Saturday 15 June 2013

The Haunted Asteroid

The final message of Dr C.D. Ward.



The...thing is behind me now, and I cannot move.
I do not know its true form, only that on the night which it was summoned It appeared to me (bound in what I had thought to be a secure pentagrammatic field) as a single spark of carmine light.

Curse that dog. A great black Alsatian, its origins now a mystery to me. Upon seeing the entity it had bounded forwards, as if greeting an old friend, scuffing the chalk marks upon the floor which restrained and bound the alien thing. The spark streaked upwards into the sky, and for a short time I thought the thing had retreated from my home and into the vastness of space - which lies beyond the windows of the dank upper tower that I had quietly annexed for my experiments.

Would that this had been the case. The pentagram, broken as it was, had included mathematical terms defining the House-upon-the-rock itself as the outer bounds of the confinement. The force of its escape has etched those terms into the metal of the floor, six inches deep.

This single sign of fallibility gives me my one hope.

One week later the fool dog disappeared, and the revolting noises in the walls and over the data streams began. The inhabitants of the house thereafter sickened, a malady as much of the mind as the body, and soon were leaving in such shuttles and inter-orbital vehicles as would carry them.
I remained. The fault was mine, and the duty to mend it if I could. I was arrogant, secure in my knowledge and hard won technomantic powers.

But the thing is greater than I. I will not tire you with the true story of my hunt for It, nor the sickening, seeping, realisation that I had summoned a thing which had seen time begin. A thing which was toying with me, testing Its control over me as a probe into the abilities of our race. I fear we have been found sadly lacking. My only hope is that we have been found so inferior as to present neither opportunity nor threat, and perhaps this thing will go Its way without bothering further with us.

In the end, exhausted, I returned to the tower room where this had began, and lowered my scorched and trembling form into the chair in front of my telescope, with which I once watched the great orb of Earth as a child – Earth which has abandoned me. Though the circuits and processors in this remote section of the house are sparse Its influence reached through them and into me. My desperate final plan to impede it as much as I might was already in motion, and I no longer had the will to keep the burning virtual tendrils out of my mind.

I was flying. I was a child again. I was myself, then someone other. It was a homunculus, then a great AI mind, then a ball of imperishable flame, burning into me. Someone else was sitting in this ancient leather chair. The no-one was. Then, for a moment, I was in someone else’s plush, squeaking armchair. For a moment the room and its view were unfamiliar to me and my memories not my own.

Now, my last defences gone, it has entered the room and is behind me. I no longer remember my name, nor whether I was a man with a loving family, a loner, a man of importance, or a lone toiler in the dank tower. Perhaps this is a mercy.

I have record of the events that have led me here only because I have placed those memories in a secure crystal of neutronium, which even the greatest powers cannot, I hope, easily corrupt. I have placed one more thing in there.

The line of code that has been steadily counting down as I send this. As I have said, the thing is bound to the House-upon-the-rock. Deep within the asteroid rock are our supplies of antimatter, mined over decades from the traces of positrons trapped in our lady Earths magnetic field. Upon the completion of the coded count down the magnetic trap will deactivate, and the thing will be torn in a thousand directions as the debris of the House scatt-
<<Transmission Ends@01.24.31.10.2183.>>

A homage to Lovecraft, I hope a sufficiently respectful one

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