Tomorrow's Cthulhu: Stories at the Dawn of Posthumanity

by Scott Gable, C. Dombrowski

  The James Webb refreshed, and the emptiness expanded. We emailed people about the telescope. Had them check the cameras. Normal. All across the board.

  This is a small industry. You hear the stories.

  Like the technician who forgot how to use tools. Some weird targeted retrograde amnesia. He couldn’t work the simplest device, just sat there staring at his dumb, useless hands. The woman from optics who suddenly stopped breathing. They got to her in time. They resuscitated her. She’s now on a respirator, but the doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with her. It was like she just forgot how to breathe.

  I left NASA. Not because of GL 386-HP. Don’t be silly; it was just burnout.

  I’ve been working at the university for three years, and they’ve been good. I’m helping them figure out a better filing system for scientific images. It’s not as sexy as the James Webb, but I like the methodology.

  Kit studied and played and grew. I told her a story about a princess who travels back in time to get her parents to fall in love, so she can be born. I told her a story about two princesses who enrolled in Pegasus flight school where they got the code names Goose and Maverick. I told her a story about a princess from the magical kingdom of Nakatomi and how she battled the evil frog wizard, Hans.

  Kit wanted a telescope for her birthday. She remembered when I used to talk about the stars.

  I gave her my old one. It had been stowed away in the garage for years. I looked through it first. Not because of GL 386-HP. Of course not. Just to make sure it worked.

  It didn’t.

  I looked for familiar objects out in space but found only little spots of unassuming black.

  I broke the lenses with a hammer and threw it in the garbage. Kit cried, but I told her I’d buy her anything else she wanted. Anything in the world.

  She asked for a Pegasus. Like Maverick, she said.

  I laughed; she didn’t. We compromised on a weekend-long vacation to a horse ranch out in the desert.

  Kit had fun today. She rode until she was burnt and exhausted. She looked up into the eyes of the horses, their heads half the size of her entire body, and she wasn’t afraid. She’s sleeping now in our room while I stand on the porch and watch the sky.

  We’re so far from the cities. There’s no light pollution out here. You should be able to see the arm of the Milky Way. You should be able to see an explosion of stars. You should be able to see something. It’s not overcast, but the sky is nearly empty.

  I can see clouds. Beyond them, the moon. There’s Venus and a handful of satellites. At the far edge of the horizon, a spattering of faint stars. But that’s it. The vast bulk of the sky above me is just a void of pure and unbroken black.

  Like I said, I don’t have much of an imagination. But a terrible idea came to me when I put Kit to bed, and I’ve been watching the sky ever since. I’ve been standing on this porch for three hours now. I’m watching those little stars on the horizon. One in particular. I call it Harold because I have to call it something, and Harold is a funny name for a star. I can’t take my eyes off Harold. It’s important.

  I don’t know what time it is. After midnight, probably.

  I thought I just lost it. But no. I’ve checked and re-checked.

  Harold is gone.

  The blackness is not a blob or a blotch or a glitch in the system. It’s not a spill, pouring over the distant stars. The darkness is blocking the stars out as it comes closer.

  I try to picture it. The size of the thing. Something that dwarfs stars, solar systems, whole galaxies—and it’s aware of us? Of me? I can’t resolve the idea in my head. I think my lack of imagination is the only thing keeping me sane right now.

  Now, I’m going to keep my promise. Remember the first story I told you—the marked princess and her quest to find a home?

  I told you it was true, except for two lies. Here they are.

  The gods were not gods; they were just men.

  The princess was not a princess.

  She was a goat.

  It’s a simple herding trick. Feral goats are an invasive species, but how do you find them all? The answer is, you don’t need to. You only need to find one, and she’ll lead you to the rest. They call it the Judas Goat. Ranchers drive or fly around their property in helicopters until they spot a lone goat. They tranquilize it and fit it with a transmitter. They release the goat, and she returns to her herd. The ranchers follow the transmitter and slaughter the herd but leave the Judas Goat intact. She, following her instincts, finds another herd. The pattern repeats.

  The Judas Goat is the ultimate traitor to her own species, but she has no agency in the betrayal. She may not understand what she’s doing, but she’s killing everybody she loves, regardless. She is being used by things beyond her understanding for purposes that she would surely find malevolent.

  The Judas Goat is an old trick. Older than anybody knew. Older than our entire species. Maybe older than the universe. And I have brought its inventor here.

  I am sorry.

  Robert Brockway is a Senior Editor and columnist for Cracked.com. He is the author of The Unnoticeables from Tor Books (released July 7th, 2015), the cyberpunk novel Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity, and the comedic, non-fiction essay collection Everything is Going to Kill Everybody: The Terrifyingly Real Ways the World Wants You Dead. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife Meagan and their two dogs, Detectives Martin Riggs and Roger Murtaugh. He has been known, on occasion, to have a beard.

  Madness on the Black Planet

  Darrell Schweitzer

  In the end, as the two of them descended to the surface of the Black Planet, Astronaut Adam Robinson had only his rage. It boiled up inside him inchoate and incoherent, beneath the level of verbalization or even thought, as he understood at some primordial level, at the base of his brain stem perhaps, that he, and all of humanity for that matter from the beginning of time, had been royally shafted, made ridiculous before a cosmos incapable of responding with even laughter.

  It might have been something close to precognition.

  The only words he managed utter were, “Oh fuck.”

  Ten minutes after the lander had separated from the orbiter, something like a shadow had passed over them, touched them, penetrated them in a way human senses couldn’t follow, filling his mind with strange visions.

  The first objective result of this was that all communications were cut off. The instrument panels in front of him all blinked out, then came back on again, but now nothing responded to his touch or command.

  Secondly, his colleague in the seat beside him, Pasternak, had chosen this rather inconvenient moment to go mad. So much for the tight-lipped brilliance that had gotten crews out of sticky situations as far back as Apollo XIII. It wasn’t happening this time.

  The Black Planet was swallowing them. He saw it outside his window, swelling to blot out the stars. It was not what anyone expected, no frozen landscape of ice and craters like most Kuiper Belt objects, but pure blackness, like a negation of the universe where the planet was supposed to be: a planet which truly had no name except for one or two fabulous ones found in ancient and decidedly unscientific texts written by persons of infinite unreliability.

  Robinson thought of it as the mouth of Hell, which was equally unscientific.

  Indeed, scientific considerations included the fact that, in all probability, their third team-mate, Zhou, left behind in the orbiter, was history by this point.

  Pasternak maintained a thin veneer of sanity as he repeated over and over again into his microphone, “Lander to Orbiter, we do not read you. Come in please.” But he went on and on at it, like a broken record, until at last Robinson nudged him on the shoulder and said, “Hey, I don’t think that’s going to do any good.”

  That was when Robinson could tell that the other man just wasn’t there anymore, by the vacant look in his eyes, by the drool that was running down his chin inside his space helmet.

  Now the broken record switched to, “Houston,
we have a problem. Houston, we have a problem. Houston, we have a problem.” That merely confirmed the diagnosis and added to the absurdity, not merely because Houston was so far away that any sort of radio message—in the unlikely event they were still transmitting—would take months to get there, which made any sort of conversation impractical. Besides which, Houston might still be the capital of one of the larger surviving chunks of the former United States, but they hadn’t come from Houston, or from any official space agency, not that there were any official space agencies anymore, now that cities were burning, oceans washed over continents, and the mad auroras rolled. No, this had been strictly a private mission, the brainchild of the last of the surviving grandsons of the infamous Delaroche brothers, oligarchs who could buy or break governments, and who survived and flourished in what newspaper reporters used to call their Fortress of Solitude: in fact an immense compound and artificial island located in the Florida Archipelago near the ruins of Miami, invulnerable to nuclear strikes or large meteorite impacts, so the story went, not to mention mere political revolutions and natural disasters. It had been tried and tested sorely of late, and it was still there, gleaming.

  Of course there was a spaceport and if Compton Delaroche, last of the line, desired it to it be used, it was used.

  Robinson, Pasternak, and Zhou had only met the old man once, when they were jointly interviewed for this mission. Even then, they’d sat opposite him at the end of an enormously long mahogany table in a darkened room, where they could not see his face clearly. Robinson thought it had rippled, like a flag in a breeze, and his every instinct made him want to rush to the other end of the table and break the bastard’s scrawny neck, or else just get the hell out of there, regardless of what was offered, regardless of the state of the world he was fleeing back to. Better to perish among the millions than sell your soul to the Devil, no, something worse than the Devil, something out of the visions that were filling his head now, something he raged against and wanted to destroy for the sheer obscenity of what it was doing to his mind and his world and his universe.

  But he had done none of these things, because Compton Delaroche willed that three astronaut candidates be recruited and trained and sent off. There was something in his voice, or in what his mind broadcasted, or in how reality rippled and shifted and changed in his presence so that there was only one will and one voice and all other living things were but detached limbs animated by his ever-reaching mind.

  Now the force that held the lander like a toy in hand set the vessel down gently on the surface of the Black Planet. There was hardly a bump, just the subtle sensation that they were no longer moving.

  Robinson turned to Pasternak, who was still babbling into the microphone, checked the seals on his suit and the gauge on his oxygen tank, and then gently led him out of the lander.

  “Hey, buddy, you’d better come with me.”

  “Houston, we have a problem.”

  “Yeah, I think we do.”

  He took his crewmate by the arm and directed him down the ladder to the surface.

  Now they could both look up and behold the features of the Black Planet. There were stars in the sky, but if it were visible, Robinson could not even make out the Sun, much less the Earth or even Jupiter. All too distant. Specks lost in a star field that looked like gleaming smoke. But they did not search the sky for more than a few seconds anyway, because now the Black Planet did indeed seem to have mountains of gleaming ice, higher than known in the Solar System, an impassible barrier toward which the two men instinctively walked. The rational part of Robinson’s mind told him that those mountains must be hundreds of miles away, and, given the lack of atmosphere and the enormous size of the Black Planet (twice the size of Earth, but somehow less dense, so his steps felt impossibly light), very likely hundreds of miles high as well. There was nothing to do but die, as their oxygen ran out in the middle of the featureless plain.

  But that was what the rational side of his mind told him, and he was not entirely sure he was in control of himself now. He saw things in memory that his eyes did not see—winged, white, many-limbed creatures rising into space, cities of featureless stone, gardens of frigid fungus in starlight—and sometimes he felt that he was someone else, a disembodied intelligence watching Astronaut Robinson making his way uselessly across the plain, dragging Astronaut Pasternak by the arm.

  The rational part of him knew that as soon as the shadow or whatever it had been had taken control of the lander, something had entered his mind, and Pasternak’s mind. Pasternak had not stood up under the strain. But he, Robinson, could still think for himself. He was still aware. He felt that rage for freedom that comes to an animal in a trap. It was enough to keep him going.

  Much of what followed thereafter didn’t make any rational sense. Possibly they covered impossible distances walking, without their bodies growing over-tired or their oxygen running out, or the distances themselves were illusions, or somehow space and distance were not the same here as they were on Earth. It seemed like no more than an hour before they actually reached the foot of those mountains, and he reached out and touched the hard, smooth surface, and all the mountains, as far as he could see, rippled like shapes made of rain, and vanished, to be replaced for a time by the apparition of an almost endless cityscape of black, featureless pyramids and structures that tilted at strange angles the eye could not follow, and of shapes like walking hills moving in and out and between and through these structures to a rhythm he could not follow but which seemed to indicate a kind of dance, increasing in frequency into a kind of frenzy.

  Then this too was gone, and he and his companion made their way over trackless miles of wasteland, knee deep in snow so darkly gray it was almost black, toward an ever-distant tower with a burning light in the window, like a beacon, like an eye, irresistible.

  By now Pasternak was screaming words Robinson could not make out, words in no human language at all, but sounds that almost meant something in his dreams, in his visions, in whatever pollution was filling his head.

  “Houston, I think we have a problem,” Robinson said. “No kidding. We really do.”

  He did not know exactly how he and his companion finally made it to their destination. Perhaps they were lifted up by winged, multi-limbed monstrosities and delivered there. Perhaps the tower was made of bones, but alive, writhing, and many-limbed, and it lifted them up through the lighted window as if shoveling two morsels into its mouth. Pasternak screamed all the way, but then grew silent as they—or at least he, Robinson—suddenly knew where they were: inside that meeting room in the Delaroche Complex/Fortress off the remains of Florida.

  Something sat at the far end of the mahogany table, clad in a misshapen business suit, wearing a silken mask that rippled like a flag in a gentle wind.

  “You can open your helmets. The air in here is perfectly good.”

  Reluctantly, Robinson unsealed his helmet. No, the air was not perfectly good, but he could breathe it. There was a sharp, acrid smell, like burning, and also a faint but indescribable foulness.

  Pasternak fumbled with the catches on his helmet. Robinson helped him.

  “Here, refresh yourselves,” said the other.

  Two plastic water bottles came rolling down the length of the table.

  “No, thank you,” said Robinson.

  Pasternak seemingly couldn’t figure out what to do with his.

  By this point, like tumblers inside his mind falling at last into place, Robinson found the solution and perfect focus to his own rage. He understood. He recognized that voice, which he had heard at their initial briefing, and in his head and his dreams so many times since. It was the voice of Compton Delaroche, or whatever Compton Delaroche had become or whatever being had impersonated Compton Delaroche all along.

  “Fuck you, bastard!”

  The yellow mask rippled. The other said, “You have not disappointed me until now. I had hoped that the climax of all of human history would finish on a better line than that.�
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  The lock within his mind sprang open. He was momentarily free. Now he did what his instincts had screamed for him to do at their first meeting. For all the clumsiness of his spacesuit he lunged along the length of that table and caught hold of the thing in the yellow mask. He felt its brittle neck bones crumbling into nothingness in his hands. It felt so, so good. He pounded with his fists as the rest of the body disintegrated and a cloud of thick, choking dust filled the air. He staggered back. He tried to close his space helmet again, but he was too late, because now, after a transition he could not remember or perhaps could not perceive, it was he who was sitting at one end of the table in that darkened room and addressing Astronaut Pasternak, who stood at the other.

  The thing, the otherness, was inside of him now, awake in his own body, as if he were mad, fractured into a multiple personality, and the prevailing opinion was that the others, the countless monstrous others, were real and Adam Robinson was the delusion. His mind was filled with hideous memories that were not his own, of a time on Earth when he—that which had never been Adam Robinson—had appeared in Egypt and beasts licked his hands.

  He—Adam—could follow the remaining conversation within the room only as if eavesdropping.

  The thing spoke out of his own mouth, first with the voice of Compton Delaroche, then, as it became accustomed, with the voice of Astronaut Robertson.

  It was Pasternak who mentioned Kadath in the Cold Waste, the Gardens of Ynath, and “more distant Shaggai.” It was he who realized that all through the universe, vast forces were awakening, and, by means Robinson could not begin to comprehend, listening intently to this conversation as it somehow rippled through the very fabric of being.

  It was the voice of Adam Robertson that explained that the entire purpose of human existence, the very reason such an evolutionary train of development had ever been allowed to begin, was so that mankind would, at the very end, destroy the Earth, or at least render it sufficiently chaotic that it more suited the desires of the others rather than humanity. He, through many guises and many millennia, had shaped events toward the intended outcome. He—that which was not Adam—was merely a watchman. Now that humans had, of their own resources, reached the Black Planet, an alarm went off, for if human beings had gained such powers and capacity, they likely had or would very soon carry the plan to its ultimate conclusion.