Little Boy blasted Yoshi’s body to ash and bits of bone, and the shockwave carried her far from Hiroshima. She remembered the pain that lasted a fraction of a second. Then she remembered the explosion—the light blinded her first, and then the sound rattled her eardrums.
Now wind tore her apart, painlessly, but uncomfortably. Yoshi tasted metal and smelled burned flesh, and underneath it, dust and burning rubble. She attempted to rub her eyes and sniffle, but her hands passed through her face. Scared, she looked at her transparent, oddly-colored hands, and no air came through her nose. Yoshi looked around and yelped at the distance between her and the water, and her and dry ground, and went into hysterics.
Eventually, Yoshi heard a man calling for the crying person. Yoshi forced herself through the air to him, relieved to find an adult. But when Yoshi reached the Imperial Japanese Army soldier, he disappeared. She dissolved into tears again.
Yoshi forced herself through the air to Japan much faster than she expected and wondered if she missed Hiroshima. But Yoshi recognized the bay islands, and Hiroshima was larger than the other nearby towns. An unusual, dissipating cloud hung over the city.
Before the air raid, she had picked up a leaflet from the United States, warning of a bombing raid worse than the ones on Germany. Yoshi begged her mother to evacuate, but her mother needed to work and they did not qualify for official evacuation.
Hiroshima consisted of scorched buildings, limbless trees, rubble, and ash. Yoshi instinctively shrunk from the developing firestorm, except the heat felt tolerable. The bombing overcame the firebreaks that she and other children had built, which annoyed her, and the concrete buildings, which alarmed her. She dreaded her mother’s munitions plant blew up.
Her mother told her, during an air raid, to absolutely never, ever, under any circumstances, for any reason whatsoever, even in an emergency, be on the same street as a munitions plant. Yoshi searched for it anyway and then her home, but found neither. Her mother was probably in a demolished hospital.
Yoshi, an only child, was too young to care for herself under the circumstances. On a normal day, she thought she was old enough. Her father died honorably in Saipan. Most of her extended family lived elsewhere in Japan; she forgot their addresses and looking for her mother’s address book was ridiculous. Stories of what Americans did to Japanese people and Japanese-Americans scared her, and so nothing would convince her to live with her Japanese-American family. Her family’s friends might take her in temporarily, or tell her where to find help.
Yoshi grew sadder and angrier through her search for Hiroshima and despaired of adults responding to her calls. She doubted the survivors could help her. They congregated together and walked in lines, with their arms and legs spread apart, and flesh and ragged clothing hanging off their bodies. Some made incomprehensible sounds with wide-open mouths, which Yoshi strained to hear. Occasionally, people near her slumped or fell. Her mother was probably in the same condition.
So, Yoshi approached a group of survivors. A few feet away, the ones closest to her fell over dead, and smoldering wood ignited. That scared Yoshi—there was something deadly on the ground, like a gas leak. Fluttering backward, she bumped into another victim. A mushroom cloud proportional to the person’s size erupted and ash and miniscule fragments of charred bone piled on the ground. Terrified, Yoshi bolted into the air.
Yoshi felt safer over Hiroshima than the Sea of Japan, but she worried about coming too close to the ground. Lingering smoke and dusty particles accumulated in her cloud without feeling dusty or smoke-filled. She adjusted her cloud to hear the wind, the only sound, better. Then she regained her normal vision and, if she wanted, she could see beyond human’s light spectrum, which explained the weird colors.
Along with missing her normal sense of taste and touch, she longed to smell anything except the sickening stench of her own body burning. She was not hungry or thirsty, and her other bodily functions seemed nonexistent. It scared her, and felt weird, but seemed good under the circumstances.
Finally, Yoshi thought the deadly thing on the ground must have been repaired, shut off, or aired out, and she descended to Hiroshima again. Her presence accidentally killed people. Yoshi realized that, inexplicably, she had cremated the victim. It horrified her, but she could not convince herself she was wrong.
She decided to avoid people, especially her mother, and including people in Yoshi’s condition. She saw them in the distance.
Another massive shockwave hit Yoshi, followed by a detonation. She turned in the detonation’s direction, where a mushroom cloud hung. Obviously, with an unfamiliar weapon, the Allies attacked Japan, and Yoshi suspected the United States carried out the bombing raid. She wished the bomb made small explosions inside the city, explaining the cremated victim.
Yoshi saw a transparent radioactive lady in a nurse’s uniform. She watched for quite a while, unsure how to treat a distraught adult.
But the nurse asked, “Little girl, do you need help?”
“Stay away!” Yoshi yelled, panic overruling politeness. “Don’t touch people! Don’t touch me!”
“I won’t. I am Hara-san. Who are you?”
“Yoshi,” Yoshi said, backing away. “I can’t go near anything. Or anybody. Living people die if I touch them.”
“The United States bombed us and asked Japan to surrender.”
“Japan won’t surrender,” Yoshi said, confidently.
“They used one bomb on Hiroshima, and I suppose they did it again to Nagasaki.”
“One bomb?” Yoshi asked.
Hara-san explained what little she knew, then said, “You were right to stay away from people. Come with me if you want.”
“I want my mother,” Yoshi said.
“I wish you could find her. But if we are radioactive, we will make her sick.”
“Couldn’t you please treat her?”
“I wish I could, but I can’t. Come with me if you want.”
“If I bump into somebody, he sticks to me, and I don’t like it. Stay away from people.”
Yoshi sped away from Hara-san.
The Japanese free people and the Korean slave labor had become radioactive clouds, and before conflict arose, they moved away from each other but remained in contact.
Concerned, Hara-san checked on Yoshi, and convinced her to visit other radioactive clouds, who lived over the Sea of Japan. Unable to speak Korean, Yoshi visited the Japanese group. But Yoshi thought she somehow killed the cloud who called for her and the idea scared her too much to associate with other radioactive clouds. Hara-san comforted her.
The radioactive clouds listened to the radio. Because the ability seemed separate from their hearing and radioactive clouds frazzled electrical wires, the radioactive clouds thought they received and transmitted radio signals.
Over the radio, Yoshi heard the disconcerting news of Japan’s surrender. It made sense because it stopped the atomic bombing. She hoped nobody dropped an atomic bomb again. Then she observed the occupation of Japan and the war crimes trials and wished the rebuilt Hiroshima was more like the one she remembered. From anger, she plotted vengeance and punishments.
Whatever sort of being the radioactive clouds were, only they knew they lived. The Japanese radioactive clouds figured out they were not true ghosts, yūrei, and, therefore, they were not vengeful ghosts, onryō. The words monster and mutant seemed wrong. They survived the atomic bombings, but in such a changed state, they did not consider themselves hibakusha, such as the living victims Yoshi encountered in Hiroshima. Yoshi considered herself half-dead. She longed to be completely alive in Japan, either as she had before the bomb or as a hibakusha.
The radioactive clouds rarely interacted with people for their safety and because the situation was unbelievable. Experiencing it forced radioactive clouds to accept it. Yoshi despaired of finding a solution to her existence.
Lonely and bitter Yoshi lashed out at marine life or the occasional seabird or coastal animal until a codfish became a radioactive cloud—it was an innocent victim, like her. Because the codfish bumbled around wreaking havoc, Yoshi absorbed it. She supposed she constantly killed microorganisms and plants, too. Following the codfish incident, when frustrated, she practiced controlling radiation.
Hara-san tried to calm Yoshi, but they disagreed with each other and argued.
They removed themselves from their conversation before Yoshi became violently upset. She was so temperamental; the other radioactive clouds feared her. She also scared herself; she might kill them. She ran away from radioactive clouds if enraged and, eventually, Yoshi stopped visiting radioactive clouds entirely. Occasionally, somebody came to her.
Radiation was odorless, invisible, tasteless, and scentless, but Yoshi and the other radioactive clouds sensed the various kinds.
Yoshi discovered that if she hovered near Hiroshima or Nagasaki, the radiation increased her strength and volume. Feeding on nuclear radiation was a personal choice among the radioactive clouds. Having a head start, Yoshi swelled. She realized the more she grew, the greater the risks she posed to people.
Observations of fasting radioactive clouds indicated she could live off background radiation quite well. Yoshi practiced emitting or restraining all types of radiation—gamma rays, X-rays, ultraviolet light, visible light, infrared radiation, and microwave radiation—, and, therefore, she needed to feed. Also, the radiation remained on Earth, but Yoshi held it within her cloud and lived far from people. Because discharging radiation simply put it into the atmosphere again, she reabsorbed it immediately.
Once able to contain her radiation so that living things survived her presence, Yoshi began eavesdropping on university courses. She learned physics and English. Gradually, with interruptions, she added various nuclear studies and the language used by each nuclear power spoke.
Correctly, physicists predicted that the nuclear radiation drifting around the world and decaying would become less harmful. Initially, physicists believed the radioactive clouds were part of the drift, possibly held together by wind currents. But radiation dotted remote spots or blobbed together in small clusters.
Physicists called the phenomena “radiological lakes.” Everybody thought the radiological lakes were a normal side-effect of the atomic bombing.
Physicists thought the atomic bombs might set the atmosphere on fire, and they calculated the chances were extremely low. The radioactive clouds surprised physicists. To many people, the effects of nuclear weapons seemed like rogue waves or out-of-season tornadoes.
The radiological lakes were too high in the atmosphere to harm people on the ground or at sea. Airplanes skirted them. Radio waves disrupted communications, but people coped. Meteorologists tracked radioactive clouds’ paths, while astronomers accounted for them while planning space flights. The radioactive clouds bypassed publicized aircraft or spacecraft. In several instances, a classified craft approached a radioactive cloud and, in seconds, it dodged the craft or withdrew from the flight path.
The nuclear programs frustrated Yoshi. The news reported steps taken to prevent nuclear war, but Yoshi had an obvious solution: stop making bombs and destroy the instructions.
When the United States, Soviet Union, and other countries tested nuclear weapons, Yoshi sensed the radiation gush from the weapons, rather like smelling water. Yoshi traveled at light speed to every test site. The fallout concerned her as much as the radiation, and collecting radiation from the open air was easier than from a contaminated area, where a descent might add to the problems. So, Yoshi swept through the area and the fallout gathered inside her cloud.
Physicists’ plans and experiments accounted for the radiological lake’s (Yoshi’s) presence, but she drove them to inaccuracies regarding non-alive radiation. After noticing the problem, Yoshi shortened the time spent at test sites.
Power stations, radioactive materials processing facilities, and waste sites popped up with little risk to people. Using her radiological senses, Yoshi agreed with physicists that the background radiation was low. Due to potential accidents and the unfamiliarity of nuclear technology, she thought placing it near a city was inherently unsafe.
Because she did not know the effect she had on plutonium, uranium, and other radioactive materials, Yoshi decided against depleting radiation from the warheads, processing facility materials, power station fuel, waste sites, and the like. But she wondered if to stop nuclear disasters, the risks she posed to people were acceptable. She lacked the confidence and scientific data to interfere or experiment.
Yoshi coincidentally arrived at the Bikini Atoll before a test, and instead of feeding, waited for the test. Whatever happened could not be worse than a nuclear detonation. She extended a sliver of her cloud. Gingerly, Yoshi soaked up the radiation from the unexploded warhead. It felt like eating a whole ginkgo nut if lava filled the center. And nothing radiologically terrible or wonderful happened. The warhead caused a pinprick spike in her overall radiation and settled into her cloud.
The physicists declared the warhead a dud that inexplicably heated the weapon. They thought the radiological lake’s temperature remained below the case’s melting point. Transferring radiation from an object to Yoshi or from Yoshi to an object produced heat, which Yoshi thought was obvious. Worried about test delays, the physicists said it was a one-time incident.
Though Yoshi wanted to absorb more warheads, she wondered about the long-term effects and if they stuffed her permanently.
The Soviet Union built the Mayak Production Association in the 1940s and it produced weapons-grade plutonium. The processing method involved ammonium nitrate and acetates. Previously, the Soviets flowed water contaminated with radiation directly into Lake Kyzyltash. They dumped radioactive waste into the Techa River, Lake Kyzyltash, and Lake Karachay. Before the Soviets collected the cooled waste from Lake Karachay, the lake’s radioactivity lethally dosed people who entered it. Belatedly, deep beneath the Mayak Production Association, the Soviets built concrete and steel storage tanks, each inside a faulty, badly monitored cooler, for ammonium nitrate and hot radioactive waste.
Yoshi wondered how the population of over 240,000 lived. The people, even factory workers, seemed oblivious to the radioactive isotopes inside their bodies and spread finely across the community. She sensed it; doctors studied radiation health problems.
The Mayak plant was among the radioactive clouds’ best feeding grounds; Yoshi always checked that she was alone before feeding there. Elsewhere, from other accidents, she taught herself to identify radiation and fallout spikes. She attributed the Mayak burst to another radioactive cloud feeding—until it persisted.
Upon observing Mayak, Yoshi regretted waiting. The tanks had exploded. Flickering radiation and fallout continuously poured across Russia. She absorbed the exploded tank’s radiation and collected fallout closest to the Mayak Production Association, the rest blended into the pollution.
She expected everybody to die, even if the Soviets evacuated them. Many people survived the high contamination levels. The Soviets evacuated approximately 10,000 people over two years and hardly cleaned up the site. They suppressed media reports about the accident.
Yoshi decided to investigate unusual radiation immediately, giving herself plenty of time to absorb it.
In England, the Windscale Piles produced, among other radioactive materials, weapons-grade plutonium, which required uranium. Rapidly after the Mayak Disaster, Yoshi sensed the Windscale Fire.
Yoshi arranged herself over the fallout. Operators thought the accident, rather than Yoshi, increased radiation. They remained on site to extinguish the fire or minimize further problems.
Quickly, Yoshi found over one hundred displaced, flaming uranium cartridges. She plunged a filament through the concrete containment and wiggled it through the cartridges, which depleted their radiation. Because the fire threatened the other radioactive elements, she drained them as well. The radiation level rose and then plummeted steadily while she worked. Then she retracted the filament, collected stray fallout, and went into the upper atmosphere over the Irish Sea.
On the radio, Yoshi learned that not only did she set the building on fire, but she fatally poisoned the operators and sickened nearby people. Because she temporarily increased the hazards, Yoshi decided to respond to nuclear accidents when either the operators finished their work or the situation became unmanageable.
The government accurately predicted little fallout or radiation from the Windscale Piles fire, but the nuclear accident scared people. The government censored the media. To Yoshi’s relief, the Windscale Piles would be decommissioned, but the lack of evacuations concerned her. She thought Soviet and British authorities underestimated nuclear radiation’s dangers.
Yoshi preferred the current Japanese government to the one she grew up with.
Hara-san encouraged Yoshi’s hypothesis that the radioactive clouds might survive outer space. Yoshi’s scientific arguments confused Hara-san after a certain point, but she liked the idea.
Radiation filled space. Gaseous planets and nebulous clouds existed, but they had high gravity and Yoshi low. The space race sent capsules of living things into outer space and retrieved them alive; Yoshi lacked a capsule, and, according to mainstream biology, could not be alive. Movie monsters contradicted mainstream biology and irritated and insulted her.
Yoshi eased a filament into outer space and felt her first pleasant sensation since 1945. To relax, Yoshi waded through half-atmosphere, half-outer space and let the upper half’s radiation drift around. Earth was a radiological desert compared to space.
Her fallout particles clung to her cloud. She left them behind at the same rate as on Earth, but she collected them much more easily; they tended to hang in one place or travel in a calculable direction and speed. Yoshi discovered if she discharged radiation in a specific direction, her filament moved. The principle worked on larger parts of her cloud.
To shrink her cloud, Yoshi emitted more radiation than she absorbed. She hoped the radiation would not damage celestial bodies out of sight. Sometimes she thought that being Yoshi, her radiation would hit the only extraterrestrial life in the universe.
Over the years, Yoshi wanted to take revenge on the United States, but attacking the rented United States bases in Japan risked harming the Japanese people. She wanted to keep radiation from American civilians, especially children. Finally, Yoshi had a feasible plan. Every attempt of Hara-san’s to ask about Yoshi’s increased grumpiness, isolation, and practice failed.
Manhattan Project historical sites in Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, and Hanford burned down, and the Truman Library and Museum, Truman’s home, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, and offices or laboratories of living Manhattan Project scientists also caught fire. The spreading fires injured various people and others nearby suffered mild to moderate radiation sickness.
There was no good explanation for how the fires started. They caused structural damage and their spread and locations seemed to allow people to escape.
Authorities struggled to lower intense media interest in the fires but suppressed the radiation sickness reports. Some witnesses reported an odd, glowing cloud overhead; most people attributed the witnesses’ claims to fires, stress, or lying.
On July 23, 1960, in Hawaii, servicemembers fell ill with radiation burns and radiation sickness or even were reduced to charred bone and ashes. Many survivors died in hospital or developed cancer.
Survivors reported hearing a child’s crying and wailing, possibly in a foreign language. Some attributed the sound to an open window or to their friends dying, but a medic said a patient insisted he look for a child. The medic glanced around at adults. People across the bases reported a burning, meat-like stench.
Investigators mapped the same event in every Pearl Harbor base, approximately moving west to east, and generally lasting an hour. It affected buildings prohibited to civilians. Inside the buildings, the problems emerged from the top of the building to the bottom and from one end of the hallway to another.
The event shorted out all communications and electrical systems across the base. Some military families complained of radiation sicknesses, but the doctors determined it was mass hysteria.
The investigators thought if the descended radiological lake caused the event, locals would have suffered, too. They searched in vain for a radioactive device, fallout, or high background radiation.
Less than an hour after the last Pearl Harbor attack, nuclear missile silos experienced similar events in a similar pattern. Every missile silo hatch had been melted; the hatch was the entry point. Especially in the most affected areas, heat damaged the concrete, and the air vents had been melted or overheated and warped.
Most missile silo airmen died within a month, and many were too ill with radiation poisoning to report their experiences promptly or coherently. A few airmen said that the dust cloud or a child cried and wailed. Many said that dust fell to the ground, rose into the air, and blew through the ceiling or air vents.
In each silo east of F. E. Warren Air Force Base, investigators found, burnt into a concrete wall, a stick figure wearing monpe trousers, a kimono-style top, and sandals. Of the surviving witnesses, none recognized it.
Entering an American base scared Yoshi, but she knew she could defend herself from any kind of assault.
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima happened too quickly for Yoshi to remember the injuries as they were inflicted. Now she wished she remained ignorant, but continued her attack.
Throughout Yoshi’s rampage, she drew the emitted radiation to her again and gathered fallout. She listened to radio and television broadcasts and military transmissions. Yoshi outpaced the military aircraft following her. She temporarily ignored most aircraft, which flew away from her, and the submarines.
The media remained silent about her military attacks but reported the fires. Yoshi cared little whether the atomic scientists lived or died; she wanted them to experience a radiological attack on something they valued. She assumed they loved their jobs. And the scientifically ignorant authorities might imprison the scientists for concocting another hazardous nuclear experiment.
Physicists and meteorologists encouraged people to remain indoors due to increased radiation. As Yoshi moved east, some regions started evacuations—but she passed before evacuations succeeded—or suggested sheltering in a bomb shelter. She heard one nuclear siren in North Dakota and none anywhere else. Quite a few stations delayed reporting Yoshi's movements, just in case people panicked.
The military called DEFCON 1 a training exercise, which seemed unusual to Yoshi. She had almost completely disabled the United States’ nuclear defenses. In Georgia, Yoshi worried the United States would accuse Japan and retaliate, despite Japan’s clear nonparticipation and the fact that military technology was incapable of her actions.
Yoshi detoured to Washington, D.C. and after checking several other buildings, found the White House. On an exterior wall, Yoshi made her stick figure mark and wrote a note: I died in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Japan or another country did not send me to attack the United States.
Then Yoshi went to Arlington and easily found the Pentagon, from which non-essential personnel were evacuating. Yoshi hovered high above it and then lowered part of her cloud.
The remaining servicemembers wore NBC suits, but they offered little protection from Yoshi’s presence, let alone when, on the top floor, she raised her filament’s temperature high enough to vaporize people. Everything else in the immediate vicinity melted or reached its flashpoint. Radioactive fallout billowed. Yoshi decided another vaporization would spread the fallout too far to collect.
As she worked her filament through the rings and down the levels, she noticed a Coast Guardsman trying to attract her attention and distance himself simultaneously. His face had melted off before he became a radioactive cloud.
“What?” Yoshi snapped.
“Do you deplete Soviet missiles?” he asked.
“Why?”
“The Soviets probably know we don’t have missiles, so they will launch at us.”
“Will you or the Soviet Union attack Japan?”
“Who cares about Japan? If the Soviets—”
Yoshi snarled and reached for him, but he backed away.
“The radiation will affect Japan. Please, deplete the Soviet warheads. I don’t know how or I would.”
Yoshi warned him about absorbing radiation clouds and giving people radiation poisoning.
Then Yoshi depleted the Soviet warheads, limiting collateral damage when possible.
A Soviet observed a stick figure mark and message write itself on the Kremlin’s wall: I died in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Japan, the United States, or another country did not send me to attack the Soviet Union or the United States.
Feeling unwieldy, Yoshi tracked nuclear aircraft into remote areas and ate the missiles. Alternatively, she waited for the aircraft to land and trawled a filament over them.
Yoshi rarely submerged herself underwater because she killed millions of marine creatures every time. Emitting visible light illuminated just a few feet in any direction and from above, she could not study the terrain. Therefore, hunting submarines was much harder than airplanes. She hovered above the ocean until she sensed a submarine’s nuclear torpedoes and missiles, and then her trawling filament melted through the submarines and absorbed the warheads.
The revenge satisfied her and while still lonely and bitter, she had vented most of her frustrations. Even her remaining problems seemed tolerable. However, she worried about losing control of the radiation and destroying the Earth. Yoshi’s cloud felt stuffed and bumpy due to carrying over 19,000 missiles.
She rushed beyond Earth’s orbit and stretched out. The radiation seeped from her cloud.
Then Hara-san peered at Yoshi as if standing on tip-toe on the thermosphere.
“Have they shamed me?” Yoshi asked.
“Yes, and the others won’t visit you,” Hara-san said. “I will, though, and I want to. You are my friend. But the other clouds won’t welcome your return to Earth.”
Yoshi ran away crying, feeling ashamed, and thinking Hara-san hated her. She felt guilty about killing people. However, Yoshi thought her rampage was right, and she was not particularly ashamed of herself.
Physicists and meteorologists called Yoshi’s rampage a “radiological storm.” Conspiracy theorists and some physicists thought the radiological lake moved too intentionally and restrictively to be a natural storm.
Yoshi’s planned route kept the Sun in view behind her. A one-way journey to a celestial body’s orbit required several minutes to several hours, and finding the celestial body’s current orbital location took longer. She tolerated the unnerving distance between planets if she traveled at light speed.
Yoshi visited acceptably hot Mercury, where the Sun shone too brightly to look at directly for long. Closer to the Sun, she felt uncomfortably hot, and looking at it hurt. She believed the Sun’s gravitational field might pull her into it or a solar flare could absorb her radiation and kill her. In the opposite direction, beyond the asteroid belt, Yoshi worried about losing sight of the Sun, and so she always escaped storms. She warmed herself up with radiation. Yoshi swam in the gas planets and, at long last, found two things she could smell: Jupiter and Uranus. To her annoyance, they stunk of ammonia, rotten eggs, something offensively sweet, and bitter almonds. On tolerably cold Pluto, the Sun shone as brightly as a full moon on Earth.
The elements and chemicals reacted with Yoshi’s fallout, and they accumulated in her cloud. The only side-effect was that she felt them in her cloud. Soon, she accustomed herself to them.
But beginning beyond the asteroid belt, Yoshi felt odd, and on Pluto, weak. The weakness and wrong feeling combined with the isolation and darkness alarmed her. Yoshi jetted herself to Mars, rested for several days, and recovered. Radiation sustained her life, which baffled her.
For a home, Yoshi found a pretty, cozy spot near the Aristarchus Crater, with a good view of Earth. She bleached drawings into the grey rock and lasered rough spots smooth. After practicing elsewhere, Yoshi lasered structures akin to furniture and climbing gym equipment, around which she shaped her cloud.
Yoshi’s attack spawned four radioactive clouds, who fed on radioactive waste and nuclear tests and lived above Nevada. Despite officially not existing, they worked for the Department of Defense and drilled in outer space.
Yoshi missed Earth and though she liked living on the Moon, outer space was too empty and lonely to endure alone forever. She shrunk herself to a manageable size, then she listened to the radio and television signals, resumed university courses, and observed nuclear matters. Hara-san visited her and told the other 1945 radioactive clouds that Yoshi was alive.
Even though Yoshi could absorb the world’s nuclear weapons and discharge the radiation in space before losing control, she decided against it. Yoshi regretted her rampage caused international panic and killed innocent people. She hated that she had created more radioactive clouds.
Still, she wanted complete nuclear disarmament. Hopefully, governments would disarm themselves, but her missile silo attacks raised Cold War tensions and she doubted she could absorb a nuclear war. The proliferation of nuclear weapons slowed to a liferation because the Soviet Union and United States replaced their weapons before increasing their arsenal. Their activities delayed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, and she approved of the treaty. Every time she ate a warhead, the country made another one. Before it frustrated her into a rage, she abandoned the idea.
The Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty relieved Yoshi’s radiation fears; she switched to feeding off radioactive waste, cooling pools, mining towns (background radiation only; nothing inside the mines themselves), and accidents. She learned to deplete them without causing fires or making people moderately ill.
Businesses stopped selling radioactive toys and housewares. As more fission power plants popped up and radiological medical equipment was invented, engineers developed coping mechanisms for a descending radioactive cloud.
Militaries were developing anti-radiation technology and defenses against it.
Suddenly, colored light flickered over the East Urals Radioactive Trace, formed by the wind blowing across the Mayak Production Association. Some people said a cloud glowed and showed blue sky in the gaps, or flashed red or orange as it had during the Mayak Disaster; very few noticed a human form and hardly anybody reported it. As birds and insects fell dead from the sky, metallic dust rose into the cloud, and so did hair and bugs, small animals, and fish, which landed gently a short time later.
Many people felt overheated on a cool day. Cases of mild radiation poisoning increased briefly, but some people’s radiation-related health issues improved. Hip or knee replacements, bone pins, and the like shifted and one man’s prosthetic leg stuck to the refrigerator for several minutes.
Across the region, electrical wires frizzled; replacing appliances and electrical wiring required months. Pacemakers malfunctioned. Cars refused to start. Jewelry coiled up, magnetized together.
Scorch marks appeared on structures and the ground and grass ignited. The Mayak Production Association’s fuel was depleted and the building caught fire, but the contaminated smoke and particles whooshed into a cloud.
The cloud vanished. The ash showed very little radiation and much of the previous fallout disappeared. The best explanation was an outbreak of small tornadoes that blew the fallout away, making the fallout somebody else’s problem.
Japan rented military bases to the United States, which bothered Yoshi. To force the American military to leave Japan, she stalked the bases with slightly less aggressiveness than she had at Pearl Harbor. She worried about affecting or scaring the Japanese people.
The United States reinforced its military installations, set up sensors, drilled evacuations, and stationed an American radioactive cloud above Japan. But Yoshi absorbed him, then the other American clouds.
The urban legend of Shadow Girl (also known as the Shadow Woman, the Ash Girl, or the Ash Woman) originated near the United States Forces Japan bases. The first reported sighting occurred on April 9, 1979, in Tokyo. Earlier unexplained disappearances, all involving piles of ash or radiation spikes, have been attributed to her.
The Shadow Girl smelled like burning meat and other unpleasant odors, such as sewer gas, cyanide, and ammonia.
Her physical appearance varied. She was either a young teenage girl dressed in monpe trousers, a kimono-style top, and sandals or a pretty, young woman dressed in a kimono and with a hime haircut. In some accounts, she was a shadow on the wall and when she reached out of the wall, her arm appeared to be made of dust and ash. Other witnesses said her entire body was made of dust and ash and she cast a glowing, radioactive green or blue shadow or that while killing, her hand glowed.
The Shadow Girl waited in alleys or behind buildings for a United States servicemember in uniform to pass. Once servicemembers were advised to wear civilian clothes off base, she chose a white person, normally a man. The Shadow Girl lured the victim closer by crying. She asked, “Are you an American?” If the person answered, “No,” she vanished, but if he answered yes, her touch cremated him or gave him severe radiation burns.
If other people accompanied the man, the Shadow Girl attacked anybody who responded to her question. She rarely chased people who ran away from her. Some survivors reported mild radiation poisoning.
Yoshi narrowly escaped a folklorist (Dr. Hughes) equipped with a Geiger counter. Killing him would just attract more researchers, and she had let other people live. By the time he published his findings, she had stopped her attacks.
Though Yoshi disliked the Shadow Girl urban legend, it did not upset her.
The U. S. Embassy considered the Shadow Girl a complete fabrication. No law enforcement investigator, either Japanese or American, found radiation or radioactive fallout in Japanese alleys, and they discredited other claims. The Japanese government refused to renew the United States’ military base rent contract. Coincidentally, the radiation attacks stopped.
Conspiracy theorists loved the situation.
Yoshi watched a movie: The Radioactive Thing from the Hypocenter. It insulted her—the filmmakers definitely based the monster on her. She wanted to write a rude note for them but thought it might scare them.
Biologists discovered that radioactive clouds confused migrating animals and birds, but peculiarly, the radioactive clouds avoided migration routes. When flashing, radioactive clouds attracted animals that saw light beyond human sight. Some seemed to flash when the animals naturally moved towards them.
Also, radiological clouds, sometimes called electromagnetic clouds, complicated the new idea of nuclear winter. The clouds trapped fallout and radiation apparently permanently. At their average accretion rate, they would block the sunlight within hundreds of years; the largest (Radiological or Electromagnetic Cloud #5) in less than one hundred years. In a nuclear war, the clouds would collect massive amounts of fallout and radiation, and the skies would never fully clear, and bands of decaying but lethal radiation would float across the world unpredictably, instead of following wind patterns.
Countries occasionally mishandled radioactive waste, certain that before it caused serious harm, a radioactive cloud would absorb it. Yoshi noticed in her nuclear inspections, that minor problems went unfixed, despite her warnings, until she wrote a strongly-worded note on the head of state’s wall. If it failed, she left another note on a wall of the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs or the International Atomic Energy Agency. As a last resort, or earlier if the problem threatened people’s lives, she depleted the facility’s nuclear materials—fully aware she reaffirmed people’s reliance on radioactive clouds. Some people considered her a symbol of safe nuclear energy or anti-nuclear energy.
Mysteries and misconceptions about the radioactive clouds abounded, some only clarified if researchers spoke with the radiological lakes at length, and scholars tended to overlook their colleagues who communicated with natural phenomena.
Yoshi studied more than enough for a PhD in physics and experimented in outer space. Her studies, experiments, and personal experiences convinced her some ideas were incorrect. Unable to explain why or offer another idea, she thought her opinion did not count and argued with physicists in her head anyway.
Among people who thought hibakusha were still radioactive, a minority believed that hibakusha could turn into radiological lake or had radioactive superpowers. However, since the 1940s, Hara-san correctly thought some people considered hibakusha monsters—she simply had not told Yoshi, who would interpret it as the people calling her a monster or evil. When Yoshi finally heard the theory, she ridiculed the premises and overlooked the conclusion that hibakusha were monsters. Then Hara-san told her. The complete wrongness of the idea upset Yoshi.
A growing number of people thought the radiological lakes were intelligent and maybe extraterrestrials. A respected pseudoscientist, Dr. Tremblay, hypothesized that one extraterrestrial attacked the United States and the Soviet Union in 1960 and returned to its planet. He thought the extraterrestrial was a radiological cloud. Next, either a different extraterrestrial from the planet or the same extraterrestrial returned in the 1970s-1980s to attack the United States military bases. Therefore, the people of Earth were in great danger of another attack by hostile extraterrestrials, who intended to defeat the world’s militaries and impose their own rule for nefarious purposes, like slave labor or stealing the Earth’s resources. Some pseudoscientists argued the extraterrestrial merely armed its spaceships with radiological weapons, which explained the atmospheric lights. Dr. Tremblay said the lights could be a spaceship—the extraterrestrial must live somewhere, like every other living thing—, but he preferred to explain it with electromagnetic radiation and glowing radioactive elements.
In Yoshi’s opinion, Dr. Tremblay essentially called her an evil monster with horrible intentions. But she helped people. She accidentally harmed the people with pacemakers and metallic implants, and, therefore, would not attempt mass magnetization again.
From Hara-san’s perspective, people amassed more data about Yoshi than the other radioactive clouds combined, because of her alarming activities. Her actions prompted Hara-san and some other radioactive clouds to respond to would-be-contactees.
“If you were more active and helped people, people would notice you,” Yoshi snapped, and ran away.
By then, most radioactive clouds faded, hardly distinguishable from background radiation. Among the feeders, Yoshi was the most vigorous. Feeding sites ran low and the radioactive clouds complained about losing Mayak as a feeding source.
During the Three Mile Island accident and Chernobyl’s meltdown, Yoshi absorbed the radiation and fallout. The power plants remained open. She deposited radiation blobs over the Poles and on the Moon, where a few radioactive clouds had moved.
Immediately upon South Africa announcing its complete nuclear disarmament, Yoshi absorbed the warheads, processing facilities, waste sites, and everything else she could find. The same happened in former Soviet Union countries and whenever a country shrunk its arsenal.
Yoshi fought against the Argentinian, Brazilian, and North Korean nuclear weapons programs. Argentina officially stopped adding nuclear weapons when the dictatorship ended, then Yoshi absorbed their capabilities, and they abandoned the program. The tiny Brazilian program persisted with anti-radiation devices. On her second trip to North Korea, Yoshi noticed everybody had been replaced, from janitors to physicists to governmental officials. She easily tracked the previous workers down: they showed a dangerous level of radiation and compared to other countries, North Koreans owned few electronics, which emitted just enough radio waves to disguise contamination. The old workers were in concentration camps. She verified their names and discovered that the North Korean government imprisoned their families, too. So, Yoshi let the program continue—she worried about sending more people to the prisons—and monitored the radiation levels more closely than in other countries.
Israel had a policy of deliberate ambiguity about its nuclear weapons. Even though Yoshi snuck into Israel’s nuclear affairs, people noticed radioactive clouds near Israel, and she interfered with the country’s policy.
Yoshi hunted down nuclear materials thieves and poisoned them, depleted the weapons, and told the authorities where to find them.
Terrorists threatened and plotted to use dirty bombs. The conventional explosives’ detonation would spread the radioactive material; there was no nuclear explosion. When Yoshi caught dirty bomb makers, she poisoned them, leaving them identifiable. She wrote a note on the authorities’ walls and guarded the bodies. She waited outside the compound. The first Italian soldier to spot Yoshi caused a convoy pile-up. However, Yoshi had scared the local terrorists too much to take advantage of a crash.
Yoshi depleted salted bombs, nuclear weapons containing radioactive isotopes for extra fallout. She appeared to the engineers, too. Because authorities approved their activities, she burned those involved to death and destroyed the facilities.
The nuclear bomb plans Yoshi found online scared her and irritated her. She despaired of deleting them.
Japanese radio usually played somewhere in Yoshi’s cloud and she half-paid attention to it. When she heard about the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, she preemptively depleted the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.
Then Yoshi lurked in the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station until the Russian soldiers mutinied. She also made the Ukrainians a bit edgy, despite a note reading, I am not attacking Ukrainians, and another warning the Russians against arresting the nuclear technicians.
Yoshi regretted her attacks, but she was happy that the United States left Japan. She wished she found another way.
Military anti-radiation shielding sapped energy from the electromagnetic clouds (the modern term for radiological lakes) so that the shielding partly powered itself. Scientists adapted the technology to collect background radiation for electrical power; an ethics board determined it was like harvesting methane and carbon monoxide. To slow climate change, scientists proposed shrinking electromagnetic clouds by collecting radiation, though the fallout particles posed problems.
Some scientists, including Dr. Nakano, thought the electromagnetic clouds had at least animal-like intelligence. Dr. Nakano objected to keeping them inside a power plant without their consent or domestication, and the longer he studied electromagnetic clouds, the more intelligent they seemed.
Dr. Nakano and others deduced that electromagnetic clouds interfered with military nuclear weapons and communicated with heads of nuclear powers. Electromagnetic cloud #5 provided the most data. He and others thought the electromagnetic clouds could be weaponized, or their actions may increase tensions, or a government could carry out a nuclear attack, blame it on electromagnetic clouds, and succeed because the general public understood little physics. Unlike many other experts, Dr. Nakano wondered if the electromagnetic clouds wanted to provoke nuclear war or accidents—they lived on radiation. Once he knew Hara-san and Yoshi better, he changed his mind.
Countries wanted to prevent each other from weaponizing electromagnetic clouds and stop the electromagnetic clouds’ attraction to their defenses. But radioactive clouds tended to be neutral. Dr. Nakano insulted Yoshi when he asked if she was pro-North Korea; she flew to Mars in a huff and Dr. Nakano apologized via Hara-san and a rover.
So, the United States government contracted Dr. Nakano to trap at least one electromagnetic cloud in an old missile silo converted into a power plant, named the Fermi Electromagnetic Radiation Power Station. Dr. Nakano focused on Electromagnetic Cloud #5, the largest. The government and press said it wrought the most havoc and that controlling it protected people. Yoshi and the other radioactive clouds became suspicious.
Omitting information to gain Yoshi’s trust, Dr. Nakano persisted. Providing electricity for impoverished countries seemed like a good cause, and so did preserving the ice sheets. Yoshi wanted to shrink enough to live on Earth constantly; she wrung radiation from her cloud almost as quickly as she absorbed it from the Sun.
Yoshi entered the Fermi Electromagnetic Radiation Power Station on November 30, 2033, and due to her electromagnetic interference, photographers stayed home, reporters took notes on paper while wearing NBC suits, and live-streaming was impossible closer than one mile. The roads shut down as a precaution and satellites changed paths.
A team closed the silo doors behind Yoshi. She eased through the corridors and new tunnels.
Once the radiation levels above ground lowered and stabilized, Dr. Nakano allowed the press access to the power facility. He banned them from visiting Yoshi at her own insistence.
The construction crew had removed the interior doors, wiring, and furnishings and filled the ventilation system with concrete. Water covered the silo like a dam, except for the silo’s doors. Walkways connected buildings. Cargo airplanes transported energy cells to and from the Fermi Power Station, and employees lived on-site or in an easy drive. The plant powered itself.
Dr. Nakano’s team entertained Yoshi with TV and radio signals and an Internet connection, and established a telephone link between her and weak, fading Hara-san. He dropped vivid, mildly radioactive cadmium pigments through the door. Yoshi added them to the radioactive matter with which she colored her cloud. Also, he tracked down Yoshi’s family, who refused to believe him; it upset Yoshi’s hopes.
The committee treated Yoshi like an animal or inanimate force, and so, by treating Yoshi like a person, Dr. Nakano risked his career. He omitted his suspicions that Yoshi had vaporized people. If they thought she was a murderer or a rogue cloud, they would cap the door, provoking a rampaging escape.
Yoshi missed traveling wherever she liked and watching the scenery. She deciphered code words indicating she was a captive; power station radio communications changed suspiciously frequently. Also, she required more sunlight than was provided by resting for an hour under the open door.
Yoshi explained to Dr. Nakano the difference between sickening and shrinking. Though he supported her against the power plant’s committee, he told Yoshi there was no solution. She melted the door open. Somehow, Dr. Nakano convinced the committee to tidy up the doorway and leave it open.
Yoshi forced herself to stay inside the silo. Then she peeked at the scenery. She threatened to give herself sunlight holes, so Dr. Nakano scheduled safety precautions that allowed Yoshi to trail a filament in the open air once daily.
The radiation collectors gathered whatever naturally flowed from Yoshi, but sometimes she emitted radiation intentionally to speed up the process. It began to hurt. She stopped intentional releases; Dr. Nakano supported her decision before the pushy, goal-orientated committee.
Yoshi realized, at her current shrinking rate, that even with Dr. Nakano’s promise of more efficient technology (that required decades or centuries to fulfill), she would emit a useful amount of radiation for thousands of years. She doubted a governmental program could last for thousands of years. If she weakened too far, they might close her inside, like boarding up an old mine.
She needed more sunlight than Dr. Nakano arranged. Yoshi pushed against the ceilings, choosing the thinner, radiation-collecting areas. The ground over the tunnel shifted as the lead above the concrete melted and dirt fell into the molten lead.
Dr. Nakano reminded the operation’s committee that gaseous lead gave people heavy metal poisoning and contaminated the ground. The committee refused to build sunlight holes for several reasons: the operation’s goal was shrinking radiological lakes and Yoshi fed on sunlight; employees would quit or strike if Yoshi exposed herself; they thought a legitimately sick radiological lake could not burn through the silo; and they doubted Yoshi adequately contained the fallout and radiation.
Over several days, heat soaked through the soil and turned the lead into a gas. The pool’s water steamed, then simmered, then boiled, while Yoshi melted through the pool’s bottom.
Dr. Nakano stopped arguing with the committee and Yoshi; he hated the business side of the power plant and sympathized with Yoshi. Technicians sandbagged the areas, minimizing water loss. He encouraged Yoshi to continue—nobody could stop her or punish her.
Hours later, the weakened pool’s bottom cracked open. The water soaked her, but it boiled off.
Dr. Nakano fell out of favor. He told her his replacement, Dr. Donovan, would arrive in two weeks. When Dr. Nakano led the operation, Yoshi felt uneasy about her situation, and she thought the replacement would change matters for the worse.
Yoshi escaped, deciding that even if people contacted her, she would only help if they started a major nuclear disaster or war again. Worried about the other radioactive clouds’ wellbeing, Yoshi breached the other three electromagnetic power plants around the world. Two clouds left, one of which visited regularly, and one remained.
Yoshi rushed into outer space and recovered for a day. Upon returning to Earth, she passed to Hara-san radioisotopes that emitted gamma radiation. Hara-san was too weak to find them herself.
Dr. Nakano developed a cheaper backyard or rooftop radiation collector and a charity spread them through impoverished regions. Yoshi regularly flew over them.
Countries built fusion reactor power plants, safer than fission ones.
As the radioactive clouds’ feeding grounds decayed, the clouds extended filaments into outer space. The practice complicated space flights. To assist the course plotters, Yoshi surrounded the metal with her cloud, then took it into outer space, where she raised her temperature to the trash’s boiling point. Once it vaporized, the particles remained in her cloud.
The French government decided to completely disarm their nuclear weapons and Yoshi finished their years-long project in a couple hours.
Along with destroying shared nuclear weapons, Yoshi absorbed warheads in the worst condition, plus five each in the United States and Russia, to equalize their and China’s arsenals. The definition of “worst condition” became relative. However, she never interfered with North Korea.
North Korea and several non-nuclear countries decided against signing the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, but Israel signed for the first time. The United States intended to—until China refused to sign.
To defend itself against China, Taiwan developed nuclear weapons from its nuclear power program; the United States also assisted them. Anti-radiation machines and disguising their weapons as North Korean kept Yoshi at bay. She missed the crisis’ signs while vacationing on Venus and she did not eavesdrop on the government.
Though Yoshi still felt bitter regarding her existence, she dreaded how other people would suffer during a global nuclear war.
She hovered over the East China Sea and the Yellow Sea throughout the Taiwan Missile Crisis. It was the most serious nuclear close-call in world history, and Yoshi thought her immediate intervention would escalate it. To her relief, politicians defused the situation.
Several countries built hypersonic missiles, designed to launch from space at several times the speed of sound. For a short time, governments thought she incinerated a particularly large piece of space junk. But she melted the painful anti-radiation machines around launch sites and factories and stalked the grounds, and the governments calculated trajectories and reviewed satellite photographs.
On the nuclear powers’ walls, Yoshi explained why she let North Korea’s hypersonic weapons orbit the Earth. She worried that the governments would blame North Korea, even though no country had developed weapons close to Yoshi’s abilities.
Yoshi wondered if her non-interference with North Korea provoked nuclear conflicts. She worried it would lead to war.
Yoshi and Hara-san considered themselves the only 1945 radioactive clouds left. Some had disappeared, maybe into outer space and might return, and others seemed to slightly elevate background radiation and drift aimlessly.
Yoshi squeezed radiation from a warhead to Hara-san’s general vicinity. Hara-san did not want to interfere with politics, which was why she had not taken a warhead herself years ago. By the time Hara-san finally agreed to a warhead, the anti-radiation machines could have killed her. Slowly, Hara-san regained her strength.
In South Africa, President Cilliers had quickly rebuilt the country his coup destabilized. He showed off South Africa’s abilities and wanted them to include nuclear weapons. Repeatedly, governments searched for a nuclear program, and altogether, their investigations indicated South Africa had the capability.
Yoshi wrote messages to each nuclear power to warn them that China covertly assisted South Africa’s nuclear program. She wrote exactly what the investigators needed to know. Her information was completely accurate and truthful; politics and supervision hid the information well from other governments, but Yoshi found it.
She destroyed the first nuclear-related shipment from China to South Africa. China denied all involvement. After sinking the second shipment, Yoshi informed other countries of China’s involvement. The news leaked. On the third shipment, Yoshi alerted the other nuclear powers to its location, but nobody stopped it. She attacked the fourth. China blamed Russia or the United States for destroying the shipment conventionally—which contradicted satellite images. Thinking foreign countries needed to see the situation themselves, Yoshi let the next shipments land in South Africa.
Pakistan and India’s land conflict had resumed. Russia supported India and China Pakistan; China deployed troops in Pakistan. Russia and China tugged neutral Iran towards one side or another amid rumors of Iranian nuclear weapons, which Yoshi tried to debunk. The United States supported Iran’s political decisions and an investigation indicated it lacked a nuclear program. After China, Pakistan, and their allies, invaded Iran, Iran joined the Russian side. As promised, Russia declared war on China.
Yoshi burnt through anti-radiation shields. Then she melted nuclear production facilities’ machinery, shorted out military communications and destabilized the silos’ supports, and intercepted raw plutonium and uranium. In civilian areas, Yoshi used a filament, but in military areas, she lurked and slapped her mark into the servicemembers’ backs.
The rest of the time, Yoshi patrolled the Earth. Half the world’s military transmissions cluttered the atmosphere and she deciphered the gibberish nuclear codes. She trawled filaments to crash or sink nuclear aircraft and submarines if she encountered them.
Coordinating with Russia and its allies, the United States invaded South Africa, and, promptly, China declared war on the United States.
Argentina and Brazil signed a treaty to defend each other, and the United Kingdom and the United States considered a similar treaty. The United Kingdom and Israel remained neutral; the other countries joined the war.
The United Nations fractured. Argentina, Brazil, Israel, and the United Kingdom were the united nuclear nations and the number of united non-nuclear nations dropped steadily as they joined the war or other countries forced them into it.
Argentina and Brazil joined China’s side officially.
News stations debated who would launch the first nuclear missiles; Yoshi convinced herself with evidence and bias that the United States would. She considered writing, Do not launch a preemptive strike in the various countries’ state offices, but she and Hara-san thought it would raise suspicions.
But China launched nuclear missiles first, on June 10, 2058, in a coordinated strike with North Korea. Most missiles targeted Russia and the United States. As Yoshi snagged warheads, Russia and the United States retaliated, and the other nuclear powers followed; Argentina and Brazil consulted each other first. Yoshi caught a Pakistani missile in Israel. Then Israel’s President nearly deployed nuclear weapons in self-defense.
Of the thousands of missiles crisscrossing the world and landing on every continent except Antarctica (the United States placed nuclear defenses in Guam), Yoshi missed three. A fourth detonated as she absorbed it. Before the new radioactive cloud knew what happened, Yoshi bumped into it. She hurried away, crying in distress. Two additional missiles reached their targets, but Yoshi caught more. The seventh missile detonated within her cloud and the blast uncontrollably inflated her and raised her temperature. The eighth missile landed in a location already struck once.
The smaller countries used up their nuclear weapons or became disabled. The United Kingdom conventionally declared war, on the United States’ side, and threatened nuclear retaliation if a missile hit a target. A South African missile landed and the United Kingdom launched a single missile. Yoshi intercepted it.
Yoshi intercepted a few missiles so close to populated areas and the ground, surface water boiled and steamed and she ignited wildfires. She brought several endangered species to extinction, changed the conservation level of more species, and killed a breaching great blue whale. In the atmosphere, along with incinerating quite a bit of space junk and an internet satellite, she crippled astronauts, whose safe return to Earth was already unlikely.
Absorbing radiation and scooping up the fallout in her wake swelled into a mobile fallout cloud. Thousands of people reported the radioactive lake’s usual shadows and multicolored glows, and hundreds a humanoid form.
When the United States fired one missile toward China, Yoshi thought the war ended, but a couple of minutes later, Russia launched the very last missile.
In less than two hours, the nuclear war ended. For another hour, Yoshi depleted the world’s remaining missiles. Over 22,000 missiles, either whole or their radiation and fallout stuffed her cloud.
Even after Yoshi jetted great streams into deep space, controlling her form required too much concentration in an open atmosphere, let alone while avoiding radioactive clouds. She squeezed a painful amount of radiation from her cloud. It puddled around her and she flew several light-years away from it, then repeated the process.
Pitying North Korean people, she absorbed the entire country’s fallout and radiation. She barely dodged a radioactive cloud.
Then Yoshi absorbed the fission reactors in affected countries. She thought they might meltdown and that she might not reach them in time.
Beyond the Moon, Yoshi relaxed her radiation field and aimed radiation into deep space. She expected to live for hundreds of thousands of years, and generally be too radioactive and sun-blocking to return to Earth.
Yoshi returned to Earth. Hara-san tended to the new radioactive clouds, some of whom absorbed some radiation and fallout. She moved the radioactive clouds away from affected areas, and Yoshi cleaned up.
Her cloud scattered radiation and fallout. Yoshi felt uncomfortably hot in places and struggled to move the hot patches to a cooler area. Chilling herself on Pluto only worked if she remained there.
Worldwide for days, auroras colored the sky. Some thought it was a sign, or fallout, or Electromagnetic Cloud #5 releasing radiation.
Yoshi needed to stop absorbing radiation intentionally—the radiation oozed out however she tried to contain it—but, first, she dragged the radiation surrounding Earth past the Moon. She rested between Earth and Mars.
Hara-san yelled from hundreds of miles away, “Yoshi, how do you feel?”
“Full,” Yoshi yelled. “Is there a problem?”
“I believe some have gone to attack their enemies.”
“But it never got past the theoretical stage!”
“I suppose they volunteered or thought of it by themselves or the program restarted.”
“I’ll stop them,” Yoshi said. “It means the nuclear war hasn’t stopped yet.”
Ultimately, Yoshi absorbed every fighting radioactive ghost. It intimidated the others, some of whom already feared her.
Yoshi dribbled and shook off radiation on her route to Mercury. She tried to aim the jets towards the Sun since the radiation traveled at a constant velocity and she thought the Sun would absorb it.
But Yoshi’s fallout felt compressed. Emitting radiation hurt again.
According to Hara-san, countries continued their nuclear weapons programs.
Yoshi swept through the exposed parts of plutonium and uranium mines, leaving behind enough radioactive elements for peaceful purposes and forcing miners to dig deeper. She destroyed every nuclear weapons facility and silo.
Her cloud melted down. She rushed into outer space, a radioactive cloud trailing behind her. Her attempts to discharge the risky radioactive elements failed, and then a warhead detonated. Yoshi’s cloud was too unwieldy to catch the fallout and radiation, which she also considered the terrible opposite of a solution.
Hara-san followed Yoshi because she had sensed the radiation. Yoshi sped away from her, worried about killing her. Both traveled at light speed.
“Can you discharge the radiation?” Hara-san called.
“No,” Yoshi said. “I’m going to explode.”
“Let me suck radiation.”
“You will have the same problem.”
Still, Hara-san gathered up some and dodged the shockwaves from detonating warheads.
Yoshi felt a chain reaction. She swerved around Mercury, but quite a bit of radiation struck it.
“Turn around before we reach the Sun,” Hara-san said.
“I don’t want radiation to destroy the Earth, and I don’t know what it will do to other places,” Yoshi said.
“Direct it at the sun and you will feel better,” Hara-san said.
“No, I won’t, and I can’t direct it anymore,” Yoshi said.
“So, wait in deep space.”
“No. I won’t recover and I’m too dangerous. Leave me alone. I don’t want to die arguing with you.”
“I will come with you as far as I can.”
A few minutes later, Hara-san stopped and watched. Yoshi forced herself onwards until the heat overwhelmed her. Her radiation and fallout traveled at her living velocity into the Sun.
This story has not been rated yet. Login to review this story.