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

  The afternoon is waning, and before the last of the light goes, Hannah dismounts, exhausted, to read her maps. She pores over them for a time before deciding on a route to Kingsport. Only then does she consult with her great-uncle.

  “Thank you,” are the first words out of his mouth. “I have no idea what they wanted with me, but they wanted me.”

  “Hell if I know,” says Hannah. “Maybe they wanted to make you their king.”

  He ignores this sally. “Did you get a map? Do you know where we’re going?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “I think so. Who knows what we’ll find there, but …”

  “It’s always better to know.”

  “Sure, I guess.” Hannah sighs. “I just wish I had, I dunno, a motorcycle and a sawed off shotgun instead of some crappy bike and a fire axe. This is some Mad Max shit. It would be nice to be prepared.”

  “Mad Max? Is he an old boyfriend of yours?”

  Hannah sighs. Sometimes she forgets her great-uncle was a head in a jar before color film was standard.

  “Yeah. An ex-boyfriend,” she says, and she puts him back, screwing on the lid extra-tight.

  It’s time to move on.

  Molly Tanzer is the author of the British Fantasy Award–nominated mosaic novel A Pretty Mouth (Lazy Fascist Press, 2012), the steampunk weird western Vermilion (Word Horde, 2015), cocktail-themed collection Rumbullion and Other Liminal Libations (Egaeus Press, 2013), and the historical crime novel The Pleasure Merchant (Lazy Fascist Press, 2015). She is also the co-editor of the forthcoming anthology Swords v. Cthulhu (Stone Skin Press, 2016). Her short fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies. Find her online at mollytanzer.com and @molly_the_tanz.

  Beige Walls

  Joshua L. Hood

  Beige walls, beige cubicles, yellow sticky notes that were slightly more beige than usual. For some reason, she had thought a state-of-the-art government research facility would be a little more … state of the art. A dot matrix printer tittered in the distance.

  “It’s because,” Dr. Merrick said, “if we upgraded hardware every time technology evolved, we’d spend all our time and money just trying to keep up. Really, it’s only the operational hardware and software that need updating frequently. And the brains, of course. You guys are our most valuable assets. Don’t forget that.”

  “I won’t if you won’t,” she said with a smile.

  Dr. Merrick didn’t respond.

  Renee swallowed her nerves.

  “Besides, funding has waned since the private sector has lost confidence in the capitalizable potential of our work.”

  “Huh. Bummer.”

  “Here’s your work station,” the doctor pointed to a beige cubicle. “Workflow is distributed by a performance-to-priority application. The better you are at certain things, the more of that thing you’ll get to process. But don’t be discouraged from widening your scope. Performance evaluations take into account your priority grade on all divisional subsets. That’s where incentive raises come from …” He trailed off, sounding bored, distracted, like his favorite song was playing somewhere in the distance. “Um, I’ve got to go. Get familiar with the set up. I’ll be back for lunch, and we’ll take a tour of the facilities. That part I think you’ll really like.”

  In truth, Renee liked all of it, even the beige—in its own way. She would put up with all the divisional subsets and incentive programs she had to as long as she got to be a small part of the team exploring the Elder Reach.

  “Eigenstatic space,” she sternly reminded herself, “not Elder Reach. Only amateurs and sci-fi hacks called it the Elder Reach. Be professional.”

  She looked up at the framed poster on the wall. A pixelated mealworm-looking thing floating in a black void, bearing the caption Eigenstae Howardia goldmanii. She got the tingles in the same way she used to when she would look at cartoony drawings of eigenstatic creatures in picture books with their sharp teeth rounded to polished knobs and their scaled tentacles turned to cute nubbins. She was glad she could still enjoy the wonder of these things after all this time. Most of her peers thought it was childish. The picture in the poster was old news, after all, but it was the first of its kind, and that meant something. It was the first confirmed proof of things that were considered pretty farfetched at best from back when they were still just fairytale horrors that drove men mad.

  “It was actually the machines,” her father had told her once. “The creatures are harmless to those in active space, but the early machines that the scientists and spiritualists plugged into their brains in the 1920s and 30s are what caused them to become manic. That’s why no one believed them. Of course, if we were to try and force our minds into static space we’d probably lose a few neurons too. Just because technology makes things easier now doesn’t make us better than those old pioneers. Don’t let the familiarity of amazing things fool you. We are constantly rewriting the fine print of the universe—and that’s big.”

  It was that last part that stuck with her. People seemed to think that just because Elder Space photos were so pervasive and mankind so accustomed to their strangeness that they were old and boring. Like it wasn’t a mind-blowing discovery every time a new one was revealed. The romance, the mystery, it was all still there behind the kids’ books and the pop-science and the ElderBurger meals at fast food joints.

  The first thing Renee did was to set her computer background to a grainy black and white photo of the earth as seen from space—her favorite image from a V2 rocket launched in 1946, the first of its kind. She gazed at the black blobs of land amongst the white blur of clouds and smiled. Most people would have picked “The Blue Marble” or some other famous space photo. But this one was the first, and moreover, as far as Renee knew, this image had never been used to market some used-car dealer’s “Out Of This World Prices!”

  “I’ll be honest with you,” Dr. Merrick said three hours later on the way to the optics lab. “Forget what I said earlier. Don’t worry about cross training. Focus on neutrino distortions. Everything else is going to be an algorithm soon. Every time you guys clear a frame, the computer learns from what you did. This data center will probably be reduced to one small supercomputer within the next two years—except for neutrinos. Those have proven a bit random for the computers. For now, anyway.”

  “Nice thought,” Renee said.

  “Don’t worry. With your resume, I have no doubt we’ll find something for you. So here we are. Brace yourself—most people don’t realize just how intense these machines can be.” Dr. Merrick opened the beige door into a stark, white room. In the center was an orb four or five meters across, covered in slender spindles like a porcupine. It was spinning so quickly that Renee felt like she was standing in a room full of fans. It smelled of sterile grease. “Stay behind the red line. This thing changes direction erratically,” the doctor said. “Each arm carries a fifty-thousand-dollar optic camera set-up. They’re not like regular cameras, of course, but that’s kind of the idea. Eigenstatic space moves by very quickly—or rather, we move through it. All five thousand of those cameras are taking pictures of the same particle cluster. Given the speed of the earth around the sun, the solar system through the cosmos, the North American plate across the mantle, and the movement of all the uncertain particles, the machine has less than one trillionth of a second to determine the course and speed of us in relation to a single Elder parti—er, eigenstatic particle.”

  Renee smiled, feeling vindicated. “Fascinating,” she said, trying to seem impressed.

  Of course, she knew all of this. Most people with PBS did. By focusing on the recently discovered static particles, those that didn’t move or fluctuate—not subject to uncertainty—a universe similar to the normal plane of existence was revealed. Just how that worked was still unclear, just like how a lot of pharmaceuticals work. And just like miracle drugs, the how of it quickly became immaterial once the results were observed. It was soon discovered that taking a series of images of these particles could
result in a mosaic that revealed a very clear physical realm, just out of notice of our own. That the realm just happened to be populated with unimaginable creatures was a huge bonus.

  Naturally, it took a lot of computational power to build a world out of single particles, and with things like atoms and neutrinos vibrating around and photobombing the pictures, it took a lot of people to sort through the confusion in the viewing spectrum, which is where jobs like Renee’s came in. As far as the population at large knew, it only took a dozen nerds and an upload server to make the pictures, but the population at large was uninspired, bored, used to it all.

  Dr. Merrick peered over thin-framed bifocals. Renee barely glanced away from the rapidly gyrating machine. “You find this all very interesting, don’t you?”

  “Of course,” Renee said.

  “Hmm. Come this way. There’s something I want to show you,” Dr. Merrick said, deep thought creasing his brow. “Yes, I think you’ll enjoy this.”

  “What is it?”

  “A game changer. Still photos may soon be a thing of the past.”

  Renee looked startled. “Video?”

  “Better. It’ll shut this whole data center down and open a vast new world of exploration … if we’re lucky.”

  Dr. Merrick started walking quickly toward the door. Renee hustled to keep up.

  “It’s just a pet project, really. But it’s one I’m particularly proud of. I kind of feel like showing it off … to someone who cares. Grant managers and lab directors are only so receptive.”

  They walked back down the beige hallway until a door with the red words “Authorized Personnel Only” appeared in the distance. Renee shivered with excitement. She was hoping she’d make a good impression.

  During the walk, Dr. Merrick prattled on. “In the beginning, it was tempting to think of it as a world of infinite horrors. There are so many of them. Then, someone actually saw the same creature twice, and then a third time, and a fourth, like it was following us as we vibrate along. This caused a bit of apprehension at the time, but it was soon realized that they were, in fact, different creatures of the same species. Then we started categorizing, applying a standard taxonomy, which seemed to hold up over time. That led Donald Racoult to create Racoult’s Theorem.”

  “Any biological life form in the same universe, regardless of plane or dimension, is restricted by the same biological principles. Like Lyell’s uniformitarianism is to geology,” Renee chimed in.

  “Exactly. But then, we immediately realized the contradiction of biological creatures existing in static space. It doesn’t make sense on any level, even quantum. So we formed a new hypothesis. Maybe eigenstatic creatures aren’t so static.”

  “I hadn’t read anything to contradict static particle theory in the journals,” Renee said.

  “You read the journals?” Merrick said, slightly surprised.

  “My degree is in statistics, but my interest is in … all sorts of unknown things.”

  “You don’t say?”

  “Sure. I dunno what it is. The mystery, I guess.”

  “I hear you there,” Merrick said, then fell silent, distracted.

  Renee smiled to herself. I’m glad I’m not the only one who hasn’t succumbed to the beige, she thought. “So what’s the new idea?”

  “Oh, well, it’s pretty simple really. Biological creatures as we know them can’t live in static space, so we reconsidered and realized that static space isn’t all that prevalent. Thin is the word we use. The eigenstatic creatures aren’t on a parallel plane, they’re behind it.”

  “Behind it? How?”

  “It’s like a wall separating us from them. A wall with eleven dimensions running through normal space, distorting our view of it. The example I use is to have you imagine that you’re in a swimming pool with one side separated by a transparent pane of red glass. If you look through the glass, it will appear as though the people on the other side are swimming in a different kind of medium entirely, but it’s still the same damned pool.”

  “Wow,” Renee said. “That’s news to me.” They’d reached the door. A beige-faced clock with a black frame ticked above it, telling her that lunch break was almost up. “So what’s behind the door?”

  “Well … it’s a sledgehammer. We’re trying to break through the glass.”

  A brief chime sounded from both of their phone alarms at once. Lunch time was over. Dr. Merrick glanced at the clock and rolled his eyes. “Ignore that. Would you like to go in?” he asked.

  Renee nodded.

  “Why doesn’t everyone know about this?” Renee exclaimed as they entered a room full of wires and digital readouts. She couldn’t tell where the so-called sledgehammer was. Half of the stuff in the room looked slapped together, specialized, like it existed nowhere else in the world.

  “We’re publishing next week, though I don’t expect much of a reaction,” Merrick said.

  “Why not!? This is amazing. People are gonna flip! A chance to see an eigenstatic creature in the flesh, to touch one! This is huge!”

  “If it works,” Merrick said, “then we’ll certainly get a grant boost but probably little more.”

  “I don’t think you realize what this will mean to the world …” Renee began.

  “Of course, we do. But we’re realists. Ask yourself, what was the last dinosaur discovered, the last one reclassified? What was the last thing they cloned?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Neither do I. Nor do I know the last guy to walk on the moon. I know the first but not the last. Have you seen the latest image from Hubble II? It’s astounding.”

  “Yeah, it’s of the Sombrero Nebula, right?”

  “Galaxy. And it’s actually only a single star cluster, but it contains a nascent supernova fluctuation. Something they didn’t even know to look for until we found out how to read the magnetic signature of stabilizing iron in the near infrared. Right now at NASA, they’re piecing together an image of that supernova as it occurs. Two weeks from now will be the first time that a supernova has been recorded in real time. You watch. It’ll get a mention between celebrity baby names and Black Friday specials. But I digress. This is a gripe as old as technology. Now watch, we’re starting.”

  A blue light began to glow at the end of a thin needle in the middle of the room: the sledgehammer. With a hum, it began to grow.

  Dr. Merrick beamed. “Look, Renee, a glimpse across an unknown plane that doubles the size of our universe. The first look at life beyond alien! This is as far as we’ve got before destabilizing.”

  A placid voice came from a speaker on the wall. “Control room to observation deck. We have destabilization.”

  The blue glow dimmed and fluctuated.

  Dr. Merrick didn’t look surprised, but he did look a little disappointed.

  “Interference critical. Looks like the new plasma siphon is insufficient. It’s overheating,” the control room said.

  “Reboot it,” Merrick said into a microphone.

  A brief pause, then, “No good … wait. Something’s happening. Numbers are balancing.” The voice from the speaker became excited. “Plasma interference decreasing.”

  Renee glanced at Dr. Merrick, who remained silent. “I’m not sure how this is happening, but the aperture is widening. The plasma siphon is still offline,” the speaker said.

  Dr. Merrick smiled.

  “Where’s the plasma going?” Renee asked.

  “Into eigenstatic space, I believe. Or what we used to call eigenstatic space. I think we’re getting a little help here … from the other side,” the doctor said.

  Renee’s eyes widened. “No way. You can’t be serious.”

  “Just speculation,” the doctor smirked, “but I have it on good authority that this could be a cooperative effort.”

  She watched as the blue light grew. An appendage, like a tentacle but of a color she’d never seen before, began to writhe through the blue light. It dripped with a slime that vaporized before it hit the grou
nd. Acrid, cloying decay wafted through the air as the tentacle oozed outward like a worm from a fish eye.

  Renee grew cold, afraid. She recalled warnings from the past. The things that scientists said to each other after science had done horrible things.

  The question isn’t can we, but should we?

  The progress of science is far ahead of man’s ethical behavior.

  All attempts to adapt our ethical code to our situation in the technological age have failed.

  I am become death.

  Renee stepped backward, but there was nowhere to go.

  Dr. Merrick still beamed. “It arrives!” he said. “We’ve done it! We’ve done it, and no one even tried to stop us!”

  “What?” Renee muttered.

  The thing from the blue eye grew and grew.

  “No contest, no opposition. A vacuum of interest! The world has grown bland with wonder, but that will change.” He laughed shrilly. “I may have been a little dishonest, my dear. The wall between us and them wasn’t absolute. There was a force for which static space is no obstacle.”

  “Dr. Merrick, shut it down. Please!”

  “The dimension of thought, my dear! Thought is transcendent, and they heard us looking even as we saw them. Can you hear them? Can you hear them in your thoughts? They come!”

  “Dr. Merrick!” Renee shouted as the tentacles slithered across the beige floor toward them.

  “On second thought, Renee, don’t worry about the neutrinos. I think we’ve successfully eliminated your job today. It’s a shame that the world will never see its first supernova, but I hardly doubt they’ll miss it. Perhaps, they will find a wonder again in the age of destruction.

  “Say, Renee, would you like to name this one? That’s the rules. Finders namers. I’ve already got a few, so you can have this one. First across the void—what an honor! You may even be remembered!

  “But hurry, it comes!”

  Joshua L. Hood lives in Boise, Idaho. He holds a B.A. in archaeology and occasionally works in the field locally. He also has most of an illustration degree but now regrets all the time and money he spent on art school. On the weekends, he volunteers for a wildlife rehab center with orphaned black bears and, on weeknights, spends his time as a night watchman for our corporate overlords. He’s had stories published through several small presses and has put out the short story collection Melting People, available from all the big booksellers. There are many more spooky stories and novels in the works, details of which can be found at www.joshualhood.com.