by Byron Craft
Once every human in the desecrated cathedral had been consumed, the shoggoths found their way outside for more.
Residence No. 55
Pyongyang, North Korea
39°N 126°E, 14360 km from South Pole (14340 km from R’lyeh)
Rising + 6 hours
Ri Sol-ju, the wife of Kim Jong Un, always thought she would come to love her husband. He wasn’t unattractive as far as inhuman dictators went, but she wished she could see her own family again. Un always told her that they were absent because they were being protected and it was for their own safety and so forth. Sol-ju knew in her heart of hearts that it was because they alone knew that “Ri Sol-ju” was actually nationally beloved pop singer Hyon Song-Wol, whom the nation had been told was dead shortly after Un saw her at a Disney North Korean concert and fell in love with her in a way he had previously loved only cheese. She knew “Dear Husband” had her entire family killed. And also made the Disney North Korea bus crash look like an accident. Hyon Song-Wol was dead, as far as the world was concerned, and “Ri Sol-ju” had come to agree.
But she had not, in fact, come to love her husband. She never allowed herself to think bad things about him. The whole Kim patriarchal line was psychic, which made sense, as they were actual deities living on Earth, so she could not take that chance. But she didn’t think much that was good about him, either, as she watched him, from her place next to him on the plush couch, shove a slab of White Stilton Gold into his rarely empty mouth. The cheese was fairly unimpressive to her as far as flavor was concerned, but Un loved that he could consume flakes of 24K gold and the moisture of gold liqueur. It cost almost 200,000 North Korean Won (the currency of N. Korea). She knew how much everything cost because Dear Leader made sure to tell everyone in any room how much of the State’s money he had spent on himself. He was the State, and he treated the State supremely well.
Un offered her a piece that hadn’t quite made it into his gob, but she declined with great delicacy, the way she did every single thing since he had claimed her.
Since it was just them, Sol-ju asked her husband, “Honored One, is there any worry about the events of yesterday and the day before?”
He finished a gulp of fine rum; Legacy by Angostura, at 22.5 million w per bottle (25,000 USD), more than twenty times what her father once earned per year, and looked at her. He had never hit her or even shouted at her, but she had more than once found herself locked inside one of the Residence’s rooms for weeks on end after no more than a question he didn’t feel like answering.
“I—I do not mean worry by you, of course, Honored One. Some of the staff tore out their own eyes. Perhaps they were not feeling completely well.”
Un stared at her for a moment, absolutely no expression on his round face. Then he laughed, which made her almost cry from released tension as she shared it. He laughed with his little painted-on–looking mouth, his whole rotundity shaking. Then he swept one fat finger into a dish of White Pearl Albino Caviar—at a mere 8 million w per kilogram—and slurped it into his mouth, still smiling.
What did that mean? Her husband never worried about telling her anything about anything if he didn’t feel like it, but this seemed especially opaque. She and the children had suffered uncomfortable headaches, and later there was a moment where she and the children ran south, toward nothing in particular on the 4.5 million-acre Kim plantation. They had completely exhausted themselves before the compulsion ended and they were forced to trudge back the mile they had covered in that fevered moment. But Kim Jong Un? At dinner, she saw he had a slight bruise on his fleshy forehead, about which he nor his literal army of sycophants had anything to say.
She let it be, a choice that had served her well throughout her marriage to the living God. Instead, she placed a gentle hand upon the arm of his party jacket and ...
He screamed, screamed, his mouth a perfect circle of shock and pain. He jumped to his feet, shrieking like something from the Southern Choson horror films he loved.
She, too, got to her feet as aides busted into the room. “Honored One! What is happening?” she shouted but stopped cold, as did everyone else rushing to Dear Leader, as he turned and she saw that the other half of his face was being fried away by green slime. Where had it come from, was this an assassination attempt—
She saw it this time, looking up at the stomach-turning squish coming from the central peak of the room’s cathedral ceiling: a gelatinous something oozed from the corner where the four walls met above them. More green slime was excreted—and plopped onto the other half of Un’s face.
His screams were smothered by the acid things extending into his open mouth. No one in the room, not Kim Jong Un’s generals, his aides, or even his wife, could do anything except watch their living god die a death made up of the most extreme pain, terror, and confusion.
More shoggoths oozed through the many corners of the room. The rest of their deaths weren’t much better.
Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) project, USA
19.6°N 155.5°E, 12191 km from South Pole (10780 km from R’lyeh)
Rising + 6 hours
Astronaut Darius Hamilton had not seen an egg for almost eighteen months. Or a dog, or a car, or a football game. That is because he had been living on Mars, within a habitat housed inside a geodesic dome; or as close to it as anyone could be on Earth, anyway. He was three-fourths of his way through a two-year simulation mission in a dome on the side of Mount Mauna on the island of Hawaii, the last there was to be before the real thing launched from low-Earth orbit in three years or so.
What he had seen, and seen plenty of, was his five fellow colonists inside HI-SEAS. Their group had collectively done everything the real first explorers of Mars would do once landed on the planet: farmed, done research, kept all systems working optimally, and all the while fought, laughed, told stories, revealed secrets, and, as NASA’s Human Research Program explicitly forbid but also knew would happen regardless, fornicated in ways both predictable and completely not.
The dome in which they lived was geodesic some thirty-six feet in diameter, so the inverted bowl was eighteen feet away from them at the common area in the center of the structure. Its curve was very nearly spherical, but what looked very smooth from a few hundred feet away resolved into dozens of triangular facets. Hundreds upon hundreds of interior angles formed wherever the side of one triangle met another.
Darius hoped, as did every one of his cohorts during the current HI-SEAS mission and all who had ever lived there, that his mastery of this unique work experience would put him at the top of every list of potential Mars mission crew members. Six months from now, he and his fellow astronauts would walk out of HI-SEAS; within six months after that, the Mars crew would be publicly announced.
He could make it another six months with these people, his new family. He hoped many of them would be picked for the first eight-person crew. Even now, as they sat down to breakfast on Day 544, they bickered and teased like a bunch of siblings. (Adopted siblings, he added to himself quickly. More like orphans than brothers and sisters, really. He wondered how living at 37% of Earth gravity would affect this crew’s libidos.) It was good fellowship if he could sound like the King of England for a second.
“Good morning, Dar,” said Thalía Mareno, the other American on this team, as he made his way to the dining area. She was sitting next to the freckled Aussie Sheila Bird, who said “g’day” to him every single morning because he knew she was making fun of every American who thought that’s the only thing Australians said except for “crikey” and something about “shrimp” and “barbies.” (And so, every American ever.)
“I hope my stereo didn’t keep you up last night, mate,” the Scotsman Will Anderson said as he slipped a couple of lemon pancakes onto his plate and sat on the other side of Thalía. “Used my download time to get the new Admiral Fallow album.”
“Your stereo?” Dalka Kovács, the Slovakian mineralist said with a laugh and continued, “Who
says that? You got a high-fidelity component system there, ty si?”
“Aye, got it at Radio Shack.”
They laughed, but Pak Eun Yong only smiled; he had not laughed in a long time. Darius, Thalía, Will, Dalka, and Sheila had learned more and more of his story over the previous year and a half, and his crewmates now knew more about the inner workings of North Korean prison camps than anyone else in the world. If the Mars mission didn’t pan out, any of the other five could give a lecture on the horrors that the defecting test pilot had experienced after somehow, he still had no idea what it could have been, running afoul of Kim Jong Un’s paranoiac state apparatus.
His smile, however, was sunny and infectious. And well it should have been: he was on the very short list of captains for the actual Mars mission. It would be a fine middle finger extended toward Pyongyang; President Hampton was middle of the road on most issues, but when it came to human rights-abusing rogue states, she gave no quarter. Putting Yong in the command seat would be satisfying from a world unity standpoint as well as a “we got your guy, losers” gesture.
At the very least, he’d be co-commander to Moreno. A Latina-American woman might be too good of a chance for Hampton to show the world that the USA was compassionate.
“So, guys,” Thalía said with obvious reluctance, “we gotta talk about the elephant in the room. Or the monster, I guess.”
They were all joking around, trying to maintain some semblance of normality and good humor, vital in this long-term living arrangement cut off from the rest of humanity, but what they could glean of events the past two days or so made every laugh hollow, made every thought of that glorious expedition seem absurd.
As he sat down with his plate, Darius felt the smile slide from his face. He could see everyone else on the crew reveal in their faces the fact that they, too, had hoped it all had been a nightmare, even a shared hallucination.
Two days earlier came the sudden, shocking head pain that knocked every one of them unconscious to the floor, the last thing they saw on the way down was a gusher of vomit jetting from their mouths. They woke soon after, the pain gone other than aches from crashing against the floor, but then the next twenty-four hours, an entire day, passed without a single communication from Mission Support. They later concluded that the enviro-insulation and heavy radiation shielding of the Mars simulator habitat had prevented their brains from turning to mush.
MS was almost always sending them something, mostly routine messages but also TV shows or movies in the mission’s dedicated Dropbox, but there had been nothing. Not one byte of anything from Mission Support, from NASA, from anyone.
To simulate the communications lag from Mars (which was 55 million kilometers away at its closest), all signals going out from or into HI-SEAS were electronically, and inalterably, delayed by twenty minutes. If Mission Support hadn’t heard from the crew in any two hours during waking time, the protocol was that MS would contact the astronauts to make sure everything was copacetic. It had happened a couple of times, on especially busy days of farming or repairs, and MS had sent them something along the lines of “Get back to work LOL.”
But this time, nothing. And not for two hours. Almost another entire day had passed: 43 hours now without any contact with Mission Support. For some reason, they were not following the protocol for them to check on the HI-SEAS crew.
There was no protocol for the HI-SEAS crew to check on the rest of the world, however; it must have seemed trivial. The rest of the world wasn’t going to disappear.
They ran every diagnostic possible on their computers and communication equipment, and all was in tip-top shape. They checked through every device and system they had: standard radio, shortwave, TCP/IP, the dedicated high-bandwidth channel that supported the immersive VR keeping them “in the world” with similarly equipped friends and family, anything and everything they could think of and their training dictated.
It was only during this unprecedented crisis that each of them really and truly believed no one had snuck in a cell phone (not that there necessarily would have been a signal 2.5 kilometers high up the volcano) or pocket radio. Besides, it was highly unlikely that every one of their radios and Internet connections would have gone wonky at the same time.
Their first tier of Mission Support emergency assistance, volunteers spread out over the United States, Europe, and Australia, did not contact them and no one responded to the repeated and increasingly desperate emails.
That wasn’t just unusual; it was just about impossible.
They briefly considered the idea that a solar flare had smacked into Earth and produced an EMP knocking out all electrical equipment, which somehow also caused the sudden short-lived but serious health event that occurred at the moment contact was lost with the outside world. But the power was still on, and Thalía and Sheila both went out with handheld radios onto the lifeless plain surrounding the mission structures. The area was a former cinder rock quarry on the side of a spatter cone (a miniature volcanic cone on a crater floor), utterly isolated and perfect for their simulation mission. They could communicate over the radios in the field, both with the base and with each other. But then a worldwide blackout or massive radio malfunction, then, was not the problem. Neither was the messaging system, as the crew was able to send text messages to one another.
Before the second day was out, an idea, obvious in retrospect, came to Yong: “Has anyone tried to get on the Web? Why do we not check there for the news? CNN or some organization such as that?”
As one, they all scrambled to the Internet station they used for relaxation. It was restricted and incorporated a forty-minute time delay, but maybe there was some site they could find that would say what, if anything, was going on in the outside world. Yong took the chair, and the others stood around him, eyes fixed on the screen as he spoke to the system “Open C-N-N dot com.”
A familiar page opened:
ERROR: SITE RESTRICTED
“I figured that,” Darius said, then added, “I thought we’d start a fantasy football league, get stats from NFL.com.”
“That isn’t football,” Will Anderson said. “But yeah.”
“Open N-A-S-A dot gov.”
They knew the NASA site wasn’t blocked, but there was nothing on it that was even slightly relevant. Maybe news about Mars was always interesting but now was not the time. There wasn’t anything they could see that referred to solar flares or any satellite issues, which routed all their communications.
“Damn it,” Thalía grumbled.
“Wait—nobody’s updated anything on the NASA main page, but what about the forum? Our forum on there?” Darius said with excitement, and he could see the lights go on inside each of his fellows’ brains. They would frequently spend downtime during the mission, and there was a lot, which gave the NASA Behavioral Health and Performance folks plenty to dissect in this two-million dollar experiment, fielding questions from space enthusiasts and the occasional conspiracy theorist who claimed that they weren’t really on Mars.
But the forums were updated whenever someone posted, not just when NASA webmasters put up new official content. “Maybe someone on the forum ...”
“Open NASA dot com Mars forum.”
After a moment reading the first of thousands of posts Will muttered, almost to himself, “Holy shite.” He was the only one not too stunned to speak.
is chtulu from space or what?
<< on: 03/23/20XX 03:01 pm edt>>
All this s**t is going down, so are we under attack from aliens? Cthulu is from space, right?
“All this crap?’ ” Sheila said to the group (it made her shake her head that NASA blanked out obscenities) but she answered her question as she read the first response:
re: is chtulu from space or what?
<< Reply #1 on: 03/23/20XX 09:03 pm edt>>
What does it matter if it’s really Cthulhu? Who cares if he’s from space or the ocean? I s**t myself for a solid minute when those psi-waves hit yesterday. And my ma
te in Pape’ete vidphoned me yesterday, and while I’m on the d**n line, HIS FRIGGING BRAIN LIQUIFIES AND POURS OUT HIS NOSE!!!! It was the last thing I saw for a while since I blacked out. I’m in FRANCE, for God’s sake!!!! A BILLION PEOPLE ARE DEAD!!!
“What in the hell?” Darius said. “Cthulhu? Like in the RPG? What does that have to do with anything?”
“A billion people are dead? People are passing out from pain, just like us, all at the same time?” Thalía said to all of them but mostly to herself, pacing around the computer area. “Alien attack? Cthulhu?”
“I assume that means that no one has been told what’s going on,” Dalka Kovács said in a precise and logical tone. “One billion people? In two days? People getting sick? What does that sound like to you guys?”
Darius’s eyes met Thalía’s, then Will’s, then Sheila’s, then Yong’s. He didn’t believe in psychic phenomena and had never heard of a “psi-wave,” but it was as if he could read every other mind in the room; “Nuclear war.”
Yong had scrolled down the many, many replies and sub-threads, and his mouth fell open. He looked back at Darius, who now returned his gaze to the computer screen and saw what the others saw once they, too, realized something new had happened and crowded into view of the monitor.
re: is chtulu from space or what?
<< Reply #112 on: 03/24/20XX 03:19 am >>
The news is saying New York and Wash are GONE. Is this true? I don’t trust anyone now. The people on here are at least impartial even though it’s a government site they’re letting it stay online. For now. PLEASE REPLY
re: is chtulu from space or what?
<< Reply #113 on: 03/24/20XX 03:22 am >>
It is true. I live in Buffalo, and you could see the glow from here. Maybe five thousand other people in Buffalo now. Cthulhu and nuclear war ----- this is it, we’re done. That’s all, folks!!