Tomorrow's Cthulhu: Stories at the Dawn of Posthumanity

by Scott Gable, C. Dombrowski

  “Really, Stephen,” I said. “I wish you’d stop changing your mind like this. You know I hate to waste good food.”

  “Whatever,” he said. “Anyway, being shut up in here with bloody Coolio killed my appetite.”

  “Not Coolio,” I said wearily as I reached the big glass display case of which he spoke, just in time to catch his shadow darting away from me. “Cthulhu.”

  “Whatever.”

  I sighed and looked up at the waxwork. It was, I thought, one of my best efforts; fully ten feet high, the throne and its grotesque occupant had been finished to glisten as if still newly damp. Even the tangled clumps of seaweed hanging off the white, rune-carved, grotesquely angled throne still looked fresh. “Cthulhu,” I repeated, “as created by the great H.P. Lovecraft.”

  “Whatever. Coolio, Yog-Sodoff—”

  “Yog-Sothoth. You’re just doing this to annoy me, Stephen. You know that.” I sighed. “You have to look beyond the obvious. They’re not just monsters, they’re metaphors. That’s the genius of Lovecraft’s achievement. The deities of the Cthulhu Mythos were metaphors for the sheer vastness and alienness of space and time in relation to mankind—who is, on a cosmic scale, a very brief, very recent phenomenon. Here for less than a split-second in the great scheme of things.”

  Stephen snorted. I tried to pinpoint the direction but couldn’t. “You really are full of shit, you know.”

  I opened my mouth to retort, hoping something suitably pithy would occur in time, but Stephen said, “Someone’s coming,” and dashed away.

  Light flickered at the entrance, and a shadow moved down the basement steps. I hesitated—it’s usually curiosity that brings people to my little emporium, and too enthusiastic a welcome can put them to flight—but then a voice called out, “Hello?”

  “Good afternoon,” I said. “Welcome to the Lovecraftiana Museum.”

  He offered a hand. “Mr. Rogers?”

  “Yes?” I said, slightly taken aback. It’s not as though my name appears above the threshold or anything.

  “My name’s Heald Jones,” he said.

  “A pleasure. A pleasure. Well, do come in. If there’s anything you wish to know about the exhibits—”

  Jones eyed my nearest creation—a nightgaunt, wings spread aloft—and then me. “Perhaps later,” he said. “It was actually you I came to see.”

  “Me? But whatever for?”

  “Well, there’s something we need to talk about. If I could have just a few minutes of your time?”

  I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of this, but it was quite clear at a glance that Mr. Jones was clearly a man of some means. Very tall, well-groomed, tanned, and if his clothes were not genuine Giorgio Armani, then I will wear tracksuits for a year. “Very well,” I said. “Let’s go to the café. We can talk there.”

  Café is perhaps a slightly grandiose term to describe the space at the back of the museum with a half-dozen wood-effect tables and plastic seats, a kettle with a pint of milk, a rumpled bag of sugar, a jar of Nescafé, and a packet of economy teabags beside. But to be fair, we’ve never had the call for anything much more. And to be fairer still, while the Innsmouth Tableaux is another of my personal favourites, it wasn’t perhaps the ideal thing to be faced with over a meal. Jones, who couldn’t stop glancing at it, certainly looked a little queasy.

  “Do take a seat,” I said, setting the chips down on the cleanest table where they gently bled steam into their plastic bag. “A cup of tea?”

  “No, thank you,” he said, looking around. “Quite a place you have, Mr. Rogers.”

  “You like it?” I said.

  “It’s … fascinating.” Diplomatic. “How did you come to, er …”

  “A kind of therapy, I suppose.” I rather enjoyed telling this story. “Until about four years ago, I was a call-centre worker: a job that led to stress, depression, anxiety, and in the end, to a quite nightmarish episode where I almost took my own life. I’m sure you know, Mr. Jones—”

  “Professor.”

  “Oh. I apologise.” But a professor of what? “Well, as I’m sure you know, Professor Jones, it’s not uncommon when one comes close to dying to take stock of one’s life. I found, as do many, that I’d been living to work instead of working to live. So I decided to reverse the equation by devoting myself to work that genuinely inspired me.”

  “And”—Jones gestured around—“this was it.”

  “Mmm. I’ve loved science fiction and horror since I was a small boy, and Lovecraft’s works most of all. Are you familiar with him?”

  “I read him when I was younger. Not to my taste.”

  “So it goes,” I said. “But Old Howard still has his devotees. It’s been a real labour of love.”

  “I do admire the skill and passion you’ve brought to it.”

  “Thank you. As I said, it’s been a kind of therapy for me. I suspect that one day soon I’ll move on and do something new.”

  A high tittering laugh echoed from among the exhibits: Stephen, of course. “Will you listen to yourself?” I caught the briefest glimpse of his thin pale face and black spiky hair peering out from under one of the iridescent globes that comprised the body of Yog-Sothoth. So achingly beautiful and so achingly cruel. With youth, the two often go hand in hand. “What a load of smug, self-satisfied, pretentious crap. I don’t know why I stick with you.”

  “Shut up!” I snapped. “Go and clean something. Earn your bloody keep!”

  Jones looked downright startled. I was too used to being alone here with Stephen. Sometimes, I forgot myself. I decided to try and make a joke of it. “You can’t get the staff these days.”

  “Right,” said Jones.

  “I have to ask,” I said, “have we met before? You seem familiar, somehow.”

  “I’ve been on television a couple of times,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “I’m a scientist.”

  “What’s your field?”

  “Nanotechnology.”

  “Not one of my interests, but … no, I’m sure I’ve seen you somewhere.”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me.” There was something in his tone I didn’t like. Jones took out a photograph. “Do you know who this is?”

  It was of a young boy, perhaps twelve or thirteen years old. Fair hair, blue eyes, a winning smile. In a few years, I had no doubt, he would be quite beautiful—though not, of course, as lovely as Stephen. “I’m afraid I don’t.” Looking from Jones to the picture, I saw a faint resemblance. “Your son?”

  “His name was Charlie.”

  “Was?”

  “He killed himself,” said Jones. “Four years ago.”

  “My God. I’m sorry. That’s terrible.” But why come here to tell me this, I wondered?.

  “You can imagine … well, perhaps you can’t. The loss of a child is an awful thing,” said Jones. “We’d had no idea there was even anything wrong. My marriage broke up. I’m told it’s quite common. My wife pursued a series of younger men and drank to forget. I buried myself in my work. Different coping mechanisms. The one possible edge that mine had over Katharine’s was that something beneficial may come of it.”

  “Oh?”

  “A lot of mental health issues, like depression, have physiological causes,” he said. “Chemical imbalances in the brain and so forth. I set out to apply nanotechnology to psychiatric medicine. You could implant a colony of sub-microscopic machines to monitor the brain and correct those issues as they arose, treating depression and other disorders in real time. Technology like that could save thousands of lives.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I can see how—”

  “It was controversial,” said Jones. “There were concerns over how that kind of technology could be misused by the military or the state. You can probably guess some of the paranoid stuff people were coming out with: ‘government mind control’ and all that. But I managed to get the backing to carry out the work.”

  “I’m terribly sorry for your loss, Professor,” I said,
“and I sincerely hope the work you’re doing will pay off—”

  “It has,” he said. “We’re pretty much good to go.”

  “That’s wonderful,” I said, “but I still don’t understand what it has to do with me.”

  “You don’t?”

  “Truly.”

  He studied me with a peculiar expression, a strange compound of pity and disbelief. “It’s because you helped to kill my son, Mr. Rogers,” he said. “And I want to understand why.”

  “What?” I said. “What? How dare you. How could you even suggest that I’d harm a child? I want you out of here. Immediately.”

  “I completed my nanotech work,” said Jones as if I hadn’t spoken. He didn’t move, didn’t even bestir himself to get up. Well, quite frankly, he was a tall man, well-built, and the chances of my being able to move him without his consent were laughable. “I hoped that, having done so, I’d feel some sense of closure or peace. But I didn’t. You do foolish things when you’ve too much on your mind and not enough to distract you from it, so I called Katharine. We had a long, painful conversation. But she said something that stayed with me.”

  I waited; the sooner he’d said his piece, the sooner he’d get out of my museum and leave me and Stephen in peace.

  “She said I was unfeeling,” he said. “That I reduced everything to the clinical and the mechanical. Treating people like machines, pieces of clockwork—something goes wrong, you take a gear out and replace it. ‘Did you ever stop to consider,’ she asked me, ‘that the reason our son died might have been that he was in pain? Suffering terribly? And we didn’t see it. You didn’t see it, for all your skill. You didn’t see what was wrong. Did you ever stop and ask why?’

  “I had been all too eager to dismiss the idea that there’d been something wrong in Charlie’s life, something I hadn’t known about. That perhaps he could have been saved not by some miraculous stroke of nanosurgery but simply by his father coming to him and asking ‘Charlie, is everything all right? Is something wrong?’ and then … just … listening.”

  There was a long pause; Jones’s fingertips traced patterns on the table top. I could see the faint white mark on his wedding finger where the ring had been.

  “We’d meant to get rid of Charlie’s laptop after but couldn’t: too many memories of him, and besides, you can never wholly erase whatever’s been on the hard drive. Delete it if you want, but the evidence remains. And so I had someone take a look there.”

  Jones was silent for another moment or two. He gazed at the Innsmouth Tableaux, though I suspected sadly that he wasn’t devoting his time to an appreciation of my artistic achievements.

  “We accessed Charlie’s social media profiles,” he said. “Twitter, Facebook, that kind of thing. And they were filled, filled, with some of the cruellest, most hateful things I’ve ever seen in my life. Messages that told him he was vile, he was scum, a worthless piece of shit. That his mother would be repulsed if she knew, that we would disown him, drive him out, whip him through the streets of the town”—his voice cracked. “And we wouldn’t have. Of course, we wouldn’t have. He was our son. But they said that, and they told him to—they told him to kill himself, Mr. Rogers. That he’d be better off dead. He was twelve years old, Mr. Rogers. Twelve.”

  “Mr. Jones … Professor,” I said. My lips felt dry. “Professor, I’m sorry beyond words for your loss. You’re right; it’s something I can’t imagine because I have no children of my own. It’s something no one should have to go through. ”

  “Most of the people who’d persecuted my son,” said Jones, very quietly, steadily and slowly, “were anonymous. They hid behind pseudonyms and aliases and avatars. I don’t think even Charlie knew half of them, which makes it worse. It’s as if someone just picked him out at random and declared him a target to be destroyed. A funny thing, though: of the nine we could identify, five where dead. They’d committed suicide. Of the others, three were catatonic following full-blown psychotic breakdowns. That only left one; he’d suffered a breakdown but recovered. That, Mr. Rogers, was you.”

  “No!” I shouted. “No! I absolutely deny that I had anything to do with your son’s death, that I could have ever done such a hateful thing!”

  From the shadows, out among those exhibits, Stephen laughed: high, hateful, tittering. “Yeah, right,” he said, “you bloody could, and you know it, you lying old queen.”

  “Fuck off!” I screamed. “Just fuck off!”

  Jones flinched back in his chair. He was very still now, watching me carefully. We looked at each other for almost a minute before he relaxed. A little.

  “You did have a breakdown,” he said. “Four years ago.”

  “No,” I said. “Well, yes. Yes, I had a breakdown, but it was work-related, I told you.”

  “Mr. Rogers,” said Jones, “it wasn’t work-related.”

  “I tell you, it was! Whose life are we talking about here?”

  “Do you think I pulled your name out of a hat, Mr. Rogers? I hired private detectives to trace the people who’d harassed my son. Not for revenge, just to understand. They found you. Your doctor, quite rightly, wouldn’t break confidentiality, but it was easy enough to talk to your neighbours and the police officers.”

  “Police officers?”

  “Mr. Rogers, you had a full-blown psychotic episode,” said Jones. “You smashed the windows in your flat, you cut yourself up with pieces of broken glass—”

  My hand went to my chest. Through the thin shirt, I could feel the scars from when I had self-harmed at the time of my breakdown.

  He took a square of folded paper from his pocket, unfolded it. “These are their statements. The police and the neighbours all said you were screaming, ranting, raving. You were saying things about ‘the hive, the great hive,’ and something about ‘tentacles in the minds of men, linking us all to the face of God.’ Or perhaps ‘the god.’ Does none of this ring a bell?”

  I shook my head, standing, stumbling back. I had to get away. I had to get away from him, away from this man who was saying these terrible things that couldn’t be true, they couldn’t be. I didn’t remember them, I didn’t remember, I didn’t, couldn’t—

  No.

  No.

  My legs felt weak; they gave way and I fell to my knees.

  “Mr. Rogers—” Jones started to rise.

  “Leave him.” And there was Stephen: dear Stephen, darling Stephen, kneeling by me. “Do you remember now?” he said. His face was inches from mine: that thin, beautiful face.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t remember. I don’t remember.”

  “Who are you talking to?” said Jones.

  I stared at him and then back to Stephen. “What does he mean? What does he—”

  I looked at Jones again, and he was staring with incomprehension. “I don’t understand,” I said to Stephen. “I don’t understand. I don’t …”

  “Shh.”

  “I can’t—I can’t—”

  “I can,” said Stephen, and he stroked my face. “Do you want me to?”

  “Please. Please, my darling. Please.”

  “All right, then,” said Stephen, and leaning forward, he kissed me.

  And I remembered.

  I remembered logging into the computer that night and thinking how odd the patterns flickering across the screen were. They were hypnotic. And then, the hive. The rage. Find a target. Destroy it. Here is the target. Kill him. Kill him. Make him kill himself. Night after night, until he broke. And—

  And not just me. Others. So many others. We are many. The many and the One. We are the One. We are the hive. We are the avatar. We are Cthulhu. Dead but dreaming.

  “Mr. Rogers? Mr. Rogers?”

  Someone was leaning over me. Stephen? No.

  “Mr. Rogers. Stephen. That’s your name, isn’t it? Stephen, are you all right?”

  “I …” I looked up at him. And now, of course, now, I wasn’t afraid of him any more. “Yes,” I said. “I’m fine.” I caught his arm and
helped myself to my feet. He was staring at me in perplexity, which I could hardly blame him for.

  “I haven’t entirely been honest with you, Professor Jones,” I said. “Because for the last four years, I haven’t been entirely honest with myself. You see, when people have asked me about the things I depict, I’ve always told them that of course they aren’t meant to be real. They’re all a metaphor for other things. While in fact, they’re anything but. I’ve created and tended this place out of denial. To tell myself, ‘It’s all just a story; none of it’s real.’ But my darling Stephen knew better. He always knew better. He was the part of me that always knew.”

  I released his arm. He stepped back, apparently weighing the prospect of making a dash for it. I side-stepped to ensure I would be in his path.

  “You see,” I went on, “once upon a time, a very long time ago—vigintillions of years ago, to use HPL’s own phrase—there were the Great Old Ones, Professor. Creatures you and I can barely conceive of: in terms of their size, their scale, their nature. They ruled earth and heaven for billions of years. They were as gods, but … all things must end. Something changed. So they went dormant—dead, but dreaming—in suitable hiding places. The depths of the Marianas Trench, the gulfs of outer space, the deserts, the mountains: on earth and beyond it, they were and are everywhere, just waiting.”

  “Waiting for what, Stephen?” said Jones.

  He was trying to humour me, but no matter. “They were waiting for us, Professor,” I told him. “The Great Old Ones could only come back if one of their own kind opened the way for them: at the right time, in the right place. You see the paradox, Professor, yes? They solved it with typical ingenuity: having identified those creatures that would survive the coming change, they modified them to evolve along the lines the Old Ones desired. So they would develop intelligence and, with that intelligence, certain ideas and desires and intentions would arise—ideas, desires and intentions that would ultimately serve the Old Ones’ purpose.

  “Of course, even the greatest human mind could only hold an infinitesimal fraction of an Old One’s consciousness. But millions, billions of human minds, networked—that would be a different matter.”