. And according to The Curator, they were connected by more than just allegory. They were connected by a serial number. “The code isn’t a ghost,” I said to Anya. “The ‘MJ’ isn’t a company. It’s a person.” Silas came back over, his coffee mug in his hand. He looked from me to Anya, then at my tablet. He couldn’t see the screen from his angle, but he saw the change in the room. “What is it?” I took a breath. This was the part of the job that never got easier: the moment of revelation, when the abstract plan became a concrete, and often bizarre, reality. We had stolen jewels from impenetrable vaults, recovered lost manuscripts from private wars, and liberated priceless art from paranoid billionaires. But this was different. “The Curator has a new acquisition target,” I said. “It’s not research data. It’s not a person.” I turned my tablet so they could see the message. Anya’s eyes widened slightly as she read it. It was the most emotion I’d seen from her all day. She understood the implication immediately. She was already thinking about security systems, floor plans, and digital footprints. Silas read the message over her shoulder. He frowned, confused for a moment. “The King of Pop? You mean the singer?” He looked at me. “He’s dead.” “He is,” I confirmed. “But his belongings aren’t.” Silas thought about that for a second. A slow grin spread across his face. “So, we’re robbing a museum?” “Something like that,” I said. “A very famous, very well-guarded one. The Curator wants his artifacts.” The press conference was still playing on the main screen, a chaotic backdrop to our new reality. Dr. Alenko had been escorted away from the podium, and a woman in a suit was now trying to read a prepared statement that no one was listening to. The world was busy trying to figure out the mystery of Mister Godzilla. We had just been given the next clue. It wasn’t about where Godzilla came from. It was about who else came from the same place. I reached over and pressed the button on the side of the main display. The screen went black. The roar of the media vanished, and the room was once again filled with the quiet hum of our servers. The silence was heavy. Anya was already pulling up satellite imagery and public records on her tablet. “Neverland Ranch is a tourist destination now, but a large portion of his personal effects were moved into a secure storage facility in Los Angeles after his death. The collection is managed by his estate. It’s a private, climate-controlled archive. Security will be state-of-the-art.” “There’s always a way in,” Silas said. It was his mantra. I stood up and looked at my team. Anya, the ghost in the machine. Silas, the unstoppable force. And me, the one who had to hold it all together. The Curator had given us a target that was both ridiculous and sublime. A thread connecting a monster and a pop star. It didn’t make any logical sense, but The Curator didn’t operate on logic. He operated on the hidden narratives that drive the world. He believed there was a secret history written in the code of our most famous creations. And he was paying us a fortune to be his librarians. “Pack your gear,” I said. “We’re going to California.”