Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Future Lovecraft

Eliana rocks in her straps as her ship shakes violently in the gravimetric storm. And then, one of the straps, long overdue for replacement, tears and she is hurtling through the cabin to smash up against the open viewport at the front of the cabin. Her head cracks sharply against the well-reinforced, poly-paned glass. And then there is only silence.

In the darkness in which she floats, there is a voice. It is her son’s. She knows this without thinking. It is as automatic a recognition as the ceaseless, effortless work of breathing. Eyes opening on a vast plane of darkness where no stars lie, she sees herself floating, then comes to stand upright on an unseen sense of solidity beneath her.

Her son is before her, rushing toward her, his small legs pumping quickly across illusory, solid terrain that cannot be seen, but is nonetheless felt. But Eliana has been here, before. She knows the illusion for what it is, even in this state, somewhere between dream and memory. Always, always in her mind is the knowledge of his death. Ingrained so deeply that neither sleep nor dream can steal the knowledge from her. She holds herself erect, dream eyes closed as her dead son throws his arms around her and holds her tight. She clenches her jaw and looks away from the small, thick arms cradled around her upper thighs and the warm, soft head nestled up against her navel.

Again, she damns her subconscious mind for thinking this will bring her peace or a measure of comfort. Doesn’t her symbol-ridden sense of self understand that nothing will ever be right again?

She keeps her eyes shut against the sight of her long-dead child, but opens them when the arms pull back and the warmth of him moves away. That’s new. Confused, Eliana opens her eyes. Before her stands her son, his head cocked at an angle, his body naked and pristine, so unlike the actual state of him in death, when the lesions had blossomed on his rosy flesh and his skin had rotted away in great weeping chunks. But there is something wrong with him, here. Something…different.

Eliana stares, unable to take her eyes from her dead son as he twitches, shudders and then convulses uncontrollably. She stands, rooted to the spot, unable to move her body, though every muscle screams to run to him and cradle his spasm-ridden body. Before her eyes, he throws up one tentacle, then two, then three, until his mouth is full with the thickness of a fungal bloom of cephalopod tendrils. He chokes on them, as she screams, and then tendrils are bursting through all of his skin, ripping it aside in order to be free of the cage of still-mortifying flesh.

She cannot stop screaming.

She is still screaming as she awakens, the sound loud in the silence of the Lacrima ’s cabin. Debussy no longer plays over the collapsed speaker system, the ship’s silent collision alarm awake and blaring in swift, repeating, red pulses of light that mimic those generated by the entity now raucously beating at the shell of its cage, drifting between her ship and the debris field far beyond. Blood wells and orbs from a deep gash in her forehead, and her vision swims, but suddenly, Eliana understands, watching the tentacled entity beat at the cage.

It is trying to birth, but cannot free itself. And through the haze of her own floating blood, Eliana sees not the trapped tentacled entity, but knows it for what it truly is. Her son has come back to her. He has found her at long last. Tears well in her eyes, but now, after twenty years, finally, she sheds tears of joy. Her son has come back to her.

Eliana sets her jaw, straightens her spine and pushes off the cracked viewport with one steady hand. She floats her way back to the cabin’s pilot seat and settles in as best she can, grabbing for the helmet that dances away from her in the weightless air, everything bathed in the intermingled glaring reds of the struggling entity and the Lacrima ’s alarm system. She adjusts the helmet over her head and snaps it shut with a violent twist, her suit filling with refiltered air. She closes her right eye against the sudden rush of properly flowing blood as it courses down her face, filling one half of her vision. Strobe-lit orbs of her blood still speckle the cabin, intermingling with the ever-present sparkle of her globular tears, filling the otherwise-empty space.

With the barest nudge on the control panel, Eliana sets the Lacrima ’s impelling engines roaring to life and the battered ship slides forward, gaining momentum as she revs the hulk up to ramming speed. With a look of absolute joy on her face, Eliana sends the Lacrima slamming into the immense, tentacled creature’s egg, shattering it. Sheer portions of the collapsing egg fall away and shear sections of the Lacrima from the main body of the hull, opening parts of the engine room and auxiliary fuel dumps to the void of space. A thick, black, quickly-globuling leak of engine coolant and fuel bleeds out into space as the ship depressurises and portions of the hull begin to crumple inward.

Eliana is thrown forward from her seat by the collision and slams up against the cabin view-port, this time full-bodied. She lingers there, watching the tentacled foetus within the egg breach, its massive tendrils ripping at the collapsing barrier. With each stroke, it reveals itself more fully until it is free.

She watches as her son stretches tendrils to the distant stars, light radiating from its pulsing, burning core. Radiative heat boils off the stellar entity, its external membrane burning a bright, pulsing red. Eliana forces her eyes to stay open as her retinas burn with the brightness of her son’s awesome new form. A swell of pride blooms up within her. His new body will not succumb to the ravages of disease, nor age, nor infirmity. Here, in the limitless black of space, he will live, undying.

For a moment, the tentacled stellar creature swells, drinking in the ambient radioactive energy of the deep black around it. And then it turns its spherical mass upon the wreck of the Lacrima , the ship collapsing in segmented stages, one portion of the hull after another crumpling in like an accordion. Drawn by the bleeding heat and light of the dying ship, and the meager warmth of the entity within, the interstellar entity falls on the crumpling hulk and wraps it in a tentacled embrace.

As the cabin is bathed in burning, pure-red light, the tentacled mass of her newly reborn child crushing up against the already-weakened glass, Eliana exults in her son’s final embrace. Metal crumples and folds in on itself in sharp, swift strokes, pinning her and crushing the breath from her lungs. And as the tentacles scythe through the hull and find purchase on her form and close tight around her, cracking bone and turning muscle to pulp, one thought repeats endlessly in Eliana’s mind.

He has come back to her.

Luso Mnthali was born in Malawi, grew up in Botswana, went to university in the United States, and now lives in beautiful Cape Town, South Africa. Luso hikes in the mountains because it helps her get over her fear of heights.

IN A ROOM ON the top floor, maria typed. And she typed and she typed. After two days, she looked up and saw a man, a short man with a clean-shaven face, standing in front of her. He watched her silently until she looked up, alerted by breathing not her own, when she needed to stretch and yawn at last. On another world, her stamina would have astounded many, but here on the New World, new human feats were always in motion, such that people were constantly re-evaluating what was humanly possible. These humans breathed differently, slept less, did more. They were also capable of retaining more information, and were also able to shut out the world when need be.