Tomorrow's Cthulhu: Stories at the Dawn of Posthumanity

by Scott Gable, C. Dombrowski

  The sun burns hot here. It’s like it’s a different sun from the one anywhere else. Here, it’s free, unbridled, like we are.

  We’d sit naked, but our poor boobs would burn, and the skin would peel, and no one wants that.

  The idea makes us laugh, and once we start, we can’t stop until we’re so weak with it we’re in the sand. Someone carries us inside.

  “It’s a side effect we’re working on,” Tony said. They were figuring out ways to stop the Sads on Mars because the Sads don’t make things happen.

  But it made us laugh too much at too little. It felt good. Like Tony does. Not like Matty did. Nothing like Matty.

  Day 67.

  Serious fucking partying going on. Swapping of fluids. Swapping of contact details. None of us wanting to go back, but sixty-eight days is what they’re testing, so sixty-eight days is what it is.

  We were all together. Ten of us. Sometimes felt as if we were one. Other times there was just me and Tony.

  I liked it when he took me out onto the roof or way, way away from the resort. He was quiet out there, and we could just hang. He showed me Mars through the telescope, and I swore I could see movement up there.

  “It’s incredible to think people will be there in a generation. And that we’re helping them get there.”

  Day 68.

  We wake up on the last day. Tony brought me breakfast, the tiny spicy sausages we have every few days. They are so good. And hothouse tomatoes and mushrooms with butter and parsley. And champagne. I still felt drunk from the night before.

  He sat on the end of the bed, watching me. It felt weird. Like my mum used to do. It’s one of the things I miss most about Mum. When I was in my early teens, before things went to shit, she’d come into my room in the morning and sit on the end of my bed, and we’d chat. I was still a bit sleepy so not as defensive as I’d be later. I remember those talks so well. In those sleepy times, we both thought it would be all right.

  He made me get up, and we walked to the meteorite. I loved it there in the early morning when it was so warm. So familiar.

  “Do you really want to go back to the city?” he said.

  I felt a surge in my heart; was he saying I could stay? “No! I want to stay here!”

  He shook his head. “That can’t happen. But to be honest, they’re nervous about sending you back.”

  “Just me or everyone?”

  “Mostly you. It’s a couple of things.” He made me drink a glass of champagne. “It’s your LE, for one.” (He was the same as the doctor, thinking that calling it LE will make it easier to take.) “You’re looking at weeks once you go back home, they think.”

  “But I feel fine.”

  “That’s the beauty and the curse of it. You’ll feel like that until suddenly this happens.”

  He showed me the worst photos I’ve ever seen of people in dying stages of my disease. Pus and blood from every orifice. It was horrendous.

  “You’re so beautiful the way you are. It would break my heart to see you like this.” He made me look at the photos, every single one of them. “Have you got anyone to look after you?” He knew I didn’t. “You can make it worthwhile. Don’t waste all you know. All you have up here.” He tapped my temple gently and stroked his cool hand on my forehead. “You know what you’ve been eating.”

  I had known. I just didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want to be sent home for complaining about it. And everyone did it. No one seemed concerned. You wouldn’t tell anyone outside, but it tasted fine. Human meat tasted fine.

  “The knowledge you have came from the one before you. She got hers from the one before her. On and on, and the knowledge improves each time. It’s brilliant; each person doesn’t have to retrain. We don’t have to waste time. Complex tasks managed in a day or two. Relationships remembered. Finding your way without being lost. Every day, every hour, is critical.” He’s still stroking me. Under my clothes, now.

  “It’s totally groundbreaking and will be part of the future of us. It will literally help the survival of the human race.”

  It made perfect sense.

  “You’ll join others who went before you. You’ll be a proud member of an elite team. You’ll be remembered. This moment is perfect. You are perfect. It is all downhill from here.”

  I said, “What about the others? Are they doing this, too?”

  “What do you think? See if you can feel the hive mind.”

  I closed my eyes. “I think yes.”

  He left me there. It was warm, perfect, and I had champagne and the smell of strawberries.

  He gave me a pill. One. It would be enough.

  I took the pill and laughed and laughed and laughed to think of what would happen next.

  Bram Stoker Award nominee, twice-World Fantasy Award nominee and Shirley Jackson Award winner, Kaaron Warren has lived in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Fiji. She’s sold more than two hundred short stories, three novels (the multi-award-winning Slights, Walking the Tree, and Mistification) and six short story collections including the multi-award-winning Through Splintered Walls. Her latest short story collection is Cemetery Dance Select: Kaaron Warren. You can find her at kaaronwarren.wordpress.com, and she tweets @KaaronWarren.

  Tekeli-li, They Cry

  AC Wise

  They tell me the future is broken. Will be broken. Has always been broken.

  I was wide awake the first time they spoke to me and have been every time since. They come from there, then, when the future is broken. Which is now because the break stretches in every direction. That’s what they tell me.

  We’re time travelers, meeting in some middle distance where they can scream at me, speak in soft, reasonable tones, jibber, weep, and tell me what is to come and is already here.

  They’re bright, like staring directly into a 100-W bulb. One that’s already broken—jagged but still burning. There are shapes behind them, smearing and blurring and refusing to stay still. It hurts to look at them, so mostly, I just listen.

  The voices overlap. Like listening to five radio stations at once. Whether they weep or plead or speak calmly (those are the worst), the one thing they agree on is south. Go all the way south to the pole. Stop the future from being broken.

  Why do I believe them? Because of my beautiful baby girl. I’ve seen her out there on the ice. Even before I came to this blue place full of wind and sleepless sun, I saw her. A skip in time. A scratch on the record of my life. A time, repeating. My past, leaking into my present. Her future, reaching back for her with empty hands.

  I know time is broken because I saw my little girl, even though she’s been dead for three years, seven months, and twenty-one days.

  Our eighth day on the ice, James and Risi brought Austin back into the station screaming. He shouldn’t have been out there alone. That’s the first thing you learn here—the ice is treacherous. It’s worse with climate change. Everything is more extreme: the colds colder, the warm periods rotting the ice soft under your feet.

  Everything here wants to kill you. Not like a jungle or a swamp with poisonous insects and crushing heat. The cold kills with kindness—or humiliation. It lulls you to sleep. It makes you think you’re burning up, so you strip your clothes off. History is full of people who have frozen to death naked in snowstorms.

  The wind blows shimmering snow, blinding and tricking the eye. The sun—ever-awake six months and absent the other six—throws shadows all stark on the ground, so we see things that aren’t there and miss things that are. If I didn’t know the world was broken, that there are worse things coming (already here), I would think what happened to Austin was just the landscape fucking with us.

  Us. I should say, that’s Austin, Ricky, Sheila, Cordon, Risi, James, and me. (And my daughter’s ghost.) You wouldn’t think I would lose count with only seven, but I do. There should be nearly two hundred bodies filling the station. It’s peak season. But since the moratorium on climate research in 2021, no one cares about the South Pole. They can’
t afford to. Still, this is where the voices say the future will break. So here we are, funding our own research, stubborn or stupid or frightened enough to run away to the end of the world.

  Austin was gathering samples from the ice for me to study. Bacteria. Fungus. Algae. Some of the few things that can survive here. I’m looking for something microscopic in the ice, something people would never notice, being too busy looking at the horizon or the sky for the big, terrible thing, then bam. World’s end.

  When they brought Austin in, he was screaming that something in the ice bit him.

  The station has a trauma center. Luckily, it’s in the part that didn’t burn. Sheila is a surgeon. Was. Like all of us, she came to the end of the world with a bag full of demons. One of them was enough to get her barred from practice apparently. She saved Austin, even though there wasn’t much for her to do other than treat him for shock. He wasn’t even bleeding. His wound didn’t look like a bite; the lower half of his arm had been sheared clean off.

  The whirring of the 3D printer woke me up even though it had already been going for hours. It’s a waste. All this expensive tech tucked away at the bottom of the world. One government funded a whole bunch of upgrades, top of the line stuff. The next one swooped in and took all the money away, made climate research damn near illegal. Now, all the fancy machines and equipment are rotting away, and private eyes and dollars are on space. Well, it’s not a complete waste, I guess. Austin gets a new arm.

  (If the government hadn’t cut funding, maybe they would have found the poison in the water sooner. I shouldn’t complain. Neelie was born with all her limbs in the right place, and no extra ones. Other parents weren’t so lucky. My baby girl only had a slight delay in cognitive development. A lag. Sometimes she was miles away, her eyes on some past or future only she could see. But maybe that had nothing to do with the poison in the ground. Just like the nights she woke screaming. All kids have bad dreams, after all.)

  Still, I’m surprised the government didn’t drag the tech out when they pulled the plug. They could have printed light armor, weapons, and bombs undetectable by scans. Some of the scientists tried to burn the station on their way out in protest. After that, the government could barely be bothered to get the people out. If they wouldn’t have had human rights groups from creditor nations barking up their asses, they probably would have left the scientists to rot too.

  Anyway, Austin is in remarkably good spirits for someone missing half his arm. He’s sticking to his story. Something in the ice bit him. I think time broke, just where he happened to be. Half his arm ended up in some other when. It’s right where he left it, just a few seconds or years into the future or the past, so we can’t see it anymore.

  One of the voices (one of the weeping ones) said a city rose, is rising, everywhere and everywhen. There are holes; things can slide through. Sometimes by accident, like arms. People can slide through, but it isn’t easy, so most stay put and shout across the distance.

  (Oh, I should have said. Time is broken. It doesn’t matter what we find in the ice. Nothing we do here matters. I lied to Austin, Sheila, Cordon, James, Ricky, and Risi. The voices (some of them at least) really do think there’s something we can do to change things, but we can’t. I recognize the stages of grief. I’m surprised the other seven (eight?) don’t. The voices are bargaining right now. They’re pleading with anyone who will listen. Just please take it back. Make it the way it was. Make it okay again. Bargaining never works. That’s why it isn’t the last stage. One thing it’s made me understand that I didn’t three years, seven months, and twenty-nine days ago—it’s not that no one is listening. It’s just that sometimes, there’s nothing they can do.)

  After I woke up, I went to sit by the printer. It’s hypnotizing, all that passing back and forth, building new bones. Out of nowhere, James burst in and said we should be printing weapons, not arms (ha ha). He said there’s a fight coming. He said he’s seen things under the ice, sleeping. He wouldn’t explain. I saw him standing by the window later, staring out at the ice, at the spot where I saw Neelie last time. I wanted to hit him. She’s my ghost. Mine. He can damn well find his own.

  It’s been a couple weeks since Austin’s ‘accident’ and now Ricky thinks he’s seen James’s monsters, too. Shadows under the ice. Vast, slow things. Turning, he said. I don’t know what that means.

  Sheila is working with Austin on rehab, even though it isn’t her specialty. It’ll be a while before he has any kind of dexterity. No one seems to care that Austin is basically useless for field work, except James. Every time James sees Austin, he starts in about weapons again.

  Ricky’s thing is CERN. He says whatever’s going on is probably their fault. He’s a good kid. He’s supposedly here to keep Risi’s notes in order, label things, make spreadsheets and pretty graphs. I think he would be smart under normal circumstances, but Risi only brought him along because she wants something to fuck.

  The birds aren’t birds. That’s another thing Ricky says.

  He’s been drawing them since he got here. Really detailed, textbook quality. He wanted to be an artist, but he couldn’t hack it. So he let Risi pay his way to the bottom of the world.

  He’s jittery, more so by the day. I don’t think he’s sleeping. I don’t know that any of us are, not real sleep at least. Risi shows it the least.

  James going on about weapons got Ricky worked up about CERN again.

  “It’s when they fired up the Large Hadron Collider,” he said. “They fucked everything up. Ripped a hole in space.”

  Risi looked like she wanted to slap him. Actually, she looked like she wanted to tear him apart with her teeth, right down to marrow and bone. Maybe that’s her kink—violence gets her off better than sex. “That’s not how it works,” she said. “This has nothing to do with science, or if it’s science, it’s not any kind of science we understand.”

  She wouldn’t explain what she meant; she stalked off and slammed the door. It’s the closest I’ve seen to anything like a crack in her armor. Maybe Risi is human after all.

  It’s day sixteen, or twelve, or thirty-seven, or two. Cordon and Risi are drinking to cope. I wish I could join them.

  I smashed a mirror yesterday. Well, crushed it, really. It was a little pocket mirror I found behind the bookshelf in my room. They’re like dorm rooms, except cleaner. Someone before me cared about their appearance, apparently. I broke it in half, squeezed it until it cracked. Seven years bad luck.

  (Maybe I should say why I’m really here, now that you know I know we can’t stop the end of the world. I came looking for Neelie. Even though I saw her before I saw her out on the ice, I think she wanted me to follow her here. Her ghost is brighter in the snow.)

  I think Ricky might be on to something with the birds. I wanted to put that down before I forget.

  I could say something melodramatic, like I was looking at my reflection, and I couldn’t stand the monster staring back at me. But I wasn’t even looking at the reflective part, just turning the mirror over in my hand like a stone.

  (It wasn’t until I picked up the broken pieces that I saw Neelie’s eye staring back at me, her mouth open to speak. I got scared. I’ll admit that. I got scared. I came here to find her; she’s my little girl, but she still terrifies me.)

  I had all this nervous energy, and I had to let it out somehow. I used to do that with drink. My brain would spin and spin, there was no other way to shut it down. After the accident, I quit, cold turkey. I’ve been sober for three years, eight months, and thirteen days. A recovering alcoholic, mind you; there’s no such thing as cured.

  I saw Neelie inside the station yesterday. Every other time, she’s been out on the ice. Ricky was drawing, and she was looking over his shoulder. It reminded me of the way she used to watch me cook, not asking questions but intently studying everything I did and recording behind her eyes, chewing on the ends of her hair the whole while. I didn’t hit Ricky. I wanted to.

  (I’ve waited so long for her t
o come inside, and when she did, I ran away. Her eyes recorded everything; what if she doesn’t forgive me for the last moments of her life? My little girl turned and stretched out her hand, and I ran away.)

  Could I have stopped the car? I wasn’t drunk, only buzzed.

  It was late, foggy; Neelie shouldn’t have been out of bed. The babysitter should have been watching her …

  No. I can’t shift the blame. Neelie liked to run out to meet my car. It didn’t matter whether I’d been gone an hour or a whole day. I knew that. I should have been paying more attention.

  (I was.)

  (Neelie … I could never get over her eyes. Deep down, in the truest and darkest part of myself, love wasn’t enough. I couldn’t get over her eyes. I was one of the lucky ones. All her limbs were in the right place, but her eyes … she was out of phase with my reality. Can poison in the ground do that? Sometimes, she looked just like a normal little girl, like the other children on our block after we moved. And sometimes, her eyes were flat black. Polished stone. Static-shot. She would look at me like she was tuning in something very far away or sending everything I was doing elsewhere. Did she know? Was she always judging me for what happened in the last moments of her life, or was it that I thought she was judging me that caused my decision?)

  The car. There was a heartbeat’s worth of space. Two. I took a breath, let it all the way out with her frail body pinned in the headlights. The fog made tendrils, swirling around her. She looked right at me with those eyes. Recording. She didn’t look human. I wasn’t drunk. I was scared, scared of my little girl.

  I took a breath and let it all the way out, and my foot didn’t move from the gas to the brake. Neelie bled out a few feet from our door. I didn’t cry. I just cradled my baby’s head in my lap and stroked her hair.