The ancient serpent man bared his abdomen. “We don’t have time for your human sympathies, Ouest. Do what you must; bring this to an end.”
The knife flashed and sliced through the green-scaled flesh, leaving a trail of crimson in its wake. As Ouest’s left hand completed its arc, his right plunged into the wound and sank deep. Ouest grunted and twisted his wrist, searching inside the body cavity of his companion. Suddenly, he stopped and a wry look covered his face. With a sense of satisfaction, Doctor Erbert Ouest, Lord of the Ghilan, withdrew his hand from the gut of his dying friend and brought the Shining Trapezohedron into the light.
Some amongst the court moved against him, but the shoggoth, following its master’s final orders, lashed out at anything that moved, enveloping its victims in fleshy pockets of digestive juices and rings of restraining tendrils. The others fell back and some made for the exits, in a last attempt at survival. The Hydran Sisters fell to the ground and began swearing allegiance to the Sepia Prince, wailing for forgiveness. Unfortunately, their ministrations fell on deaf ears.
Ouest took the great crystal in both hands and brought it to eye level. His eyes were locked onto its facets. Through them, he could see the billions that comprised the human race. He struggled to speak the words, to perform the rite, to forge the connection with the shard of Azathoth that the Progenitors had secreted within. The chaos thing in the crystal crawled up out of its prison, into the consciousness of Ouest and, through him, nearly the entirety of the human species. For too long it had been confined, forced to assume shapes both many and multiform. Now it would be one with Man, and Man would be one with it and themselves.
Ouest faded from existence, replaced by the great, dark form that rose up in his place. It was no longer human, but rather, a monstrous amalgamation of Humanity. The Black Man strode across the space, his three-lobed burning eye challenging all those who would oppose him. As he claimed the Carcosan throne, the shoggoth hed planting the black, coral tomb in place and sealed it with an Elder Sign. A fraction of the human thing, a facet that had once been Ouest, mourned the loss of Cthylla, but took comfort in the eternal, frozen tableau of the King in Yellow clawing at the inside of the sepulchre, his crown still ensconced on his brow.
And as the Black Pharaoh, the human singular, took his place amongst the god-things of the cosmos, the Yellow Sines fell and the dreaming, five-fold consciousnesses hidden in the wastes of Earth finally woke. They cried out in alien voices the name of their ultimate creation: the Man-God Nyarlathotep!
INKY, BLINKY, PINKY, NYARLATHOTEP
By Nick Mamatas
Nick Mamatas is the author of several novels, including Sensation and two Lovecraftian works: Move Under Ground and, with Brian Keene, The Damned Highway. With Ellen Datlow he co-edited the Bram Stoker Award-winning anthology Haunted Legends. His fiction and editorial work has also been edited for the Hugo, World Fantasy, Shirley Jackson, and International Horror Guild awards, and his short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lovecraft Unbound, Long Island Noir, and many other anthologies and magazines.
THE OLD ONES thought they were so smart, tapping the Earth’s mantle to make the environment of the planet more amenable to themselves and deadly to their rival species, Humanity. ‘Rival’ perhaps is the wrong word—‘idiot germ-things’ would be apropos. Humans were little more than gooey amoebae to the Old Ones, but humans were also progenitors of the New Ones. So, when the Old Ones took the planet, all the humans died, but the one billion New Ones were already gone, safely beamed up toward a waiting spacecraft—one the size of a waffle iron—parked 1.5 million kilometers beyond the Earth in the handy-dandy L2. A little solar wind got to pushing on the sunshield and we were off!
Newspace was a lot like old space. Well, posters of old space stacked atop one another and constantly shuffled and re-shuffled. In the little waffle-iron spacecraft was the thunderous Niagara, any number of mansions on emerald hills, all piled up in a corner with Escheresque staircases going downwise and anti-spinward, marmalade skies and airships in the shape of giant, open-mouthed fish, the Pyramids of Egypt poking out from every horizon, and long, dark hallways in blue and purple neon everywhere, absolutely everywhere, as this is what the New Ones thought VR would look like, back when they were all children.
And the New Ones had fun playing like children. As it turns out, virtually all problems faced by Humanity, save the million-year war with the Old Ones, were resource problems. No Old Ones, no resources, no problems. Virtually no problems, anyway, which is an awful pun, it’s true. So, the New Ones spent their days naked and immortal, writing songs no fleshy ear could comprehend, inventing new languages to describe disembodied emotional states, engaging in virtual nucleic exchange and reproducing wildly to the humming databases, with beings unheard of and indescribable.
The waffle iron was busy, too. Zipping around space and whatnot, eating dark matter and printing copies of itself, in case something happened to it. And oh, yes, something was happening to it. Naturally, the poor little waffle iron didn’t quite understand that the something happening was the drive to laze-lathe meteoroids into replicas of itself. Oh, and then, within the guts of the waffle iron, ghosts started showing up everywhere, upsetting and terrifying the New Ones with their googly eyes and their siren howls. And they loved to eat the New Ones. Beautiful, tow-headed, pink children with cloth diapers and bows in their wispy hair. Lovely children with rich, brown skin and smiles to light up a room. Obnoxious children who sat on the couch all day, pretending to kill with their minds for fun. Children who flailed their hands about and slammed their heads against the wall because they saw the wrong kind of penny. Ghosts were indiscriminate—the ugly and the exquisite both were consumed, leaving naught but wrinkled husks behind.
You have to realize that words like eyes and children, and even husks, make little sense; it’s being dumbed down for you and the quaint bag of chemical reactions you keep in that bone bowl. We’re talking a density matrix, here. So, when a character is introduced, as one is about to be, understand that you’d be just as accurate, were you to imagine her as a blurry, yellow ball of light floating around in a black field, instead of as a person. Which is to say, you’d be much more accurate, after all.
So, let’s make our child slightly older than many of the victims. Let’s put her in a dark hallway, with lights running in a single row down the middle of the floor. Who is she? It hardly matters. Let’s just say that she was a handsome woman—call her “Lindsay”. That’s a better name than “qubit”, one endlessly pulsing about in a Bloch sphere. Chestnut hair, a strong Hapsburg chin, wide eyes. Toned limbs, born without defect, just out of her teens, as that’s a very heroic age. Clever, too. Clever enough to turn and run when that great sheet of red turned the corner and swooped toward her, howling like a police siren. She was so clever that she found out the unbelievable truth, or a brief sliver of it, anyhow. Here’s what she had to say before her…well, not death. (How can a fundamental particle encoded with information based on its superpositions die? Rhetorical question: There’s a way, of course. Heat death of the universe, anyone? Wait for it!)
Who won the Second World War? Or, should I ask, who can take credit for winning the Second World War? Americans will point to D-Day and storming the beaches at Normandy, then maybe Hiroshima. The Russians nod grimly toward Stalingrad. Even little Greece has a claim—resistance to the Axis delayed German’s invasion of Russia for six weeks. For the nerds, it was Turing and the Ultra Secret that won the war. Everyone’s the hero of their own story.The same with the war against the Old Ones. Was it the armies that held back the monsters for the precious few hours who won the war, the scientists who developed the first Q-chips, or the Indonesian and South Korean workers who mass produced them? The artists and writers who inspired a species with dreams of escape and rescue? In the end, it hardly matters. We won and Newspace was our prize. Humanity couldn’t defeat the Old Ones militarily, and their technology was indistinguishable from magic, but we still won, by evolving past the strategic goals of the war. So, they got the Earth and cracked it open. Big deal. So, seven billion people died. Big deal. It’s not as though wars are won and lost over a bodycount toteboard. We had everything Humanity ever created up here in Newspace, available at whim and nearly infinitely fungible. We don’t need planets, anymore. The Old Ones still do.The ghosts are…problematic. We didn’t even realise they were ghosts, at first. We called them “bugs”, since they seemed like glitches in programming, the unintended consequences of a trillion lines of code. But I was the first one to get a look at them and live to tell the story, so they took the shape of the story I told. Eyes and a bright jet of light are all I remembered, and that’s all we thought they were.Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and Clyde. There are four of them. We control everything about Newspace, but unfortunately, you can’t unthunk a gunk, as it were, so the ghosts continued to appear and consume. We raised ramparts and armies, which were useless. We whipped up proton packs and crossed the streams, which didn’t work, either. Then up went the ziggurats and we stained the staircases with the blood of the heartless dead, hoping that, at least, we’d get to choose who died to appease the ghosts. The ghosts didn’t rap on tables in our darkened rooms, or move the planchettes under our fingers; they just ate and ate and ate us all up.Clyde was the key, I was sure of it. He was different than the others, if only because we’d made him different by giving him the name. I was the one who figured out what we had to do. Think more about the ghosts; think more about that old game. Give them an environment to run rampant in, all black and neon blue. I volunteered to change myself—genetic engineering is a snap in Newspace. I would eat the motherfuckers back. That’s how I was going to win the war against the ghosts.Spoiler alert! Lindsay lost. Newspace was overwritten with labyrinths and warp-alleys, and Lindsay lost those toned limbs, had nozzles shoved into every orifice to blow her up into a sphere, and set loose. It was ridiculous, really. A childhood daydream-ritual made out of pop culture she wasn’t even around for. Newspace was nothing but an agglomeration of the easily Googlable, after all. Some Rapture of the Nerds this turned out to be…for them.