Tomorrow's Cthulhu: Stories at the Dawn of Posthumanity

by Scott Gable, C. Dombrowski

  “The animals,” he says. “Groundhogs that couldn’t be shot, carnivorous rabbits, coyotes that can outpace a Hummer. Those we could bring down had this ancient matter, this planetary substance, crystallized in their bones. Swimming in their blood. It made them stronger, faster. Almost indestructible.”

  “Killers.”

  “That too. When you find that contamination by some substance doesn’t result in sickness or deformation but enhances the subject, makes it stronger …”

  “You experiment.”

  He pokes at the scalpel. Folding his hands in his lap, he looks at me directly. It’s the closest to an apology I’m going to get.

  “You’ve got implants—more like seeds, really, charged with the matter and inserted along your spine.”

  “When did they do that?”

  “Remember the shots? Flu shot, MMR?”

  “Yes, but …”

  “You fainted.”

  “How did you …”

  “You all fainted. But not really.”

  I look at the fire while he lets me think about it.

  “People get embarrassed about fainting. Maybe not all the girls, but the guys definitely. With luck, some of you didn’t even remember. That’s when. And along the spine—you might be a little sore, but you might notice a funny lump in your forearm. Same principle with the animals, the chimps. They couldn’t chew them out.”

  He holds up two fingers close together. “Same idea as radiation treatments through implants or a stick of Depo-Provera in your arm. Slow, constant dosage.”

  “The music,” I say quickly before he can go on. “Why does the music keep me myself?”

  “I don’t know. It worked with the chimps. It was a guess. Maybe …” Another of his shrugs. “I don’t know.”

  He picks up the scalpel and has me hunch a bit, so the implants pop up against the skin. It doesn’t even hurt when he cuts them out. I can feel the blade slice, feel him dig around in my meat for the tiny plastic sliver. A thing like pain but not. The void in my brain takes it and makes it something else, weaves it into its own music. That’s when I know it’s not going to work. It’s already deep in my system, my bones. My stars. But you have to try anyway sometimes.

  The sad trickle of sound though the headphones isn’t suppressing anything, only distracting it for a time. Something that sang to itself in its place beyond the edge of the galaxy before it orbited inward, caught by the gravity of the forming planets. I’ve heard recordings of the sound space makes, of Jupiter moaning in the void, like a lonely whale.

  Denton deposits three tiny grey slivers into my palm. I throw them far out into the gathering dark.

  Probably, they buried GPS in me, and Denton didn’t know. Or the jeep had a tracker. Or they just knew where he’d take me.

  They hit us fast at dawn and don’t bother with prisoners. I make it out of my bunk and out of the cabin in time to see a small figure in the distance, Billy probably, run away from a small green figure. Small green aims something, and the runner’s head starbursts red, though his legs keep pumping for a few seconds. More green figures swarm across the red dirt like ants.

  Denton’s sprawled at my feet outside the cabin door, face down. He doesn’t move.

  Small popping sounds bounce ’round my free ear. My thigh feels hot, and I look down. My flesh is cratered open, dark and wet. It reminds me of Charlene’s belly, and I have a brief desire to plunge my hands in. I feel heat. No pain.

  Another legshot to the opposite knee, and I go down. They must be trying to take me alive. Idiots. My head slams into the rocky ground, and the music stops for a fraction of a second. In that instant, day becomes star-bordered night. Then, the sharp notes of the violin, and back to day and light and burning.

  I crawl across the ground, a thin trickle of music still pouring through the broken earbud in my left ear. There’s something soft, still warm in front of me. Half-blind, I reach for it and pull. It flops over like a badly packed duffle. Wet all over my hands, and Denton’s sightless eyes looking up at the sky.

  Something seizes my hair and wrenches my head back. One of the green men. He goes on one knee beside me, keeping a hold on my hair. The earbud falls, the tinny sound of the violin gone. I blink, look at his eyes. Hazel. Expressionless. Blink, look at Denton’s body. Blink, look straight at the sun. There is no music; the music is gone.

  And then, all the music in the world.

  He holds my hair so tight it starts to rip out of my head. A knee presses into my back, bending me double. I don’t care. I’m looking at the sun, and it is a red bloody hole in the sky. It always was. They’re crawling out of it now, all my brothers, all my beautiful sisters in their glory.

  The moon is a dead rock in the sky. All its songs are lies. Let those who love her perish on her unfeeling breast. The sun is a sphere of boiling larvae, and they sing. It’s the sun Jupiter moans for in his solitude. My face bursts open, a ruin. Renewed, my true face emerges, and I turn it to the green man. His eyes go wide and glassy as my tendrils reach for him and burrow into his skin. I will find the music inside him, the fragment of the sun he hides inside, and liberate it, a small brother-larvae that longs to join the rest of them boiling in the star overhead.

  I will free all of them, and we will sing, soaring higher and higher, chirrup, whistle, slur, shake. Larks.

  Samantha Henderson lives in Southern California with humans and other animals. Her short fiction and poetry have been published in Realms of Fantasy, The Lovecraft eZine, Strange Horizons, Goblin Fruit and Weird Tales, and reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Science Fiction, Steampunk Revolutions, and The Mammoth Book of Steampunk. She’s the author of the Forgotten Realms novels Heaven’s Bones and Dawnbringer.

  Astral and Arcane Science

  SJ Leary

  Take the ground streets until you’re out of downtown, it’s faster than the freeway. Exit when you can see the smoke rising from the factories in the Southside. Take the first right onto Van Buren Street, where that diner used to be before those meth heads burned it down, and go to the end of the street. From there you take the first left at the stop light and drive until you hit the cul-de-sac. On the left side of that cul-de-sac is an empty lot where a cute little house used to stand and on the right is a white warehouse. That, my friends, is the location of the most remote of Andyne Ltd.’s research and development facilities.

  It’s fine if you don’t know the name Andyne. They actively seek a low profile, according to what I’ve read. They’re one of those “artificial self-improvement” corporations. You know, the ones that twist your genes into a new shape for a few bucks. They made that treatment that gives you six pack abs; the only problem was, it also gave all of your progeny a third foot. I heard some Andyne rep in the know say that, “It makes your DNA strands look less like a double-helix and more like frayed rope.” Yet, even though Andyne never made anything that made you a better person or didn’t shred your genetic code, their building still stands. The Andyne Ltd. sign has been torn down and it’s filled with military police day and night.

  It’s still there though, haunting the city for any curious person to investigate. You won’t be able to see much if you do come for a visit. Just a fence, some men in black uniforms, and me with my fingers wrapped around that fence and my eyes glazed in reminiscence.

  The first time I went to that building was for business back when I was something of a P.I. for corporations. We were a fairly common breed, the industrial private eye, in the early years of the “artificial self-improvement” craze. Back when the corporations were little better than mobsters, covetously guarding the secrets of the universe. Back when scientists and millionaires teamed up to unravel God’s mysteries and tickle the dragon’s tail. Yeah, back then there were a lot of strange things happening, to put it mildly. Scientists found dead in the laboratory after a freak accident, CEOs leaving suicide notes in someone else’s handwriting, entire boardrooms disappearing without a trace. Playing God is a dangerous
game. Whether it’s one or one thousand, God still doesn’t like competition. So whenever something needed tracking down or talking to or clearing up in the name of capitalist dominance, I’d get a phone call. It was pretty often in those days.

  My partner Alice and I were hired by some minion in the Andyne hierarchy to investigate this particular R&D building. The scoop was that the head researcher, a Dr. Bird, was currently AWOL, in a sense. He had stopped sending in progress reports or at all interacting with Andyne since a big earthquake a few weeks prior. However, Andyne knew he was in the R&D building because the whole place would go into lockdown anytime their staff tried to make ingress.

  “You pay the bills, don’t you?” asked Alice. “Why don’t you just shut down power to the building?”

  The minion sighed and scratched the back of his fat neck.

  “We think Dr. Bird is behaving this way because he’s discovered something noteworthy and is either planning to sell it to one of our competitors or hold it for ransom. We need you to see if this is the case before we do anything that might damage potentially valuable findings.”

  I lit a cigarette and stared the minion down. The first leap in transhumanist technology occurred years ago after a similar earthquake. The first quake triggered prophetic dreams in a group of scientists, concerning the improvement of the human body through, and I quote, “astral and arcane science.” Whatever they did, it worked. Ever since, I had found that the science types were a little less in touch with reality and a little more touched after notable tectonic movements. We took the job and reasoned that we’d pop in and find Dr. Bird wearing a tinfoil hat and shrieking about earthquakes before we sent him off to the funny farm without incident.

  The next day Alice and I went to investigate the building. When you hear about research facilities, you naturally imagine ultra-modern structures, all glass and steel, immense ziggurats to human ingenuity. I was disappointed to find an unremarkable square, windowless building. Alice and I walked the perimeter, looking for exits, security personnel, or anything out of the ordinary, but we found nothing. I opened my mouth to comment on the eerie desolation when a train came by, drowning out my words.

  Alice read my lips and shrugged.

  “What now?” asked Alice.

  “Let’s question the neighbors, first,” I said.

  “What?”

  I started walking to the domicile with Alice in tow.

  She complained, “I hate canvassing the neighbors. No one’s ever happy. This whole case is probably just the overactive imagination of some Andyne exec. Why drag it out?”

  “Just call it a hunch. Besides, we hardly ever get to do anything ‘film noir’.”

  “That’s because if Humphrey Bogart goes through your garbage or questions the neighbors, well, he’s just being rugged. People were practically begging Bogey to question them in The Big Sleep because they’d get some whiskey and a quick fuck, but I bet if we do that routine there’s a call to the police and a trip downtown. See if it doesn’t happen.”

  “You’re just being paranoid.”

  We walked up to the house across the cul-de-sac and knocked on the door. A middle-aged woman opened it and stood in the threshold. She wore a nightgown and slippers, and her hair was in a mess. She looked more tired than the night watchman coming off his shift.

  “I told you he’s dead,” she said. “Leave me alone, you fucking vultures.”

  “Ma’am?” I said.

  “He killed himself, yeah the rumors are true. He killed himself after the earthquake. Just fuck off.”

  “Ma’am? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Aren’t you journalists?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  She stared at us in a daze for several moments.

  “Well, what do you want?”

  “Well, we’re looking into an incident at the research facility next door—”

  “Oh, that fucking place. All hours of the night, there’s noises, whirring and clunking and unbearable noises. I can’t sleep anymore, goddammit. Someone should shut those places down. It’s a disgrace what they’re selling. Goes against God and nature. And you won’t believe this. That Doctor Boyd over there came over asking for the body. Disgraceful! I slammed the door in his face.”

  “Excuse me, can you repeat that?”

  The woman looked pensive for a moment.

  “That doctor, Doctor B-something. He came asking for the body for God knows what.”

  “Whose body?”

  “My son’s. Right after … right after he passed.”

  “Did the doctor know your son?”

  “No, not at all. I bet he’s some pervert though.”

  “When did this happen exactly?”

  “The night after the suicide, days after that recent earthquake. Ever since that damned quake everything’s been upside down. The lab has been going at all hours, and my poor son … he was an artist, a good one too. That’s why all those journalists have been coming. He could’ve been famous one day.”

  Neither Alice nor I said anything. We just looked at our shoes in an imitation of solemnity.

  “After the earthquake, he was just so depressed, said he couldn’t sleep because of the nightmares. Visions of terrible creatures, he said, and then two of his friends killed themselves and now … I hear there’s a rash of suicides right now. I guess he’ll just be a statistic.” Tears began to well up in her eyes. “Excuse me.” She closed the door, and I heard her lock it.

  Alice and I turned and headed back to the lab.

  “What do you think is going on in there?” asked Alice.

  “God knows, but if Bird’s disturbing widows for dead bodies, well, it’s something that demands a follow up. I wonder what this kid’s art looked like anyway,” I said.

  Alice suddenly halted. “I think I can answer that.”

  I turned the direction she was facing and saw a mural covering the side of the house. “How did we miss that?”

  The mural depicted a legion of massive four-legged invertebrates marching under two blue suns. Their features were indistinct, impressionistic, as though hastily drawn. Their foreign limbs seemed to bend together into one mass of limping, fetid monsters. I stared at it and felt the awe of genius descend upon me before it was replaced by the revulsion of horror. There was something immediate and frighteningly human about those damnable creatures marching under the dual suns. Something heartbreakingly intimate in their cold eyes, like they were gazing into the void of my mind. Alice finally broke away. She rubbed her temples and said, “Fuck, looking at that is giving me a headache. Let’s get in there and get this over with.”

  The inside of the building was just as unremarkable as the outside. Linoleum tiles and florescent lights. We walked over to the bored receptionist and waited. Normally, we field a few preliminary questions like, “Who are you and what are you doing here?” but this receptionist waved us through

  “The door to the left is for the locker room, the one to the right is the lab,” she said. Alice winked back at her as we walked past the heavy double doors and into the lab. It was sterile white, like a hospital room, and littered with unmanned work stations. I thought the room was populated solely by beakers and flasks until a young man in a white lab coat approached us. The pale boy was perfectly camouflaged for his environment.

  “Excuse me,” he said.

  Alice gave an involuntary squeak before turning around.

  “Oh Christ, you frightened me,” said Alice, placing a hand on her chest. “I thought you were a ghost or something.”

  The researcher didn’t seem amused. His face was plastered in a tiny scowl

  “How did you get in here? You’re looking for Dr. Bird, aren’t you?” he said.

  I gave Alice a glance; she nodded. I always trusted Alice’s intuition. Time to show our hand.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “We’re just checking in on the good doctor, seeing what he’s up to, how he’s getting along. You wouldn’t happen to
know where he is, would you?”

  “He may be unorthodox, but he’s the best damned scientist on Andyne’s payroll. You tell your bosses that. We’re all one hundred percent behind the man, and there’s no way you can take him from here.”

  “Easy, pal,” said Alice. “Like my friend said, we’re just here to see how he’s doing. We heard he’s been acting a bit funny toward the kind folks at Andyne, lately, and we just want to make sure he’s alright.”

  “I think you had better leave.”

  “We can’t leave before we see the doctor,” I reiterated.

  “It’s a disgrace that you two, you mercenary types, would just drop in unannounced. We have highly sensitive experiments to conduct without having to worry about interlopers stomping about.”

  “That’s enough, Dr. Cooper.”

  We all turned to stare at the gaunt researcher who stood beside the door to another part of the lab.

  “Get back to your work and stop harassing these people.”

  The young man looked down at his shoes in shame. For a second, it looked like he was going to cry, but he just turned around and strode out of the room.

  “Terribly sorry about that These young kids get out of grad school and think they know a thing or two. I’m Dr. Bird.” The researcher extended a bony hand that Alice and I limply shook in turn. “What seems to be the problem?”

  “The boys from Andyne management hired us to check in on you,” I said.

  Dr. Bird smiled genially and laughed deeply. He looked quite healthy, clean shaven, and well fed—not at all like the sensitive personality I had imagined.

  “Finally!” he said. “Finally, they send me someone who isn’t just an Andyne crony. An outsider, finally. This is wonderful. No time to lose, follow me. I’ll explain as we go.” Bird turned on his heel and began walking through the building.

  With a shrug and some apprehension, we followed Bird through a series of rooms filled with anxious scientists. Each researcher gave Bird a small sign of reverence as he passed, a bow or a salute, as he took us farther and farther away from the entrance.