My Work Is Not Yet Done

by Thomas Ligotti

THE NIGHTMARE OF THE PAST

  BECOMES THE DREAM OF THE FUTURE.

  ONEIRICON: ONE WORLD, ONE DREAM

  On the nightmare network

  Our names are unknown and our faces are shadows drifting across an infinite blackness. Our voices have been stifled to a soft murmur in a madman’s ear. We are the proud failures with only a single joy left to us – to inflict rampant damage on those who have fed themselves on our dreams and to choke ourselves on our own nightmares. In sum, we are expediters of the apocalypse. There is nothing left to save, if there ever was anything . . . if there ever could be. All we desire (in all our bitterness) is to go to our ruin in our own way – with a little style and a lot of noise.

  The harvest

  The main grid at Security Central indicates that there is a crisis situation in sub-cube six-o-six, which is located several hundred kilometers below ground level. A minor security officer explains to his supervisor that, for an undetermined period of time, the Nightmare Network has been engaged in undetected communication with all one hundred and fifty of the ALs in six-o-six, feeding them images and data on their computer screens. A hasty check of all monitors reveals that personnel in that particular sub-cube have been in a malignant dream state for at least seventy-two hours. Signals to the monitors have been altered so that visual and auditory data from sub-cube seven-o-seven were substituted for those that were supposed to emanate from six-o-six. The system was not programmed to indicate an alert after detecting the duplication of data, an oversight that would be corrected in the future. In the present, a heavily armed security force descends to six-o-six for the purpose of assessment and possible remedial action. What they discover there causes some of the new recruits to vomit into the face masks attached to their helmets. The entire cube is in an uproar, and there are mutilated bodies everywhere. The ALs who are still alive are running amok within a maze of computer terminals. Most of them are naked and covered in blood; some have adorned themselves with entrails that dangle around their necks or have wrapped flayed skin about their heads. Many of them are eating the flesh of the dead and the dying. An influx of blood and other bodily fluids has caused short-circuits in many of the computers, which are spraying sparks and occasionally electrocute one of the dervishing ALs. The computers that are still in working order have the same message upon their screens. In flashing, luminous letters all of them read: GREETINGS FROM THE NIGHTMARE NETWORK.

  CLASSIFIED AD III

  ONEIRICON REQUIRES EMPLOYMENT Units with autonomous or semi-autonomous programming to oversee a workforce of Nonconscious ALs. Some contact with Noncons or their semblances may be involved (visual desensitization or nihilization for all EUs paid for by OneiriCon). Remember: there are no bad dreams if there is only one dream; there can be no outlaws where there is only one law. Artificial entities from the Nightmare Network that attempt to impersonate Employment Units will be discovered and reprogrammed to exist in an eternal state of hallucinated agony. Imperfectly functioning EUs will be discovered and mercifully deleted. Possible elevation to part-or full-time status as cyberpersonage (with commensurate benefits and restrictions) for all qualified units.

  Masters and slaves

  Twilight in an ancient desert land. The slaves have all been gathered before an enormous, semi-circular platform. Behind the platform the spires and towers of the great palace are outlined against a fading sky. Before the platform is a sea of loin-clothed slaves kneeling in the desert sand, which has grown cool with the setting of the sun. The camera focuses on the central part of the platform, where a number of slaves have been tied to a row of freestanding pillars. From the crown of each pillar emanates a clean, steady flame that provides generous illumination for the entire platform and places special emphasis on the restrained bodies of the slaves. On either side of the platform are the seated figures of the royal family, priests and high-priests, high-ranking military officers, and other notable persons of the kingdom. After the sun has disappeared behind some distant sand dunes, leaving tens of thousands of slaves in total darkness, the proceedings finally commence. The head executioner and several of his assistants now ascend the enormous platform from a stairway to the right. The camera follows behind them as they approach the flaming pillars where the bound slaves await an elaborate regimen of torture that will continue throughout the night and end with their simultaneous deaths at sunrise. But when the head executioner reaches the center of the platform and turns to receive a sinister-looking instrument held out to him by one of his assistants, he suddenly freezes in position – a statue with outstretched arms and open hands. At this point, one of the slaves kneeling toward the front of the massive audience rises to his feet and jumps onto the platform. No one makes a move to stop him. The slave walks up to the flaming pillars and scans the horrified faces of his fellows who are anticipating a night of agony and, ultimately, death. After a while he simply shrugs and turns away from them. Stepping over to the head executioner, the slave looks the frozen figure up and down. With the fingers of his right hand he probes beneath the wide gold neckband which the head executioner is wearing and which is symbolic of his office. Some moments pass with no change in the gruesome functionary’s state. The slave now appears to be slightly exasperated. He removes his fingers from the gold neckband, and with the heel of his right hand gives the statue-like figure a sharp rap on the side of the head. The head executioner then goes into motion once again, seizing the proffered implement of pain and picking up where he left off. Before returning to his place, the slave glances around, as if to see if any of the others might require maintenance, excepting those tied to the flaming pillars, who are the only living persons among the assemblage of automatons occupying the platform. He then rejoins his fellow slaves, none of whom in any way acknowledge that he was ever absent from their ranks, although they too are all flesh-and-blood beings. Briefly deferred, the long night of torture and death can finally begin – followed by a feast upon the bodies of the dead.

  Within the system

  Having absorbed or destroyed every one of its competitors, OneiriCon begins to deteriorate. It is then that its Governing Executives conspire to create a number of puppet entities which would provide a degree of competition for the organization, thus reinfusing its lower-level executives and other conflict-driven personnel with a sense of purpose and staving off total degeneration. (The majority of OneiriCon’s employees – the billions of ALs and even greater numbers of EUs – have existed in a benign dream state for so long that they seem to require no external stimuli of any kind, although this remains a matter of debate among the organization’s scientists, who are highly adept at providing themselves with trumped-up mysteries and challenges.) For a time Project Puppetcorps succeeds admirably, and some of the artificial corporate entities do quite well in the marketplace, or what is left of it. In the end, however, they too are absorbed or destroyed by OneiriCon. Unable to reconcile themselves to the prospect of terminal stagnancy for an organization that has always subsisted on the principle of ceaseless growth, many of the Governing Executives voluntarily submit to devolutionary brain surgery and afterward join the ranks of Noncon ALs. Others have themselves transported to the distant past, where they become slaves of a society governed by automatons, thus affording their competitive spirits new objects of resistance and a low point of orientation from which they can once again work their way to the top. The remaining GEs occupy their time by playing extravagant and intensely cruel practical jokes on one another. In this manner most of them are killed off or so severely damaged that they can no longer function at any level of the organization. Then all of a sudden a solution seems to present itself to one of the highest-ranking GEs, who is an old-timer recovering from a major substitution procedure in his own private medical cell. At some stage of his convalescence the ancient exec is made to regain consciousness of himself and his surroundings, a situation that is not supposed to occur during the normal course of these procedures. When he becomes fully awake he is surprised, and somewhat
horrified, to find that grafted to his torso is the decapitated head of a corporeal Noncon. This state of affairs seems to him to exceed even the wildest of the pranks lately being perpetrated at OneiriCon. The head of the Noncon does not appear to be alive, so the old man is startled when its mouth pops open and begins to emit a long thin strip of paper much like those produced by ticker-tape machines that reported stock values during the twentieth century. With a sense of atavistic nostalgia, the GE picks up the tape and reads the words printed upon it. The words are these: ‘How about letting the Nightmare Network have some fun?’ Possessing the innovative vision and cunning genius of administrative life-forms through the ages, the old Governing Executive exclaims: ‘We are saved!’ Then he dies, his body succumbing to the trauma incurred by its assimilation of the Noncon’s foreign tissue. Fortunately a video record of the entire incident is preserved.

  The dreams of a double agent

  There is considerable resistance at OneiriCon to the proposal that the organization join forces with the Nightmare Network. None of the surviving GEs denies that the concept of a hostile merger with one’s own anti-entity, corporately speaking, is a risky venture. On the other hand, admitting such a parasite into their system for the strict purpose of revitalizing aggressive impulses – an inoculation, as it were – seems the only alternative to the progressive atrophy and ultimate shut-down with which the organization will otherwise be faced. It is therefore agreed (at the highest level) that all personnel at OneiriCon (of every level and status of reality and consciousness) will also be in the employ of the Nightmare Network. This initiative will in effect make everyone in both camps of these long-conflicting entities into a double agent. In a telepathic memo, one of the most powerful GEs warns his peers: ‘Obviously there can be no official sanction at OneiriCon of our so-called merger with the Nightmare Network, since the sole purpose of this arrangement is that of a motivational strategy for our employees, both real and virtual. This organization certainly has no intention of becoming mother hog for an overpopulated system of deadbeat operatives (as well as their semblances) who are drawing an easy paycheck for every gesture of either espionage or counter-espionage, every act of sabotage or anti-sabotage, whether they try to pass counterfeit data through the OneiriCon circuits or inform on their own semblances for attempting same.’ In other words, no single agent in either camp must ever be made aware that their personal betrayal is merely part of a large-scale, cooperative venture between two age-old enemies. Otherwise, the potential abuses and slacking off on both sides might undermine the whole arrangement. Thus, infiltration of OneiriCon by the Nightmare Network, and vice versa, has to be pursued simultaneously, taking place in a most surreptitious manner, one recruit at a time, until there is a perfect similitude between the two entities. This process is swiftly completed throughout the Nightmare Network, where individual and collective values tend toward subversion without regard for rational pretexts. All of them being natural-born losers and self-destructive organisms of the worst sort, they run crotch-first into the bargain, some even adopting multiple identities so that they can experience more than once the monstrous thrill of selling out their own futile aspirations. The camera pans a crowd of faces whose eyes are bleary with sedition and a lust for all-out pandemonium. To no one’s surprise, the response of the personnel at OneiriCon is identical to that of their counterparts at the Nightmare Network. Subsequently there ensues an epoch of complex, proliferating intrigues and conspiracies among the ranks of double agents, whose agendas become so densely intertwined that they are virtually indistinguishable. Even the Governing Executives of OneiriCon, many of whom are defectors from the Nightmare Network, throw themselves into the depths of the new order and lose all sense of identity in the ever-expanding nebula of blind ambition, which possesses a power and impetus that belongs entirely to itself. After a time no one can be sure whom they are serving whenever they commit any given act of either sabotage or support. There are no longer two distinct entities in well-defined opposition; there is only a great chaos of confused purposes churning in darkness. Each entity is disappearing into the maw of the other, thereby realizing their most cherished dreams and worst nightmares of oblivion. At last, it seems, they will have managed to close the whole thing down.

  CLASSIFIED DISTRESS SIGNAL

  VAST ORGANIZATION OF delirious images and impulses seeking Sustenance Input for its decaying systems. All data considered, including polluted discharges from the old Nightmare Network and after-images of degenerated EUs and ALs (Con, Noncon, or OneiriCon). Total atrophy and occlusion of all circuits imminent – next stop, the Nowhere Network. Your surplus information – shadows and semblances lying dormant in long-unaccessed files – could be used to replenish our hungry database. No image too hideous; no impulse too attenuated or corrupt. Our organization has a life of its own, but without the continuous input of cheap data we cannot compete in today’s apocalyptic marketplace. From a rotting mutation, great illusions may grow. Don’t let us go belly up while the black empty spaces of the galaxy reverberate with hellish laughter. A multi-dimensional, semi-organic discorporation is dreaming . . .

  The signal repeats, steadily deteriorating, and then fades into nothingness. Long shot of the universe. There is no one behind the camera.