Cthulhu Lives!: An Eldritch Tribute to H. P. Lovecraft (20 page)

“It’s almost finished, Stephen. You’ve done good work.” Roger stood in the entryway. The service lights were out, and behind him was yawning blackness. But there was something in the shadows. Something huge. I could hear it slithering across the floor.

I stared at him. “You lied to me.”

He smiled, a bit more of a sneer this time. “Lied about what? You acted as you willed.” He stepped into the room. The shape behind him hovered there.

“I certainly
have
lied to people. I lied about my name. It’s not Roger.” He sniffed. “In Egypt, they called me ‘Lord and Master’, in a language that no living man still speaks, but outside my presence, they had another name for me. The modern equivalent would be
ragil
.
Sawda ragil
. ‘Black Man.’” He came into range of my monitor’s light. The glow reflected off his impossible, carbon-black skin. He looked like an ancient, haughty statue come to life.

“As I said, you have done good work, no matter how our little rivals –” He paused to smile, broadly this time, “– or your own mind might try to tell you otherwise.”

The loathsome chant began again, from my own computer this time. It sounded different now. More strident, desperate almost. The compiler was nearing completion. I looked back at him. “Jean... She called you a name I can’t really recall.”

He nodded. “Yes, well, some are more aware than others. It’s just one of many.” The thing in the hallway began swaying to the rhythm of the chant. Its tentacles were twisting out into our space. The air was throbbing.

Roger smiled again, and his eyes cleared. They were black, and matched the large woman’s somehow. Her face was soft and muted where his was hard and precise, white and pale where his was black and shining. It fit his like a mask, the eyes hooking it to whatever reality was at this moment.

I closed my own eyes, willing everything away. It was a dream. It
had
to be. Events were long past possibility. How did you normally wake up from a dream? By making things... stop? I turned to my machine.

“That won’t help you.” It was probably the darkest tone I’d ever heard him use. My hands dropped to my keyboard as I cocked my head at him. The tentacles were reaching all around the room now.

“It doesn’t have to help me It’s supposed to help
us
, right?” My finger rested on the F9 key. “And it
has
been us. Kleiner
and
I have been running the compiler. Kleiner
and
I have been executing the vision of all of these others. Of course, I haven’t seen Kleiner in a long time. Now that I think of it, I don’t even remember what he looks like. So maybe it’s always just been me. Maybe it is just my vision.”

Roger – the Black Man – glared at me. It was the most emotion I’d ever seen him show. “That won’t help you, Stephen. My father has already awoken.” He gestured backwards to the thing. It still hid in the shadows, but it was now splayed around the chamber, a forest of tendrils, trembling throughout. “The fact that there’s a flautist here, waiting to guide him, is evidence of that.” The chanting soared, and a flute burbled from the hallway, a tantalizing music that fell down through the ages, and seemed to dance along the edge of a power that I would never understand.

I looked down and smiled. “Even guides need a path.” I pressed the key. The compiler’s failsafe activated. The scrolling data stopped dead, and then blanked. A moment later, my monitor did the same.

The chanting dissolved into an anguished howl. Vast winds ripped through the room, scattering papers, desks, machines, me. There was a thundering presence overhead – a huge, pulsating force that spoke of ancient evils I could feel in the depths of my being. It hungered, as I did. It lusted, as I did. It yearned in a manner way beyond my tiny human perspective. When it howled, its voice filled the universe with dreams that defied thought.

Then it vanished, leaving me in darkness.

“Hey, man.” An uncertain grip shook my shoulder. “Dude. You OK?”

I opened one eye, and looked into the face of a probable college student. He had a little bit of acne, and a thatch of blond hair. I had to peel my face off the trash bag that it was bonded to before I could open the other eye. I was cold and wet, and the alley that I was lying in was a perfect funnel for the fall wind.

He smiled a little as he saw me registering my surroundings. “You OK? I saw you over here when I stopped to text somebody. You were shivering, man. You want me to call the cops? Did you get mugged? Or just an office bender?” His smile grew broader at that thought.

I shook my head and grunted. “No. No police. I’m... I’m fine.” I wasn’t about to ask him which city I was in.

He raised his eyebrows in obvious disbelief. “All right, man. You should get out of the cold, though. Gonna catch pneumonia or something.”

I nodded. “Or something.” It must have been late in the day, from the color of the sunlight in the alley mouth. “At least the sun’s out.”

He stood up and shifted his backpack. “Yeah, but it’s a bitchin’ weird sunset! Must be global warming. Take care, OK?” He walked off into the slight mist. I thought I could see other figures in the distance. Smudges.

I stood up, still shivering, and stepped into the street. The sun was setting to my left. I turned and looked into the deep magenta sky. There were scattered flashes of light from the sun as fast-moving clouds streaked across its face. Clouds with black shapes darting through them, too fast to see clearly. I shuddered, and far off, I distinctly heard the piping of a flute.

THE THING IN THE PRINTER
by Peter Tupper

Are we recording? Good. Thanks for letting me give my statement verbally. Believe me, this is a lot better than having me write it.

What organization did you say you were with?

Never heard of that one.

In answer to your first question, I don’t know where Conrad Delkirk is. I couldn’t even begin to guess what he’s doing now. But if you find him, don’t judge him too harshly. I don’t, even after what happened to me.

Anyway, I first met Conrad in a corridor in the basement of the Engineering Faculty building. I was in the hackspace set up for Engineering students, across the hall from the ceramics workshop, which had the pottery wheels and kilns and so on.

The door was open, and I heard breaking pottery, which wasn’t unusual, and a woman yelling, which was. Curious, I looked out into the hallway.

Millicent, the woman who ran the workshop, was shoving a guy out the workshop door. He clutched a cardboard box, and as she thumped him, he stumbled and lost his grip on the box. Curved ceramic shapes tumbled out and hit the floor, shattering. Millicent slammed the door shut behind him.

I got up to help. “You all right?” I asked. We exchanged names as I helped him pick up the broken stuff on the floor.

Conrad was an odd-looking guy. When we met, he was, wearing a T-shirt that read, ‘Why? Because the hamster told me to’. I could never quite decide whether he was an older man with an incongruous baby face, or a young man with an early receding hairline. He had a twitchy, distracted way about him. It always took him a fraction of a second longer than it should to answer a question, as if he was constantly thinking of something else.

He looked past me into the hackspace, specifically at the long table in the middle of the room. “What’s that?”

We’d only finished assembling the new printer a few days before, and I was still in the “mechanical bride” phase of my relationship with it, eager to show it off. “Come on in, I’ll show you.”

The Skulptomatic 400 3-D printer sat on the central table, with my laptop connected to the data port and a coil of blue ABS plastic 1.75mm filament feeding into the plastruder. The platform zigzagged back and forth, just finishing a print of the Stanford Bunny. It was a tricky shape, with a lot of fine details and overhangs, particularly the ears. This was my third attempt at it and I’d managed to tweak the printer right, so it looked like a bunny instead of a blue melted thing.

When I finished, Conrad said, “So you just give it the math, and it does the rest. Any possible shape.”

“With some limitations, but pretty close.”

Conrad looked at it like it was the most beautiful thing in the world. “Show me how.”

I let him sit in front of my laptop and brought up the design window. “Think of it like a–”

“Don’t use metaphors,” he snapped at me. Then he deliberately calmed himself. “They distort thinking. Mathematics isn’t a metaphor for anything. It is the thing itself.”

“Okay, you define solids like this...”

He figured it out a lot faster than I had. Within half an hour, he’d got his laptop out of his messenger bag, installed the design software and started designing shapes, abstract assemblies of curves and angles that didn’t make any sense to me.

“What are you trying to make?” I was shoulder-surfing. His laptop showed a screen full of MATLAB functions that were way beyond anything I could understand. The graphics window showed a surface plot of these blobs moving around each other and intersecting, like they were mating or eating or infecting each other.

“I will create something that has never existed in our universe before,” he explained, never taking his eyes off his work. “Woodworking and ceramics were unsatisfactory because of the limitations of the materials and the manual processes. This looks much more promising.”

I’d once spent a summer making a life-size statue of Yoda in Lego, so I decided this was some kind of artistic project. Sometimes you just need to do something, if only to see if it is possible.

I left to get a drink from the machine in the hallway, and on the way back I ran across Millicent as she locked up the ceramics workshop. She looked into the hackspace, saw Conrad working at the laptop connected to the printer, and frowned. “You really don’t want him in there.”

“Him? Seems harmless enough,” I said.

“If you saw what he was trying to make, you’d keep him out too,” she told me. “He got kicked out of a woodworking class for the same reason.”

“What was he making?”

She grimaced. “I’d rather not say.”

“Come on, what?”

“Not sure, really,” she said at length. “They were... sex toys, maybe. Anyway, they looked nasty.” She huffed her disapproval, and left the building.

I didn’t think too much of her assessment, honestly. If you hang around an engineering or math department long enough, you’ll see people with far worse social deficits than Conrad. I felt a bit sorry for him, so I let him stay late and use the printer.

“You’ll lock up, right?” I asked him. The Skulptomatic was working away, drawing a new shape in plastic on the heated stage, something that looked a little like a diseased kidney.

“Sure,” he said, eyes fixed on the equations on his laptop.

♦

Conrad hung around the hackspace a lot over the next few days. He was a math undergrad, not an engineer, but I let it slide. He ignored all the other gear and focused on the Skulptomatic exclusively, designing complex mathematical shapes and printing them. There were curved ones, angled ones, ones that seemed like three-dimensional optical illusions. Some of them I wouldn’t have thought it was possible to make with the printer. He knew how to adjust the design file to compensate for that individual printer’s quirks. Based on his work, we actually fine-tuned some of our own designs and got them to print better. For lack of a better word, he had a knack for it.

I dated this girl once who had severe dyslexia. When she was a kid, all her teachers tried to force her to write longhand or on a typewriter. She hated it, and got shunted off to remedial classes. Then somebody showed her an early word processor, and she grasped it immediately. She could just type in thoughts as they occured to her, non-linearly, and edit them into shape later. Now she’s writing stories and getting published in literary journals, even winning awards.

My point is, she just couldn’t adjust her thinking to write prose in a linear way on a typewriter or longhand. Her talent as a writer never would have been expressed without access to word processing software.

I think it was like that with Conrad – a combination of mental qualities that made him a savant with this particular medium without any formal training, like an outsider artist. He had shapes in his mind that he could express mathematically but not physically, not until he encountered the 3-D printer.

The better Conrad got with it, the more obsessed he became. He was always the first in when we opened the hackspace and the last out when we closed. Not big on people skills. If you asked him to let somebody else use the printer, he’d ignore you, or snap at you, or call you an idiot because you wanted to make a model of your Warcraft character instead of doing something important with it.

After I broke up another argument over the printer, I took him out into the hallway for a chat. I think he only went along with me because the printer was in the process of doing his job.

“Conrad, I understand that you’re really into the printer, but you’ve got to learn to share your toys, okay?”

“It’s not a toy,” he said, looking at me like I was an idiot.

“It’s not yours. It belongs to the hackspace and there are other people who have a right to use it. You’ll have to wait for your turn like everybody else.”

He glared at me, then went to collect his print job, another abstract, vaguely insectile shape. Then he unplugged his laptop and stepped outside. I tidied up a few things in the hackspace and locked up. I found Conrad sitting right there in the hallway, his laptop plugged into a wall socket, still doing math.

“Jesus, Conrad,” I said. “Can’t you give it a rest?”

He looked up at me, and instead of his usual arrogance, he just looked tired and sad. “No. It never stops.” He made a spiral motion next to his head. “The math. It’s always there, always changing, always demanding. When I close my eyes. Even when I sleep.”

I crouched down so I could talk with him. “Can’t you see a doctor or something?”

“I’ve tried, since I was five years old. Seventeen different diagnoses. Ritalin, fluoxetine, Quaaludes, Haldol, risperidone, marijuana, hashish, hypnosis, cognitive therapy, LSD, peyote, mescaline, psilocybin, biofeedback... Either it has no effect, or the side effects are unacceptable.”

Conrad reached into his messenger bag and pulled out one of his abstract printed forms, like a peapod with thorns. “The printer helps. If I make some of the numbers into shapes, and create three-dimensional objects of those shapes, something that can be touched, they become less intrusive. For a while.” He rolled it between his fingers, the spikes digging into his skin.

“Sorry.” It was all I could say. That and, “But you can’t stay here.”

“I know.” He closed his laptop and put it in his messenger bag. “I... don’t like being this way.” That’s when I realized he was in pain, not just from how he was obsessed, but from knowing how he treated other people.

As Conrad walked down the corridor, I felt sorry for him, whatever had him in its grip.

♦

The next morning, I dropped by the hackspace and found the door crowbarred open. I’ll give you one guess which single device was missing. I tried to track down Conrad, hoping that he’d return the Skulptomatic and the ABS filament if confronted. He hadn’t attended lectures for weeks though, and he’d abandoned his room in student housing the same night the hackspace was robbed. Nobody had seen him since.

A few days later, the things started to appear around campus. When I say “things”, that’s because I really don’t know what else to call them. All they had in common was that they had the drawn-out-of-string-and-hardened texture of the Skulptomatic. But even aside from the distinctive texture of the printer, those shapes were unmistakable.

The first one I saw was sitting on the floor in the library stacks. It was the size of a golf ball, shaped like a model of a virus, and positioned right in the centre of an intersection. You might have mistaken it for some random piece of plastic from a junked machine, but I could tell by sight that it was the work of Conrad and the stolen printer. I kept it, puzzled by this one clue as to what had become of him.

The next few I found around campus were abstract shapes, of unknown purpose and insane geometry. Over time they started to look more representational, though it was hard to say what they represented. The closest comparison was to insects or deep-ocean marine life, or even the fossils of whole orders of extinct life that had thrived and died out millions of years before the dinosaurs, completely divorced from the vertebrate life we’re familiar with. One egg-sized piece was right in the centre of campus, a little statue that looked like the love child of a squid and a gargoyle, maybe.

The printed shapes became more varied over time. Some of them seemed to be actual tools, created for some purpose, though I can’t say what. Imagine trying to figure out what a corkscrew was for if you had never seen a wine bottle. Others looked incomplete, like they were components of something larger that had to be made in pieces because of the printer’s size limitations. Again, I couldn’t begin to guess how they fit together.

During this time, I read in a local news story that somebody had broken into the toy store in town. Didn’t touch the money, but took every Lego brick in the place. The bricks are made of ABS plastic, the same stuff that feeds the Skulptomatic. Various theories circulated around campus, claiming that this was some kind of fraternity scavenger hunt or publicity stunt for a movie, but nobody took credit for it. People wrote it off as a harmless prank. Until things got weird.

One freshman took a nap on the padded benches in the library and woke up with this bracelet locked around his wrist. It was a twisting, Möbius-strip meets Ouroboros worm kind of thing, epoxied together. He had to cut it off with a hacksaw. Similar things happened to other people. The printed objects kept turning up too. I actually started patrolling the campus, looking for Conrad’s creations. I was hoping to catch sight of him, and persuade him to get some help. I assumed that he was holed up somewhere with his laptop and the printer and a supply of ABS plastic, printing out these things again and again. If you knew where to look, there were lots of places you could tap into power, and the wi-fi network covered the entire campus.

I called in a favor from a guy I know in campus IT, and asked him to look for network packets going to MathSciNet, math society sites and the like. Ones that originated outside of the usual places, like the student dorms or the math faculty building. Normally I’m opposed to surveillance, but I made an exception because Conrad might hurt somebody, or himself.

A day later, I got a report. Somebody was downloading math journal articles through a router near one of the old agricultural buildings. That suggested Conrad was hiding out somewhere in a city-block-sized area full of nooks and crannies.

It was later than I expected when I got out to the building, expecting a long search in the autumn evening. Instead, there he was, walking down the road towards me, wearing an oversized raincoat. I was so surprised, I didn’t rush over. Instead, I watched as he walked up to the bus stop between us, took something the size of a baseball out of his coat pocket, put it on the bus stop bench, turned around and hurried back the way he came.

I jogged after him, and spared a glance at the printed plastic thing he left on the bench. A ball of vulvas or something. Just as he ducked behind a hedge, I caught up with him. “Conrad, what the hell are you doing?”

He noticed I was there, shushed me and motioned for me to join him. Reluctantly, I crouched behind the bush, next to him.