Explaining Cthulhu to Grandma and Other Stories

by Alex Shvartsman

  Alistair Tobin, traitor to humanity and its savior, sat alone in his Union Central office. He had to believe that humanity’s better angels would prevail the next time around. People of Earth would pass the Union’s next test and realize their full potential.

  Until then, it was going to be a slow couple of decades.

  This story originally appeared in the Politics issue of Penumbra Magazine. The Russian translation appeared in Kosmoport.

  This is one of my several “throwback” stories written in the style and voice of the golden age space opera. I grew up on a steady diet of such stories, and never tire of them.

  Virtually every novel or short story in a space opera setting is about direct conflict. Spaceships blowing each other up, planetary invasions… But there is another school of thought, one that suggests interstellar wars aren’t economically feasible, and that species capable of achieving faster-than-light travel will have outgrown desire for bloodshed. This is, of course, a rosy and overly optimistic theory, but I thought it would be fun to write a story set in the “universe of plenty” where all known intelligent species manage to live in relative harmony, and where the humans’ most dangerous foe is our own nature.

  THE TELL-TALE EAR

  From: ceo@telltalemarketing.com

  To: Telltale Marketing Employees mailing list

  Subject: Misdirected broadcast

  We seem to be having an equipment malfunction. I can hear bits broadcast from the Grand Cayman Casino and Erectile Dysfunction marketing campaigns while at the office. Somebody get on top of this. James Finch

  P.S. It’s a little annoying on repeat. At least now we know how the recipients feel. Haha.

  From: ceo@telltalemarketing.com

  To: IT@telltalemarketing.com

  Subject: Leak?

  Apparently only I can hear the ads, not the whole company. They’re playing on a loop and driving me up the wall. Whose bright idea was this? The stuff is supposed to be broadcast in the streets, not in my office. Get it fixed. Pronto.

  From: ceo@telltalemarketing.com

  To: IT@telltalemarketing.com

  Subject: Re: Leak?

  What do you mean you can’t figure it out? I’m telling you, I hear our commercials. ALL THE TIME. I even hear them at home now; can’t get a good night’s rest. Somebody must be doing this maliciously, and when I figure out who, heads are going to roll.

  Do whatever it is you do to make this stop. Come on people, what am I paying you for?

  From: ceo@telltalemarketing.com

  To: drseannguyen@ntkmetical.com

  Subject: Appointment

  Dear Dr. Nguyen,

  I run Telltale Marketing, the company that produces the hypersonic sound commercials. Over the last several days I’ve been hearing our ads, at increasing frequency and volume.

  At first I resisted the suggestion that this might be a psychological issue, but my IT people are swearing up and down that the problem isn’t technical in nature, so I’m beginning to worry. May I come in for an evaluation at your earliest convenience?

  Sincerely,

  James Finch

  From: ceo@telltalemarketing.com

  To: drsnguyen@ntkmetical.com

  Subject: Re: Appointment

  I’m sorry to hear that you aren’t able to fit me in. Also, I appreciate your feedback about the hypersonic ads, but I assure you that your assertion about us breaking the law is entirely false. We broadcast them only in public spaces and only between the hours of 8 a.m. and 11 p.m., in accordance with FCC regulations. It’s just like playing an advertisement on a radio or posting up a billboard.

  This is absolutely not an invasion of privacy. We get a bum rap in all the other media, but only because they’re jealous. A technology that beams sound directly into people’s ears is far more effective than their outdated methods. It’s much easier to tune out ads on TV and radio than to ignore our product, and the advertisers know it.

  Also, I completely agree, broadcasting the pornographic website commercials where young children can hear them is completely inappropriate. We don’t do that. It’s those upstarts at Digital EAR. They have no class.

  From: ceo@telltalemarketing.com

  To: SandraFinch@AOL.com

  Subject: Tonight

  Finally found a shrink who’ll see me. Going to her office after work, so don’t wait with dinner.

  I can’t believe it was so hard to find a doctor. As soon as they learn who I am, they want nothing to do with me. One even went as far as to call me a spammer and say that I deserve this. Didn’t they take some sort of an oath to help people? Geez.

  From: ceo@telltalemarketing.com

  To: legal@telltalemarketing.com

  Subject: Exposure

  I’ve been seeing a psychologist twice a week about my hearing-the-ads problem, but it’s only getting worse. The noise is loud and incessant. I haven’t had a decent night of sleep in weeks.

  Dr. Harris says that it’s all in my head, my guilty subconscious torturing me over “forcing your ads on people who don’t want to hear them.”

  According to Dr. Harris I might only get better if I admit to some of the shadier stuff that the company has done, to get it off my chest. It’s nuts, I know. I dismissed the idea initially, but I may literally be losing my mind. I can’t stand it anymore and am willing to try anything.

  If I go through with this, how bad is it going to be, for me or for the company?

  From: ceo@telltalemarketing.com

  To: SandraFinch@AOL.com

  Subject: Update

  The minimum security facility they’re holding me in isn’t so bad. Food is tolerable, and the other inmates are white-collar types, mostly from the financial sector. I even get to use the computer for 15 minutes a day.

  But the most important thing is: it worked. I told them about beaming ads into people’s homes, advertising knockoff pills that weren’t approved by the FDA, and the bribes we paid to make the regulators look the other way. And once I admitted these things, the cursed noise in my head finally stopped.

  I may be in here for a couple of years, but I tell you, it was worth it.

  From: AgentWellsley@fbi.gov

  To: Director.ConsumerFraudDivision@fbi.gov

  Subject: Finch

  It worked like a charm.

  After getting blasted with a taste of his own medicine for a couple of weeks straight, Finch sang like a canary (pardon the pun.) He confessed to some stuff we didn’t even know about. My team is disassembling the broadcast equipment as we speak. We’re going to be moving Operation Poe on to our next target tomorrow.

  Tell agent Harris to expect a call from the president of Digital EAR sometime soon.

  This story originally appeared in Nature and was subsequently podcasted at the Toasted Cake.

  Relying on non-traditional narratives (like a bunch of e-mails) to tell a story is fun, and perfectly suited to the medium of flash fiction. I’ve written more than a few of these and always look for fresh ways to utilize an unusual narrative format.

  As in the case of “The Take,” the technology in this story is based on the real-world prototypes, capable of beaming sounds into one’s inner ear. The real thing is far more limited and relies on direct line-of-sight. Thankfully.

  THE MIRACLE ON TAU PRIME

  The investigators arrived in the morning. Father Laughlin and Father Sauer trudged through the dense, chilly fog from their shuttle to the spaceport terminal just as the twin suns of the Tau system began painting the eastern horizon in yellow hues.

  “Thank Christ, you’re finally here,” said Abbot Fierni, who was waiting for them in the relative warmth of the terminal. “I’ve been bombarding the Vatican with messages for weeks. He’s on to The First Epistle of John by now and should be finished within days. I fervently prayed that you would arrive in time to witness the miracle firsthand.”

  Both priests shook his hand and made no comment on the timing of their arrival. The Abbot was outrageously lucky;
the Vatican’s typical response to a miracle claim this far out on the edge of occupied space was measured in years rather than weeks. The fact that they had been nearby, looking into a stigmata report on a planet only ten light years away, was a minor miracle in its own right. But informing the Abbot, so certain of the urgency of his case, would’ve been unkind.

  “Here he is.” The Abbot made a show of opening the thin wooden door into one of the monastery’s living spaces. Inside the small room was a bipedal insectoid alien, its five foot tall chitinous frame hunched over a workbench. It was writing in an enormous book.

  The alien’s pincer held a thin bone stick that looked like a featherless quill. With rapid, fluid motions it dipped the stick into a glass inkwell and applied it to a half-empty page. It wrote neat lines of symbols so precise they could have been printed. There was not an ink stain or a careless mark in sight.

  “That’s Koine Greek, all right,” Father Laughlin whispered, not wanting to distract the alien.

  “It is,” nodded the Abbot. “He started with Genesis and made his way through all of the Old Testament in a month or so, as best as I can tell. Wrote down the whole blessed thing in Hebrew and Aramaic, he did. I can’t read those languages, but I’ve been comparing the symbols to an original and it looks to be an exact match. Then he moved right along to the Gospels and switched to Greek.”

  Sauer cringed at the Abbot’s loud voice reverberating through the room, and the man’s insistence at calling the alien a ‘he’.

  “You can speak at full volume” Fierni added. “Xitzl has been in some sort of a trance since he began transcribing the holy texts.”

  Abbot Fierni riffled through a thick stack of completed pages, lifting them only a few inches off the left side of the tome so as not to disturb the page Xitzl was currently writing on.

  Father Laughlin took a step forward and leaned in for a better look. Unperturbed, the alien continued to fill the page with line after line of Greek script. Laughlin crossed himself and retreated toward the door.

  “This isn’t a miracle,” Father Sauer raged in the privacy of a study the two investigators commandeered at the monastery. “It’s a travesty. Or maybe some sort of a scam. Or some alien idea of a joke. Who knows what this critter is capable of—perhaps its species can memorize pages of text at a single glance.”

  “Don’t rush to judgment,” cautioned Father Laughlin. “According to the Abbot, this Xitzl creature expressed interest in our faith long before the miracle business. That in itself is extremely rare.”

  “Little good it would do it,” grumbled Sauer. “The oversized cockroach has no soul, and so it can’t be saved.”

  “It’s archaic attitudes like yours that prevent more of our intergalactic brothers from joining in Christ’s love. Why should they, if they’re told that his love is reserved only for the descendants of Adam?”

  “Careful,” said Sauer. “Last I checked this ‘archaic attitude’ is still the official position of the Vatican.”

  “I pray that His Holiness may one day reconsider,” said Laughlin. “Anyway, I anticipated the eidetic memory argument. So I sent a recording of the completed pages to the experts at the Holy See. Their findings were surprising, to say the least.”

  “Oh?” Sauer looked up sharply. “What have they discovered?”

  “The Bible our alien friend is writing down isn’t just accurate—it’s overly complete. In addition to the standard texts, Xitzl appears to have added in all the apocrypha. And I mean all of it—including texts not available outside of the Vatican vaults for over two millennia.”

  Sauer stared at his fellow investigator, head tilted.

  “There are passages in there so obscure it took the labor of some of our best scholars just to verify their authenticity. But verify it they did. Xitzl didn’t simply copy a Bible he found in some hotel room. We may have finally discovered a genuine miracle. This is the real deal.”

  “So what are we supposed to do with that?” Sauer got up and began to pace across the study. “Invite this alien into the College of Cardinals? Beatify it after it dies? Make it Saint Bug of Who-Knows-Where? I’m not comfortable with this.”

  “For now, we do what we always do. Observe and wait. Xitzl made it to the middle of Revelation already. Perhaps it can shed some light on the mystery directly, when the book is finished.”

  Father Laughlin burst into the study. He was disheveled, his clothes cut in several places, stains of fetid orange discharge covering the front of his shirt. He clutched the large handwritten volume to his side.

  “Come,” he told Sauer. “There’s no time to explain. I must leave this place now. Please,” he pleaded, “hurry.”

  Reluctantly, Father Sauer joined his associate. Laughlin revealed nothing on the ride to the spaceport. He shivered, clutched the book to his chest, and prayed intently, his lips voicelessly sounding out the supplications. It wasn’t until their shuttle was racing away from Tau Prime that Sauer coaxed a few words from the perturbed priest.

  “I didn’t mean to do it,” Laughlin kept saying. “I didn’t know it was so fragile, so brittle. All I wanted to do was to make it stop writing.”

  “Calm yourself, Father,” said Sauer sternly, “and explain.”

  “I watched the alien finish writing down the Book of Revelation,” said Laughlin. “I stood there and watched, eager to know what would happen next, after it ceased writing.” Laughlin stared past Sauer at the shuttle wall as he recounted the event. “Only it didn’t stop, didn’t even pause. It kept going. It just kept going…”

  Laughlin focused on Sauer now, his eyes full of pain.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt it. I tried to take away the book, or the writing tool; anything to make it stop, but it wouldn’t comply. We fought.” Laughlin pointed at the stains on his clothes. “I… broke it. Crushed its body with a few careless blows. Killed it.” Laughlin’s last sentence was barely audible.

  “What did…” Sauer began to ask but stopped himself and reached out a hand instead. Wordlessly, Laughlin handed over the book.

  Sauer flipped through the pages to find the last one filled with text. There were twenty verses in the last chapter of Revelation, just as there should have been. But it didn’t end there. The next book of the Bible was started on the following page, a text written in a language Sauer had never seen before, a language not of Earth.

  The two priests sat in silence for a long time. Finally Sauer took hold of the last page and tore it from the tome. He methodically ripped at it, shredding it into smaller and smaller pieces, until nothing discernible remained.

  “Even the Holy See isn’t prepared for certain truths,” he told Laughlin. The other priest nodded slowly.

  Sauer disposed of the destroyed page and began preparing a eulogy. He decided that someone should pray for Xitzl’s soul after all.

  This story originally appeared in Daily Science Fiction.

  The concept of Vatican investigators trying to verify miracles in a space opera setting was very appealing to me, but the resulting story turned out darker and more retrospective than I’d ever expected.

  THE TINKER BELL PROBLEM

  Herbert woke up shivering. His mouth was dry and he had an epic headache, but mostly he was freezing. Stubbornly refusing to open his eyes and face the new day, Herbert felt around for his blanket. Instead, his palm touched cold stone.

  Herbert sat upright, which sent a minor nuclear apocalypse through his skull. He was totally naked, sitting on the ground inside of an elaborate pentagram.

  A large five-pointed star was drawn on the floor in a gooey red substance which Herbert dearly hoped wasn’t blood. A wider circle was drawn around the star. A variety of symbols were sprinkled along the circumference of the circle. Herbert recognized a peace sign, a Stop sign, a smiley face and a Pepsi logo in the mix.

  Herbert gaped at the unfamiliar surroundings. The floor and walls were made from large cut stones. There were no windows and only a single door. The unfurnished space wa
s lit by a chandelier filled with dozens of candles and hanging so high up it barely illuminated the ground.

  He vaguely recalled going to a party the night before. Had he been drinking that much more than usual? He took a pair of unsteady steps toward the door and ran face first into an invisible wall.

  “Ouch!” His nose wasn’t bleeding, but it hurt almost as badly as his head. He reached out cautiously. The invisible barrier was there, stinging his fingertips with what felt very much like an electrical current.

  That’s when the door opened and a monster walked in.

  It was nearly seven feet tall. Its red skin contrasted with obsidian-black horns. The creature ambled over to the outer edge of the pentagram. It stared at Herbert, its rattlesnake-like tail flicking impatiently, like a cat’s. It bared long, sharp fangs as it spoke.

  “Hello. I’m Murzivel,” it said in perfect English.

  Herbert did the only reasonable thing he could under the circumstances, and fainted.

  When Herbert came to, he was disappointed to find himself in the same uncomfortable position. His overwhelming desire to wake up from this nightmare wasn’t bearing fruit. Murzivel was still standing nearby, studying him with what appeared to be great interest.

  “Are you quite finished with this whole playing dead business?” asked Murzivel. “Because I’m not buying it and besides, you know we only have a short amount of time. So why don’t we get around to making a deal?”

  “A deal?” Herbert rubbed his temples. A deal, the pentagram… “Wait, do you think I’m some sort of a demon?”

  Murzivel laughed, sounding like nails on a chalkboard.

  “Again with the tricks. I’m a demon. You,” he said, “are obviously a human.”