Giants Song
Chapter 8: Giant's Song
The gummy tasted like lemon and something else — something that wasn't quite a flavor, more like the memory of understanding something for the first time. He chewed it completely, the way the label said, and swallowed.
For a moment, nothing.
Then he heard it.
Not differently than before — it was still the same low hum, the same pressing-down frequency that ran through the whole grey city like the sound of a machine that never turned off. But now he understood it. The Translation Gummy had done what it promised: it translated any language, any frequency, spoken or otherwise.
And the Anti-Life Equation — the most powerful force in Darkseid's realm — turned out to be music.
Not good music. That was the first thing he noticed. It was technically perfect. Every note was exactly where it was supposed to be, mathematically, the way a formula is exactly right. Each tone followed from the last with perfect logic. There were no wrong notes, no hesitations, no cracks. It was the most orderly piece of music Giant had ever heard.
It was the most lifeless piece of music Giant had ever heard.
It went on and on, forever, never varying, never surprising, never failing. Perfect.
Giant stood in the alley and listened to it with the gummy-translated ears and understood it for what it was.
The frequency was a song that said: there are no choices. There is only this. There has only ever been this.
He stood with his gloved hand at his side.
He thought about his own music.
The polite word for Giant's singing voice was "distinctive."
Other words included: difficult, challenging, technically unprecedented, something that made small dogs bark in rooms three buildings away. He had been singing since he was five. He would be singing when he was ninety-five. He was never going to get better and he was never going to stop, and if you had a problem with that, you were the problem.
He sang with everything he had. Always. Every single time. He sang like each song was the last song and the world needed to hear it, really hear it, before it was too late.
The result was terrible.
But it was his.
He walked out of the alley.
Not running, not charging — walking. Straight down the middle of the grey street, the Hercules Belt heavy on his waist, the Power Glove on his right hand, past the columns of people with their empty eyes and their correct smiles.
He walked all the way to the square at the center of the city, the one directly in front of Darkseid's black tower.
He stopped in the middle of the square.
He looked up at the tower. Red light burned from somewhere near the top.
He took a breath.
He had chosen his song. He had been choosing it since he was seven years old. He sang it every Saturday afternoon in the empty lot by the river, while Nobita covered his ears and Suneo invented excuses to be somewhere else and even Shizuka, who was too polite to say anything unkind, somehow always had other plans.
He sang it now.
The first note came out like a foghorn that had learned the wrong lesson.
It was enormous and off-key and completely wrong in the way that a foghorn is wrong in a concert hall — it wasn't that the instrument was bad, it was that the instrument had no idea what the concert hall expected of it and wouldn't have changed anything if it did.
The second note was worse. He was going for a high C. He found something in the vicinity of a C that had been through some things. It cracked on the way up, found a different frequency by accident, and came back down with enormous confidence.
The third note was actually correct, which somehow made it more alarming.
The columns of people slowed.
Not stopped — slowed. Heads still down, still walking in their lines. But the lines were slightly less straight. One person stumbled. Another tilted their head.
Giant sang.
He was singing the theme song from a show he had loved at age seven. It was a show about a robot who went on adventures. The theme song required three different vocal ranges, a sense of dramatic timing, and, ideally, the ability to hit a sustained high note in the chorus. Giant had none of these things, and sang it anyway, every word, from memory.
He did not sing quietly.
Darkseid appeared at the top of the tower.
He did not speak immediately. He looked down at the small figure in the square, and for a very long moment — the length of time it takes a mountain to decide what it thinks of the weather — he said nothing.
Then he said: "What is that."
"A song," Giant said, between the third verse and the chorus.
"Stop."
"No," said Giant, and went straight back into the chorus, which involved an extended held note on the word ROBOT.
The note was magnificent in its wrongness. It went up when it should have gone down. It wobbled. It took unexpected detours. It lasted four seconds past the point where it should have ended.
The Anti-Life frequency was, Giant could now hear clearly, in a state of confusion.
The frequency was orderly. It knew what it was. It was note-perfect, mathematically inevitable. And Giant's voice was something the frequency had absolutely no framework for processing, because the frequency was designed to exist in a world where things were either perfect or absent.
Giant's singing was neither. It was completely, catastrophically present, and it was wrong in every possible technical dimension, and it was full — absolutely full, overflowing — of something the frequency had apparently never encountered.
Feeling.
The citizens stopped walking.
Not all at once. One by one, starting from the ones closest to Giant, then spreading outward. They stopped and lifted their heads, slowly, the way people lift their heads when a sound reaches them that they weren't expecting and can't quite place.
Their faces were strange. Not the empty smile anymore. Something else was happening — a confusion, a flinching, not from pain exactly, but from the sensation of something waking up that had been asleep for a very long time.
One woman put her hand to her face.
An old man stopped walking and looked at his own hands as though he had forgotten he had them.
A child — a different child from the one Giant had met earlier — started crying. Not the sad kind of crying. The other kind.
Giant sang.
He was into the second chorus now, the one that repeated the main theme but louder. He was fully committed. There was no version of this where he stopped partway through. He had never stopped partway through a song in his life. The entire history of his singing was a monument to not stopping when the sensible thing would have been to stop.
Darkseid fired the Omega Beams.
They came in two lines, burning red, straight at Giant.
He saw them. He kept singing.
The lines hit the square around him, splitting stone, leaving black trenches in the grey ground. He had to jump left to avoid the second beam. The heat was enormous. But he was already back in position, still singing, only two words behind where he would have been without the jump.
The citizens closest to him had stopped entirely now. They stood in a ring around him, watching.
"Stop," Darkseid said. The word carried everything — weight, absolute certainty, the expectation of compliance. It was a word that had never been refused.
Giant took a breath.
"No," he said.
And sang.
The chorus again. The big one. The one with the held note.
The Power Glove hummed on his right hand. He could feel the Anti-Life frequency all around him — feel it with the glove, hear it with the Translation Gummy — and it was faltering. The perfect orderly certainty of it was encountering something it couldn't process, couldn't absorb, couldn't reduce to its own mathematics. You cannot calculate chaos. You cannot incorporate sincerity into a system built on the absence of feeling. Giant's singing was the most inarguably, undeniably, thoroughly sincere thing in any room it existed in.
The crystals — two blocks away, he couldn't see them, but he knew — began to crack.
He heard them go.
Three cracks in succession, crystal shattering from the inside, and then running footsteps, and then his friends were in the square.
Doraemon was the first to understand what was happening. He stopped, read the scanner, looked at the frequency display, looked at Giant, and then looked at the display again with an expression that was impossible to fully describe but contained significant elements of disbelief.
"It's working," Doraemon said.
"I know it's working," Giant said, between verses.
"Your voice is—"
"I know."
"I've never seen a frequency—"
"Doraemon," Giant said. "I know."
He took a breath and went straight into the final verse.
Darkseid came down from the tower.
He descended slowly, without hurry, moving through the air the way very large inevitable things move — not quickly, but with the certainty that wherever they are going, they will get there, and the arrival will not be negotiated. The red eyes burned. The grey stone face showed nothing, because it had never needed to show anything.
The citizens of the grey city were standing still, all through the square, and many were making small sounds. Crying. Murmuring. One man kept saying a word that might have been a name. A woman looked at the man, and the man looked back, and neither of them could speak but something was happening between them that had not been possible three minutes ago.
Giant stood in the middle of it and sang.
Darkseid raised his arm. The Omega Beams charged.
And then someone else started singing.
It was a man to Giant's left. Gray-faced, like all of them, blank-eyed, but — not entirely blank anymore. He started singing, quietly, the first few notes uncertain, like remembering a language you haven't spoken in years.
The song wasn't Giant's song. It was something else. Something old. Giant didn't know it.
It was worse than Giant's singing.
Giant had never heard anyone sing worse than him. He had thought, privately, for many years, that he was the floor — the absolute lowest point of musical ability, the deepest note achievable. But this man was finding new territory. He was singing the way a person sings when they haven't sung in so long that they've forgotten what singing is for, and they're trying to remember in real time.
It was the most beautiful thing Giant had heard in his life.
Because it was real.
Another voice joined. A woman, off-key in a completely different direction, which should have made it worse and somehow didn't. Then two children, both wrong in their own separate ways. Then five more. Then twenty.
The square filled with terrible singing.
Every voice wrong. Every voice genuine. Every cracked note carrying exactly what it felt like to crack — the weight of all the time spent silent, the strangeness of making a sound when you'd forgotten you could.
The Anti-Life frequency — which was perfect, cold, mathematical, a system built to process and contain — met a chorus of thirty off-key voices and had no idea what to do.
The frequency cracked.
Giant heard it go — a fracture, then spreading fractures, the way ice cracks across a frozen lake, one split becoming ten becoming a hundred. The low hum destabilized. The orderly note lost its footing, skidded, found nothing to hold onto, and broke apart into frequency static.
Darkseid made a sound.
It was not a word. It was the sound of something that has never been refused encountering, for the first time, refusal.
The Omega Beams fired wild — not at Giant, not at anything. They hit the tower above, and pieces of the black stone fell into the square, and the citizens scattered, and they were moving differently now, not in columns, not in lines, just people moving in all directions at once, which was wonderful and chaotic and terrifying and right.
"RETREAT!" Doraemon shouted. "Everyone move!"
They moved.
The tower fell.
Not quickly. It went in sections, the black stone dropping in chunks, the red light at the top guttering and going dark. Darkseid stood at the base of it, and the thing about Darkseid, Giant realized as he ran, was that even diminished, even losing, he was still a mountain. Mountains didn't fall all at once.
But mountains could be worn down.
"Portal," Doraemon said, pointing. On the far edge of the city, a disc of light appeared — the same purple-dark color as the hole in the forest, the same pulsing rhythm. It grew as they ran toward it.
Around them, the citizens of the grey city were looking at things. At each other. At their own hands. At the sky, which was still grey, still buzzing, but the buzz was quieter now, the frequency static fading. One man picked up a piece of rubble from the fallen tower and held it up to the light, examining it as though he had never seen stone before.
They would figure it out. Giant thought they would figure it out. The frequency was broken and the song was in the air, badly, off-key, and real, and that was enough. It had to be enough.
They went through the portal.
The forest hit them all at once — wet leaves, morning air, the sound of birds, the quality of light that was real light, the kind that came from somewhere you could identify. The oak tree stood overhead, completely indifferent to the whole situation.
Giant came through last.
He was still humming.
The portal closed behind him with a sound like a breath being let out.
Nobita sat on the ground and stared at the oak tree.
Suneo sat beside him and stared at his own shoes.
Shizuka had her arms around both of them, which she did sometimes, and which they pretended not to notice because they were boys and boys pretended not to notice things like that, even when they needed them.
Doraemon looked at his scanner. The readings were ordinary. Just the forest, just the morning, just the birds.
He looked at Giant.
Giant took the Translation Gummy wrapper out of his pocket. He looked at it for a moment, then folded it very small and put it back.
"You saved them," Doraemon said. "All of them."
"I sang," Giant said.
"With enormous commitment."
Giant shrugged. It was the kind of shrug that meant: obviously.
They walked home.
The morning had turned into midday by the time they got back to the neighborhood. The convenience store on the corner was open. Suneo bought cold drinks for everyone, which he announced was a loan, which everyone knew was a lie, and nobody said so.
They sat on the steps outside the store and drank their cold drinks in the afternoon quiet.
After a while, Nobita said: "Your singing saved a whole world, Giant."
"I know," said Giant.
"That's actually really something."
"I have been trying to tell you this for years."
Nobita looked at his drink. "I always thought your singing was kind of — you know."
"I know what you thought," said Giant.
They sat with that.
"But it saved a world," Nobita said.
"Yes," said Giant. "It did."
He said it the way he said everything that he was sure of: loudly, flatly, with the quality of a wall that had thought things through and come to a conclusion.
Then he said, "Next Saturday. Baseball. Seven forty-five."
Nobita groaned.
"And afterward," Giant said, "I'm doing a concert. A proper one. You're all coming."
Suneo opened his mouth.
"You're all coming," Giant said.
He drained the last of his cold drink.
The afternoon was ordinary and warm and the birds in the oak tree above the steps were singing badly, in different directions, each in their own key, and it was fine, it was all fine.
Somewhere in a grey city in a dimension adjacent to this one, thirty people were figuring out what came next.
They would be all right.
The worst voice in Nerima had made sure of it.