The Old Ones were back, and Great Cthulhu drinking up the vast Pacific in his vaster gullet was the least of the legion. The Poles ignited, burning with a dark electronic fire. New place-names sprang up. Lake Ohio. Chesuncook Pit. Transyl- Pennsylvania. Kalifornia. Nyarlathotep again strode the whelmed Earth, reverse-engineering centuries of human civilization. It was terrible.
Mankind stood prepared to battle this hellish host — only to learn that the invaders regarded man as parasites on their newly reclaimed world.
Some said they merely wished to exterminate us. But there was more to it. Far more.
I was in a unique position to observe it all. Never mind my name. Call me ORV 004 — Operational Remote Viewer #4. I was attached to the External Threats Directorate of the Cryptic Events Evaluation Section of the National Reconnaissance Office.
“External threats” was our euphemism for extra-solar or other-dimensional concerns.
The Old Ones kept us hopping. But that was Back in the Day. Now there was no day — only endless night.
We had our first post-change briefing session by guttering candlelight, like a coven of damned witches.
The Director kept it simple. “I don’t want to hear any crap about end times. This isn’t the Rapture or Ascension. It’s a goddamned invasion, and we’re running a counterinsurgency out of this office.” Pounding his desktop, he growled, “I want intelligence — local and non-local.” He looked at me, the only surviving ORV.
“On it,” I said.
“Get cracking.”
“I’ll need a tasker and a monitor,” I pointed out.
Remote Viewing is an intelligence methodology devised in the 1970s for special military applications. One definition calls it “The ability to perceive, by purely mental means, persons, places and things usually inaccessible to normal senses, regardless of time, distance or shielding.” I was trained under Department of Defense RV protocols, at a sleepy place nestled in the Virginia foothills called the Monroe Institute.
The secret of Remote Viewing is to blind the viewer to the target. If you have no idea what you’re supposed to look at, your imagination can’t run away with you.
No deduction, induction, or adduction possible. Just pure psychic signal.
I lay in the dark and listened to the monitor’s voice. He had no clue as to the target any more than I did. The tasker simply handed him the coordinates, and the monitor read them to me. That way I couldn’t inadvertently access his mind and glean clues by common telepathy.
“Your coordinates are 8646 7944. Target is to be viewed in present time. Good luck.”
I went in. It was like walking through a dreamscape. Fleeting multisensory impressions swept across my mind’s eye. I scanned for resolution.
“I see a black blot,” I reported. “Huge. The size of a city.”
“Can confirm blot.”
I probed the image. “Blot was once a major city. City is no longer there. Not even ruins. I don’t even perceive a soil base. ”
“Keep going,” the monitor encouraged.
“Nothing exists there. It’s like a drop out in reality. There’s no matter there — as we understand matter. It’s vibrating on another level — slower, colder, darker.”
I shuddered in contact with the anomaly. That told me I had successfully bilocated to the target area. My senses felt like they were swimming through static.
The monitor commanded, “Move to a point northwest of the center of the black area, please.”
I found myself perceptually at a far different place. Something familiar about it. I reported my aesthetic perceptions.
“Concept of factory. Sense of purpose. Darkness and secrecy around the latter. I see beings. Bipeds. A mixture of human and not. Decoding as centaurs, but not centaurs. No horse attributes. Some type of bioengineered half-human hybrids. They function as slaves and slave-drivers.”
“Enter factory.”
I tried. I really did. But I was blocked. I felt an impenetrable membrane.
It reminded me of the time I viewed the current location of the Ark of the Covenant. I got in, but something forcibly ejected me. Something powerful.
“Denied area,” I reported.
“Recon vicinity for impressions, Number 4.”
The ground gave up nothing but a cold staticky energy. But when I shifted my focus skyward, I detected something.
“Sense of clouds above. But these are not meteorological clouds. They pulsate, then brighten. No recognizable atmospheric phenomena correlate to these changes. But I sense a connection between the activity in the factory and the clouds above.”
“Describe this connection.”
After a period of struggling with inchoate impressions, I reported, “Cannot.”
“Are you blocked, Number 4?”
“Negative. Feels more like I lack a frame of reference to comprehend the exact nature of the activity within as relates to the overhanging clouds.”
“Okay. Come back.”
When I attempted to sit up, I felt like a truck had hit me. My brain expanded against the cavern of my brain pan like a fat balloon. I closed my chakras down as best I could.
By candlelight, I wrote my report. Secondary impressions of a rendering plant danced in my head, but I left them out as imaginal artifacts.
The director had me in his office within the hour. My report was on his desk.
“Number 4, I want you to recon this so-called factory.”
“In person, sir?”
“Only someone with your clairvoyant abilities can get close without detection. Determine what’s going on in there.”
“But — ”
“This is not a request. You are not a volunteer. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir.” It was a death sentence, but how could one care? The entire race was under a death watch.
The locality was outside the former Richmond, Virgina. A short ride. I took a train. Some were still running.
As the engine pulled me through the unrelieved night, I looked up at the star-starved sky. A narrow face stared down from the clouds. It was a confusion of luminous contra blue and purple, suggesting a sharp-featured demon with a round open mouth. Too round. Like a black orifice.
Once you train up to Master Remote Viewer, you are always in viewing mode. The only question is whether or not your inner perceptions reach the conscious mind’s level.
This time they were. I had the distinct feeling that the demon of the clouds was looking exclusively at me, and would swallow me if he could. Was it a presentiment — or a warning?
The demon passed from view. But I still felt its hollow eyes upon me. They reminded me of those nightmarish canine apparitions.
The train let me off short of the dormant crater that had been Richmond. I walked from there. It was like a trek through a minefield of the unknown. Even the leafless locust trees had a stark look, as if shocked by their new habitation.
Three miles along, I encountered trouble breathing. I backed up and worked around it. No-oxygen zones. They were growing. The Old Ones didn’t need oxygen, people said. I wondered if the factory was dedicated to atmosphere conversion.
Even as the thought glimmered my mind, I intuited that the truth was more dire. Far more dire. But I could not conceive how much.
People filed along the road, coming from somewhere, but going nowhere.
Everyone understood that, so talk was shunned. I was reminded of Springsteen’s mournful end-of-the-world song, “The Ghost of Tom Joad.” Welcome to the new world order.
You don’t fully understand time and timelessness until the sun and moon and the familiar planets are no longer there to help mark the celestial procession. Against a fading blue web spun by the star-quenching Sothis Radiant, Nug and Yeb careened crazily through the vacant sky, confusing matters.