Pacific Rim: The Official Movie Novelization

PROLOGUE

We always thought alien life would come from the stars… but it came from beneath the sea.

A fissure between two tectonic plates in the Pacific Ocean. A portal between dimensions, one we would come to know simply as The Breach.

I was fifteen when the first kaiju made land in San Francisco. It came through the Breach on August 11, 2013, at oh seven hundred hours. A beast as big as a skyscraper.

By the time tanks, jets, and missiles took it down, six days and thirty-five miles later, three cities were destroyed and tens of thousands of lives were lost.

Some of those missiles were tactical nukes. The kaiju, which got the code name Trespasser, survived the first two. The third finally took it down, but there are places in the Bay Area where people won’t be able to live for centuries. You’ve heard of Oblivion Bay? That’s how Oblivion Bay happened.

But the monster was dead. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

Then the Breach puked out another kaiju, five months later. It headed for Hong Kong, and when they nuked it they created the Exclusion Zone. The third came a little less than eight months after that. It almost destroyed Sydney before it too was nuked to cinders. Every time, tactical nukes eventually took the kaiju down, but large swathes of the world’s great Pacific cities were being destroyed and rendered uninhabitable.

We couldn’t keep nuking them, or pretty soon the Earth was going to be destroyed while we were trying to save it. And no conventional military could handle them. They didn’t even notice tank shells. Hellfire missiles hurt them, a little, but couldn’t take them down. They were the closest thing to invincible that our world had ever seen.

But that was where humanity started to show its best. The world came together, pooling its resources and throwing aside old rivalries for the sake of the greater good: the survival of the human race. The Jaeger Project created a way for two human beings to merge their brains into a single organic supercomputer more powerful than anything you could make out of silicon. Why? Because in Germany and Australia and Japan, the best roboticists and engineers and military minds in the world were putting their heads together to create the only thing that could stop something the size of a kaiju without resorting to nukes: Robots.

Thirty stories tall, bristling with weaponry and wired to respond to their pilots’ commands as if they were extensions of the pilots’ own brains… it was time for the kaiju to pick on something their own size.

The Jaeger program was born.

In a way, I was, too.