P R O L O G U E
The theoretical design had existed for months, he’d tweaked it and poured his life into its inception for nearly six years, but now, physically, it sat on his desk. The patterner constructed as far as human science understood. But the beauty and elegance of his creation was that the things it required, it had created itself. And now it was there, sat in front of him. Looking directly at it, it was unremarkable, the size of a pack of cigarettes - innocuous. But when the eye shifted so did the space around the instrument. He rose and poured a whisky. His image in the mirror was normal, until he saw the machine in the reflection, and reality seemed to warp. He sat heavily and rubbed the stubble covering his head. Done. Finally. The pinging of the alarm registered after a few minutes. He finally reached forward and pressed the intercom. What’s up, you dead in there or what?
Nearly. The project’s finished. Come on up.
He hit the entry buzzer. Sarcen was well dressed as he entered, not showy, but well groomed. Talben had a sensitive sense of smell and recoiled at the pungent stink. "Christ - you trying to kill ´em or shag ´em?" Sarcen grinned and sat. "Don’t be a bastard all your life, gimme a drink."
He rose and poured one. "So what’s the plan?"
"Dunno, go to the Prometheus first then see what happens - but hold on - it’s finished?" "Yeah, done, dusted; but not put to bed. Still don’t know if it works." He handed the glass over. "So how many mice this week?" Talben smiled tiredly.
"Four", he replied.
"And they blew apart like the others?"
"No, they’re over there."
He waved a hand in the direction of the Plexiglas boxes sat in the corner of his apartment.
"They fell unconscious for a few days, all vital functions continuing, then they died, though one did go nuts and start doing some weird shit, stood up on hind legs" - he chuckled harshly - "looked like it was trying to do sign language, then keeled over dead as a doornail."
Sarcen had stood up, crossed the room, to inspect the stiffened corpses.
"Enough of this shit, it’s not healthy - you know that lass Donna? She was asking after you, wondering what the fuck since you spent the night at her place that week."
"Stuff got in the way, I never have the time."
"But you do now." He pointed. "It's finished, you said so yourself. Well, the testing . . . bollocks; look my friend, forget all this for a few hours, time to go!" "Sure. Okay."
He stopped himself.
"Wait, have you seen it? Look"; Birkin held up the tiny device, sat in the palm of his hand.
"When those fuckers over at slipgate research see this they'll cry. All of them useless wanabees working off the back of a long dead genius - this thing is more than teleportation, more than possible to understand in human physics."
He looked down at the tiny machine in his hand, pride, longing and greed showing in his face. He didn't notice that during his oration, Sarcen had been looking at the device, fixated. Birkin looked up, eyes meeting the blank stare. Saracen's eyes moving upwards as well, looking through him. "I never thought it was possible. A strange coincidence - me, knowing you, for so long, and you, creating this. Don't worry, I'll remember you when I ascend."
Sarcen reached forward, all his space marine bulk eclipsing that of his scientist school friend and picked him up easily, looking away as he snapped Birkin´s neck.
He dropped the corpse and pulled the device from its cooling fingers. Something was speaking to him and he knew how it worked despite his zero knowledge of its design. He activated the sphere, which spread outwards from the device in his hands in a two-meter bubble. Then the alternate reality collapsed. But what had been within it was subtly changed. Sarcen took the machine and smashed it to pieces, even the base electrical components. Then he wrote a virus and eradicated all of Talben´s files and research. But it wasn't him that created the self-replicating disease which destroyed Birkin´s life work, but something that he now knew, told him that all he wanted could be his. The once mortal Sarcen stood up and the air moved around him. He smiled, eyes unfocused.
He drank some of the whisky - a good Scottish replication - then recoded the patterner to dispose of the body. To go on the razz or not to go on the razz. He smiled, he had time; the slipgate complex wouldn't be open and charged until 0730. He went out that night and was charming, boisterous and friendly. But always the knowledge lay there, like a star in his mind.
He woke the next morning next to the twins - he couldn't remember their name - and names, now, but they'd probably be dead in an hour when he blew the reactor anyway. Shame, nice girls, but he had bigger fish to fry. He flexed and picked up the antique broadsword that had been his killing tool for years, subtly modified by the technicians so as to have an edge around a molecule in thickness. First things fucking last, get into the slipgate complex and kill all resistance, lock it after him so that no-one would be able to stop the fusion reaction. Then step through the gate and become what the mortals around him would probably call a god, them lacking the vocabulary to describe what he was going to become. And all thanks to good old Talben, said a voice in his head. Yep, the rest of him replied, good ´ol Talben. He keyed the thumb pad and walked out the door, one of the Dana twins stirring on his bed at the whoosh of the servos as it shut.
S A R C E N
He had been a member of the Ranger section for around four years - a surprisingly long time since most died within six months or took permanent leave on psychological grounds after a year. The theoreticians in Slipgate research thought there could be long term effects of constant slipgate travel, though the government and big corporate science divisions are quick to downplay any advice that could endanger its huge financial implications. Sarcen was a typical marine when he entered the project, if slightly more intelligent and with a knack for surviving. By the end of his fourth year his was held in awe. He was also incredibly rich and well-connected, his danger pay and being one of the few reasonably sane experts on real, physical slipgate use seeing to that.
But he was a loner.
No other soldiers could work with him on mission, the psychosis enhancing effects of interdimensional suggested by the scientists becoming evident. It was never him that requested a team mate be transferred, either they were MIA - without any of the other team being able to give a reason, or else they dropped out by themselves, requesting transfer, risking anything, even severe demotion or technical inquisition in order not to work with Sarcen anymore.
Eventually the brass learned this was just the way, and so sent him on his continued missions, alone, through the gate into other worlds, dimensions, universes. And he kept coming back, time and again, surviving against the odds.
At the end of his fourth year his sense of humor was macabre to say the least, his savage behavior and cruel demeanor making him a feared figure in the night life of the base - his favorite past-time after going on missions.
But he remained functional, lots of medals were awarded, along with bigger bonuses and more fame. All the missions he had been on, the countless environments in which he had killed, maimed and tortured, had left an imprint on his animal soul, somewhere near the very centre of the brain, where the mammal met the reptilian. And he had learned to harness it.
Research had helped - those who didn´t see past his brutish visage would have been surprised at how quickly he reaped information from the net. He learned and he practiced.
Now there was no question of others accompanying him on a mission. He also found a way to disable the hard-wired military feed from his body armour. This inferred that he was doing things too depraved even for the stern minded military officers of the Ranger section to be able to stomach. But it was quietly overlooked.
He had trained in a discipline called the Warp Spasm.
Ancient and powerful.
He disabled the feed not because he was worried that the military would court-marshal him for his acts on the other side - those had been sadistic and psychotic for years. He was worried they wouldn't let him back through the portal at all, leave him drifting on the other side, lost.
A friend of his who was similarly brilliant in his chosen field - Talben.
T A L B E N
A child prodigy in a time when, thanks to genetic manipulation, all children were expected to be many years ahead of where their base-genetic equivalents would have been.
But Talben was different.
The facet's of his mind were balanced perfectly to create a machine before which problems dissolved, superstition became a shadow and complexity the simplest of equations.
He created a machine, technically unnamed, though he liked to think of it as the Reverter - his own little joke. It folded space, but, an important distinction; only within the perceptions of those within its sphere of effect. In other words, it warped the mind, beyond and before and aside and after anything the human brain would ever or had ever known.
He was worried when he first drew up the design - there was something there, beyond his ken, he didn't know where this would finish. But he was a scientist. He couldn't resist creating it. And so he did.
The ramifications of the prototype alone were huge, a leap in the understanding of mankind akin to the discovery of fire. But he didn't test it. Some part of him was terribly scared of what he had done. Endless testing on mice - he felt trapped by his creation, like it was consuming him from within and without, the only thing left a slowly corroding shell, getting thinner, losing willpower.
He knew this and yet couldn't bring himself to destroy it, either. His life slowly collapsed into drunken nights, late mornings and bitter hangovers; spent staring at the thing.
The bills mounted and his spiral into dissolution continued.
W A R P S P A S M
You smile grimly and concentrate, channeling your whole essence in readiness. It begins, its easy now. The itching at the base of the scalp starts, then spreads to your whole skin surface, seeming to crawl along your bones. Like fire.
These puny weaklings.
They don't know pure force, let alone pure reality. Your hackles raise and heart pounds, a drum of doom for those around you. But this time it is in your one-time home. No matter, they would stand in your way. A howling, roaring, ululating sound echoes in your mind and body. You grin, your view dark, shot with blood, and take the sword from its hilt. It dances in your palm and across reality like a flowing line as you practice.
You finish by slicing through a soldier from head to crotch who had thought to sneak up on you.
You hear the rattle of footsteps on gantries. Here they come.
You hear a roaring, hacking, broken voiced laugh echoing off the walls. Here they come.
A U D I E N C E
The blind idiot danced at the centre of the maelstrom, his servitors mute in their vigil. As he danced they watched, swaying in time to his rhythm. The flutists roiled in agony, the bamboo flutes speared into their bloated torsos bleating in discordant harmony.
The messenger drifted forward in humanoid form, body twitching spasmodically along with his master's dance. In deference his face was blind and lifeless, blood flowing from the eyes. The great one danced closer, body jerking from side to side, crushing underlings who made no attempt to avoid their destruction and had no joy or hope; only the song.
Azathoth took the puppet messenger in two hands of negative light, their shape impossible to see. Still dancing he held his servant aloft, twirling across the black void of his own consciousness. In one swing he set down the puppet, limbs broken and twisted, a manic grin distorting its features.
Azathoth danced away, changing reality with his every gesture, mutating worlds, destroying and giving life, torment and satisfaction. The puppet, Nyarlathotep, righted and repaired his shattered body, reforming it at the same time into a leprous beggar, twisted with age and disease.
He watched his master dance for a few moments, the adoring throng surrounding him. A tooth came away as he smiled. And then he was there, between the dimensions, watching yet another of his machinations unfold.
The human and the demons - beautiful to watch - the tiny creature thinking he had purpose, the demons thinking the same. There was something piquant about their idiocy he always found refreshing. He thought back to the orders he had been given by his master. The call for a viewing came intermittently, sometimes human adjusted millions of years between them.
This time the hearing was very short. Azathoth had told him, through the dance; "CHILD; I COMMAND YOU, ENJOY YOURSELF!"
Not very specific, and hardly worth the audience, but he had been summoned, and so had attended. He leaned over the dimensions where the story would unfold, promising himself that this time he would not sculpt fate, no matter what. Though he knew, especially as he was a student of human nature, that he would break his own promise. And that the act of observing changes the observer.
E P I L O G U E
The human fell into the machination, body and mind held static from the energy, helpless, inert, unknowing.
Nyarlathotep performed the human equivalent of sitting back. Most diverting. The marionette had overcome so much, destroyed and survived in such incredible amounts it was almost beyond reason. The indistinct figure coalesced into a raven haired woman, who began to stroke her tresses absent-mindedly. The human, Sarcen, was frozen in place, he would remain for eternity or a split second, as she wished. Nyarlathotep really, physically, sat back. The other things crept back into view, the other worlds, times and places.
So much to do and so little time. And yet the human creatures were facinating. Something about their hope in the face of hopelessness. The corporal representation of the god tested the strength of her nails against the rest of the stone seat upon which she sat, forcing them into the pediment. One cracked, one split; blood dripping.
She smiled, raised the hand to her human eyes and vanished, swirling into the multiverse. Omniscient, fascinated and indomitable.
N Y A R L A T H O T E P
And it was then that Nyarlathotep came out of Egypt. Who he was, none could tell, but he was of the old native blood and looked like a Pharaoh. The fellahin knelt when they saw him, yet could not say why. He said he had risen up out of the blackness of twenty-seven centuries, and that he had heard messages from places not on this planet.
Into the lands of civilization came Nyarlathotep, swarthy, slender, and sinister, always buying strange instruments of glass and metal and combining them into instruments yet stranger. He spoke much of the sciences - of electricity and psychology - and gave exhibitions of power which sent his spectators away speechless, yet which swelled his fame to exceeding magnitude. Men advised one another to see Nyarlathotep, and shuddered.
And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished; for the small hours were rent with the screams of a nightmare.
—H.P. Lovecraft, "Nyarlathotep"
