Cthulhu's Reign

Now, it amuses me to walk among mortals in disguise of a fellow commoner. I also feel a hell of a lot safer — the Old Ones sometimes rouse from their obliviousness to humanity and send questing tendrils to identify and extract those who excite their obscene, yet unknowable interest.

I’m going to wait them out.

Seven or eight of us still celebrate the Fourth of July despite the fact the United States is of no more modern relevance than cave paintings by hominids. Specialist historians and sentimental fools such as me are the only ones who care.

This year, Pontiff Sacrus, Lord High Necromancer, bought me a hot dog, heavy on the mustard, from an actual human vendor, and we sat on a park bench. Fireworks cracked over the lake. Small red and green paper lanterns bobbed on the water. The lanterns were dogs and cats and Paul Revere and his horse. The city had strung wires along the thoroughfares. American flags chattered in a stiffening breeze. I breathed in the smoke and petted Softy-Cuddles who’d appeared from nowhere to settle in my lap.

The pogroms were finished. Pontiff Sacrus had overseen the Stonehenge Massacre that spring and there weren’t any further executions scheduled. According to my calculations, exactly six hundred and sixty-seven unmodified Homo sapiens remained extant, although none were aware the majority of the billions who populated the planet were replicants, androids, and remote-operated clones. Pontiff Sacrus’s purge squads had eradicated the changelings and shifters and the gene-splicers and any related medical doctors who might conspire to reintroduce that most diabolical technology. He’d reversed the Singularity and lobotomized the once nigh- universal A.I. Super job, pontiff old bean. He purported himself to be the High Priest of the Undying Ones, but they ignored him pretty much the same as every priest of every denomination has ever been ignored by his deity.

Now, the pontiff has been around for ages and ages. He’s kept himself ticking by the liberal application of nano-enhanced elixirs, molecular tomfoolery, and outdated cloning tech. Probably the only remaining shred of his humanity lies within that mystical force that animates us monkeys. His is the face of a gargoyle bust or the most goddamned beautiful, dick-stiffening angel ever to walk the earth. He’s moody, like me. That’s to be expected, since on the molecular level he is me. Right?

Man oh man, was he shocked when I appeared in a puff of sulfurous smoke after all these eons. I’m a legend; a boogeyman that got assimilated by pop culture and shat out, forgotten by the masses. Every devil is forgotten once a society falls far enough. But Pontiff Sacrus remembered. His fear rushed through him like fire; he smelled as if he were burning right there beside me on the bench. He finally grasped that it was I who’d tormented and slain, one by one, our inner circle.

We watched the fireworks, and when the show wound down, I told him I’d decided to reach back and erase his entire ancestry from the space-time continuum. The honorable High Necromancer would cease to exist. The spectacle of the god’s anguish thrilled me in ways I hadn’t anticipated. Naturally, I never planned actually to nullify his existence. Instead, I made him gaze into the hell of my left eye. He shrieked as I manually severed his personal timeline at the culmination of the fireworks display and set it for continual loop, with a delay at the final juncture so he might fraternize with his accumulating selves before the big rewind.

Last I checked, the crowd of Sacruses has overflowed the park. He’ll be/is a city of living nerves, each thread shrieking for eternity. My kind of music.

Crete, 45 B.C., again. The universe is a cell. I travel by osmosis, randomly, to and fro betwixt the poles that fuse everything. It’s dark but for a candle within the potter’s house. The blood odor is thick. My prior self snores within, sleeping the sleep of the damned. I alight upon the slanted roof; I peep through chinks and spy our restless form in the shadows. He whimpers.

Because I’m bored to tears with my existence, and just to see what will happen, I slip down through the cracks and smother him. His eyes snap open near the end. They shine with blind energy and his bowels release, and he is finished. Then I toss his corpse into the well, and return to the bed and fall asleep in his place.

I’ve gone back a hundred times to perpetrate the same self-murder. I’ve sat upon the hillside and watched with detached horror as a dozen of my selves scrabble across the roof like ungainly crows, and one by one enter the house to do the dirty deed, then file in and out, to and from the well like a stream of ants. This changes nothing. The problem is, the universe is constantly in motion. The universe stretches to a smear and cycles like a Slinky reversing through its own spine. No matter what I do, stuff keeps happening in an uninterruptable stream.

How I wish the Pod People could give me a hand, help me explore self annihilation or ultimate enlightenment, which I’m certain are one and the same. Alas, their alien intellect, a fungal strain that resists the vagaries of vacuum, light and dark, heat and cold, remains supremely inscrutable. That goes double for their gargantuan masters. Like me, the fungal tribe and their monster gods (and ours?) exist at all points south of the present. It’s enough to drive a man insane.

After epochs that rival the reign of the dinosaurs, the stars are no longer right. Yesterday the black continent and its black house sank beneath the sallow, poison waves and the Old Ones dream again in the dread majesty of undeath. I wonder how long it will be before the dregs of humanity ventures from the bubble-domed metropolises it’s known for ages beyond reckoning. The machines are breaking down and they need them since after the pogroms all bio modifications were purged. Just soft, weak homo sapiens as God intended. The population is critically low, and what with all those generations of inbreeding and resultant infertility I don’t predict a bounce back this time. Another generation or two and it’ll be over. Enter (again) the rats, the cockroaches and the super beetles.

I sigh. I’m shaving. Wife is in the kitchen chopping onions while the tiny black-and-white television broadcasts a cooking show. The morning sky is the color of burnt iron. If I concentrate, I can hear, yet hundreds of millions of light years off, the throb and growl of Ur-Nyctos as it devours strings of matter like a kid sucking up grandma’s pasta.

I stare at my freakish eyeball, gaze into the distorted pupil until it expands and fills the mirror, fills my brain and I’m rushing through vacuum. Wide awake and so far at such speed I flatten into a subatomic contrail. That grand cosmic maw, that eater of galaxies, possesses sufficient gravitational force to rend the fabric of space and time, to obliterate reality, and in I go, bursting into trillions of minute particles, quadrillions of whining fleas, consumed. Nanoseconds later, I understand everything there is to understand. Reduced to my “essential saltes” as it were, I’m the prime mover seed that gets sown after the heat death of the universe when the ouroboros swallows itself and the cycle begins anew with a big bang.

Meanwhile, back on Earth in the bathroom of the shabby efficiency flat, my body teeters before the mirror. Lacking my primal ichor and animating force that fueled the quasi-immortal regeneration of cells that in turn thwarted the perfect pathogen, the latent mutant gene of the Pod People activates and transmogrifies the good old human me into one of Them. Probably the last self-willed fungus standing — but not for long; this shit does indeed spread like wildfire. My former guts, ganglion, reproductive organs, and whatnot, dissolve into a thick, black stew while my former brain contracts and fossilizes to the approximate size of a walnut and adopts an entirely new set of operating principles.

Doubtless, it has a plan for the world. May it and my android wife be very happy together. I hope they remember to feed the cat.

NOTHING PERSONAL Richard A. Lupoff

The flashes on the surface of Yuggoth were so brilliant that they shorted out every bit of electronic equipment on Beijing 11–11. Dr. Chen Jing-quo was the sole occupant of the observation satellite at the time, and her own eyes were spared only through a lucky break. She had been showering when the flashes occurred, sealed off from the outer universe.

Still, she had a devil of time extricating herself from the shower-stall, now that the fractional horsepower motor that rolled the door open and shut as well as the touch-sensitive keypad that controlled the motor were dead.

Dr. Chen found the manual override control by touch, got the door open, slipped into a jumpsuit and made her way to one of Beijing 11–11’s visual ports. The series of flashes had caused the