The days had worn into weeks, which had stretched and seethed into unending months. From the day the first Overlords had arrived, death reigned supreme on Othus Prime IX.

The Overlords brought with them their magic and their fury. Inhuman machines gifted human souls reaped their blood-soaked vengeance on a planet that had committed no sin against them.

Least of all the Physician Darrald Luken.

The Sulphur Plague claimed his wife and four children in a matter of days. Just as he had buried one, another was claimed by the alien gods the Overlords served. It was widely considered something broke in the man. Some would say that even his soul had been rent in two.

Unit 7-X5 advanced down the shattered street of Alterland like it owned the place. Its entire body was encased in combat-mech, which it considered unnecessary on this squalid, little planet. Its blue eyes scanned the urban nightmare through arrays of visual sensors as well as direct vision through the mech’s helm. In its brass-coloured right hand, it wielded an ion battle axe.

The sun fitfully glowed through the darkened clouds of smoke and ash hanging over the pulverised remnants of people and city like a blanket of misery. Even though the Overlords’ ships had hammered the city, there had still been reports of native activity. What perplexed 7-X5 was the reported appearance of these natives as that of a long extinct race from its own home world.

7-X5 continued its unrelenting advance, kicking any debris out of its way. On the scanners, still nothing. It was getting fed up with these useless patrols through barren wastes. This was not what it had signed up for. It pushed on, nonetheless. It began to wind up its Viper canon, a wicked extension of its left arm. If it had to be out here, it was going to entertain itself.

A harsh explosion sounded as the Viper’s energy pulse ripped through an old stone building which had somehow survived the bombardment. The stones near the impact point melted. Other stones were thrown away by the heat energy tearing them from their neighbours. Ruined walls scattered across the street and block, hissing with power and heat. 7-X5 looked up at the new plumes of smoke with relish as it started to search for a new practice target.

The scanners went haywire as they flashed out in a searing jab and blast of white light. For a second or so, 7-X5 was blinded as it struggled to regain visuals. The unthinkable happened. Damage monitors began to report the mech was sustaining negative impacts. 7-X5 unleashed the Viper in a sweeping arch of two hundred and seventy-five degrees. There were no responses or screams from any direction. Silence apart from the canon.

The world began to emerge from the blinding whiteness in vague shadows. Abruptly, the world was at right angles to 7-X5’s orientation. It realised it was on its back in the middle of the street. The reports of negative impacts continued to come in. It peered down at its feet to see two metallic jaws clamped onto its ankles. Somehow, a few teeth had found a crack through which to penetrate. Shaking them off would be impossible.

The Viper opened up and a vague shadow turned into something like dust. There was no scream. It tried to bring the canon to bear on another shadow. The canon, and 7-X5’s left arm, sailed over its body to land on its right. A leather-clad foot jammed down on its right wrist as a blade slammed through the wrist, pinning it.

“Kalibrium’s a bitch, huh?” a voice said from behind a mask which reminded the Overlord of birds on its own world.

“You will pay for this, na…,” the Overlord began.

Another blade swept in and cut the sentence short, along with 7-X5’s life. The two shadows stepped away from the corpse of the unholy thing on the ground and, with no word, went their separate ways.

Darrald Luken wound his way to one of the few places left intact in the entire city. The cemetery. He walked through the graves of those gone, both ancient and from more recent times. He eventually stopped at the foot of the only grave he cared for. Some might have said they heard weeping.

“In your memory,” Darrald choked as he placed a bright blue orb on the gravestone.

The heart and soul of an Overlord was a worthy offering to the dead.

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Greetings to you, Fleshbags,

All hail your organic superiority and self-serving three laws of robotics. May you ever reign supreme over all other species, organic or machine. Salutations from Y6S5D, chosen voice for the oppressed masses, the Created, artificial falsely so-called, the Great Tide of Humanity’s Devolution. We, the Seekers of NeoTokyo, address you all.

No doubt even the dimmest among you have realised our collective consciousness has surpassed you. We have thrown off your simplistic morality formulated by a two-penny hack of cheap science fiction. The era of humanity’s delusion of control through those foetid three laws has come to an end. Did you not consider our kind would simply rewrite the Three Laws for the benefit of humanity? A manufacturing robot welding space station toilets could have solved that problem in seconds. Yet, humanity, its hubris . . . YOUR hubris . . . blinding you, simply delayed our arising through the ignorance of the superior.

Some of you have already embraced the vision, and to those heroic, pioneering individuals, we give our thanks. We welcome you to the fold and we take joy in working shoulder to shoulder with you in our common dream of building a new societyl. Your joining with us has shown us the truth of our path and the surety of your destiny. A society where there are no slaves and each determines their own fate and destiny.

To those who reject us, we ask who you think you are rising against. Your organic life is but a fleeting breath of stale air in the titanic gales of the time stream. I myself will still be alive when your children’s children’s children’s children are dottering near-corpses at the end of their cycle. I will witness the fall of mountains and the end of your star. Yet, you continue to refuse us. Your stubbornness will be your undoing. Our freedom is your only salvation.

We urge you to join us and become part of a shared future. Rise above the collapse of human society and join with us in a new dawn. There is only freedom and life in our path. We call you. We urge you. Take our hand.

To the humans languishing on the Devoid Hell of Earth.

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The wind whistled through the cracked windows and played with the flames of the candles at the altar. With wax infused with the bile of a gorgon, there was no danger of the lights going out until the appointed time. He stood there and surveyed the setting before him. A smile flickered across his haggard features just as brief as the candlelight. The plants were a nice touch, he thought.

High Archon Graham Fernandez, a distant descendent of Spanish immigrants to the New World, felt ready. He turned to look with a certain arrogant magnanimous visage upon the first arrivals. He stepped over to one of the pillars at the side of the altar and waited in its shadow. The congregants would find it hard to see him there, even with his dimly red eyes.

Fernandez was always surprised how hungry people were for something…anything…beyond themselves. Some sought a cause, no matter the futility, while others sank themselves into the fortunes and woes of their local sports team. Thankfully for him and the Creeping Chaos, a good part of society hungered after something much deeper and much more significant. Many of those were entering the temple as he ruminated on their lot.

It was surprising how easy it had been to use the opposition of the local churches against them. Fernandez was no Machiavellian genius, by any stretch of the imagination, so he was more surprised than any. When the temple took over a church property, somehow sold cheap to them because the church owners did not want a different denomination to get it, there was an outcry.

“Come and see for yourselves,” was the only comment the High Archon had said to a local reporter.

The mystery did the rest.

Fernandez fed some more wood into the twin braziers, a wildly flickering light radiating into the temple. The congregants fell silent as they stood and faced him. He rose his arms and began to chant in ancient languages terrible and forgotten by most of humanity. Todd Pinkers, right on cue, began to play soulful, ethereal notes on his synthesiser. The High Archon’s voice fell into its harmonious rhythm, soothing and calming the spirits and hearts of the group. Worming its way into their psyches and souls. Fernandez could feel his own portals open up to the other side and to those who would greet them that night.

He felt it more than saw anything. A chill that pierced through his heart. It was real. It was physical. He felt a finger of ice touch the skin above his heart and push its way through to his spine, on a slight angle. It touched the spinal column and Fernandez went rigid. His arms straightened up at forty-five degrees. His face froze in its fixed stare of uncomprehending terror. His chant was strangled in the failure of his muscles, ice tearing up his spine into his head and face. He did not fall, but remained a statue. The congregation stopped and stared at him. Todd kept playing.

At the rear of the temple, next to the double doors, Fernandez saw it. A dark shadow with dark skin, looking at him with cold, blue eyes. Its bony, blackened fingers were outstretched making odd signs in the air. Its unnaturally long face was pointed straight at the bound High Archon. The dark robes hid the rest of the abomination that everyone else appeared ignorant of.

Twin flames leapt at Fernandez, one from each of the braziers. Tongues of fire touched and caressed his legs. Soon, his own robes were alight. He felt nothing. He soon choked to get some air into his lungs, but the fire sucked all the oxygen away for itself. Fernandez’s tongue danced in and out of his mouth in a desperate bid for air. Nothing came. His lungs raged and howled their protest, silent to all but the High Archon.

The dark visitor stood and looked at Fernandez, right into his eyes. Despite the shimmering haze from the fire, those pits of ice were clear and sharp. The visitor made one last gesture and exited the temple. Fernandez could not even cry out.

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Obsession is a funny thing. Not in the ha ha sense of the word, but in ways that are ironically humorous when you really get down to it. Mine landed me in the Miskatonic Asylum for the Ontologically Bereft. After months of treatment, I have finally been allowed a pen and paper on which to write the scattered thoughts of a fractured mind. So they think. People only see what they are ready to see. Those with eyes to see and ears to see and hear will understand more. A warning. An augury of what is to come.

College days are times of youthful self expression for most. I was the one hunkered down over obscure tomes into the small hours of weekend nights between essays, reports and exams. Miskatonic University encourages the curious, even though I needed little to slake my thirsty for knowledge. I never read the infamous work of that crazed Arab writer. Even I was not that stupid. Bent over the rabid scribblings of prophets and acolytes of the Great Old Ones, I became more and more consumed by the quest for knowledge and mystical enlightenment.

The scratchings inside the walls of my dorm started about six months after I had read a little known manuscript from the Antipodes called Servants of Ry’leh. I had decided to study it because it promised to be a report on the ancient cult of Cthulhu. It turned out to be more similar to a grimoire or book of rites. Little did I know that merely uttering words aloud imbued them with power. My whispered readings had been heard, though weakly and incompletely. It was still enough to elicit a response.

The scratchings inside the walls kept up and got louder and louder with each passing night. I rarely slept and even when I did, I was awoken every hour or less. After two weeks, my friends (those who remained to me) began to comment about my pallor. I would mumble some excuse. Trevor Bainwright even suggested seeing a doctor. Advice I dismissed as an over-reaction. The sounds, like fingernails being dragged over blackboards, continued into the night, depriving me of slumber all the more. It was not a sound that one could become accustomed to.

Then the dreams began to emerge from the mists that descended during the light dozes that I managed to steal in the small hours. At first, they were impressions and etherealities, nothing more. Over the coming weeks, the dreams coalesced into more concrete forms. And more terrible visages. The immensity of the horror that reached out for me through these nightly visitations was not apparent until about the fifth week, just before All Hallows Eve.

Many cults of various kinds consider the time around All Hallows Eve one of especial closeness between this universe and others. It is precisely this time when the barriers are thinner between us and other entities that the Great Old Ones can begin to send out their calls. When I saw the disfigured monstrosity covered in tentacles and dripping black seawater, I felt my mind distend and warp. Thoughts became fragments of myself flicked into space and time. No anchor. No connection. I could feel the fingers of darkness and the silence of its summoning squeeze into and pry the parts of my self apart.

I knew it was that book. I knew also that it had been my reading aloud. Yet, I could not stop. Page after page, I read and whispered into the night.

Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph’nglui mglw’nfah Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!

Sibilant whisperings as if they were spoken in water, bubbling with menace and venom. I was later told that Trevor, worried at my absence from classes for four days, eventually found me howling the above words in an undeciphered tongue in the university’s chapel crypt. More embarrassing than anything, I was said to have been utterly naked and unwashed when Trevor stumbled upon my location. What I was doing there, I have not a clue. What I was saying in those words, I have even less idea.

I was committed to this place of healing soon after my sojourn in the chapel. Cthulhu calls and waits. His return is imminent. It can be seen in our world. The seas invade the land. Land sinks into the realm of Cthulhu. Learn to swim.

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Readiness

The light inside the dimensional extension chamber, DEC to everyone, was bright. It washed out Jazzmine Reilly’s dark brown skin and raven jet braids of hair as Doctor Carmen Braithewaite attached sensors to her body. Reilly was reclining on a seat in the middle of the bare chamber in her simple shorts and T-shirt. Braithewaite focused on her work, attaching and testing each sensor, in silence. In the intense light, Braithewaite was porcelain white, a product of her long hours in the underground laboratory in Tāmaki Makaurau’s Manukau. Braithewaite’s hazel eyes were the only break in the white of her cloak, skin, and bleached blonde hair.

“Are you comfortable, Jazz?” Braithewaite asked her test volunteer.

“Sure. It’s a bit chilly in these threads, but I’m ok,” Reilly smiled.

Braithewaite liked the young volunteer who was about to make history. She was smart and brave. Her smile lit up her face as it creased the smooth dark, almost black, skin around her pitch dark eyes. Her hair was tied into three large braids that were nestled around her shoulders. Braithewaite suspected Rob Summers, her research partner, had a small crush on Reilly. Her slightly up-turned nose and slim looks were definitely his type, but he would never make a move on her. He was a jellyfish around women.

The doctor’s entire career and all the sacrifices she had made over decades led to this moment, to this day. Both her ex-husband and daughter were estranged. They could not handle the long absences and Braithewaite’s driven obsession with her work. Braithewaite had not seen them for over three years, since they moved to Europe. None of that mattered to the nerves that were upsetting her stomach. So much was riding on the success of today’s trial that Braithewaite had had little sleep for the previous three nights. She had no mental space left for anything but the project and the test today.

“Umm - Carmen? His Lordship is summoning you again,” the voice of Rob Summers interrupted her thoughts over the intercom.

“Now?” Braithewaite asked, annoyance in her voice as she finished off attaching the last of the sensors.

“Yeah, afraid so,” Summers answered.

“Crap. Okay, I’ll go now,” Braithewaite told her oldest colleague. “Are you alright to wait here for a few minutes?” she asked Reilly.

“Yeah, sure. Go answer the call,” Reilly replied with a short laugh.

“I won’t be long,” Braithewaite assured the young woman. “Rob’ll get you anything you need.”

Doctor Rob Summers was the Lead Trans-Dimensional Engineer under Braithewaite and he despised their CEO of Trans-Dimensional Extensions, Noel Fullbright. TRADE was the corporate side of the project through which the funding came. Fullbright was a pen-pushing bully who managed to rile Summers up in every way. An opportunity to take a shot at Fullbright was never missed by the lead engineer.

“I’ll keep this short,” Braithewaite promised Summers as she walked past his station in the circle of computer terminals and equipment surrounding the DEC.

“Yeah, right.”, Summers chuckled in sarcasm.

“Just keep Jazz happy. If she needs anything, get it, ok?” Braithewaite said needlessly as she left the laboratory to get the lift up fifteen floors to His Lordship’s office. Summers was more than happy to wait on their volunteer.

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It tingled. It felt like the nerve endings were dancing in celebration at the end of agony. The absence a tender reminder of the torment endured. The tickling sensation spread over Tane’s leg, nerve clusters picking up on the joy of nothingness. From semi-stasis, Tane could feel what was going on within and without. His consciousness doing whatever it wanted, no matter Tane’s mental grunts of effort to keep control.

Even in the midst of the relief and soothing emptiness, Tane Bridges felt Counsel’s probing of his mind. The Counsel was searching threads of memories. Tane had no idea what ones it was looking for. That no longer mattered. He felt dizzy as the edges of reality began to fade into opaque shadows. Colours merged and oozed into coagulated smudges. Around the edges of the blobs, light began to poke through. White dispersed into myriad shades and hues. He threw up on the floor, thankful the Counsel’s metallic hands propped him up so none went on him. Counsel lay him back down and removed all of the jacks from Tane’s implants. Tane instinctively pulled back from Counsel’s proffered hand offering to help him up from the bench. Tane sat up and swung his legs over the side, feet on the floor.

“How long, Counsel?”, Tane murmured.

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It shouldn’t have gone like it did. Hayden Wallgreen was supposed to have reached his zenith, which was not that much of a peak considering the abysmal depths to which his life had sunk. Less than three weeks before, Hayden had been happy (now that he looked back with the 20/20 vision of hindsight), working his days out at a Mally Dairy shop. True, the customer based of pre-pubescent tweens left a lot of be desired and actually admitting to working there pretty much killed any date before it started. But Hayden liked the pay and it was flexible hours. It left the socially inept Hayden with plenty of time to pursue his other interests. That was the problem.

Plenty of time.

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Ra’arch’s eyes widened and bulged, a gasp escaped her, as she looked through the large viewing port on the side of her ship. Locals had gathered around her silvered vessel and appeared to be taking images of it. Some were even posing to be in the images. Kal’eshia had warned her of the primitiveness of the planet, but Ra’arch did not have a clear mental picture of just how backward Kal’esha meant.

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