My stomach was queasy, both from the memory of the wound I’d suffered earlier and the implications of the Great One’s words.
“You’ll … save humanity?” My mouth was dry, the words coming out slowly. I wanted to believe what the monster was saying but couldn’t bring myself to do so. Humanity’s hour was passed, and we were just waiting for the Grim Reaper to finish us all off.
It does not have to be that way, John, the Great One replied. It is within my power to shape for you a new world in another galaxy, safe and secure from the cosmos’s predators. We will then transfer a breeding population in sufficient numbers of pure human stock to the planet with the right equipment to build a self-sustaining civilization. Your race will survive on a world of plains, deserts, and rivers.
I saw the world as he described it. A place with a blue-green sun hanging in the air, vast herds of mutated cattle, six-legged horses, and no monsters. It was not a paradise of utopian cities and great technology, but it was a hell of a lot better than our own world. So much so that I questioned whether it existed anywhere but the Dreamlands.
“Do you see it?” I asked Mercury, trying to keep my voice flat and even.
“Yes,” Mercury said, reaching over to place her hand on my shoulder, her eyes filled with a cautious optimism. More than anything, I believed my lover wanted to find a home away from the death and destruction life on the Earth had become. It was a dream shared by all humans.
Yet I was unmoved.
“No,” I said, staring up at the Great One.
Mercury looked between me and the Great One. I could tell she was stunned at the selfishness of my decision. “Booth, could we talk about this?”
“I refuse for multiple reasons. First, I don’t believe a pure human strain exists. There is something creepy and crawly in every single person’s family tree if you dig deep enough. Two, if you could build your own planet, then you wouldn’t want this one.”
The Great One made multiple clicking noises with its claws, which I understood despite our immense language barriers as the equivalent of having his hand caught in the cookie jar.
“Three.” I raised a third finger. “I do not believe all these humans here would be so enamored of you and willing to sacrifice everything if you had not already promised them something similar.”
“You are more intelligent than your appearance suggests,” Professor Armitage said, staring at me. “The world promised to humanity is located in the Dreamlands.”
I grit my teeth. “So, you promise us an illusion.”
Human consciousness will live on in that dimension, the Great One said. It is a form of survival. One the Great Race prefers not to lower itself to, but one we keep as an option should the necessity for migrating there come to pass.
Mercury growled, clearly angry over the Yithian’s betrayal. “Survival isn’t everything. We want to build a new life for ourselves and our people. Living in a dream just means we’re alive until the dreamer decides to wake up.”
Better than this world, the Great One replied. Where you have only a few decades left. With our dream-crafting machines, we can sustain your people for millions of years more. Longer than you would last on your own.
“And what do you think, Armitage?” I looked to my side. I expected the professor to be of the same basic stuff as myself, unimpressed with being a science experiment.
Armitage looked at me, narrowing his eyes. “It’s better than nothing.”
I took a deep breath. “Then let me make a counteroffer. We have a child, Jackie. We’d like to enroll her here with the promise she’ll be allowed to become part of the University’s staff someday. It’s safer here than elsewhere. I should warn you, she’s a ghoul, though, and will undergo the transformation into one of their kind when she reaches her thirties.”
Mercury glared at me. “You should have asked me, John.”
“Do you disagree?” I asked.
“No.” Mercury lowered her head.
Understood, the Great One said. Your request is granted.
“That decision should have been made by me, Great One,” Professor Armitage said. “But, yes, we can always make room for one more student. I just hope she’s able to keep up.”
“She will,” Mercury said, proud of her adopted child. “I can promise you that. She’s a doctor in the making and I don’t mean the crude whiskey arm-cutters that pass for them nowadays. The ghouls will be lucky to have her.”
How ironic Mercury was able to give so much love to Jackie, but was so revolted by my changes.
“Also, will you fix my arm?” I said, raising the cursed appendage. “I want to be human again. I want to be with my lover and not have her recoil in disgust.”
The Great One leaned over its conical body to look closer. You are what you are. However, I can teach you how to transfer minds with another being. The Great Race will grow for you a body in your idealized image and you may transfer your consciousness into it.
I pondered his offer. “What will happen to my double in my old body?”
We will destroy it.
I pondered that. Would I really be me? Would I know? Would Mercury? I decided to risk it. “All right.”
Then we have an accord? the Great One asked.
“Do you want anything?” I looked at Mercury.
“Nice of you to ask,” Mercury muttered. “I want access to your knowledge stores, too. I want to live as long as John will and to have magic that will allow us to be together.”
Agreed, the Great One said. You will live as long as John the human. Your bodies are weak and easily broken but simple to repair.
“Then we have an agreement,” I said.
Splendid, the Great One said. Professor Armitage, would you be so kind as to introduce Mister Booth and Ms. Halsey to the associates we’ve gathered for them?
“I work better with a single partner,” I said, just barely avoiding saying I work better alone. I was a former R&E Ranger. I knew the Wasteland and how harsh it was, as well as how to find a man even across the rugged, mostly-barren terrain of the twenty-second century. I didn’t want a bunch of doddering old academics slowing my search down. I trusted Mercury could keep up, but there were precious few others in the world I believed could.
“Marcus is not to be underestimated,” Professor Armitage said, his voice still holding hints of anger. “You defeated Doctor Ward, but as I recall, that was with an army of Dunwych warriors.”
I grimaced, remembering the slaughter that day. “I don’t like working with people I don’t trust.”
“Neither do I,” Professor Armitage intoned. “However, we all make sacrifices for survival.”
Seeing as I was getting nowhere, I let the matter drop. “Very well.”
“Look at the bright side, Booth, this could be an opportunity to make new contacts and associates. There’s nothing better to bond over than the murder of a mad cultist out to destroy the world.”
Is there not? The Great One asked, rising back up to full height. I would have thought there was any number of other activities more suited to fellowship.
Mercury looked up at the Great One.
I was joking.
“Ha ha,” Mercury said, softly.
“Follow me,” Professor Armitage said, gesturing with his crystal rod. “We keep our most sensitive materials down here.”
Professor Armitage started walking down a side path of the alien-technology-filled caverns far below Miskatonic University’s ruins. I had heard of the vast natural caverns twisting and turning beneath the whole of New England. My departed friend Richard Jameson, a ghoul, told me often about how there were literally hundreds of thousands of miles worth of tunnels leading to a vast civilization of ghouls—one as devastated by the Rising as humanity.
I did not necessarily believe him, but I’d seen the tunnels and heard of many still-surviving cities down there. Someday, I wanted to journey there to see if I could make contact with them. If we could ever overcome the xenophobia existing between our two races, and the fact that ghouls considered human corpses a delicacy, then we might make good allies.
Mercury, as always, was focused on more practical concerns. “So, what sort of posse have you assembled to go with us?”
Armitage didn’t look back as he walked down the side of an oddly smooth tunnel. “Killers, thieves, murderers, and savages.”
“So, pretty much a normal bunch of Wastelanders?” Mercury asked, smiling.
“Yes.” Professor Armitage actually smiled.
“You don’t like us very much, do you?” Mercury asked, expressing more interest in Professor Armitage’s attitude than I cared to know.
“Which is strange, since you’re the guy who killed all of our associates,” I added, less than friendly.
Professor Armitage paused mid-step. “I was there, young but there, when humanity’s survivors were still vast in number. A seventh of the world’s population was still in the billions, and I watched them slaughter each other for cans of peaches. When the Deep Ones tried to claim the world in the name of Cthulhu, they died in the fallout brought from humanity’s weapons. They were unaware they did not have Cthulhu’s favor any more than humans did. When the ghouls attempted to offer their help to both races so they might rebuild, man attempted to destroy them as well, finding they were far more prepared to deal with both. The seventh was seventhed and seventhed again until there was little more than a scattered handful of madmen realizing how close to extinction they were.”
“What does that have to do with us?” Mercury asked, both of us stopping.
“To him, we are the murderous savages left over from what was a civilization of enlightened men,” I suggested. “The ugly mutant remnant of a better race.”
Mercury narrowed her eyes.
“Yes,” Professor Armitage said, having the decency to sound ashamed. “I could tell you more, about how the New Arkhamites’ Rangers have murdered and exploited those I have called friends, but in the end, I don’t like you because you’re outsiders. Creatures of the Wasteland.”
“And that’s so much worse than the time-traveling aliens possessing people,” Mercury said sarcastically.
“Very much so,” Professor Armitage said. “They are helping us rebuild. Things that would have otherwise been lost have been restored to us. Secrets of producing electricity, food, and clean water and protecting ourselves from the Old Ones have all been made available to us. You may dislike the Great Race, Doctor Halsey, but they have done more for us than our fellow humans.”
“They give you trinkets and lord over you,” I said, contemptuous. “They will claim this planet for themselves and move us to reservations in the Dreamlands if they don’t exterminate us outright. Whenever a technologically advanced society meets a lesser one, they abuse and betray them. The Yithians are no different.”
“Because that is what humanity has done throughout history?” Professor Armitage asked.
“Yes,” I muttered. “We’re not that different.”
“I disagree. If they wanted us dead, they could just project themselves into the future and seize all of our bodies.”
“Maybe they don’t want to be weak and easily broken, however simple to repair. We’re just the vermin under the porch they want to lure out into the wild rather than shoot.”
“Is it so hard to believe they just want to help us?” Professor Armitage asked, looking me straight in the eyes.
“In my experience? Yes.” I pointed my black-clawed forefinger at his chest.
Professor Armitage looked down at the ground. “Then maybe that’s why humanity is dying.”
There was nothing more to say to that. The three of us continued down the tunnel until we came to a large cavern where an octagonal building stood. It was made of some unfamiliar metal, shining and reflective, possessed of its own light, which glowed in the darkness of the cavern.
I blinked rapidly and had to narrow my gaze to prevent myself from taking it in all at once. Much like my arm, it seemed there were qualities of the metal that did not exist in three-dimensional space. It was one of the ways the Great Old Ones and the other elder species proofed their construction. If a thing did not exist in time or space, it could never be destroyed—at least, that was my theory.
“What’s so important here?” I asked, watching Professor Armitage advance on the building. There was no door or window I could see.
“Knowledge,” Professor Armitage said, his gaze becoming intense. “It is a time capsule in case the University is destroyed.”
Professor Armitage tapped his crystal rod on the side of the object and an octagonal door appeared. A light from inside shone outward, and I covered my eyes. Professor Armitage ignored it and headed on in.
“Kind of a shitty time capsule if no one can get in it but the guys who have magic wands,” Mercury said, following him. “Speaking of which, do we get one of those?”
“No,” Professor Armitage said. “You will not.”
“Spoilsport.”
I snorted, smiling. I didn’t know what I would do without her. One of the reasons I was so desperate to recover my humanity.
You will never be human again, the voices in my head said. You will walk this world’s ashes.
Liar, I cursed them.
Covering my eyes with my left arm, I walked forward into the brilliant light and found it softening as I heard the walls bubble behind me like water. The path behind me was sealed, having morphed together as if the metal were liquid. When my eyes adjusted to the illumination, I found myself in a most unexpected location.
The largest library I’d ever seen.