Tomorrow's Cthulhu: Stories at the Dawn of Posthumanity

by Scott Gable, C. Dombrowski

  Now, just have to release the warning. The trigger word—have to think of a good one. One that ricochets off the radar of every Illuminati and cultist and scholar dedicated to preventing what’s been set in motion.

  His name. The one who will be reborn in this world on Samhain at midnight. Born at least once before: the avatar of the Golden Death.

  My dad taught me about the Deaths. Some are plagues and sicknesses brought from beyond the stars, felling humans like trees and reaping the dead. It hasn’t happened in my lifetime, not here. Not since nanotech figured out how to slow cellular decay. Not since antibiotics were augmented with cyber-antibodies; still experimental and ridiculously expensive, but working even now through the right channels to trickle down to all the regular people in the next three or four years. Not the Black Death or the Blue or the White, bubonic plague and cholera and tuberculosis.

  My dad warned me of the Golden Death: the King in Yellow and his consort Thale, the Queen in Red. The spread will start tomorrow, and there is no stopping it. Only delay. Delay and delay, and maybe one day, someone will find a way to stop the spread of his power. But it won’t be me. I’m no occultist. I’m just the Ghost in the machine.

  I key in the last bit of code. The trigger word is the name of the monster, the one who is not to be named, the demon king.

  The king who destroyed my mom’s world.

  “A king emperors have served,” my dad always says, and I hate the awe mingling every time with the dread in his voice. “A king named only at the last.”

  Well, we’re almost at the last. Dawn’s coming as I prep to pull out of cyberspace, as I cement the trigger word into the code. So I’ll name him, the thing I’ve trained to fight my entire life.

  Hastur.

  I’m back in the physical world, back in my little nest in my beech tree. I have to call my dad and warn him that the Apocalypse is about to kick our door down.

  Somehow, I get some sleep as dawn rolls around. When I wake up, it’s afternoon, and there’s drool on my face. I actually feel rested. And who says bed hair isn’t sexy?

  Picking through my curls takes minutes because I don’t have time to be gentle. It’s time to pack up and get moving. I need to be out of the city before I trigger the warning, or I’m probably dead. All hell’s going to break loose, and I don’t want to be swept up in it.

  Unhooking my tent and blankets from the tree and rolling them up tight with the soft swishing of nylon, I stuff everything in my backpack and scuttle down the tree before someone can come along the path and get me stranded up there. Camping in Central Park without a permit is against the law.

  The moment I hit ground, the hair at my nape prickles. Uneasy in my android sneakers that light up when I key them on with a click of my heels—cheerful green and gold to drive away the nerves. I move along the path and out to the 59th Street entrance.

  No birds chirp. No squirrels chase each other through the branches. Distantly, the city noises lie through their chrome and fiberglass teeth that everything’s fine. I know better. I’m a Carter, and we come from a long line of nosy people too curious to avoid getting slapped around or eaten by cosmic crawlies. Now that I’m more awake, I can think about being eaten by the things that are going to crawl out of the abyss tonight without breaking out into a sweat.

  But I still slip my butterfly knives from my back pockets to the front because something isn’t right. The air tastes stale, even here among the trees. The light settles dully in the sky; it’s the color of cat vomit. Dry lightning cracks white as bones across the sky, and the trees I’ve slept in for ten months shudder in their earth.

  Maybe, he doesn’t have to wait for the play to begin. Maybe, the spell that will suck in the audience isn’t what triggers the splitting of worlds. My dad taught me—that was what my mom always told him—but if he’s wrong …

  I have to get out of the city. Now.

  Racing for the entrance, the cement jarring my legs with every thud of rubber sole on pavement, I blink hard twice to bring up a miniaturized projection of my bank account. Good—I have enough money for a taxi. No way am I going into the subway. Too close to the sewers. My dad once showed me pictures of what a group of people descended from this guy named Pickman had let out of the New York sewers. Who knows if they’re still there or not?

  Phantom pain heats the stripes on my arm from the gug kisses. “Kisses” is such a nice, cozy term. It doesn’t describe what it’s like to have a seven-inch, leathery slit filled with teeth latch onto your skin and punch through flesh to find muscle and bone; what it’s like to feel their acid pumping into your body to turn you into soup so they can suck you up like a spider.

  No sewers. No subways. Nothing underground ever. I’m taking a cab.

  Dashing through the open gates, I give a little skip-jump and yelp, “Taxi!” The need to move, the drive to run—it burns in my blood like liquid lightning. My hands are shaking so hard, I almost drop my backpack.

  A fat yellow cab slides up to the curb. That bilious sky stares down at me; I can feel it, like imps clambering along my back to dig their claws into my spine. I jump in the cab and tell the driver—a young man with a mane of locs and sun-kissed skin—to get me to Pelham Manor, a village in Westchester. It’s far enough away that I can keep an eye on the growing eldritch storm brewing over New York without getting sucked up in the frenzy of sex and homicide that’s going to sweep through the streets like blood.

  Assuming nothing tries to eat me.

  I close my eyes and slow my heart and my breathing enough to transfer half the money wirelessly to the taxi’s cyber account. The meter dings, registering the payment. The cab lumbers away from the curb.

  Have to get out of the city. Pelham has a railroad station. I can take a train from there to Essex County. It’s a short walk to Arkham from the Essex County Station. I can be home in a few hours. Hopefully, I will live that long. I don’t know what’s going to come crawling out of the widening split in the world.

  I pay the driver the rest of his money when we reach the station in Pelham.

  “You gonna be okay, Miss?” he asks, frowning.

  I nod. It’s almost five in the evening. I have to trigger the warning now. People will have eight hours—seven hours to midnight and the hour during the first act of that cursed play—to get out of the city. I don’t have to worry about people seeing it. Everyone will see it.

  Hastur, I think. I think it hard, hard enough the syllables beat like a heart in my mouth, under my tongue, demanding to be said out loud instead of growled silently in my skull. I feel the code activate, electricity jumping from my coding site to satellites to servers all over New York.

  The driver smiles. “Okay, then. You take care out there.”

  My smile makes my face feel like it’s going to crack in half, but I make sure to give him one. He seems nice enough. No reason to be rude.

  As I buy a train ticket from a gnarled old ticket master, I activate my Xplore Viewer and zoom in on the aerial view of New York City.

  My warning is everywhere: neon letters screaming in slashes of toxic yellow dripping down the sides of skyscrapers and billboards like alien blood; pictures of the horrific things that are going to spread across the city once midnight hits. My code even hacked the feed for the Times Square Jumbotron.

  I know a lot of people won’t listen. But I also know a lot of people will. The people of New York have learned to trust the Ghost because the Ghost exposes the lies and the hidden dangers. I was the one who warned about faulty flu viruses last year; about the crumbling footbridge kids needed to stop biking across and that the city needed to cordon off and repair; about the corrupt school superintendent sexually coercing her students and the district that tried to hide it. Maybe the older folks won’t listen, but my generation, they know the Ghost, and they’ll know to get out.

  This is the only thing I can do.

  I watch the chaos spread through the city from my viewer. People scramble for their cars. They fl
ood the subways. I warned against that in my message, but for some, desperation leads to recklessness. It isn’t even midnight when blood first splashes crimson on the steps leading to the tunnels. Fights break out on the streets. Windows shatter under blows from cinderblocks and bags of bricks.

  Blood seeps between my fingers. Only when the warm wetness drips over my skin do I realize I’m digging my nails into my palms.

  I have to believe I did the right thing. I have to believe people are getting out before the real violence starts.

  My mom is the only person I know who ever saw what happens when the play The King in Yellow is performed and Hastur’s avatar steps into the world—and only because of what my great-grandmother recorded of the aftermath before her death.

  My mom was the last to see the ruins of Carcosa, a world circling the distant star Aldebaran. The star I watch every night. I always wondered, was it really like my mom described when she used to sing me to sleep?

  Along the shore the cloud waves break,

  The twin suns sink behind the lake,

  The shadows lengthen in Carcosa …

  Earth will be like Carcosa soon. Delay all I can, nothing will change that. Hastur cannot be stopped. But he can be fought, and I’ll fight him: a specter against a monster.

  I promise myself this when I get off the train at the Essex Station. I laser etch it into my brain with every step through the strangely peaceful countryside surrounding Arkham.

  It’s the peace that warns me. Arkham is never peaceful. Too many nightmares call the decrepit town home. Too many secrets fester in the shadows of the gambrel roofs.

  Something isn’t right. I keep my knife in my fist.

  The golden-skinned taxi driver is waiting for me at the gates to my dad’s old house. I don’t see his cab. Just him, warm brown eyes and gold-kissed skin and dreadlocks dark as midnight. And I realize this has been too easy.

  “Welcome home, Casilda Carter.”

  Casilda. My mother’s name—and her mother, and her mother’s mother, and on and on. He knows who I am and how I can hinder him.

  I know who he is, too.

  Clutching my knife, I bare my teeth in a smile.

  “You honor me with your oh-so-lofty presence, King Hastur.”

  The King in Yellow laughs.

  He doesn’t laugh long.

  Counting this story, LA Knight’s short work has been published five times (the others are a post-apocalyptic western short, a poem published in a magazine and reprinted in a “Best of” anthology, and a Persian sword-and-sandal short inspired by One Thousand and One Nights) and has placed in several HarperCollins online contests. She has written one novel for adults and four fantasies for teens. Nearly all the science and body-modifications mentioned in this story are either currently available or will be (though perhaps not cheaply) in the next two to three years.

  Nimrod’s Tongue

  Cody Goodfellow

  Six minutes after liftoff from the Deimos complex, I climbed out of my coma-pod and murdered my two surviving crewmates. One of them was faking the coma, and it got ugly, but she would’ve done the same to me. She screamed gibberish in my face as I strangled her while Eater of Shadows watched and jeered at us in synthesized Atlantean dialect. She didn’t even recognize her own name …

  Wasn’t it Goethe who said that any time a person speaks and someone else understands is a little miracle? I grew up watching so much shit on TV where the aliens spoke our language. The first time I met aliens, I was terrified beyond belief to discover they had their own language, their own thoughts, their own utterly inscrutable way of perceiving the world, themselves, you. The impulse to crush them as something offensive never quite goes away.

  I had to do it. Even though we were able to cooperate enough to launch the ship, we couldn’t abide the stink of each other, couldn’t stand the nauseous nonsense of each other’s speech, couldn’t stomach the insect-tickle of each other’s incomprehensible thoughts, like ants running ’round the surface of your brain.

  I’m keeping an oral diary because I’m afraid that I’ll pause in writing this down and look at the preceding paragraphs and recognize not a word, not a letter. I won’t listen to it when I’m done. Don’t expect anyone to hear it or understand, but it has to be said.

  If you can understand this at all, then maybe I’ve gone insane, and that would give me relief. But maybe it’s because you and I are the only ones still sane out of the whole fucked human race.

  I was the closest to a rogue archaeologist the Deaver-Wei Expedition could find on Mars out of two hundred thousand colonists. The only funding for archaeological digs on Earth was for rabid collectors who no longer bothered to hide in the black market. We were done, relegated to the dead science annex with the geographers.

  I came to Mars as a surveyor and got certified in oxygen-farm engineering when the surveying ran out. I was doing construction in Mariner City’s crater arcologies and considering selling a kidney and whatever else to go back home when Dag Strothers summoned me up to Phobos.

  Dag had assembled a team to study Mars from its larger moon to find the Martian sister of the Babel Tower. We had to identify potential candidate stones and put our technological ears to them until we heard Liu Wei’s voice coming from one of them.

  Strothers ran the operation the same way he ran Liu Wei’s shipping. A real live war hero, he had turned communication satellites into tactical nukes and dropped them on Cheneyville and half the security compounds on Mars, ending the corporate occupation in four hours. Javier Kroll was our systems expert. Ari Leitner was our medic and xenobiologist. Dr. Khadijatul Kubra was our astrophysicist, charged with the unenviable task of proving Liu Wei’s delusion and replicating it in a lab. Bedjina Pierre was an anthropologist, neurolinguist, and the reason I stayed.

  Liu Wei made a penny every time someone on Mars breathed and was one of the first to prospect in the asteroid belt.

  Wei could afford to indulge in his fetishes for Western cultural junk. He had not so much joined as purchased an American UFO cult and was using his fortune to prove its crazy ideas as scientific fact.

  Horton Deaver rode a Section 8 out of the Navy after a nervous breakdown on the submarine USS Barracuda and retired to the Mojave Desert where he almost immediately started hearing voices again. The sounds of the deep ocean had driven him mad; now, he believed he could hear the voices of ancient men, voyagers in outer space, and it gave him peace.

  Under a great rock, he built his church. A single 300-ton boulder of vaguely iridescent labradorite, Deaver claimed in his increasingly bizarre pamphlets that an unusual configuration of silicon crystals in the rock made it a “cosmic whisper dish” that focused thoughts and speech for instant transmission across time and space. He claimed they were not manmade, but neither were they natural.

  He believed that all the terrestrial planets and Jovian moons had identical stones and that the inhabitants of each had a rapport with the others—that the asteroid belt was an inhabited planet once and that it had been destroyed in a war around the time of the Cambrian extinction on Earth.

  Deaver tunneled out a dwelling underneath his rock, his Babel Tower. He listened with all manner of equipment to the music of the spheres and transmitted his own thoughts and entreaties. Slowly, the mad hermit attracted a following of like-minded kooks, and by the ’60s, Babel Tower became the focus of an annual UFO festival and Aquarian freakout.

  Thousands claimed to have heard the voices, and glitchy, questionable recordings cropped up everywhere, claiming to be the sounds of the Grays or the Lizard People or Quetzalcoatl. When Deaver died in ’82, his wife carried on his work as the high priestess of an absurd UFO cult, the Babelians, who dropped acid until they lost all language and engaged in glossolalian gibbering to try to rediscover the mother tongue of the universe.

  Their last adventure spawned the infamous Deaver Ping recording. The Babelian faithful had taken to continuously playing Deaver’s lectures under the rock and scanning the
heavens for an echo. But rather than publish or even reproduce their works, the group devolved in your traditional fringer murder-suicide pact in 1993. It didn’t even make national news.

  Nobody ever humored the Babelians by testing their claims until Wei bought the remaining federal land in the Mojave Desert and so acquired the Babel Tower. The stone still somehow demonstrated incredible conduction properties unrelated to ordinary granite. The celebrated crystal lattice eluded even microscopic detection. Whether Lu Wei was a true-blue fanatic or just saw a kernel of truth in the weird phenomenon that might become a viable subspace communication system, he went all in.

  While Strothers and I freebased every Martian geological satellite survey in the records, we bombarded the whole planet with radar and ground-penetrating sonar, looking for a twin to Babel Tower. We even combed it with lasers, hoping to trigger telltale fluorescence. But our job was easy compared to Kroll’s.

  As Liu Wei read continuously for six-hour stretches under Babel Tower on Earth, Kroll and Kubra scanned from upper atmosphere for an instantaneous ping using six of his own satellites and buying up time on everyone else’s.

  He paid us to do this for three months. It was the kind of pointless, infuriating job I would’ve worked to get myself fired from if I didn’t desperately need it and if I wasn’t in love. Bedjina and I courted and were married.

  Security was tight. We were searched and scanned for implants before we went up to Deimos. I remember staring at her when she got sick right after launch off the Elysium Ladder. She whispered a prayer in a smoky French accent and used a sick-sack. Jaw clenched to show she knew I was watching, she dug in the bag to take out a tiny medallion and a leather pouch. I asked, as respectfully as I could, if it was dirt from Mars. It was dirt from Earth, she told me, and to the look in my eye, she added her beliefs were nothing to mock when we were going to try to find the ocean in a seashell.