Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Future Lovecraft

He will walk, breathe, and learn by uncontrollable compulsions like great, heaving seas of lava.

Time is running out. She, however, has not given up hope. She believes some message will reach her father, the planets, or at least a stray ship.

Sadly, no help will ever reach her. She is alone , too far from anyone.

We see this all and laugh.

Close now are your iron footfalls. With majestic instancy they beat.

Crouching, she uncoils the segments of her cyborged arm, which then part and configure into two snake-like appendages that input into a wall panel nearby, joining metal to metal. Direct communication with the central brain of the CompuMind is now possible. She feels the totality of the station and, in cyberspace throughout it all, lurking, a foreign mind , hunting and sniffing for her. She bypasses this presence whenever she senses it and secretly whispers with the CompuMind in a shut psyche-lock. Her waiting is almost over, she tells it. The CompuMind warns her it hasn’t stored enough energy, yet.

Her hastily-attached synthetic reader, resembling a goggle, retracts and re-lenses. Visual images, albeit poorly, allow her to focus more closely on the end of the lightless corridor.

Your footfalls have stopped, Brother.

A small scoutdrone is suddenly thrust into her line of vision. The drone makes a horrible screech and red lights begin to flash violently around it. She quickly tries to re-lens, to get a better optical reading, but before she can, we feel the drone’s insides ballooning with your meaty metal, Brother, until it explodes, leaving your gleaming feelers quivering with excitement.

Shards of the scoutdrone hit her, cutting and jabbing into her organic parts. She loses her balance and falls over, hitting her plated head, yet still, she manages to remain hooked to the wall panel.

Though dazed, the primitive lizard brain in her humanity causes her to involuntarily send a shocked, lightning-like panic signal to the CompuMind. It answers in kind.

Reams of corded electricity shoot out from capacitors hidden throughout the corridor and impact on you fantastically. Energy illumes you, flashing and exploding in blinding, brilliant lights. Erratically, you still advance, like a dark planet rising within a molten sun. Her lens refocuses and she sees your shape, full of wrong angles and impossible edges and strangely moving contraptions that should not fit together. You heat up like the core of a red-hot star.

She begins to feel pain. Terrible, burning pain . Her flesh bubbles. Her metal heats.

We hear the CompuMind say, in a tone too emotional for a machine, “Impossible! Impossible! Nineteen dimensional spaces! Curved space collapsing, inconceivable angles surfacing!” And then it goes silent. The charges cease, darkness comes and, at long last, ends the chase.

Now your being is upon her like a looming horror. She feels your electrified presence. She sees your terrible hand reach out to her. She awaits her death bravely.

But nothing happens.

She feels, above, your hand swing past her, like a bird of prey swooping for the kill and then leaving. You pass by her like a planet swing. Uninterested. Walking around her.

She turns to see your footfalls recede and then vanish into a wall. You are now on the outside of the asteroid. Your massive shape is moving away. Your alien intent and intelligence are incomprehensible to her. An intelligence more like ours .

How you yearn to set us free. The blessed impurity of angular Space-Time will soon enter her dimension.

Once, there was a God of love and spirit; now they have fashioned a god of metal and of the outer hells. Her father wanted to destroy those responsible for their ceaseless war and then start anew, yet through our influence he created instead a sentient machine, designed to perpetrate genocide on its own creators.

You are like a scapegoat, Brother. In times long gone, when her species was as yet young, they would lay their sins upon a goat and send it into the wastes to die. This creature bore the sins of the people and they would be cleansed of their sins. You, the Talus Machine, are the last scapegoat come back out of the wastes, bearing their sins back to them.

As she prepares to hunt for you on the asteroid, she hears your voice inside her head, metallic and scratchy, say the ultimate incomprehensibility to her mind: Witness as I fall into the sun and pull the worlds down . Then your heavy feet push away from the asteroid. Senseless, she thinks. Utter, complete senselessness.

Seconds pass and then she begins to feel the pull—the great, gravitational pull of the collapsing sun that will soon form into a fast-burgeoning black hole, from which nothing will escape.

These are the last hours of her species. Unbeknownst to her, on Earth, a few days past, the Great Old Ones rose in madness from their sleep and plunged with worshippers and slaves towards the blasphemous, ultra-dimensional, black planet of Yuggoth. And now, the last portal to Tindalos will soon be opened.

Sasana Xavi VI rushes to a window, horrified. The stars in the night-black sky begin to burn out. The celestial bodies move. The asteroid shifts forcefully towards the sun. She looks one last time and then the lights of the universe go out.

We will soon howl free from the other side of our prison-home. It will soon be time for a new arrangement.

*From Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene , Book V, Canto I.

Avery Cahillhas worn many hats in his life, from working at a cheese factory to Lecturer of Classics. He’s lived in Japan, Italy and Norway, but currently awaits the End Of Time while waging a losing war against fire ants in Florida. He is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop, and his fiction has appeared in Dog Oil Press and Innsmouth Free Press. Tweeting as Falcifer9000 or blogging at scythe-bearing chariot in the 2D world, he shouts into the meaningless void.