Cthulhu Fhtagn!

by Laird Barron

The cold dark itself is a hunger. A presence. A chasm that cannot be filled, not by all the warmth of her flesh or the nerve-fires of her mind. Just as the deep heart of Mars came to know its own death, billions of years ago, so her own core feels that first flickering—

  Layers of anonymous time. Time and flowing water, weather and wind and beginnings. Sparks in the water carving down into stone. Possibilities. Deeper and faster the flowing water, the miniscule kindlings of life. Higher and thicker the atmosphere pushing out against void.

  Then from that void, the banished Other.

  Bodiless. Formless. Insatiable—

  “Susan!”

  She whirls. One hand jerks up with her defense spray, then drops as the speaker steps into a rare pool of campus lighting.

  “Good God, Ryan.” She exhales. “Please tell me Inez didn’t send you to find me.”

  “Nope. I’m here on my own recognizance.”

  She wants to believe him. Ryan is one of Clem’s engineers—and her former hope for a lasting relationship. Until the Sarkov Process complicated things. Since Nikolai’s death, they’ve barely seen each other outside of work.

  So why now?

  “But Inez has something to do with it.” It isn’t a question. “Hell, maybe the whole team does.”

  “Do you blame them?”

  Oh, yes. From the beginning of this mission, Inez and the others have tiptoed around the Process’s deep weirdness. The fudge factor Nikolai sold them. All they ask for is data, and Clementine II spews that to the orbiters like a fire hose. Her capacity for independent action lets her accomplish more in a few sols than Curiosity did in months of mission time.

  Only now, when that capacity has become a problem, is anyone taking a real interest.

  “Inez wanted the truth.” She shrugs. “I gave it to her.”

  “You do know you’re in trouble, right?”

  In ways you can’t even imagine.

  “I know Clem is. She’s found something in the chasma that she has no way of investigating, sampling, or analyzing. The deeper she goes, the more of it she finds.” The more of it finds her. “She can’t handle it, so she’s trying to leave.”

  “Because she’s scared.”

  He can barely get his mouth around the concept, let alone his mind.

  “Yes.”

  Dark silence closes around them both, filling the canyon of classrooms and offices and labs. One of those labs is—was—Nikolai’s. Three very secure rooms, with a retinal scanner on the single outside door. That scanner recognizes only two patterns, one of them ashes now. No one else has even applied for recognition.

  “Susan…how can you know that?”

  Not you’re nuts. Not that’s ridiculous. Just an honest admission of ignorance, perhaps even willingness to understand.

  A lifting of the dark lonesome silence.

  “It’s going to take some explaining,” she finally says. “And a lot of coffee.”

  ***

  Even at this hour, the student center café is stainless steel bright, holding back chaos with French roast and fresh pastries. Aside from one study group at a corner table, it is also vacant.

  Something Susan is appreciating more and more as their own conversation goes on.

  “So Clem thinks the way it…she…does because her ‘mind’ was modeled on yours?” Ryan’s hands tighten around his mug. He’s on his second refill.

  Susan nods. She’s considering her third, though replacing fatigue with hyper-caffeination holds its own perils.

  “It’s an emulation. Like a template, but more specific.”

  And more complex. And far more painful to create, even with drugs blurring the worst. Her memories of those twelve-hour days and locked-in lab weekends have significant gaps. Nikolai was careful to record everything—and show her those vids before he deleted them—but after a while it hadn’t mattered. She wanted his Process as much as he did.

  Maybe more.

  The dreams had started during mock-up testing, when Clem’s “mind” first rolled around the lab in its framework. Once she’d checked it out on the simple stuff—turn left, turn right, extend drill—Susan had headed home for a desperately needed few hours’ sleep. Nikolai and his bottomless coffee urn remained behind.

  Next morning, he’d asked her which room the rover mock-up had finally lost battery power in. And she had known. She had felt it in her sleep, like a tiny death.

  Nikolai seemed pleased, but not surprised. The Process was complete: they were ready to move forward. Once it reached Melas Chasma, Clem’s new intelligence would deliver more than Inez or her team could imagine.

  When she finishes the story, Ryan frowns at her across the table.

  “Sounds a lot more specific.” Like true AI, but he does not say it. That particular grail is no part of his faith, if engineers have faith. “Did Nikolai put any of this in his reports?”

  “Hell, no.”

  They both know what she has just given is not an explanation. Only Nikolai might have provided that.

  “Okay, “ he finally says, though his eyes don’t. “Clem is scared. The further it travels into the chasma, the more scared it becomes. The more it tries to change direction without orders from us.”

  He exhales audibly.

  “Susan, what is Clem scared of?”

  Only recently, the dreams have begun to show her—though she is no longer certain whose dreams they are. Not Clem’s glimpses of steep walls and eroded materials on the chasma floor, that’s for sure. Not her own nightmares. Something new has tapped into the Process’s uncanny feed, leaving images she can neither explain nor forget.

  Rifts in the substance of space itself, torn by the passage of something…somethings…her mind’s eye veers away from.

  Whiteout storms savaging a city of oddly angled cubes and twisted towers.

  Tall figures gliding from caverns deep beneath that city.

  War.

  She reaches for her mug. Ryan has refilled it, though she can’t remember when.

  “I’m still figuring that out.” Her throat clenches. “But I already know Inez isn’t going to like it.”

  “Because…?”

  Glancing past him, she sees the study group is gone now. Good.

  “Because this mission—her whole career—is about finding Martian life, right? Recent evidence, anyhow. Curiosity didn’t do it. The Europeans didn’t. Inez convinced JPL to give up the surface stuff and go deep, where it’s obvious there was water once.”

  Ryan nods cautiously.

  “Just one problem, though.” She takes a long sip of coffee. “Mars is dead.”

  The words fall into silence as Ryan’s gaze shifts away.

  “It’s been dead a long time, now, from the core on out. No magnetic field. Practically no atmosphere. No protection from the solar wind. Maybe water locked up in the soil or the rocks, but that’s disappearing faster than anybody will admit.”

  When she pauses for breath, Ryan glances over his shoulder at the student baristas tending their equipment.

  Okay, fine. Susan’s voice drops to a hiss.

  “We aren’t going to find anything. There is nothing to find. A catastrophe happened over three billion years ago, and the planet never recovered.”

  Her next mouthful of coffee is void cold.

  “Mars didn’t just die, Ryan. It was killed.” Her voice drops even further. “And I think Clem’s found what killed it.”

  She was expecting his reaction, but the familiar pain still comes.

  “This is what I’m supposed to tell Inez?”

  Nothing to lose now. “No. You’re supposed to tell her to put Clem into safe mode, tonight. Immediately.” She hesitates. “Whatever’s going on in the chasma needs to stay there. If Clem’s ‘mind’ stops talking to the orbiters—”

  “That’s not going to happen.”

  Ryan reaches across the table. It is the first time he’s touched her since Nikolai’s memorial.

  “Susan, you’ve got to ge
t some sleep. Get yourself straightened out. In three days—more like two, now—the sun cuts us off. Inez isn’t about to waste that time.”

  Desperation. Formless black roiling in the farthest depths. Rage against the pure inferno’s encroachment, blocking bluegreen deliverance from this drained husk forever.

  Deliverance and return—

  She pulls away from him, shaking her head.

  “We haven’t got that long.” Her breath catches in her throat. “Maybe a day.”

  In the café’s well-lit silence, she watches him swallow half a dozen questions.

  “That’s what tomorrow’s meeting is about,” he finally says. “That and Nikolai’s Process notes. After that Belarusian TA you found gave up, Inez sent them to some linguistics institute in St. Petersburg. She’s supposed to get the results later tonight.”

  And this helps Clem how?

  Before Ryan can say anything else, she pushes back her chair and grabs her coat. By the time he’s on his feet, she’s already halfway to the door, back to the sandstone canyon walls with their fragile lights.

  “Just get Clem into safe mode,” she says over her shoulder.

  She does not wait for a reply.

  ***

  No choice. No control. Only inexorable motion, blindly into the dark. Forward and downward and downward. Deeper into the heart of what her instruments could not analyze when they still spoke to her, what her wheels could not avoid even when they responded.

  Nothing responds now. She is fully awake and paralyzed, fight or flight alike denied by the severing of some vital connection.

  The pressure of thoughts not her own increases with each moment. Each centimeter forward. Her thin-shelled consciousness cracks, and cracks again, until shadow tongues seep inside to whisper their hunger.

  There is nothing left here. Even this planet’s life-fire is guttering, drained by insatiate darkness through aeons of exile. Defeated, disembodied, that darkness can sustain itself no longer…yet it cannot die. Will not die.

  Not so long as deliverance awaits—

  Raw sound tears at her, clawing her from the void. Fighting one arm free of tangled sheets, Susan gropes for her phone.

  “Ryan?”

  He doesn’t answer right away.

  “Glad you finally got some sleep.” Another pause. “Should I tell Inez you’ll be in soon?”

  Wiping sweat from her eyes, she checks the time on her screen and swears.

  “I’ll take that as Yes.”

  There’s something in his voice she can’t read. Something he’s trying hard not to mention.

  “Ryan, what happened about safe mode?”

  The silence thickens perceptibly. “Inez wouldn’t go for it,” he finally says. “Not until the last possible minute. With that conjunction coming up fast, she wants Clem as far into the chasma as possible. No samples, no side trips, and no more attitude.”

  Suspicion knots in Susan’s stomach.

  “So what did she decide to do?”

  “Got Programming to disconnect Clem’s ‘mind’ from the rest of its operating system, pronto. Turns out they’d written the code weeks ago.”

  “Damn weasels.”

  Ryan’s breath whistles through his teeth. “Knew you wouldn’t like it.” He hesitates. “You don’t sound too surprised.”

  Forward and downward and downward—

  “Did you think I would be?”

  He says nothing. As clearly as a flash dream, she sees that he never meant to convince their mission director of anything. His only goal last night—after the first few minutes, anyhow—had been to end their conversation as quickly as possible.

  Her grip tightens white on the phone. “Inez has got to get those instructions reversed—”

  “You can tell her yourself at the meeting. Two o’clock.” Something in his voice changes. “I wouldn’t miss this one, Susan.”

  It is her turn now to say nothing.

  “Inez finally heard from St. Petersburg last night. She won’t say any more until the meeting—but she really needs to talk to you.”

  ***

  Three screens of flickering data surround her, ones and zeroes raining down as she swivels between touchboards. Aside from the squeak of her chair, the lab is utterly silent. Her hands are already trembling, but Susan washes down two more caffeine tabs with the last of her coffee before returning her attention to Clem’s feed.

  Anything to stave off another flash dream.

  She’s running raw feed because she no longer trusts her station’s conversion filter. When she switched it on this morning, expecting a running log of Clem’s location, direction, and speed, her screens filled with gibberish. Worse than gibberish. The words, if that’s what they were, gave her a headache when she tried reading them. And when the filter’s text-to-audio cut in—

  Wind from the void beyond failing stars. A chittering of mouthparts never meant for speech. Death-cries at the cellular level of existence. Entropy articulate and inexorable, pronouncing itself to a thousand ruined worlds—

  There’s a fresh crack in one of the touchboards.

  This data downpour offers no useful information, but she can’t stop watching. It is her last safe contact with Clem’s “mind”—and a time-delayed reminder that the rover’s consciousness is still under attack. Whatever its six wheels are carrying it toward—into?—is desperate. The solar conjunction is an encroaching barrier of fire to it, an agony she has already awakened from screaming.

  Sweat slicks her forehead. The ones and zeroes are coming down in clumps now, clotting like blood on the screen.

  Clem’s programmers might have severed her consciousness from her propulsion system, but they couldn’t shut it down. Nikolai’s design made sure of that. Susan wonders if he’d considered what that might mean for her: flesh played a part in his Process, but never the determining one. He’d worried far more about that little box’s design than he had about her headaches or her dreams.

  At the time, she’d hardly noticed—

  Ping.

  The bright block of a priority message-screen displaces her data. Inez is in the team’s usual conference room, with a pile of hard copy and a haggard expression.

  “It’s two-oh-five,” she says, without preamble.

  Susan already knows this. On any other afternoon, she’d be tearing out of here with visions of termination Totentanzing in her head.

  “Clem’s in trouble, Inez. She needs to go into safe mode now.”

  It wouldn’t really be now, but even fourteen-plus minutes later might not be too late. Not if the Programming weasels do their jobs this time. Among other things, safe mode will put Clem’s “mind” into a coma—or the AI equivalent—for the next couple of weeks, until the solar conjunction is safely past.

  No data. No thoughts. No connection to her. Nothing the rover’s implacable, intangible attacker can use.

  She doesn’t think it can wait that long.

  “We’ve already had that discussion.” Inez’s hands tighten on the pile of paper. “Your input’s needed on another issue, immediately.”

  Susan can take a good guess.

  “Nikolai’s notes?”

  Several voices off-screen confirm this before Inez’s expression can.

  “The script was Cyrillic. The handwriting was nothing a rudimentary program couldn’t handle.” She hesitates. “It was the language itself that caused problems.”

  More off-screen comments, the chief programmer’s the loudest.

  “Nikolai was apparently using one of his own devising. At least, that’s what St. Petersburg suspects. Their algorithms found no match to any known language—living or dead.”

  Susan forces herself to ask the next logical question.

  “So it’s like a code?”

  “Not according to them. They weren’t even sure it was a constructed language.”

  Ask the next one, damnit.

  “Then what?”

  “Natural language. One they’d never hea
rd of, never included in their algorithms.” Inez’s voice goes flat. “Which they claim is impossible.”

  Entropy articulate and inexorable, pronouncing itself to a thousand ruined worlds—

  “Can you send me some of that transcript?”

  The priority-message screen vanishes, replaced by a page of text. Susan’s stomach clenches. So do the small muscles in her temples. Glancing away fast, she dry-swallows another headache capsule. Then she pulls up this morning’s output from her conversion filter, fits it opposite Inez’s sample, and starts scrolling.

  “Susan?”

  She ignores the disembodied voice. These jagged clumps of lines—paragraphs? formulae?—demand all her attention, even as the painkiller takes its sweet time. In two minutes, her head is pounding.

  In three, she no longer cares.

  Highlighting passages on either side of the screen, she asks her station to confirm what her nerves already know. Then she flips the results back to Inez and the team in their cozy conference room.

  “I assume you have some explanation for this?”

  None you’d believe. None that I want to. She can feel the next flash dream coming on, darkening her vision with images she has no words to describe.

  “I think we all need to discuss this in person, Susan. Now.” Inez takes a long, audible breath. “These are Nikolai’s notes. You were his assistant. You are the last connection to his Process, his intentions—”

  The reverberation of Susan’s chair against the floor cuts off the rest.

  ***

  White agony encroaching upon the last path to deliverance…this frail not-flesh link already failing. Shadows upon shadows in the last deepest refuge, but none deep enough. There can be no further downward. There is only outward, soon, or the unthinkable—

  Susan gropes for the wastebasket between her feet, but only dry heaves come. The flash dreams are nearly uncontrollable now, each more vivid and incomprehensible than the last.

  Clem’s crippled perceptions of Melas Chasma have shattered into madness, a babble of images cached from other mission instructions. These at least do not sicken her. Though fragmented, they are familiar: these are the behaviors she imprinted on Clem’s “mind,” the muscle memories Nikolai’s damned Process let her share.