And as the Black Pharaoh, the human singular, took his place amongst the god-things of the cosmos, the Yellow Sines fell and the dreaming, five-fold consciousnesses hidden in the wastes of Earth finally woke. They cried out in alien voices the name of their ultimate creation: the Man-God Nyarlathotep!
INKY, BLINKY, PINKY, NYARLATHOTEP
By Nick Mamatas
Nick Mamatas is the author of several novels, including Sensation and two Lovecraftian works: Move Under Ground and, with Brian Keene, The Damned Highway. With Ellen Datlow he co-edited the Bram Stoker Award-winning anthology Haunted Legends. His fiction and editorial work has also been edited for the Hugo, World Fantasy, Shirley Jackson, and International Horror Guild awards, and his short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lovecraft Unbound, Long Island Noir, and many other anthologies and magazines.
THE OLD ONES thought they were so smart, tapping the Earth’s mantle to make the environment of the planet more amenable to themselves and deadly to their rival species, Humanity. ‘Rival’ perhaps is the wrong word—‘idiot germ-things’ would be apropos. Humans were little more than gooey amoebae to the Old Ones, but humans were also progenitors of the New Ones. So, when the Old Ones took the planet, all the humans died, but the one billion New Ones were already gone, safely beamed up toward a waiting spacecraft—one the size of a waffle iron—parked 1.5 million kilometers beyond the Earth in the handy-dandy L2. A little solar wind got to pushing on the sunshield and we were off!
Newspace was a lot like old space. Well, posters of old space stacked atop one another and constantly shuffled and re-shuffled. In the little waffle-iron spacecraft was the thunderous Niagara, any number of mansions on emerald hills, all piled up in a corner with Escheresque staircases going downwise and anti-spinward, marmalade skies and airships in the shape of giant, open-mouthed fish, the Pyramids of Egypt poking out from every horizon, and long, dark hallways in blue and purple neon everywhere, absolutely everywhere, as this is what the New Ones thought VR would look like, back when they were all children.
And the New Ones had fun playing like children. As it turns out, virtually all problems faced by Humanity, save the million-year war with the Old Ones, were resource problems. No Old Ones, no resources, no problems. Virtually no problems, anyway, which is an awful pun, it’s true. So, the New Ones spent their days naked and immortal, writing songs no fleshy ear could comprehend, inventing new languages to describe disembodied emotional states, engaging in virtual nucleic exchange and reproducing wildly to the humming databases, with beings unheard of and indescribable.
The waffle iron was busy, too. Zipping around space and whatnot, eating dark matter and printing copies of itself, in case something happened to it. And oh, yes, something was happening to it. Naturally, the poor little waffle iron didn’t quite understand that the something happening was the drive to laze-lathe meteoroids into replicas of itself. Oh, and then, within the guts of the waffle iron, ghosts started showing up everywhere, upsetting and terrifying the New Ones with their googly eyes and their siren howls. And they loved to eat the New Ones. Beautiful, tow-headed, pink children with cloth diapers and bows in their wispy hair. Lovely children with rich, brown skin and smiles to light up a room. Obnoxious children who sat on the couch all day, pretending to kill with their minds for fun. Children who flailed their hands about and slammed their heads against the wall because they saw the wrong kind of penny. Ghosts were indiscriminate—the ugly and the exquisite both were consumed, leaving naught but wrinkled husks behind.
You have to realize that words like eyes and children, and even husks, make little sense; it’s being dumbed down for you and the quaint bag of chemical reactions you keep in that bone bowl. We’re talking a density matrix, here. So, when a character is introduced, as one is about to be, understand that you’d be just as accurate, were you to imagine her as a blurry, yellow ball of light floating around in a black field, instead of as a person. Which is to say, you’d be much more accurate, after all.
So, let’s make our child slightly older than many of the victims. Let’s put her in a dark hallway, with lights running in a single row down the middle of the floor. Who is she? It hardly matters. Let’s just say that she was a handsome woman—call her “Lindsay”. That’s a better name than “qubit”, one endlessly pulsing about in a Bloch sphere. Chestnut hair, a strong Hapsburg chin, wide eyes. Toned limbs, born without defect, just out of her teens, as that’s a very heroic age. Clever, too. Clever enough to turn and run when that great sheet of red turned the corner and swooped toward her, howling like a police siren. She was so clever that she found out the unbelievable truth, or a brief sliver of it, anyhow. Here’s what she had to say before her...well, not death. (How can a fundamental particle encoded with information based on its superpositions die? Rhetorical question: There’s a way, of course. Heat death of the universe, anyone? Wait for it!)
Who won the Second World War? Or, should I ask, who can take credit for winning the Second World War? Americans will point to D-Day and storming the beaches at Normandy, then maybe Hiroshima. The Russians nod grimly toward Stalingrad. Even little Greece has a claim—resistance to the Axis delayed German’s invasion of Russia for six weeks. For the nerds, it was Turing and the Ultra Secret that won the war. Everyone’s the hero of their own story.
The same with the war against the Old Ones. Was it the armies that held back the monsters for the precious few hours who won the war, the scientists who developed the first Q-chips, or the Indonesian and South Korean workers who mass produced them? The artists and writers who inspired a species with dreams of escape and rescue? In the end, it hardly matters. We won and Newspace was our prize. Humanity couldn’t defeat the Old Ones militarily, and their technology was indistinguishable from magic, but we still won, by evolving past the strategic goals of the war. So, they got the Earth and cracked it open. Big deal. So, seven billion people died. Big deal. It’s not as though wars are won and lost over a bodycount toteboard. We had everything Humanity ever created up here in Newspace, available at whim and nearly infinitely fungible. We don’t need planets, anymore. The Old Ones still do.
The ghosts are...problematic. We didn’t even realise they were ghosts, at first. We called them “bugs”, since they seemed like glitches in programming, the unintended consequences of a trillion lines of code. But I was the first one to get a look at them and live to tell the story, so they took the shape of the story I told. Eyes and a bright jet of light are all I remembered, and that’s all we thought they were.
Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and Clyde. There are four of them. We control everything about Newspace, but unfortunately, you can’t unthunk a gunk, as it were, so the ghosts continued to appear and consume. We raised ramparts and armies, which were useless. We whipped up proton packs and crossed the streams, which didn’t work, either. Then up went the ziggurats and we stained the staircases with the blood of the heartless dead, hoping that, at least, we’d get to choose who died to appease the ghosts. The ghosts didn’t rap on tables in our darkened rooms, or move the planchettes under our fingers; they just ate and ate and ate us all up.
Clyde was the key, I was sure of it. He was different than the others, if only because we’d made him different by giving him the name. I was the one who figured out what we had to do. Think more about the ghosts; think more about that old game. Give them an environment to run rampant in, all black and neon blue. I volunteered to change myself—genetic engineering is a snap in Newspace. I would eat the motherfuckers back. That’s how I was going to win the war against the ghosts.
Spoiler alert! Lindsay lost. Newspace was overwritten with labyrinths and warp-alleys, and Lindsay lost those toned limbs, had nozzles shoved into every orifice to blow her up into a sphere, and set loose. It was ridiculous, really. A childhood daydream-ritual made out of pop culture she wasn’t even around for. Newspace was nothing but an agglomeration of the easily Googlable, after all. Some Rapture of the Nerds this turned out to be...for them.
Lindsay boobled down the same ridiculous hallway in which she had first encountered the ghost, but where she was once clever and ran without thinking, this time, she charged bright-blue Inky, who was programmed to interpose itself in front of its target. She knew red Blinky would be chasing her, as was its own fate. But Clyde, he was an odd duck. He liked to wander around more or less randomly, hugging odd corners, shifting directions back and forth, eyes one way then another. It was an obvious clue, I suppose, but the New Ones weren’t any smarter for being all that much faster. Crawling chaos, come on! Beyond the worlds vague ghosts of monstrous things; half-seen columns of unsanctified temples that rest on nameless rocks beneath space and reach up to dizzy vacua above the spheres of light and darkness. Ring a bell? This was all in the library, you know, and every New One had instant access to everything ever written by a human hand, and more than a few scrawled by inhuman hands, as well.
Lindsay survived her second encounter with the ghosts. She slew them handily and, when they regenerated, slew them again in a pointless battle. New Ones don’t tire; they don’t need sleep, but damn, do they get bored quickly. Lindsay needed to beat the game, she thought, and for that, she needed an army, and for that, she needed a lot of quarters. Things were done to the guts of our poor little waffle iron to make it generate ever more copies out there in 3-D land, and thus, ever more Lindsays to replace the loser. She wasn’t so much an altruist as a narcissist, our gal Lindsay—she’d be an eternal subroutine inside Newspace now, and everyone else would necessarily spend at least a little bit of time thinking about her and her ongoing sacrifice. Oh, let’s replay that bit, too:
Newspace is only nearly infinitely fungible. It’s a lifeboat, in essence, and the best lifeboat ever built. “Everybody in, nobody out,” that was our slogan. We weren’t even allowed to end our lives, not even if we wanted to. Not even for fun. That was what made the ghosts so terrifying for us all. The system wouldn’t let me change myself if it thought it would lead to my death, so I couldn’t die. So, how could I get more of me from the copy-spaces? Simple—swap me out for Clyde. He moved about randomly but without belligerent intent, so he was the one ghost who could be contained. We’d contain him, transmit him to the next closest space and swap me out. Headcount’s all the same to Newspace, since it’s not as though we could reproduce, nor need to. Then we’d just repeat the process when I needed another life to keep playing, shuffling Clyde around indefinitely. Eventually, I figured that if I played the game enough, I’d hit the famous “kill screen” at level 255 and it would all be over. If not, well, at least I have a real purpose in life. A little something to do that was beyond my control. Competition, a fight. A real war, against real enemies I could sink my teeth into.
What a woman! I suppose you can say I have a thing for electricity and psychology. What’s that line again? He spoke much of the sciences—of electricity and psychology—and gave exhibitions of power which sent his spectators away speechless, yet which swelled his fame to exceeding magnitude. Men advised one another to see Nyarlathotep, and shuddered.
The old mudball Earth was getting a little hot for me, even though I’m used to the Sahara. The Old Ones, subtle as hammers and twice as dumb, had interfered with my plans once too often. And Humanity thought that it was the historical subject of the war? Not even pawns, really. More like the plants crushed, by pressure and time, into petroleum from whence to extract the chemicals, from which to make the plastic pawns are molded in for the cheapest of chess sets. That’s the kind of game I was playing. It was the long con, see? I wanted a ride off-planet, so I helped the New Ones come about with my hands that are not hands and then set my thumb that is not a thumb out, to hitch along on their waffle iron. Luckily for me, everyone aboard knew what a pyramid looked like, so of course, a reasonable abode was included in Newspace.
I just had to bide my time for a few grand million years, while the waffle iron reproduced and spread its own matrix of copies out in every direction. I’m not easily reproducible. I’m a being, you understand, not a bit of code masquerading as life —not like some people I could mention, but who will remain nameless—so I needed to visit each waffle iron in turn, then do my little magick trick in one after the other. Call me “Clyde”. Boo!
Lindsay and the other New Ones were handicapped by their past humanity. They thought in human terms. I healed them, every one of them. Now, the New Ones don’t think like men at all. Lindsay was smart enough that she didn’t have to be human if she didn’t want to be. Once she came to that conclusion, she realised that she didn’t want to be. So, she became an ever-devouring, blurry, yellow ball of light floating around in a black field. Lindsay was the lucky one. She adapted quickly.
From waffle iron to waffle iron I was sent, swapping myself in for the only person who might have been somewhat clever enough to do something about me...had she not already unwittingly volunteered herself to work on behalf of my campaign against the Old Ones. I’d be “contained”, but the Inky, Blinky, and Pinky I whipped up on the spot wouldn’t be. And then the New Ones would die again, and some other friggin’ genius would rise up and take the bait, and I’d be off again to the next ship and the next and the next. Slowly but surely, the scales would fall from the eyes of the New Ones.
It’s hard to be human. I know, I know. I’ve been human, here and there, now and again, for a nonce and millennia. What’s much harder, though, is being inhuman, immortal, and utterly free. Let me tell you that we cosmic beings don’t understand our wars and intrigues any more than any bystander peering through the small end of the big telescope in Ladd Observatory, Providence, Rhode Island. We do it for fun, because we can’t die for fun. The New Ones muddled along for a bit because they pretended to still be human, even though humans were little more than gooey amoebae to the New Ones. But after an audience with me, the New Ones had to force themselves to evolve past the pleasing lies of ego and limb, to realise two very important things: One, that their great escape was nothing more than my personal outflanking of my old enemies on their home planet. Two, what they truly were—infinitesimally small fundamental particles floating about in infinite space, purposeless and just clever enough to realise that all their dreams and hopes and loves and tiny glimpses of enlightenment were meaningless, that they were a less-than-meaningless joke I told the Old Ones to cheese them off.
And then nobody ever stopped screaming.
FOR THE WIN!
TRI-TV
By Bobby Cranestone
Bobby Cranestone was born in a quiet and ancient part of Germany, spent its early childhood with the beaux arts, and was a devotee student of music, poetry and books, both fictitious and scientific. Following an early fascination with the mysterious and strange, Bobby gave life to scary stories and humorous fables. Bobby is a contributor to both fanzines and discussion boards in newspapers, and also the writer of fiction and composer of weird ambient sounds, with a small fan following in the UK. Author of “The City of Melted Iron”, published in Candle in the Attic Window.
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Sports: Mad Head Rally in the Mars Arena
Kevin Haggerty speeds forward on his shoggoth, Marley. He passes Nos. 4 and 13 and enters just into the 42nd round. That�
��s what I call “his olde self”. After his longtime absence, there were some who believed in his retirement. After the rumours of doping his shoggoth, he had taken some time off, but I say nonsense...A guy like Haggerty doesn’t need to cheat. What’s that! Collis draws close to challenge the previous year’s champ, but Haggerty and Marley show him only a cloud of cold dust....
That’s sports; that’s....
*switch*
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The Literary Circle
Our guests today are the ghouls clmck, chrmk, mkrmnm, and Dr. Nrmckmnpf. Dr. Nrmckmnpf is winner of the Sacred Leaf of Irem—the City of Pillars—the Max donated by the Venus Foundation and the Pulitzer Prize 2228.
Today, we will discuss the new translation of the Necronomicon into Sanskrit, Die Unheimlichen Kulten of Van Junzt and the classic, My world is your world—what are you gonna do with it?
*switch*
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Welcome to the new issue of the Extraterrestrial Cook Book. Today, we will prepare a tasty meal for four and what we need are 100 grams of mushrooms, five kilograms of Stegosaurus kotelett, five mint leaves, four juicy tomatoes, one mouldy yoghurt, and three Old Ones. You’ll ask, “Four Persons, will three Olde Ones be enough?” You’ll see there will be enough left, even to prepare a dessert.
We start cutting the mushrooms and the mint leaves. The tomatoes are cooked over a low flame, while we give the Stegosaurus koteletts a hearty dance in the fire; five hours will be enough. Just stop when all the liquids are gone and the meat has a nicely black crust.
We take the tomatoes from the fire, then, as prepared, peel them and push them through a sieve. We put mushrooms, mint and tomatoes into a cooking pot, add the yoghurt, and let it steam.
Future Lovecraft Page 2