Tomorrow's Cthulhu: Stories at the Dawn of Posthumanity Read online

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  Blowing minds, one book at a time. Broken Eye Books publishes fantasy, horror, science fiction, weird … we love it all. And the blurrier the boundaries, the better.

  TOMORROW’S CTHULHU

  Published by

  Broken Eye Books

  www.brokeneyebooks.com

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2016 Broken Eye Books and the authors

  Cover design by Jeremy Zerfoss

  Interior design and editing by Scott Gable, C. Dombrowski, and Matt Youngmark

  ISBN-10: 1-940372-16-X

  ISBN-13: 978-1-940372-16-7

  All characters and events in this book are fictional.

  Any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  INTRODUCTION C. Dombrowski & Scott Gable

  TANGLES Daria Patrie

  THE STRICKEN Molly Tanzer

  BEIGE WALLS Joshua L. Hood

  THE FIVE HUNDRED DAYS OF MS. BETWEEN Joshua Alan Doetsch

  68 DAYS Kaaron Warren

  TEKELI-LI, THEY CRY AC Wise

  THE SKY ISN’T BLUE Clinton J. Boomer

  A PATHWAY FOR THE BROKEN Damien Angelica Walters

  THE CRUNCH UNDERFOOT Lizz-Ayn Shaarawi

  THE LARK ASCENDING Samantha Henderson

  ASTRAL AND ARCANE SCIENCE SJ Leary

  ADVANCED PLACEMENT Richard Lee Byers

  FRIDAY NIGHT DANCE PARTY Thomas M. Reid 131

  BOOTS ON THE GROUND Jeff C. Carter

  INNSMOUTH REDEMPTION Joette Rozanski

  CHURCH OF THE RENEWED COVENANT Shannon Fay

  THE POSTHUMOUS RECRUITMENT OF TIMOTHY HORNE Pete Rawlik

  CURIOSITY Adam Heine

  PERFECT TOY FOR A NINE YEAR OLD Bruce R. Cordell

  THE STEEL PLAGUE Nate Southard

  BETWEEN ANGELS and Insects Simon Bestwick

  THE JUDAS GOAT Robert Brockway

  MADNESS ON THE BLACK PLANET Darrell Schweitzer

  DRIFT FROM THE WINDROWS Mike Allen

  CHUNKED Matt Maxwell

  TESTIMONY XVI Lynda E. Rucker

  THE WORLD ENDS IN NEON YELLOW LA Knight

  NIMROD’S TONGUE Cody Goodfellow

  THE GREAT DYING OF THE HOLOCENE Desirina Boskovich

  Introduction

  C. Dombrowski & Scott Gable

  There’s something in the air. You can’t quite put your finger on it. Maybe it was just the branches against the window. Or the zoogs in the attic. Or the “corpse” in the lab. But the air seems charged. Filled with change, with promise. It’s making your tentacles itch.

  There’s really nothing to worry about. It’s coming. Or rather, it’s here. Possibility, slouching toward reality. It’s exciting, really. Out there, everyone’s changing, discovering what this new tomorrow holds for them. Some will go kindly; some won’t. But in here, it’s all you. Quiet, cozy. Here in your study, you’ve got your brandy at hand and a cat in lap. Many of your friends’ brains lie in their jars on the bookshelf, always up for a chat. The Tillinghast resonator’s turned to low, and you’ve got your books.

  For when you need a touch of the weird, when you just know something’s not right. These stories will help you remember the rituals, the important things. This is a collection of Lovecraftian proportions, gently revealing the tears in this reality we hold so dear.

  Just this moment, things couldn’t be better.

  “Pleasure to me is wonder—the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability.”

  —HP Lovecraft

  Tangles

  Daria Patrie

  He called out to me in the night. He called over and over, night after night.

  At first, I thought it was dreams, and then, I thought I had a mental problem. But it was him, calling, all along. We fear what we do not understand, and I didn’t want to fear any longer, so I sought to understand.

  That was the first mistake.

  There was this man named Plato, and he talked about shadows on the wall and how a man, if he was with some other men and watched the shadows on the wall all the time but one day he turned to look at the light behind where everyone was sitting, he would go blind, because he couldn’t handle the light. Then, when he’d try and go back to explain to the other men watching shadows on the wall, they’d tell him he was nuts because they wouldn’t understand without looking at the light themselves.

  You don’t want to look at the light. Keep looking at the wall. I’ll make some shadow puppets for you.

  Take the internet. It’s this big mess of connected stuff, and some of it is real, and a lot of it is crap people made up. It has big flashy pictures, things you can click on, VR you can go live in if you’re rich enough. It’s a technological wonder, and it’s the greatest communications tool since people first started scratching pictures in the dirt, right? Ok. So what if the internet was this giant smokescreen? What if it had another purpose?

  It’s in people’s homes. It’s how your fridge tells the grocery what to auto-deliver. It’s tied into the backbone of every communications system on the planet. It monitors our children. It drives our cars. Even if you’re not on the internet right now, you interact with something that interacts with the internet. Everything from streetlights to satellites.

  Now, what if there was a thing, a big thing. And what if this big thing had some kind of psychic powers. Now, don’t go all rolling your eyes at me. Just listen.

  You know how if you leave water out in a bowl, it’ll evaporate into the air? And then eventually if the bowl is big enough and enough water evaporates, curtains across the room can get moist, but if you dip the ends of the curtains in a bowl of water, the moisture will move much faster to the top of the curtains? What if it was like that. What if there was this big thing that had psychic powers that had set up the internet, so it could diffuse to all the human brains, and it was just ready to push over the first domino in a big pile that would reach out in all directions.

  And what if it wanted you to be domino number one and called you in your sleep? What would you do?

  I’ll tell you what you’d do. You’d wake up screaming. And you’d wake up screaming the next night, too. Humans can be very well conditioned to stimuli. When something bad happens, our brains try and get us to avoid having the bad thing happen again. It’s a Darwinian survival mechanism. So your body, after several instances of calling and screaming and pain and fear would just stop sleeping. There’ve been all sorts of crazy-ass studies done on sleep deprivation. It’s supposed to be like the most powerful hallucinogen, makes people irrational, violent, twitchy.

  After two days, I found the yarn. No, it wasn’t smart yarn. It was just regular yarn. Only it wasn’t.

  My grandmother’s sister’s husband’s friend’s daughter was Melissa Witchboorne-Halloway-Smithe. Her name had three hyphens because she had a hyphenated name when she married and added the married name on the end of the whole mess, too. She only had one leg. The other leg was cut off because it grew cancer. She lived with a fake leg for nineteen years after the real one got amputated, but the cancer came back and ate her bowe
ls. She died because you can’t amputate all of someone’s bowels. It just doesn’t work. It’s like trying to dig a hole out of a hole—you just end up making a bigger hole. She kept her crochet yarn in her fake leg. It was one of the new fake legs: a smart leg, connected to the internet, GPS, stats on physical activity … it had pockets. In one of the pockets she kept the yarn. Don’t ask me why. I don’t know why. Maybe you go a little nuts when cancer eats your bowels.

  So she had yarn, the yarn was purple, and I found it in the leg. She had been crocheting this thing when she died, and it was a sweater-like thing, but it had six arms, and everyone had thought it was a joke she was making a sweater with six arms that was purple. But she just scowled when they commented and kept poking away at it with her hook.

  So I found the yarn, and I started unravelling it, and the thing I found was that, while it had no fiber-optics in it, it also wasn’t normal yarn. It was real yarn though. It didn’t feel like something manufactured by robots. It felt … organic. But it wasn’t normal yarn. It was connected in this strange sort of three dimensional mesh. The only thing I can think of similar was this one time on a nature show they were talking about fungus, and they did a time-lapse photo of a fungus growing underground in a clear jelly that they’d made so they could watch it grow. That was how her purple yarn was. It split off in all directions with different places where it rejoined itself, no knots or obvious ways of having it joined. It just was this tangle that had no ends. And while it was normal yarn, it also wasn’t normal yarn. I started trying to make sense of it because I hadn’t slept in two days, and it was wearing a little thin on me: this whole not sleeping and nightmares and crap.

  Well, I don’t know if you’ve ever stared at a puzzle for long enough, but if you stare at randomness long enough, the randomness speaks back. It’s called scrying. Seers and witches do it. Some of them look at fire, and some stare at tea leaves …

  See, there’s a pattern in a tangle, every tangle. When your hair gets in a knot, or there’s a mold bloom in your living wallpaper, or you look at the roots of trees, there’s a pattern in it. And if you look long enough and take the time to untangle it, it will tell you things. A pattern is something that repeats. Doesn’t matter what, but if it repeats, it’s a pattern. Sound is a wave pattern. And light, light is radiation just like your surface sterilizer in your kitchen is radiation, and radiation happens in waves. So that’s a pattern. You wiggle light one way, and that’s blue. If you change it, it’s red. If you wiggle sound the right way, it’s the note E. If you wiggle it fatter or thinner, then it’s E-flat or E-sharp.

  The patterns in the yarn made no sense and had no beginning and no end and were tangled. It was him calling again. But this time, it was a puzzle that I had to unravel. When you start getting unsure of yourself, you start to quantify your surroundings to try to understand. You count things because math is this logical fundamental concept that most brains find reassuring at low levels. So I started counting. And as I was pulling the yarn one way and another way, following it along one strand to where it met with another, and following that second to meet with two more, I started to see a pattern. Now, I was really squirrelly from lack of sleep and all preoccupied with unravelling the yarn, so I didn’t realize when I stopped actually counting and started doing it in my head. And then, my mind started telling me what I would come up with before I saw it, and I realized that I was telling the future—that I knew what kind of branch I would come up with before I got there because, even though I did not consciously understand the pattern, unconsciously, I had absorbed it, and it was part of me.

  And then I looked away from the yarn and started to see the spider web patterns showing up everywhere. In the cracks in the walls, in the way smoke swirled out of someone’s cigarette … there was no chaos any more. I understood. I knew which way something random would happen before it randomly did. I was tapped in, and my mind was in a groove of the web, and I knew things. And then as the patterns began to be clearer, around the fourth day of no sleeping, I started to see him. I saw parts of his mind, and how he was using the patterns to call to me because when he tried calling directly it was too much.

  I killed the dog on the fifth day. I felt bad because it was a nice dog. But I needed to know if my idea was true. And it was. Most animals that wander around on two or four legs, humans included, have swirly bits in their brains, wrinkles that are all squished up and random. But they aren’t actually random. They have a pattern. Those are the fingerprints of our maker: the mark of God. Those little squiggles that hold thoughts, those patterns, they are the blueprint and the circuit board for what the human race was designed to do all along.

  People project holograph ads into the subway and scrawl graffiti on the walls about how God is coming. They’re right. And the end of the world too. But God isn’t a nice guy. God is big and wet and dripping and ugly and hungry and has a whole lot of squiggly bits. The only thing God is going to save you for is dinner, and it isn’t going to be quick. It isn’t going to be okay. Nothing is ever going to be okay. No one is going to be okay. God isn’t some benign entity that thinks humanity is special. Humanity exists for one thing and one thing only. You know how steering wheels have grooves for fingers? How tools have grips designed to conform to the shape of your hand? Yeah … that’s what the squiggly bits in our brains are. They’re handlebars.

  Even if we’re dead, he can still reach in. He can take over and force us to prepare each other and every living thing in the world for his … homecoming dinner. He’s a slow eater, too, and even if you’re no longer alive, he makes you linger, keeping you so even death can’t take you away. Killing people doesn’t protect them. Nothing protects them. There is only one way to protect each other from him, and it, like God, isn’t very nice, but it’s a hell of a lot better than the alternative. He doesn’t have enough control yet. He’s not quite here.

  I’m fighting. I started with everyone I ever cared about because they were the ones that I wanted to be sure were safe first. He called me. That’s through ears. And then he called me with yarn. That’s through fingers and eyes.

  Drano makes things smooth. Sure, we have plumberbots and smart drains, but when it comes down to it, nothing cleans out a blocked pipe better or cheaper than Drano. It’s like extreme soap. When you get soap on your fingertips, it makes them all slippery. That’s because the soap is actually gently eating away at the fingerprint ridges in your hands. Drano does the same thing only it’s stronger. It has chemicals in it that make it boil when it comes into contact with water, and tiny bits of metal that work like sandpaper, so it boils and swishes and makes everything slippery and flat. That’s how it cleans drains, by swirling boiling bits of metal to eat, to cut, to destroy anything in the way.

  You need to start with the eyes and the ears because that’s how he gets to you. You have to stop him where he gets in and take away the handlebars before he can take over. Now, at least the people I care about are safe. I can’t save everyone, but I’ve made a difference to a few lives. He won’t ever touch them. He won’t ever make them do awful things. They won’t have to hear the screams: their own or anyone else’s.

  When he comes through the internet, he won’t have anything in them to hold on to.

  I made everything inside their heads all smooth.

  Daria Patrie is a delusion, agreed upon by society, which sometimes manifests during the process of reading. If you are reading this right now, you may be under the presumption that Daria exists. You would only be partially wrong. Some say Daria evolved from the left over pasta sauce forgotten in the back of a second-year Physics student’s fridge, emerging fully formed and blinking from the crisper drawer one rainy afternoon. Others say Daria is one of several humans possessed by the long dead and quite angry spirit of a three-legged alley cat named Pickleface. Still others say that long ago, Daria arose from a failed poet’s recycle bin, the mountain of crumpled paper having gained sentience through a strange mutation of grammar, and that the fi
ction attributed to this “author” is in fact a misguided attempt by the abomination to locate its accidental creator.

  The Stricken

  Molly Tanzer

  The rain-puddled, mist-shrouded streets of Arkham are empty—emptier even than the sullen graveyard Hannah now calls home.

  Home. It used to just be camp, but she has been squatting in this mausoleum for close to a week now and has no immediate intention of leaving. In spite of what it is, the stone room has taken on an almost cozy appearance. Her few possessions—a cookpot, spoon, some food, matches and dry firewood, a blanket, a few changes of clothes, her bike, a fire axe with a brown-stained handle, and a sturdy burlap sack with a large jar in it—are strewn about the place just like they used to be when her apartment was home. When she slept on a futon instead of with her back against a shattered coffin.

  To be fair, the sack with the jar hadn’t been there—but if it had been, it likely would have been tossed into the corner. Funny, the things that never really change. She’s still a slob, even now.

  It’s a shitty evening, that’s for fucking sure, but Hannah is barely damp and almost warm from the small, unpleasantly smoky fire she risked building. Steady rain drums on the roof and patters on the unmown grass and disturbed headstones beyond the doors of the crypt, and the soggy branches of the trees rattle in the intermittent gusts of wind. She is keenly aware that the orange glow might attract unwanted attention, but she has made her choice. She needs the fire. She is certain she will die of exposure or misery without it—and she does not believe those who would injure her will seek her in this place.

  When it all began, it would not have occurred to her that a graveyard would be the safest place to hide from the dead, but they seem eager to roam everywhere but here. Her sanctuary was empty, with the doors broken open from the inside when she sought refuge here on the solid advice of the only person she has spoken to in a very, very long time.