Ninth in the series. Read after the break…
Insight
By Scott Lowther
Copyright 2019
1978, June: Brass Valley
It was cold and dark, with winds that could strip frozen flesh from bone. The humans of Brass Valley were cooped up in their subterranean facilities dotted throughout the ancient alien metropolis. The facilities were intentionally separated from each other by a minimum of half a mile; it had been found that during average daytime summer temperatures in the city, approximately 20 twenty degrees below, an escaped shoggoth could go no further than about a quarter of a mile before it began to freeze up. And in conditions such as those that prevailed at that moment, a shoggoth would almost immediately begin to freeze and crumble.
Frozen shoggoth cleanup duty was bad, but live shoggoth cleanup duty was much worse.
Over the last three decades, the surface of the ancient city had been completely mapped and a good chunk of the subsurface was known to high precision. The Elder Things had been maniacs for carving bas relief illustrations of everything they did; nearly every wall was covered with such depictions. Initially the great majority of the markings had been indecipherable; some early explorers like the late Professor Dyer had gone perhaps a bit too far out on a speculative limb in assigning meaning. There was no Rosetta Stone for this alien form of communications. But for the last quarter century, they’d had assistance in deciphering the pictograms and ideograms: several of the actual aliens themselves. In fact, four of them.
The aliens biology and biochemistry were based on comprehensible chemistry and physics, but they were the result of not only an alien evolutionary path, but also millions of years of their own species genetic tinkering. In the last few hundred centuries of the aliens surface city, as Antarctica began its last, permanent slide into deep freeze, a number of individuals had been lost outside and had frozen solid. And their biology was so tough that when they were thawed again, they woke up, complete with personalities and memories intact. As far as the humans knew, anyway.
This particular region of Antarctica had frozen permanently solid something like fifteen million years earlier. The aliens were far removed from their people.
It had taken a decade before anything resembling a dialogue could take place between the humans and the so-called “Elder Things.” There was a seemingly invincible language barrier: compared to the difference between English and the aliens language, ancient Egyptian would have seemed like the accent of the next county over. Additionally, no human would ever be able to make the sort of whistling noise the aliens did, and none of them would ever be able to put together a decent collection of vowels and consonants. So the early efforts at communications revolved around written languages.
It took a decade before a reliable English-to-Alien dictionary could be put together and the first meaningful conversations had. Unsurprisingly, the aliens first recognizable questions were “where am I,” “where are my people,” and “what are you things.”
Fortunately, with a combination of written responses and field trips to see the city and the night sky, showing that the patterns of stars in the sky was utterly different than they might remember, the aliens were brought up to speed. Of the four, one alien seemed to go into psychological shock and had not moved since. Two had seemed depressed, for lack of a better word, and would co-operate with the humans only reluctantly. The last, however, seemed to readily accept the situation, and seemed to enjoy the company of humans. He – they were all thought of as male, for no well defined reason – also seemed to enjoy the things humans made.
Like right now, as he was the center of attention in the mess hall of Bunker #7. A week earlier a cargo resupply had come in, bearing food and meds and paper and pencils and other such necessities from Japan. And with it came entertainment items. Now, the alien, nicknamed “Ed,” was busy racking up new high scores on the two “Space Invaders” video game tables. He stood between the two low tables and played them simultaneously, while a dozen humans stood around and cheered him on.
Ed was large and radially symmetrical, with five wings, five branching arms, five eyes and a five-lobed brain. Everyone assumed that had the resupply brought in five “Space Invaders” games, Ed would have been able to play them all at once. However, they’d noticed that his high scores when playing two machines at once were never as high as when he played one at a time.
Ed, at least, was popular with the humans. He was friendly, in his way, and always communicative; he had learned to write in stilted English on a childs “Magic Slate.” He always carried it with him in a satchel, along with several other favorite items. He was allowed free movement around the base, anywhere he wanted to go… at least, anywhere he knew to go. The humans of the Office of Insight liked Ed, but they did not fully trust him. His people, after all, had, half a billion years earlier, created the shoggoths that were at this very moment sloshing around deep under that facility, and which had been appropriated by other species of more clearly malicious intent such as the Deep Ones. Out there under the oceans, the Deep Ones had pet shoggoths; they had been seen from time to time by deep submergence vehicles; only video evidence of them was ever returned to the surface. The vehicles themselves were never seen again.
Ed and the other Elder Things were often questioned about their people, their culture and their technology, along with threats to the world that they experienced in their day. Many of those same threats seemed to still be around… the star-spawn of Cthulhu had been fought to a standstill by the Elder Things and seemed to have vanished, but the Mi-Go that had driven the Elder Things beneath the waves were still around, though in far smaller numbers. When shown images of the Deep Ones, Ed and the other Elder Things professed ignorance. Perhaps, Ed once suggested, there was a faint resemblance to a much smaller and infinitely more primitive form that the Star-Spawn were tinkering with. But that was fifteen or more million years ago. How evolution and engineering might have worked into the Deep One development, no man – human or extraterrestrial – could say.
With the shoggoths, though, the Elder Things proved invaluable. Once they were convinced that the geothermally warm cavern deep beneath the city that their people had fled to was now populated solely by cave dwelling penguins, fungus and shoggoths, the Elder Things helped the humans to catch and study shoggoths. The process was pretty simple… an Elder Thing would accompany a group of humans into the tunnels, call out for help as loud as possible and at least one shoggoth would come running. It would be led on a merry chase up the tunnel and towards the surface, where it would be allowed to burst forth past a heat-retaining set of plastic sheet flaps. Within seconds it would start to freeze up and could be captured fairly easily, transported by tractor to a research area.
The Elder Things were allowed in on the research, but only on a limited basis. Ed might have been quite friendly with humans, but it was clear that he took a malicious joy in torturing the shoggoths. The Office of Insight had no interest in torturing the amorphous beasts, just in understanding them in case the Deep Ones were to employ them.
The humans were learning things about the shoggoths. Most of what they learned was exceedingly bad news, but every now and then some small snippet of tactically useful information would be teased out of the tests. The recent shipment from Japan, for instance, brought with it a few tons of plant fertilizer. A previous very small scale experiment had had some decent results…