Future Lovecraft

IRON FOOTFALLS By Julio Toro San Martin

SHE CROUCHES ALONE in a corner, waiting quietly for you, her prosthetic reader barely registering her enclosed environment. She waits and remembers when her father first told her the dream of you. You were the embryo, the idea, the fixation in his brain, throbbing constantly like a metronome. How many versions of you there were, at first, she can’t now remember, but when something finally like yourself—your terrible self—emerged from the compass of his craft, his workshop cocoon, she naively marvelled at the sight.

From somewhere, she hears the powerful disemboguements of the Ion-Plasma weapons. The tearing of metal. What a strange sound metal makes when it rips like paper. Tremors shake the walls. Loud blasts set air particles quivering. Then comes the silence. How many station drones have you destroyed now, Brother? Perhaps hundreds? She places her one biochemical hand against the cold, metallic sheen of a wall and thinks she can feel the steady, diminishing pulse of the CompuMind, retreating into itself, like a lanky, frightened tentacle into a deep hole. And then she hears your footfalls again.

Steady. Steady. Moving in her direction.

She wonders if you wonder how Father felt when you were almost complete. She wonders how he felt, too.

As a young soldier, her father could remember being taken to the peripheries of the Oort Cloud. There, in the Rim System, where human habitation barely penetrated, from the windows of an interplanetary carrier, he could see the silent spaces beyond, stretching to eternity, where, in unfathomable distances, lay the cluttered stars, eons old. Stars, that had never known human passions, sickness, evil, war. Staring into those abysses of beautiful darkness and uncountable time, he had felt peace, awe, silence, and all the ages of strife had seemed as nothing to him, then. This is what she imagines he felt then, looking at you, as they both stood on this lone asteroid hurtling quietly through open space, around a star that’s been its companion since before life ever appeared on Earth: when the first planets were formed in early times out of the primordial, galactic ooze; when the stardust first touched the nascent valleys and mountains of his homeworld, and the first sunrises were there to be recorded by no one, until mankind had come.

Do you grasp the sublimity of the image, the awe of time and eternity, the feeling of vastness, of grandeur—do you feel anything at all, she wonders, Brother?

She’s lost. The only difference she can imagine between you is that her darkness is the blackness of this station, where the lights have all gone out, while your darkness is the blackness of the soul, where no light shines and perhaps never shone.

She says, This darkness, this nutshell, this being locked up, inside and out, this claustrophobia is becoming maddening.

She reaches out with her mechanised hand and cybersynapses instantaneously make her realise she’s touching blood. Dry blood—her own.

Your footfalls are getting closer.

From the corridors and the nearby airlock, she hears snippets of her absent father’s recorded mad talk, disjointed and emanating from the comm centres scattered throughout the station. They say:

His footfalls are coming faster, now, girl. Unstoppable. The booming echoes—gigantic. Like a mad-brained, moonstruck hound, he’s homing in on you.

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.