Psykogeddon (19 page)

It gets no better even if, somehow, one manages to open a portal to a place that isn't absolutely nothing or instant annihilation. Alternate Earths, for example, where Nazis won wars and/or presidents didn't get shot simply do not exist in any way, shape or form. They only ever existed
in potentia
, and the fact of the world we know collapsed the probabilities entirely. Like being pregnant or dead, you can't have a world just a
little bit
different.

There is, or possibly was, a world where the Dark Judges took power, defined all life as a crime, and busily wiped out the entire population on an industrial basis. Not so much of a change from our own world, you might think, if a bit twisted and extreme - until you realise that the base constants of that particular universe allowed the use of Magicks that were quite horrific - and not just in the sense that they were being wielded by people who couldn't even spell "magic" properly.

That world is a dead wasteland now, and worse, contact with it has allowed its surviving entities to cross over into our own, their sojourns killing everyone and everything with whom they come into contact, death and devastation trailing in their wake. And this is the closest world - sufficiently different, sufficiently self-consistent to cohere and exist - to our own.

There are worlds more different and worse. Worlds so different, their inhabitants so inimical to life as we know it, that direct contact would obliterate all that we know, and everything we ever can know, as easily as the pricking of a soap-bubble...

The chamber is just one that exists in an infinity of rock, one of the countless bubbles that make up the known universe entire. There appears to be nothing out of the ordinary about it in the physical sense - save for the objects that are scattered through it. Strange objects that have no business being here in the bubble-world, and never will. To human eyes, if human eyes were here to see, and were able to actually see things in the infra-red radiating from the chamber walls, these objects might include:

A big, freestanding brass barometer, its workings shot and the dial set permanently on "blustery".

A small occasional table, the scorched and crazed varnish on its top still showing vestiges of a partridge and peacock-feather inlay.

A wooden tea chest filled to the brim with a tangled collection of wire spectacle-frames.

A crucifix, from which the little man has fallen, leaving only one pale leg behind, screwed to the wood.

A bakelite radio with the majority of its innards missing...

And any number of other, apparently random items, all clotted with the ichorous slime that the inhabitants of the bubble-world constantly exude. We shall call these inhabitants the Slaarg, purely for the sake of something to call them, although that is certainly not their proper name, which cannot be heard by human ears and is unimaginable to the human mind.

The chamber is alive with Slaarg, a seething mass of them in a variety of sizes and states of development. Slaarg begin life as spores and exist in a state of continual growth, feeding on the slime exuded by the larger of their fellows and the bodies of those smaller they can catch.

They are metamorphic, their skeletons telescopic, enclosed by viscera the consistency of mud and, in turn, enveloped by a muscle and a carapace of chitinous platelets. Within their basically obloid forms they carry a full component of sensory and manipulatory appendages. They can assume new forms more or less at will - none of them particularly pleasant.

Off to one side, perched on the bulk of an overturned nineteenth century Victrola, something the size of a rat, with an extensible and yawning mouth, envelops something the same general shape as a lobster. The plated mass of the devourer ripples, momentarily, then suddenly constricts with a muffled yet perfectly audible crunch. A blast of acidic vapour shoots from a sphincter-vent, scorching the wood of the Victrola and raising bubbles on the varnish.

The continual frenzy of feeding and being fed upon seems to be prompting a kind of accelerated evolution as the immature Slaarg attempt new and tentative shapes to gain some small advantage. Something snakelike with the pseudo-hood of a cobra strikes repeatedly at something that, briefly, tries a generally insectoid form. A kind of animated mantrap writhes in agony as it is pecked apart by a flock of birdlike forms, connected by a tangle of fleshy tubes and in fact a single Slaarg organism...

...and on and on, in every combination. All in all, it's a sight that might put even H P Lovecraft off his calamari and chips.

None of it is noticed by the hulking forms in the centre of the chamber. Slaarg only achieve what passes for sentience at a certain size, and the feeding frenzy going on around them is as unimportant and unnoticeable - if, occasionally, as annoying - as the buzzing of insects.

The largest of these Slaarg, the Dominator, has produced a collection of surprisingly delicate-looking pseudopodia and is brushing them, speculatively, against an apparently empty patch of humid air. The ends of the tentacles seem, in some manner, to fade into nothingness - though whether that is because they divide and sub-divide at their ends in a fractal manner that means their ends are ultimately and effectively infinite, or whether they are in actual fact disappearing into some other dimension, it is impossible to say.

Interesting... <\speak>
The Dominator says, in a manner that has about as much relation to the forming of audible words as a denial-of-service DataNet spam-attack has to an item of junk mail pushed through a letterbox.
You tell me, my Scientificator <\name> that there is some new instability within the Dimensional Rift <\nomenclature> ? <\speak>

The Slaarg, who has taken on the form of a cerebellum the size of an elephant, extends an eye on a stalk and turns it in the direction of its Dominator:

O Grand High Dominator of the Nine Known Dimensions! On whose stout and mighty axis those dimensions spin! All hail he whose smallest pseudopodium has ground continents to dust and from whom every utterance is a profound and roaring wind. O Dominator, from whom issues a bright and most effulgent radiance, as if from - [interrupt]

I believe, <\speak>
says the Dominator,
that a slightly less formal mode of address might be permissible, just this once. Otherwise we could be here all squeem. <\speak>

Right you are, squire. <\speak>
says the Scientificator.
Now you'll remember this here chamber is the site of what you might be calling an ontological instability. Over the decasqueems it's been throwing out all manner of crap. Stuff we don't have the first clue about what it is and how it's used. We've never quite been able to get a clear sensorial-complex of what's beyond it - I mean the crap that comes though could have just been spontaneously generated, completely at random, for all we knew... <\speak>

Go on, Scientificator <\speak>
says the Dominator.

Now there seems to have been some change from within, <\speak>
says the Scientificator.
The basic nature of the Multiverse is, basically, tied into the processes of sentient consciousness on the quantum level. Something has shifted, beyond the Dimensional Rift. <\nomenclature>We are able to detect creatures in the world beyond. The world beyond, in fact, is infected <\emphasis> with them. <\speak>

Infested, eh? <\speak> s
ays the Dominator.

Infested, <\speak>
says the Scientificator.
Crawling with them. A variety of primate. Filthy little things. Leaking biological contaminants out of every pore and orifice of their bodies, pulsing psychoneurological waste from every synapse in what passes for their brains. Direct contact would, I am very much of the opinion, be fatal. <\speak>

The Dominator regards the Dimensional Rift thoughtfully - or at least, contemplates the sense-input from its sensory tentacles, as they probe at apparent nothingness, in a clinically dispassionate manner.

Fatal? <\speak>
it says
. For us or them? <\speak>

Both, ultimately,
says the Scientificator.
What with the degree of cross-contamination and all. You're probably picking up a whole bunch of secondary micro-resonances as we do what to physically speaking is a macroturgle to a squeem. <\speak>

The Dominator's sensory pseudopodia whip back from the dimensional rift as if they have been stung.

This won't do, <\speak>
says the Dominator.
This won't do at all. Scientificator, keep a sensory-apparat on events beyond the Dimensional Rift. <\nomenclature> The first sign of destabilisation, dispatch an Assimilation Drone. <\nomenclature> Sterilise this other world of its human filth immediately. <\decisive> <\speak>

I shall give the orders, my Dominator. All shall be arranged. It shall be done. <\speak>
The bulk of the Scientificator collapses in on itself and reforms into a complex arrangement of planes with fractal-ragged edges, as it conveys said orders and arrangements to its various minions - the equivalent of technicians - in other, nearby bubbles of the bubble-universe.

The Dominator, for its part, manoeuvres its hulking form through the chamber, heading for the tunnels which, with suitable locomotive assistance from its retinue, will take it back to the rather more extensive complex of chambers that serves it as a stronghold.

Idly, feeling the need for a small snack, it turns an eye-stalk to regard a smugly well-fed, immature Slaarg perched on top of a big brass barometer with a needle permanently stuck on "blustery". It shoots out, from its main mass, a kind of bone grappling-hook trailing a length of thin tendon.

The speared immature Slaarg squeals and attempts to resist by planting a sucker. The big brass barometer falls over with a clash and a splay of ichorous sludge. The immature Slaarg is dragged, big brass barometer and all, into a gaping sphincter-maw, ringed with teeth, that the Dominator has opened up especially for the purpose.

THIRTEEN

"
Away, then, with these Lewd, Ungodly Diversions, and which are but Impertinence at the best. What part of impudence, either in Words or Practice, is omitted by the Stage. Don't the Buffoons take almost all manner of Liberties, and Plunge through Thick and Thin, to make a Jest?
"

- St Clement of Alexandria

Works

The effects of the psycholeptic pulse had been building for months, subtly damaging the neurosystems of those in the Sectors surrounding Sector One.

Initially, this had merely led to an increase in mental illness, an escalation of random acts of violence, or served to trigger specifically structured varieties of psychosis in certain pre-damaged individuals who had been carefully manoeuvred into positions where they could make the most impact, or cause the maximum of confusion and damage when they flipped out into mania.

Now, however, the influence of the psycholeptic pulse jumped several entire orders of magnitude...

In Shangri La Towers, in an intimate little bistro-chamber, the Lady Tamara Whelpington-Smythe smoked an arch cigarette - of a camomile and modified-cannabis mix that would still be technically legal for another two hours - and regarded the man seated opposite her with flat distaste.

The man, an uncouth lout by the name of Joey Malish, was nothing more in life than a chauffeur-for-hire, and had no prospects of ever bettering himself into anything else. Not that this was automatically to be despised, Lady Tamara allowed, being, she believed, staunchly egalitarian to the core. Slumming it with a bit of rough had been, after all, part of the attraction in her involvement with him.

Now, however, certain factors meant that the attraction of the affair had most definitely begun to pall.

"It was out of my way to come here, you know," Malish now said. "I'm completely off my level."

"Myself, too," said Lady Tamara. "Ordinarily, one would rather be seen dead than in a low-class 'joint', as I believe you and your 'mates' are inclined to call such an establishment as this. I simply didn't want either of us to be seen where we might be recognised. We have things to talk about, Joseph."

"That we do, ma'am," said Malish with heavy sarcasm, miming a little pull on a nonexistent peaked cap.

He glanced at Lady Tamara's cigarette, and at the glass of high-strength customised synthahol before her. "Do you think you should be doing that? You know it's a bad idea to drink and smoke when you're..."

"When I'm what, precisely, Joseph?" asked Lady Tamara sweetly. "Who says I'm anything?"

"But you told me..." Malish trailed off as the implication of what she was saying hit him. "You mean you've...?"

"No I haven't," Lady Tamara said. "Not yet, at least. My point is that, until I decide what I'm going to do about it,
nothing
has happened. This could be the last drink I take and cigarette I smoke for quite a while. Or it might not. That's my decision. It has nothing to do with you."