before, or one with numbers that faint bluish-green tone.
I had coffee in front of me, black, half-full. The waitress swept into my vision, a mess of limp brown hair, her wide eyes staring disappointment and boredom at me. Her nametag said ‘Chelsea.’ She wore a dark button under it, with what looked like three cat’s pupils in a triangle pattern, but fat slits of orange rather than the normal black.
“Still OK with just the coffee?”
I nodded to the button, certain I’d seen it somewhere before. “Yes. Thank you.”
Her sigh was very audible as she moved down the counter. She probably thought I was some kind of shut-in. In a way, I was. My world had pretty much become work and sleep and more work. I rarely left the base to do anything, so I was kind of surprised to find myself here. The life of a US Cyber Command programmer. I twisted around in my seat. Was this where Jean and I had come for lunch?
The walls were tiled in stark white, punctuated by the occasional black square. Apparently, they ran a no-frills operation, as there were no placemats or condiments at the tables. There was no one else in the place, except for a very large, black-haired woman in one of the green booths. She stopped playing on her phone, and looked up at me with baleful eyes that had seen too many phishing texts or Angry Birds or whatever. Hey, lady, I’m one of the people that keeps Iranian serpents from lunging through your screen and ripping your face off. Or something. She continued to stare until I looked away. There was something wrong with her eyes, like they were missing definition somehow. I couldn’t make it out, and didn’t want to keep looking – not because I was concerned about being rude, but because she was kind of creepy.
The windows that made up most of the outer wall of the place were fogged by the steam and the rain. There were people moving outside, but they were smudges more than shadows. When I turned to look for the waitress, thinking I might actually eat something, she was nowhere to be found. I tried to catch the cook’s eye, but he was entranced by his grill. I turned around again.
The woman was still staring. I could just make out the reflection of the clock in her eyes.
12:21
I was looking into the depths of Dylath, lines of code showing me the strange path to the land beyond the servers. I rubbed my eyes. The time was there, in the corner of my screen. I was pretty sure it meant p.m., as in ‘afternoon’, but the operating system we used didn’t bother with such niceties and, despite this being a military base, it wasn’t using military time either. I was tired, but not as much as if I’d come back here straight from the diner. I’d gone home to sleep, like a normal drone. Must have. I dimly recalled the large, staring woman, a distant memory that I grasped for. Had I dreamed her?
I looked up. Hunched shoulders and indeterminate brows made up the rest of Onyx division. Their faces were hidden behind screens, faded smears of light in the shadow. I didn’t see Jean anywhere. I’d kind of been hoping to spot her red hair as a confirmation that it wasn’t all light and shadow and invisible faces.
I stopped for a moment as it hit me that I didn’t really know my co-workers that well. There was Jean, of course, and Kleiner. His first name was some traditional German contraption (Reinhard?) but everyone just called him ‘Kleiner’, or ‘the compiler guy’, since that’s what he was responsible for. He wasn’t the only one – I had access to it as well – but he just happened to live and breathe putting everyone’s parts together. I was more about finding new parts to make the system work. Exploring, if you wanted to be romantic about it, even though there’s very little romantic about security programming.
I looked down the hallway. The operating lights set in the ceiling and floor almost seemed friendlier where I was, as if I could escape something here. But there was nothing to threaten me. Just my veteran chair, my fellow (faceless?) programmers, and the susurrus of keyboards, building Dylath in the interest of all Americans and even humanity itself.
That was what I remembered Roger saying, anyway. I wasn’t sure if I believed it. We were trying to protect the people in Onyx, but there were other programs in Cyber Command that were more aggressive. I wondered if anyone else on the team puzzled over our orders, and whether they just came from Roger. How did we define ‘security,’ anyway? Was it beating the enemy to the punch because we knew what was coming, or building protection from the unknown? Both?
I had multiple windows open to various segments of the program as they were being written. Somehow, they had arranged themselves in a pattern like bricks in a wall – or in a pyramid. The imaginary picture came through so starkly that I knew I’d seen it somewhere before, like the cat’s eye button. A magenta sky, behind stepped pyramids with gargoyles mounted on their levels. The pyramids seemed Aztec or something else Mesoamerican, but the gargoyles screamed Western Europe. Or they would have, if they could have screamed. They were faceless, however, lacking features entirely. They were black and bat-winged, and they were moving. The sky pulsed with a presence that hung just beyond it.
I closed my eyes tightly, getting after-images of white code against the ebony screen, and willed away the dream image of... wherever that was. I was definitely working too much. I turned to look down the hallway again, and Roger was standing there, watching me and smiling. His grin stretched wider as he saw me notice him. I nodded to him and turned back to my monitor, not wanting to think about how long he might have been there, or why. The huge stone blocks were still on the screen, suffused with the crawling script of technology.
7:56
“Uhhhhh! Oh, Godddd!”
Jean moaned in my ear as I gripped her hair and thrust into her. I’d invited her back to my Spartan little domicile, where we’d made the best human connection that either of us had experienced in quite some time. I was pretty sure that’s how it had gone, anyway. I felt her writhing beneath me as we received the input/output that all programmers want and sometimes even experience – slimy and hot and wet and desperate. The alarm clock flashed its stoic, blue-green numbers, unimpressed by our activity.
I saw a flicker of movement past the window, and imagined someone watching us. My mind really should have been focused on other things, but the hair on my neck was standing up at the thought that someone might have been observing our little tryst. It was both unnerving and mildly exciting.
“Uh! Uh! Stephen!”
I closed my eyes, and saw the face of the large woman in the diner, her expression accusing and questioning at the same time. Her eyes were tinged with yellow, the pupils and irises just solid black spots. An image formed in them of the pyramids and towers of Dylath – blocks of immaculate granite, covered in the code that was the true language of the world. We were building it for him, and his father. I felt utterly removed. I had no idea who he or his father really were, or why it should matter.
I opened my eyes as Jean howled and clung to me. It sounded like she was speaking in tongues, but the words seemed to have meaning, rather than being gibberish. She was telling me something – or at least it felt that way. My body shuddered. Excitement, fear, or simply finishing? It was hard to tell, but I was spent, regardless. I rolled off of her, both of us heaving in release.
She sighed. “Mmmm. Been waiting for that.”
“Have you?”
“I don’t get out much more than you do, and let’s just say that there aren’t that many guys on base that I’d like to show my code to.” She was a programmer, taking my concepts and implementing them as Onyx demanded. “Besides, you always send me the interesting stuff.”
I got up on one elbow and looked down at her. She was flushed, but somehow still pale, her hair arrayed in a frenzy of still motion. “How do you figure that one? I didn’t think I was actually being that original with my designs.”
Her eyes narrowed a little, and the corners of her mouth turned up. “Really? I thought they were transformative. Real ‘reaching into other dim
ensions’ kinda stuff. Which is the point, right?”
I frowned, remembering the vision of the pyramids. I was about to ask if she’d ever seen anything like that when something else occurred to me. “Do you know any other languages?”
She raised her eyebrows. “You mean, like other than Haskell and the Cs...?”
“No. Real human languages.” I half-grinned. “When you were going off there, you were talking in a language that I didn’t recognize. Hebrew, maybe?” Stereotypes were sometimes instinctive, and not always wrong. I already knew that she was a natural redhead.
Her eyes narrowed again, and she cocked her head forward a little to look at me intently. “No. I don’t speak Hebrew. Just English. I’m not sure what I might have been saying. I, uh, lose my head a little sometimes, when things are really good.” She returned my grin. Then something clearly dawned on her. “Although... since I’ve been thinking about it so much lately, it might have been your language. Your code.”
7:57
I sat at the counter with my coffee. The diner had become my retreat, in a way. It was the one place where I felt that that no one could bother me. Why that didn’t include my own apartment was hard to fathom. Ever since the moment when I’d felt that Jean and I were being watched, the sense of vulnerability had persisted. It just no longer felt safe. ‘They’ could find me there, whoever ‘they’ happened to be.
Of course, I’d also spent a fair amount of time trying to process Jean’s odd comment about ‘my language.’ She seemed to think it was obvious, and said that it probably wasn’t safe to discuss outside of the base. Since then, she’d apparently been avoiding me at work, in meetings or what-have-you.
I swirled the black sludge in my cup, hoping that my reflection might give me some answers. What language had I invented to convey my programming visions to the rest of Onyx, precisely? I couldn’t remember taking any great leap forward. There were certainly moments where it seemed like the frameworks were basically writing themselves, but that hadn’t required any great flashes of insight. I could have been channeling someone else, for all I knew.
I swallowed. The thought stuck with me. A pair of very dark eyes stared back at me from the cup. A glimpse of motion pulled my attention to the windows, where a small crowd shifted in the darkness. I didn’t remember there being a bus station near this place... and then I saw her.
The large, dark-haired woman was in her booth again. She was staring intently at her phone, stubby fingers fluttering over it. I could see her murmuring occasionally, although her face gave no sign as to whether she was reacting to something on the phone – no one seemed to use them to actually talk to other people any more – or simply commentating to herself. In this place, the chances were even.
She looked up at me, and held my gaze again. There was a familiarity in her expression, and it wasn’t just that we’d had this test of wills before. She continued to murmur, even as we stared at each other. It was almost like a chant, and I could nearly make out the words...
2:24
My face stared out of the bathroom mirror at me. I didn’t know whether Jean was still in the bedroom or not. Sometimes she skipped out before I could return, something about not wanting our relationship to get too cozy given that we were still sharing office space. With the water running as loudly as it was, I couldn’t hear anything either way. Why had I started the shower? I was completely dressed. I also wasn’t sure how I knew what the time was. Perhaps it just seemed like 2 am. Why would I be at home otherwise? It’s not like we ever had days off at the Command. I couldn’t remember taking one, at least. The steam from the shower was beginning to coat the mirror, my face slowly melting into a blank smudge.
I shook my head and looked to the doorway. The door to my bedroom was just across the hall, and I heard a soft moan from inside. Had I looked because of the sound, or had it happened because I looked? I went toward the bedroom, leaving the water running.
The room was dark, and there was a quivering lump on the bed. I felt a burst of relief that this was, in fact, Jean still sleeping off an earlier encounter. The lump moaned again. She must have been dreaming. I reached out and patted what I thought was her shoulder. As I did so, I noticed that the lump was bigger than I remembered. It shifted under my hand with a noise like gelatin squishing into a bowl. I pulled the blanket back.
The large woman was there, phone in hand, its glow suffusing her face and making the black hollows of her eyes even more prominent. She was naked and drenched in sweat, but she took no notice of me. Instead, she was intently focused on her screen, and occasionally moaning softly in a language that I couldn’t make out. I stood there, blinking, gears churning in my head. Why was she here? Had I imagined Jean while inviting this woman home from the diner? I looked down at her slabs of skin. Varicose veins made blue circuitry across the fishbelly-white peaks and crevasses that shivered in time with her soft exclamations.
Her vast thighs became a mass of tentacles somewhere around what should have been her knees. They were writhing against themselves in a bath of mucus, pulsing with each of her breaths. They appeared to be tattooed with code, which scrolled across them in the same way as when the compiler was rolling – as if she were assembling Dylath in her very being. Not tattoos, then. Her skin was the screen. I recoiled, not just at the sight, but because the feeling growing inside my chest, knifing through the shock and confusion, was inexplicable lust.
One of her tentacles separated from the pack and slithered across the sheets. It slipped over my hand and pinned it to the bed. The code continued to roll, and suddenly her mutterings were much louder. She was chanting, in the same language that Jean had shouted in my ear as she came. Fighting my inclinations, I tugged back, trying to pull my hand free. The tentacle gripped me. I threw myself back with a shout.
The sheets released my hand. I lay there alone, in my bed, most of the covers halfway to the floor. Dreaming. I’d been dreaming... Except that I was fully clothed. I could still hear the water running in the bathroom, and steam drifted through the light across the hall.
10:13
Roger was standing in the center of the room. He seemed taller, as if absorbing the darkness to cast a longer shadow. I still couldn’t see his face well, but I could see his watch quite clearly from where I was. Considering the size of its face, I was surprised that the blue-green numerals were so visible. I hadn’t expected someone of his stature to wear a digital watch, either. Once a tech geek... He didn’t speak to any of the programmers around him, buried in their keyboards, but he did seem to lean in appreciatively over some of them. Maybe I was just trying to humanize him. I felt the need for some human contact after the moment in my bedroom. I needed to reassure myself that it had just been a bad dream, no matter how real it’d seemed. I didn’t see Jean anywhere.
“Have you – have you always been in the intel game, Roger?” I was surprised to hear my own voice.
He turned his head, and looked down at me, as if surprised that I’d shown enough initiative to speak without prompting. “I’ve been in this game for a very long time, yes. ‘Always’ is probably a good way of putting it.”
I had no idea what that meant, so I kept at it. “Ever do any field work, or have you always been stuck behind an office door like me?” I tried to smile as I said it, but it was difficult while being stared at like a dog that wouldn’t heel. His manner relaxed a bit, though.
“Field work. Yes. I spent a lot of time in Egypt. It was long ago.” His eyes looked deep enough to contain the memory of fifty lifetimes. “Much of it isn’t relevant any more.”
I nodded. “Guess that happens. The game changes.”
His gaze finally softened. “Ah, but some things stay very much the same.” He spun on his heel and clicked away towards the hallway. With a jolt, I noticed that the sound wasn’t in time to the movement of his feet.
“He’s lying.”
Jean spoke softly, behind me. She was crouched down by the opening to my cubicle. She’d gone from pale to outright ashen. Her hair didn’t shine any more. I got out of my chair and knelt down beside her.
“Hey. What’s going on with you? What do you mean? Lying about what?”
She looked at me, halfway between irritation and panic. “About everything. About what we do. About who he is. It’s all lies.”
I took her hand. She was clammy. “OK, look. Don’t panic. If there’s really a problem, we’re not military. Cyber Command or not, we’re contractors. We can go outside the chain of command and talk to a superior. Now, tell me, what did you find out?”
Her mouth set in a line. “It’s right in front of you, Stephen. It’s in the program. It’s in Dylath.” She laughed unhappily. “You’d have to go a very long way to speak to his superior, and you probably wouldn’t have much luck.”
She pulled her hand away, and headed to her desk. I could see Dylath on her screen. The windows on her monitor opened out onto that magenta sky, and I caught snippets of something coming from her speakers. I couldn’t tell whether it was feedback or a badly played flute. Her whole screen conveyed menace, as if something was watching me through it.
I turned back to mine. The compiler was still running. The kill switch, F9, would shut it off, bring everything to a null state. It was dangerous to do, without some preparation. Besides, if I brought the compiler down, Kleiner would have a fit. Wherever he was. I probably needed to find him first, and see if he knew more about what we were actually doing. Why didn’t I know? What was happening here?
Cthulhu Lives!: An Eldritch Tribute to H. P. Lovecraft Page 18
