New Cthulhu 2: More Recent Weird

by Elizabeth Bear

  The whirling finished, and the image sucked away into the SpaceHole—and the Realm of Azathoth unfurled to fill the screen . . .

  That’s what Buster had called it . . . Azathoth. Claimed the thing living in Azathoth itself taught him the name. If it had, that must mean it was, in fact, the result of a program some brilliant game design engineer had worked up, the gamer having put that in somewhere, and not—as Frederic theorized—the result of a series of meta-program worms linking up in cyberspace, almost like the way the early forms of life had linked up to make more complex organisms, in that giant bowl of hot primordial soup the sea had been.

  Of course there was Buster’s explanation—or what he claimed to believe, that last time he’d been here in the skuzz den. Probably just playing Frederic for lulz:

  “Dude, I’m going to tell you this and you’re gonna think I’m snagging but man, this is for real: the fractal set I worked up outta the Rucker formula, it opened a door into a real place, man. Check with Jacques Vallee: information is a form of energy. In fact everything’s a form of information. And, deep down, information is the form of everything. So we can create real objective stuff with pure information long as it’s the right information . . . And I’m telling you, Azathoth is a for-reals place.”

  “You do know I stopped smoking dope, right?” Frederic had said. “You think you’re gonna get me all freaked and shit, but it’s flat not happening man . . . ”

  Frederic shook his head, remembering. What he was seeing couldn’t be a real place. This place couldn’t really exist . . . except in the mind of some lunatic. It was just a cellular automata model, tessellation automata, iterative arrays.

  Automata cellulare, his dad would say.

  They were fractal patterns generating templates of life forms in a three-dimensionally modeled artificial environment, purely digital, and he knew from looking at great special effects all his life how animation could seem crazy-real.

  And of course he was seeing it in a virtual screen, the floating AI’s work projected to his chip, his chip projecting to his mind, his mind projecting to his mind’s eye, so that he saw a three-dimensional place, and the things in it, hanging in space just up above . . .

  There was no clear-cut edge, unlike other virtual projections. It was squamous, wrigglingly ragged along the edges of the “tank” of image that floated over him. It just plain seemed alive. Amazing animation work, really, given the source of it—a couple of deep-web eccentrics, Buster figured, had worked it up, made it out of some bits and pieces of online gaming environments, movie clips copied and altered, someone’s personal animation program, all mixed together.

  That was the only acceptable explanation for what he was seeing: a place that was an entity; an entity that was a place. It was as if he were looking with X-ray eyes into something’s body, but he was also looking into a world, an entire landscape. Those numerous writhing protracted pyramids of ichorous green were organs of perception, maybe; but at the same time they were a kind of forest and somehow he knew that if he were to go there (horrible thought), the growths would tower menacingly over him; yet for sure that thicket was some kind of living cilia; that jade and purulent sky was a high enclosure of living tissue—at the same time he was certain that if he were to reach it, himself, to ascend to it, he would penetrate into it, and it would go on and on and on, unending. And surely that iridescent, spiky compound tetrahedron in the foreground, slowly whirling, fulminating with bloody fury, was an angry thought crystallizing in a trapped mind.

  He could almost . . . almost . . . hear it thinking. It thought in minatory buzzing sounds; its words became its form . . . its mind defined its world . . .

  Frederic shivered. C’est fou. He was having some kind of weird psychological reaction to the program. And this was only the first mode; overdrive mode was faster, captivatingly visual, something you had to use big will power to look away from . . .

  He stared into the mêlée of brutal abstract shapes, the slow-motion maelstrom of Azathoth, wondering about Buster . . .

  And Buster appeared there, at that exactly moment, within Azathoth. Buster’s chunky, acne-spackled bearded face materialized in the center of the translucent compound tetrahedron. Buster’s mouth moved; after a moment Frederic heard the words, materializing in his mind.

  “Frederic, bro, I’m stuck, digesting in Azathoth, no hope for me, doesn’t matter, ready to disintegrate, only way out, but your brother, nearby . . . ”

  Frederic’s stomach lurched. “Shut up about Jackie, Buster!” he blurted.

  Then he snorted at himself. Buster wasn’t really there. His mind had probably superimposed the image, made up some story about Buster, put it in the program. Ostensibly, the AI wasn’t supposed to take anything from your mind but a literal interpretation of your words, subvocalized, and occasional motional directions, and certain very defined projections . . . but for a while ecog chippers had suspected that there was an unpredictable involuntary telepathic level to the connectivity.

  Here it was—this fantôme, this digital ghost, was proof of espering chips. He’d have to tell DG and the torrent skaters about it.

  The iridescent crystal entrapping “Buster” mutated into a solid icosahedron—and went opaque.

  Buster vanished.

  Had Buster been—digested?

  Cut it out, you’re getting sucked into the fantasy. This program is some kinda lulz hoax and somewhere some programmer’s laughing his fucking ass off right now.

  Didn’t matter. It’d do for what he had in mind—it’d do for Filrod.

  He had planned to insert Jackie into the images; to toss in the candid footage he had of Filrod jerking off over tranny porn, which he’d gotten when he’d hacked Filrod’s webcam system, whirl it all together in this sick place, let it iterate, copy and paste it into every variant of YouTube there was. Make Filrod pay for what he’d done.

  The plan was to get Filrod stuck in this place, long enough to really make him feel it—because when you went into overdrive mode on this program, that’s what happened. It was hypnotic, was Azathoth, inexplicably hard to look away from, and you could mix in any image you projected so it looked like you were in Hell surrounded by . . . whatever the programmer inserted. If he wanted to put images of the new president’s inauguration into it, you’d see the Prez and his backers splashed all over the Azathoth landscape. And you could feel weirdly trapped there . . .

  Images of Filrod’s shame, Filrod’s guilt, could be wrapped around him in overdrive mode . . .

  But now—he might have a more direct mode of attack on Filrod . . .

  Filrod himself. He had an ecog chip, after all . . .

  He glanced at his watch—and right then, as if on cue, the doorbell rang upstairs.

  Filrod was a broad-shouldered college student with widely spaced front teeth, a dull, blunt face, and faux-hawked brown hair. Frederic had heard that Filrod was barely passing his classes; the jock was not exactly stupid but never far enough from his interchatter channels to focus on anything. He was a wide receiver on the football team and wore the school jersey with his number, 8, on it.

  Behind the eightball, you asshole, Frederic thought, as Filrod hunkered on the futon beside him.

  “You wanta hit some syntha?” Filrod said, when he came in, waving the e-pipe.

  “Nah, I gave it up, you go ahead,” Frederic said, distractedly, as he tinkered with the hardware by the futon, trying to get the best signal.

  Filrod sucked on the e-pipe, blinking at the floating AIs, and asked as he blew out a stream of chemical-laden water vapor. His eyes glazed as the drug hit him. “Don’t those things use up a lotta power, floating around?”

  “They’re made of super-light materials, man, and they tend to get less interference from the drives if I keep ’em floating. Do have to change batteries pretty often though.” Frederic finished tinkering and waved smoke out of his face. “Enough with that shit, I don’t want your secondhand smoke, dude.”

  “Whateve
r.” Filrod switched the pipe off, tucked it away in a pants pocket. “So can you get me the stuff I need to see or not?”

  “Yeah, if you transfer the money to my account.” The money he never actually expected to get. This wasn’t about money.

  “You show me the stuff, I transfer, right here.”

  Frederic shrugged. “ ’Kay, fair enough.” He prepared the virtual screen, gave Filrod the frequency, so he could see it too. Then he decided to prep Filrod himself a bit more. Set him up good. “Okay, you sent me the password, the ISP, all that—file names. You sure you sent me everything?”

  “Everything! My mom’s will’s in there, man. I need to see it, I gotta know. She’s pretty sick. But the mean ol’ cow lingers on and on.” He shook his head sadly. “I think I’m gonna get kicked outta school—won’t have my school money, nothin’ to live on. I need to know if money’s coming.”

  Frederic looked at him. Something in Filrod’s voice, a certain tightness, said cover story.

  Christ. Was Filrod thinking of killing his moms, easing her off into the ether, since she was sick anyway. Was he going to do it if he had enough inheritance coming to justify the risk of a murder?

  Wouldn’t be surprising . . .

  “Okay, Filrod, so . . . this isn’t going to look like a conventional penetration program. This’ll look—different. It’s three-dimensional, it’s cyberspace stuff, it’s very . . . hard info-animation.” He’d made up that last term to keep Filrod confused.

  It worked. “Hard info . . . whatever. I just need to see her will and testament stuff and I know this fucking attorney has it on e-file.”

  “Sure, we’ll get there. But see this technique is more . . . stealth. You know? Don’t want ’em to know we did this, right?”

  “Right, that’s for fucking-A sure. Don’t want nobody to know.”

  “Then—lock in. Stare right into that circle you see forming there. It’s called SpaceHole. Look right into it, keep your eyes on it, and we’ll see what we find . . . ”

  “That thing? It doesn’t look like any kind of . . . ”

  “Trust me, dude, this is what you need to see.”

  Filrod blinked, and stared into the SpaceHole, and Frederic sent a message to the AI, moving into Mode One of Azathoth.

  “What the fuck . . . !” Filrod blurted, staring into the changeworld, the shifting landscape that was a mind—that was an entity, Azathoth; that was a program, really—and what would be Filrod’s Hell, if Frederic had anything to say about it.

  Frederic sent the second signal—to overdrive Azathoth into full manifestation—and looked away from the floating three-dimensional screen as he did so . . .

  Filrod gasped.

  Frederic smiled grimly—then uploaded the first vid, of Filrod pleasuring himself as he gaped at some serious porn.

  Filrod made a choking sound.

  “Turn that shit off!” he managed, his voice hoarse, almost inaudible.

  “Why, man?” Frederic asked calmly, looking at him. “It was you who found that video of my brother posing all sexy for an under-twenty gay dating service. My brother wasn’t ready to come out to my folks yet—we got some old-fashioned grandparents he was worried about—and he was going to a private school because Dad was trying to get churchy. My père was raised Roman Catholic . . . and there’s been big pushback from the religious types about gay marriage last few years. The school is like brainwashing these kids against gays and . . . well, my brother Jacques, little Jackie, he was full-on gay. I knew it, but we didn’t really talk about it much, and he didn’t tell anybody else, he wanted to do it all private until he could face the bullshit as an adult living on his own. But then you hacked him, Filrod, because he was talking to your girlfriend and man did you misread that shit, until you found out he wasn’t hitting on your girl, you saw the dating service video he’d made for Gay Youth Meet-Up. And you told everyone, showed the jocks at his school and they beat him up and he lost feeling in some nerves in his arm, and his left hand wasn’t working, and then a priest saw the dating video, when you guys put it up online, and brought Jackie into his office and gave him the hellfire talk and made him thoroughly miserable . . . ”

  “I didn’t know that was going to—”

  Frederic shook his head, and pressed on. “And then you posted some lies about him stalking some teenager, that Danny Zoski, which was totally not true, and so people said Jackie was a pedophile—he was all about real adult men, not kids—and then people stopped talking to him and he took some drugs over it they left him depressed and then they were going to kick him outta the school and . . . Lemme see, I leave anything out? Oh yeah. He killed himself. He fucking hung himself.”

  “I . . . ” Filrod made an uck sound.

  Frederic could see Filrod was trying to look away from the hypnotic drain of Azathoth . . . and Frederic was careful not to look into it himself. “Yes, ‘Filrod’?”

  “I . . . I . . . ”

  “Spit it out, dude!”

  “ . . . didn’t know he was your brother.”

  “Jackie didn’t like the surname DuSang, ’cause it means ‘of blood’ and Jackie had hemophilia, and my folks said he could go by grandma’s name, once he turned eighteen. So he changed it. Then you met him. Then he killed himself. Cause and effect: sensitive person runs afoul of an emotional cretin, and dies.”

  “ . . . sorry.”

  “Oh, because he was my brother? But it’s okay to hound a gay kid into suicide? Long as they’re not related to someone you know?”

  “Um . . . no.”

  “Yeah, well, fuck you—and your sorry. You boasted about what you did after he killed himself, I got the emails . . . see ’em there? They’re going up around you too. Read ’em, asshole. You’re in that world, in your mind now, and it’s not easy to get out. All that stuff is there. Now I’m going to upload some . . . ”

  Then Frederic heard Jackie’s voice. And for a moment he was struck dumb.

  “Sorry to see you hurting dumb animals, Frederic.” Jackie said, gently chiding.

  “What?”

  The voice had come from the floating screen. And Frederic had to look.

  He saw his brother’s face, in a wobbling globe of translucent emerald and gold, a fantôme floating over the Azathothian landscape.

  His brother was looking right at him.

  And Jackie said, “The idiot Filrod here is just a dumb animal. It’s like poisoning a dog that bit you ’cause it went crazy being locked to a short chain all day. Not really the dog’s fault it bit you. But I do hate Filrod, that’s true. Even now. And it’s hard to hate anyone where I am now.”

  “Where you are . . . ?”

  “I’m in a kind of limbo sorta place kinda oblique to Azathoth. Where Azathoth is, that’s where a lotta people get stuck. Poke their noses in the wrong place. Me, I’m in another world, and it’s not bad. It’s pretty awfin’ awesome. I’ll be here a thousand years or so, the guardians tell me, and I don’t mind. But see, it’s like it’s a through-the-looking-glass inside-out upside-down mirror place in relation to Azathoth; they’re opposites, you know? Symmetrical opposites. It ain’t Heaven, where I am, and Azathoth ain’t Hell—but close enough.”

  Frederic gawked at the apparition of his dead brother. It sounded exactly like him; sure looked like him, even down to that typical humorously rueful expression.

  Frederic wondered if he were being pwned somehow. Was this some hoax? Had Filrod outsmarted him?

  But he could see Filrod himself, a replicant of his mind inhabiting Azathoth—trapped in a crystalline world of self-loathing. The miniature Filrod in the floating screen image was a kind of Filrod avatar, matching the physical one who gasped and moaned and whimpered beside Frederic.

  Frederic shook his head slowly. “Jackie . . . is it really . . . ?”

  “Yes. It is. I’m not in Azathoth—but I heard you messing around in it, I heard your mind . . . and I’m able to talk to you through it, because I’m in its opposite, and they’re co
nnected, in a weird way. Like, you know, those old Yin Yang symbols, the white and black going around and around in one circle together. You know?”

  “I guess . . . ”

  “So I’m able to talk to you from my world. See, dude, Azathoth is real. It’s not a program. Azathoth is a real world. And a real creature—all at once. But you’ve got a kinda digital device for looking into it. You’re not seeing into a program—you’re seeing it through a program.”

  Frederic felt sick, hearing that. Somehow, it all came together in his mind with a click. This is real. “I’m going to get sucked into it!”

  “I don’t know if you are or not. I hope not, bro. Once you’re there, I probably can’t help you. Your body’ll die and . . . well, let’s see if I can head it off.”

  “Jackie . . . listen . . . I’m sorry I didn’t help you . . . I should’ve helped you when you were so depressed. I was caught up in my own stuff . . . ”

  “I know. It’s okay. I just wanted to say . . . don’t worry about me. I’m in pretty good shape now. Like I said: I’m stuck in this place for a while, but it’s not a bad place. It’s just somewhere you go if you kill yourself. Killing yourself, you get stuck in the next world, and you have to work that off. So don’t ever do that, Frederic. But one day I’ll move on. And that’s something I got an ache to do, to move on . . . ” Jackie smiled. “To move on in the right way.”

  Frederic couldn’t smile back. He felt a mounting terror, seeing the hideous, encroaching reality of Azathoth widening, stretched out from the floating screen, like a beast widening its jaws to swallow him . . .

  Then Jackie’s image seemed to expand—and seemed to rush at him, getting between him and Azathoth, Jackie’s face coming like the grill of an onrushing car bearing down on him, Jackie grinning mischievously—

  And then Frederic felt the shove. He heard Jackie shout, “Go, bro!”