Hacking a Great One

The abomination stands in the center of a networked pentagram, red LEDs shining from the five routers at its points. It completes its shuffling circle, trapped there.

“Ready,” I speak into my throat mic, and the LEDs turn green.

Information flows through them to a hundred specially designed supercomputers, each in its own pentagram, each observed by five specialists in formal logic, neurology, philosophy, mathematics.

I lick my lips. This will work.

Eyes like pits stare from a head swinging at the end of a broken neck. The abomination did that to its body, minutes after that body’s possession. The body’s larynx was torn in half, so in order to understand the thing, I must read its chewed and blackened lips.

You shall fail, the abomination mouths at me, driven by impulses from a mind unimaginably vast and alien. Unimaginable by any one person, anyway.  I am the possessor, not the possessed. You walk into the mouth of a shark, hoping that by the force of your arms you may hold its mouth open.

“Shit,” says Valentin, “does it know what we’re doing?”

“It could hardly fail to,” I say. “It’s insane. Not stupid. It doesn’t matter if it knows.”

If that is what you believe, take my hand. The thing in the pentagram pulls back its abused lips. An arm twitches up as if operated by a string tied weight falling through a black hole.

I watch blue light seep from its fingers. Consider touching that possessed flesh. The water and salt on my skin forming a conductive connection from my brain to it.

 

I reach into the pentagram, and seize the Deep One by the mind.

Happy Halloween!