This is a short story I wrote in mid-2022. Genre: cosmic horror as a metaphor for living with a high p-doom.
One
The last time I saw my mom, we met in a coffee shop, like strangers on a first date. I was twenty-one, and I hadn’t seen her since I was thirteen.
She was almost fifty. Her face didn’t show it, but the skin on the backs of her hands did.
“I don’t think we have long,” she said. “Maybe a year. Maybe five. Not ten.”
It says something about San Francisco, that you can casually talk about the end of the world and no one will bat an eye.
Maybe twenty, not fifty, was what she’d said eight years ago. Do the math. Mom had never lied to me. Maybe it would have been better for my childhood if she had, but here, now, I was grateful.
I sipped my coffee. “Mom, I know how you feel–”
“It’s not what I feel, it’s what I believe is true.” Her voice was rough. “Are you still holding out hope?” Her face twisted into a silent laugh. “I’d offer a bet, only, if I win then it won’t matter.”
“I don’t want to win a bet, Mom. I want to live my fucking life. Here. In this world. Which, if you haven’t noticed, is the only one I’ve got. I want to have kids.” And I hesitated, but only for a moment. “Like you did.”
She winced. For a fraction of a second, I felt satisfied. It wasn’t worth it.
“You knew, Mom,” I said, fully aware that I had already driven in the knife and now I was just twisting it. “You knew, and you had me.”
My earliest memory is of my fourth birthday. Mom baked me a cake in the shape of a capybara, my favorite animal. I had two friends over, I think; I’ve forgotten their names. Mom swept the floor after. I wanted to hold the dustpan.
“The world has a skin,” she said. “We’re not meant to see its insides.”
I was confused. “But the planet doesn’t have skin,” I said, indignant. “It has a crust and a mantle and an atmosphere.”
“You know that’s not what I mean.” Her eyes were dark and far away. It wasn’t the first time I had seen that look, and it frightened me.
“It’s only the surface,” Mom said, softly, distantly. “Like the sea, right? Remember watching the sunset at the beach? It was just a reflection on the skin. You don’t want to know what’s underneath.”
She had stopped. I kicked her leg. “I do know! There’s fish that forgot how to have eyes, and, and worms that eat sulfur from bottom-sea vents.” She had gotten me that book from the library herself, and I was offended that she didn’t remember what was in it.
She looked at me, and I think I realized that her eyes were looking at the future, not the now.
“It’s a metaphor,” she said. “It’s– I’m sorry. Nevermind. Why don’t we go play?”
And we built Lego houses, but my toybox didn’t have any Lego people, so Mom helped me draw little dolls on paper and cut them out for me. We stayed up half the night playing, way past my bedtime. We invented a whole city in our minds and filled it with mommies and daddys and babies, and I was happy.
I don’t, actually, remember when or how I went into foster care. I wasn’t even five.
But I remember how it started.
I was four-and-two-months-and-five days – I had recently become very excited about counting – when I saw the inky, iridescent shadow sliding its way out from under the dresser in our bedroom.
My eyes tried to skitter and slide away from it, and I noticed but I wasn’t scared. “Mom! Look!” I said, like I had a thousand times, for snails and slugs and snakes. “Mom, what is it? Can I pick it up, is it safe?”
Mom grabbed me around the middle, carried me to the bathroom, and shut the door in my face.
It wasn’t the first time she’d done that – and, looking back, it was never a game – but she’d always improvised silly jokes, turning it into play. Protecting my childhood, I guess, the only way she could.
This time, she sobbed audibly on the other side of the door.
Two
Pete, my biological father, explained some of it later.
(Pete isn’t my dad. He never asked me to call him that, and if he’d wanted to be a dad, he could have stuck around.)
But when Mom had her nervous breakdown and I ended up in foster care, the social services department of California heroically tracked my father by blood. I’m impressed at their persistence. He was in Malawi, working with Doctors Without Borders, but he came back right away when he got the phone call. Both of which tell you a lot about him.
I was almost seven by the time their ponderous bureaucracy ground its way to its eventual destination; even a bio-dad who could probably qualify as a literal saint had to pass their screenings. Our new apartment was in San Francisco, on the twelfth floor of a brand-new building, and the entire wall of the living room was all windows, looking out on a skyline that the Internet later told me is iconic.
To his credit, Pete didn’t seem to expect me to be impressed.
I remember he looked nervous on my first visit. Maybe because my social worker was still hovering, or maybe because he hadn’t seen me since my second birthday party. I’d had a photo in my baby album, once, but tore it out in a moment of rage when I was five.
“I didn’t have your bedroom repainted yet,” he said. “I wasn’t sure what color you’d want.”
I hissed at him.“Don’t care!” I said. “Tell me about Mom.”
His eyes got big. “Liz?”
Liz was my foster carer. I hissed again. “No, stupidhead! Mom! The one you stuck your penis in and then she pushed me out her vagina nine months later!”
(It is possible I had read some books about human biology that are not generally recommended for six-year-olds.)
“Ah, you mean Aria.” Pete swallowed. “I can tell you about her, but - some of it should wait til you’re older.”
I glared at him. “I’m big enough!”
He glanced at my social worker.
I took his point, and subsided into sullen cooperation. “Fine,” I muttered. “Later. I’ll remind you.”
Liz gets most of the credit that I’m a functional human being at all.
By the time I arrived at her house, my Sight was fully open, and it wasn’t just iridescent shadows from under cupboards that I was seeing. Those were the harmless ones. It’s a mercy that Mom held it together long enough to teach me what I should and shouldn’t completely panic about.
(“We watch the cracks,” I remember Mom saying, and her eyes were red-rimmed, she hadn’t slept in days, but I knew she wasn’t lying to me because she never had. “It’s the only thing I’ve ever done that mattered. I watched the cracks, and I closed them when I could, but they’re getting bigger…”)
Liz was forty-eight when she took me in. I would never have guessed; she was a big lady, round and plump and soft to hug, but her face didn’t look any older than Mom’s.
She pulled me into her arms and hugged me tightly, the first time I saw a glittery haze drifting up from the bathroom sink, and her arms felt safe. “Hey,” she said, quietly, when I had stopped screaming. “Can you use your words and tell me what’s frightening you?”
And I told her, carefully enunciating the words that Mom had had time to teach me. Class two emanation, subtype…I couldn’t remember…but it was okay, emanations could only affect the physical world via minds, class two could only get little kids, and I was the only kid in the house but I knew what I was doing.
Liz held me, and listened, and asked questions like a grownup would ask another grownup in a conversation about grownup things. She must not have really believed any of it – I must have known that, on some level – but she listened like I was a person…
I was scared I would forget, and I didn’t use my words but she noticed. “Do you know how to write?” she asked me.
“Almost,” I admitted, gulping. “Sort of. I can write my name. And I know how to spell STOP.” It was on all the STOP signs.
Liz beamed at me. “What a clever girl! You’ll definitely learn it quickly. This story seems so important to you, so – how about you tell me again, and I can write it down for you? And we’ll practice lots and lots, so soon you can read it yourself.”
Barely believing my ears, I carefully repeated what I’d said, and then the words kept spilling out, and I found myself telling her everything I could remember.
She kept the notebooks for me, just like she’d promised. When she set me up with a typing game and I shrieked in alarm about the class four invocation sigils in the program’s logo, she hit the power-shutdown button on the laptop without hesitation, and then hugged me and apologized for scaring me.
(She did, very responsibly, take me to a child psychologist. I think they had no idea what to make of me. She saved the written report for me, of course. It said I was an unusually intelligent child with an active imagination, and would benefit from more out-of-home activities and socialization.)
Pete moved out before my first birthday, but he must have heard enough from Liz – and listened, and taken it seriously, enough – to know that I had Mom’s Sight.
Once we were alone (I was being very good, and hadn’t made a sound when he ordered Thai food from a phone app even though there were, like, three different potential vectors for class two and three emanations), he took me to the living room sofa. He didn’t try to touch me.
“Your mom,” he said.
“Hmm?” I said.
“Your mom.” He swallowed, almost like it hurt. “I – it doesn't matter now, but I did love her– not the point.” He swallowed again. “Your mom saw things. Right? And you see them too.”
I really wanted a hug, but I even more desperately didn’t want to admit to wanting a hug from him. “Yeah,” I muttered into the hood of my sweatshirt. It was grubby, which must have embarrassed Liz and my social worker, but it wasn’t their fault; I was the one who’d refused to change it for three days.
“Tell me?” He sounded genuinely curious. “What do you see right here, right now?” A pause, “- uh, obviously only tell me about things that won’t be worse if you look at them.”
(Which, from my perspective as an adult who can actually use any of the reasoning techniques that Mom taught me, was obviously evidence that he knew and understood – but, since I was six and an idiot, at the time it mostly made me feel incredibly pissed off.)
“There are like twelve class one emanations in your stupid apartment,” I announced to the ceiling. “Doesn’t matter ‘cause they’re dumb and harmless but - under the fridge, on top of the fridge, two in the wooden thingy on your counter, why do you even have a stupid wooden thingy on your counter–”
“It’s a bread box,” Pete murmured. “To keep the bread fresh.”
I growled at him.
He lifted his arm, like he wanted to hug me, but then set it down again. “...I can get rid of it. Sorry?”
I hissed at him again. “Don’t patronize me!” I pronounced it perfectly; I had, perhaps, memorized this phrase and practiced it in front of the mirror.
Pete looked at me, calmly, gently, and I remember feeling like I hated his stupid face. “…I can’t see them, you know,” he said softly. “I’m not like your mom, or you, I just learned about it secondhand.”
I avoided his eyes, tried and failed to spot dust bunnies on the floor. I was annoyed that my usual avenue for distracting-the-adults wasn’t working. Even Liz’s house had always had some sort of mess that I could point out and yell at her to clean up.
“Is that why you left,” I said, eventually, looking at everything except him. “‘Cause you were scared.”
Pete still didn’t flinch. “...It’s one reason. Your mom and I - well - we had other problems. But…yeah. It’s scary, and I’m, I’m not one of the people who can do anything about it.”
I was furious. I hit him, hard, in the shoulder.
“You can do things!” I shrieked at him, full of six-year-old indignation. “Anyone can do things! You can’t see the shadows but no one can see atoms and there’s still particle colliders! And, and microscopes, and,” I remember pausing to carefully enunciate,”and e-lect-tron microscopes for really tiny things like mo-le-cules, and, and the Hubble Telescope in SPACE, and…”
At which point I started crying, and stopped thinking, and I don’t remember what happened next.
It took years before I realized I could just ask to see Mom. I was ten, and I wasn’t living with Pete anymore. He had run away again, to South America this time, heroically dealing with some sort of new viral epidemic. Like I said, he’s on the track to sainthood. He never asked to be on the track for good parenthood, and I didn’t ask for a dad either, so it’s fine.
I ended up with Pete’s parents in Portland, Oregon. They were delighted to raise a granddaughter they hadn’t known existed until three months before Pete fled to a foreign country.
They didn’t know the least thing about my Sight or the cracks, of course. But they loved me, and they also loved the abstract concept of Family, and were happy to support me in meeting up with who they insisted on calling my “tummy mummy”, like they thought I was still five and also stupid.
(Maybe they were trying to acknowledge Liz, and what she’d done for me as a supposed replacement mom, but it’s not like she ever needed or wanted me to call her Mom.)
They did remind me, repeatedly, that Mom was “flighty” and “unreliable” and that I shouldn’t get my hopes up. But she had been out of the psych hospital for years by then. She was living in small-town California while she finished getting her head together; there were fewer things leaking through the cracks in less dense areas. She didn’t have a car, but she booked a Greyhound bus and rode up to see us.
We met in a park, a “neutral location”, and I think my grandparents were shocked that I immediately sprinted into her arms, sobbing.
I didn’t cry for long; I wasn’t sure how much time we had. “Mom,” I whispered, urgently, into her ear. “I took notes on everything you taught me. …Liz took them, I guess, I couldn’t write yet.”
(By then I was long over the anger about how she could have taught me to read and write, I was clearly smart enough - it took two and a half weeks, with Liz - and she hadn’t prioritized it. When I was younger it had felt like evidence that she hadn’t cared about me, because she hadn’t prioritized anything important.
But I was ten now, I wasn’t a little kid anymore, and I could understand better that she had just been trying to give me a normal life, in between the cracks and the looming horrors in her future, trying to give me some kind of childhood before the end that she already saw coming. Which isn’t to say I was grateful - my feelings about it varied widely depending on the day - but I understood, mostly, that she had been trying her best.)
I moved back in with Mom when I was twelve.
She was renting the basement unit of a hundred-year-old house, paying cash under the table, five hundred a month. The house belonged to two lesbian couples co-raising their five children. They were lovely people, even if they did offer to realign my chakras every time we crossed paths.
Our walls were unfinished, bare wire running along the ceiling. We shared a king-size mattress on the floor. There was no bathroom; we had to go out to the backyard and slip into the family home via the porch, and I remember at least once, at two am, peeing while pretending there weren’t kissing sounds coming from the other side of the shower curtain. We had a minifridge and a microwave, plugged in on the floor in a corner. Mom bought family-size packs of coleslaw mix; we’d cut a slit in the bag, drizzle in ranch dressing from a bottle and shake it, and then pass it back and forth and eat it straight from the bag with plastic forks.
It was probably the happiest six months of my life. Mom was coping. The shadows hardly bothered us at all.
Pete visited a few weeks after my thirteenth birthday. He didn’t say a word of criticism about the room. He’d just returned from rural India; maybe he was still grateful for a house with a flush toilet.
“They were tearing down one of the slums,” he said. “In Bangalore. To build one of those, whassitcalled. Server farms? Needs its own new power plant.” He scoffed. “Pretty sure they didn’t pass any sort of environmental assessment, either.”
I was sitting cross-legged on our bed, eating gummy bears from a five-pound bag I’d ordered online and cutting out glossy pictures of outfits from magazines.
“Datacenter,” Mom correctly absently. “What for? They barely have an information economy, I thought–”
Pete shrugged. “Outsourcing, I heard. Cheaper for corporations in the US to exploit workers over there.” He stared at the wall. “And you wonder how many of those poor wage slaves just got kicked out of their homes so the billionaires can profit.”
Pete talked like that, sometimes, but Mom’s eyes had the faraway look again.
“What?” Pete said.
“They’re forging pathways.” Mom was holding her empty foam coffee cup from our coffee shop run that morning, and fidgeting with it. “That’s another node, just by itself, and - outsourcing, shit, it’ll have links all over the world. Were there anomalies?”
My hands froze on the scissors. I think I knew, even then, how significant this would be – not just for the world, the future, but for me.
Pete scowled. “How would I know? I’m not like you.” And he glanced over at me, but I was pretending not to listen.
“You can see the echoes,” Mom shot back. “You pointed out just fine that San Francisco isn’t a natural place. And the paths are already too entrenched, it’s leaking – LA, Vegas…”
Pete winced. “Bangalore’s…worse. In some ways. It’s changing so fast. Has that same feeling, that it’s pulling apart – the rich in one world and everyone else in another…” His eyes flickered with something. Fear, maybe. “Is that, uh, your sort of thing? I always thought it was just, you know. Capitalism.”
Mom was crushing the coffee cup now. “What do you think capitalism is? It’s an egregore, Pete. It’s just one of the less unfriendly ones.” At his shocked look: “Relatively speaking. At least it needs us alive.”
“If you can call it living,” Pete muttered.
Mom didn’t deign to answer that. I’m not sure if she heard. I was scared – not, actually, because of the content, though I should have been. But I knew that look in her eyes.
It meant that my oasis of happiness was coming to an end. It meant that, yet again, my mom was going to do the math and put the whole world ahead of her daughter, and she would do that until it shredded her and spat her out broken, and maybe this time she wouldn’t get better.
Pete noticed. He looked scared. “You said fifty years. When we met.” Which, obviously, must have been at least fourteen years ago. I did the math, and I didn’t like it. He swallowed. “Aria, damn it, how much time do we really have?”
She didn’t look at him. “Maybe twenty. If we’re lucky. But there hasn’t been a lot of luck to go around, has there, why do they have to keep building new nodes - if we could tell them without everyone thinking we’re insane - the problem being that half of us are insane sometimes - I wish, Pete, I just fucking wish people would ever just. Decide not. To do the stupid thing. Then we might have a chance.”
I’d never heard Mom sound like that. She was honest with me, but until now she had tried to hide the bitterness.
Pete laughed, humorless. “Then maybe we don’t deserve to stick around as a species, do we? Maybe it’s for the better.”
She hit him, an open-handed slap across the face, and I flinched, and she didn’t even notice.
“Peterson,” she said, thinly, dangerously. It was the first time she’d called him by his full name. I hadn’t even known that was his full name. “Don’t ever say that again.”
There’s a moment I think nearly everyone reaches eventually, when you look at a parent, and suddenly realize that ‘parent’ isn’t a special metaphysical category, that there’s no kind of magical protection there. That parents are more or less just people too, that they were kids once, that inside them there’s a part that’s still a kid. That they get scared, and they’re - usually, most of them - trying to be good, but sometimes it’s too much and they behave badly, and they have tantrums, even if grownup tantrums are more likely to be tucked away inside, or quarantined to a quiet corner of the Internet, and not involve any screaming and writhing on the dirty floor in the aisle of a 7-11.
So I couldn’t even be angry with Mom, when she got on a plane to India in a doomed effort to buy the world a few more years. It would have hurt less, in a way, to believe that she was rejecting me, that she was mean and bad and hurting me on purpose.
Instead, I was angry at everything and everyone else.
Three
It took me a long time to realize just how much Mom taught me in the first years of my life. I bet I’ll keep noticing bits and pieces of it for years, right up until we don’t have any more years left.
She taught me to see. Very literally, because Sight doesn’t just pop into your head fully formed. I guess normal kids also have to learn what colors and shapes are, too, but it’s different when the shadowy horrors don’t want to be seen – and when your brain, which deep down still belongs in the body of a glorified savannah ape, very badly doesn’t want to acknowledge the nightmares.
“You’ll flinch,” Mom told me. “But it won’t always feel like flinching. Because flinching hurts, and our minds don’t like to hurt either. It could be ‘I’ve seen this before.’ Which might even be true, but – it’s never an excuse to stop seeing the here and now. You can’t let what you already know overwrite what’s actually there. Boredom shouldn’t be something your thoughts bounce off.”
And then we practiced, endlessly.
(I guess I’m grateful, in a way, that I was born when I was, once the cracks in reality had already torn wide and deep enough that I saw about a thousand incursions every day. I had a lot of opportunities to practice.
Of course, if I’d been born fifty years earlier, my life would have been completely different, and I wouldn’t have needed those lessons at all. But it was always hard to imagine. What would it even mean to be the same person, when so much of me was shaped by living in a world that was already doomed?)
By the time the social worker took me away, I didn’t always succeed at seeing reality, instead of my pretty imaginary picture of it. But I knew the difference. I knew to keep listening for those tiny quiet notes of confusion and not-quite-right. And I understood, deep in my bones if not in words, that it would almost always be fine either way, but one in a million times it wouldn’t. And one in a million adds up, when your entire fucking planet is rolling the dice every single second of every single day, so it was real and it mattered.
The lesson was for Sight, but really, it applied to just about everything else as well.
My most vivid memories of middle school are of the way people laugh, when you tell them the world is ending. I got to be something of a connoisseur.
There are so many different flavors and textures of that laughter. There’s the vapid kind, when someone thinks you’ve just made a daring witty joke – not that they get it, but why would they need to, to appreciate a moment of improvised comedy? That was usually the hangers-on, the fellow outcasts, kids who sometimes sat with me at lunch because they weren’t invited to any of the main tables either.
There’s the nervous laugh when someone feels like they should get the reference, and they don’t, and they’re trying to fake it anyway but they’re worried you’ll notice and judge them for it. I think I got that one from a substitute teacher, once. Don’t ask me why I was torturing some poor substitute eighth grade teacher with incomprehensible doom jokes. I never claimed I had social skills.
There’s the cruel mocking laugh, at not with, the gloating looks exchanged, halfheartedly subtle but not, actually, out of your sight, it’s even funnier if you notice and realize how stupid they think you are. It came up a lot. I wasn’t popular, but by seventh grade I was certainly notorious, given how I still hadn’t learned to keep my big mouth shut.
There’s the laugh that’s a little too high-pitched, as though trying to throw one of those tacky garish novelty-shop scarves over the shadowy thing in the corner that they’re trying not to see but can’t quite stop glimpsing from the corner of their eye. They do, on some level, know what you mean, but it hurts too much to live in the world where it’s true, and so they try to deny it, talking too fast and too loudly, and it’s never quite enough. I remember feeling incredibly smug the one time I managed to creep out some of the popular-clique girls who bullied me, though in hindsight one could argue I was just bullying them right back.
And there’s the laugh that does understand, and sees the sheer pointless absurdity of it, and it’s awful and unbearable and you’re probably a bad person for laughing at it, but it is, in fact, funny. It’s the only kind of laughter that ever made me feel less lonely.
Mom never laughed. Mom cried, sometimes, but the rest of the time she was grimly focused. And when it was too much to bear, and she needed to light the room with a distraction, it wasn’t laughter she brought to bear, it was Lego and paper dolls and patiently teaching a child how to be a person, knowing that there wasn’t a future, but part of her needing to believe there might be.
I went a little off the rails in high school.
It’s a big enough life transition at the best of times, and also Mom had just deposited me with Grandma and Grandpa. (Odd, how I called them that even though Pete was never Dad.)
Grandma wasn’t all there anymore, and Grandpa had sprouted some really horrifying political opinions that I’m pretty sure were thanks to a brush with a new egregore, since they were all over FaceWeb. The week after Mom left, when I was soothing my sorrows with ice cream and endless scrolling, I saw a class six emanation for the first time ever.
(Oh, for those innocent days.)
I had begged Mom to take me with her. I wanted to do something. But, reading between the lines, she wasn’t exactly planning to obey all the local laws. She hugged me and told me to focus on school.
As if that was ever going to happen. As if it would have mattered if I did.
I didn’t so much fall in with a bad crowd as fling myself at them headfirst. I skipped class to smoke dope with kids who wanted to be older and tougher and grittier than they were. I shoplifted candy from the convenience store, the one whose owner had known my grandparents for decades and used to give me lollipops when I was little, and I still don’t know why.
I snuck out after my grandparents were asleep and hung out with the local homeless camp in a freeway underpass, and it was…well, mostly tragic and awful, but in a way I think they saw the end coming. Only as inchoate fear and confusion, and a depressing number of them were clearly the half-eaten victims of various mind-flaying nightmares, but I remember that sometimes, for a little while, I felt less completely alone.
A reasonable person might point out that if I had wanted a sympathetic ear, I could have answered Mom’s calls. I doubt that such a hypothetical reasonable person was ever fourteen, filled with rage at a vast, cold indifferent universe and more importantly the parental abandonment.
Pro tip: it turns out that when you run away from home twice in the span of a month and have to be hauled back in a squad car, and you keep going to class on shrooms, you will eventually end up in front of a clueless but well-meaning and very concerned school therapist. Fifteen is old enough that ‘she has a vivid imagination’ won’t cut it, and I wasn’t actually in the mood to end up in the psych ER, so I had to LARP being an entirely different person who had never seen a creeping horror and certainly not starting when she was four, and an absolutely mortifying conversation ensued.
I settled down. A little. Grandma was deteriorating, and Grandpa didn’t need the stress. I stopped prowling the streets and switched my self-destructive outlet to all-night dumb arguments on the Internet. I actually made some friends, even if I only knew them by pseuds like Zaxxx and NotFuckingAround24.
I was in my senior year when the cracks caught up to me, jarring me out of the fugue I’d been marinating in for years. It was the first deliberate binding of a text infovore, though of course they didn’t call it that; the app had some dumbass cutesy forgettable name. You fed it your entire social media history, and it spat out a garbled remix of ‘Stuff only [name] would say’. Despite having the grammatical mastery and topic attention span of a toddler with ADHD, it captured something, uncannily copying the little verbal tics you’d never noticed you had until you saw yourself reflected in an eldritch mirror.
It swept our high school like wildfire, and suddenly everyone was reading out garbleposts, laughing until we couldn’t breathe.
(Yes, I laughed too. In my defense, I was undercover as a normal high school student, and it really was hilarious.)
I went home that night and trashed my room for the first time since I was fifteen, and then I called Mom.
By my nineteenth birthday, people weren’t laughing anymore. No one could deny that things were getting surreal.
Mom was in England, trying to meet with a tech giant CEO and convince them not to turn their newest supercomputer into a class eleven honeypot node. She kept me updated by email. She always had, once a week like clockwork, even though after she left I didn’t pick up her calls for the next four years.
I still didn’t, for the most part, but that’s mostly because my generation always preferred texting. Mom and I had one of those cryptographically secure instant-messaging apps. For all that we were usually on opposite sides of the planet, we knew the ins and outs of each other’s lives.
Mom wasn’t hopeful. Financially speaking, stepping back from the brink and choosing not to be the first to achieve some new breakthrough was hardly a winning move. CEOs who sacrificed profit to appease the crazy doomsday cult people tended to attract the ire of the board of directors, and didn’t stay CEOs for long. If they put something on pause for a year, or even hesitated, they would lose market share. That’s how fast the world was moving.
Pete was in rural South America, in some steamy jungle, far enough from the nearest humming metropolis to pretend for a little while that nothing had changed. He hated our brave new capitalist world, the shining billboards, swapped out every week with the-latest-buzzword new startups (it was “transformational” this week). More importantly, he knew the implications, and he was too deep to unsee it now.
I was at college, because what else was I going to do with myself? I was hardly about to glom onto one of those venture-capital startups competing to harness the eldritch horrors for something no one even needed in the first place, but that with enough state-of-the-art sales techniques – because I was pretty sure there were at least ten new egregores masquerading as ““transformational”” (gag) new marketing trends – let them slurp in customers and cash anyway. It was only marginally less horrifying than the rotting trash heap that was national politics.
I didn’t go to class much.
A highly qualified or at least convincingly resumé’d ‘consultant’ could get meetings with CEOs. A random nineteen-year-old with half a community college degree and a poorly controlled anger problem really couldn’t. I spent too much time surfing the Internet, having stupid absurd arguments on obscure forums and lurking in a hundred other places. Mom had barely figured out IRC; she certainly couldn’t keep up with half a dozen new “““transformational””” (puke) social media sites popping up every year.
So I was her eyes and ears. I had secure-message-app pseudonyms for half a dozen of her colleagues, people I’d never met face to face and probably never would, but still knew better than I’d ever known Pete. I warned them about a new service using “tame” (ha, as if!) class five infovores to write uncannily convincing B-student essays from just a title, and “wellness retreats” that involved summoning class eight emanations, and the latest social media fad, an app with a little doll-like avatar. I’m not even sure what powered it, it might have been an entirely new category of creeping horror. It could draw things when you asked, about as well as the average moderately talented middle schooler except for its occasional hilarious bloopers, and it chittered away in what almost sounded like words.
I doubt it made a difference. It was probably the equivalent of throwing starfish back into the sea or picking up worms from the sidewalk, but it was more interesting than class.
Grandpa was dead; he’d gone peacefully, a stroke in his sleep. Grandma was in a nursing home. Somehow, despite the glittering heights of the Information Age, and the sparkling health advertisements for products that really didn’t need the prefix ‘Smart’ especially when that meant ‘powered by an alien monstrosity from outside ordinary spacetime’, the actual health care infrastructure was even worse than a decade ago. I visited when I could and yelled at the staff who neglected her, but she still ended up with bedsores.
Which felt like a metaphor for everything, lately. We were living in the sci-fi future, and the world was still falling apart.
Four
When I turned 21, Mom had been in Singapore for three months. She was doing corporate espionage on Eschaton, the company that had bought FaceWeb and then Riptide, an even more egregore-optimized pit of insanity; by this point I was barely rolling my eyes at the naming scheme. The tech buzzword of the month was “data integration”, which still didn’t mean anything but at least sounded like it was pretending to.
Eschaton was responsible for the Dollies(™), a distant descendent of those old-timey animated avatars. This time, though, summoning and binding the (newly named and tentatively categorized) class thirteen Leviathan, which piloted every Dolly instance like a puppetmaster with a million topologically impossible tentacles for arms, had taken three weeks of runtime on a computing cluster that made the server farms of eight years ago look like toy calculators. It was still there, sated, squatting on top of Singapore – however much of it fit through the gate, Mom’s colleague thought this might be only a satellite of a vastly bigger system.
There wasn’t a chance they would shut it down, since the Dollies were selling like crack cocaine. They were, to be fair, wildly impressive. Possessed by a Power we couldn’t begin to comprehend, they danced gracefully, produced nearly-perfect art on demand matching the style of any artist you cared to name (not to mention really convincing cat pictures), and sang in beautiful not-quite-right voices, a little like those sirens from mythology that seduce sailors to their deaths.
Mom knew there was no stopping it. She was just trying to figure out what they’d done, extrapolate what that meant for where they’d be in a year, and get some advance warning if they decided to push their market advantage and make a ritual offering of another half a billion dollars of computing hardware.
Which probably wouldn’t end the world, not yet. Their summoned monstrosity might be enormously powerful on a few narrow dimensions, but it seemed content to lounge around in its cushy binding, puppeting the million or so novelty toys from the limited-edition run and waiting for its next meal, rather than tearing its way further into our reality in search of more delicious, delicious cat pictures.
Contra one of the common misunderstandings – somehow made by people who mock doomsday cults AND who claim to believe in them – the things lurking in the incomprehensible void outside our reality aren’t malevolent. We’re not even ants to them, since that metaphor implies a shared biosphere and evolutionary history. From their perspective, it would be like feeling deep animosity toward carbon atoms.
But someday, some innovative genius will accidentally get the attention of Something that dwarfs us like we dwarf carbon atoms, and see dollar signs, and try to bind it. And the Something won’t know or care that we have preferences and are politely asking it to follow some simple rules while it’s visiting, any more than we feel guilty when we turn graphene into carbon nanotubes; all it’ll see is a tasty bubble of mass-energy, that it could use for something more interesting than stars and planets.
It’s not like I’ve ever worried about whether we’re torturing electrons when we send them howling along our circuits.
(Some people do. I’m genuinely not sure if it’s an egregore, or just the inevitable outcome of spending too long applying logic to things your little savannah-ape brain was never meant to confront. Or, you know, maybe they were right all along and I’m the asshole.)
While Mom investigated, Eschaton’s upstart new competitor hadn’t exactly been sitting on their laurels. With great fanfare, they announced Stable Oozings(™) – no, I don’t know who runs their marketing department or what ate them, but with a name like that right there in the title, you couldn't help but wonder what would happen if any of them went unstable.
They’d tamed their own alien nightmare, fed it on the wild and wonderful Internet, and bound it to obey the every command of their premium users. Just register with their site, enter your credit card info, type in the ritual invocation – soon everyone was passing around tips for propitiating the eldritch mind behind the screen – and behold your heart’s desire. Gorgeous alien landscapes and futuristic cities, if you wanted, though they all looked a little like those “inspirational” desktop wallpaper backgrounds that were all the rage when I was in middle school. Or you could get creative, ask for your favorite celebrities kayaking on the moon, or capybaras blowing bubbles, or two airplanes making friends, or a stairway to heaven.
Mom suspected they’d figured out a new way to stabilize a gate so it wasn’t really just a gate anymore. We needed a new term anyway, and their app already suggested one: Portals. We confirmed Mom’s theory within a week, when it turned out that some joker had reverse-engineered the process, and released Open Oozings to the world. Download his repo, run some code, let your pet eldritch monstrosity digest for a while, and you could open your very own Portal to Elsewhere from the comfort of home.
Could, but shouldn’t – but, of course, millions of people did. Because this entire fucking planet is insane.
(I have a confession to make: I was one of them. For research purposes! And besides, if we were going to get ourselves eaten in less than a decade in exchange for a few years of beautiful things, I didn’t want to completely miss out on the upside.)
Coincidentally, it was nearly the “silver jubilee” 25th anniversary of…well, all I can say is some significant event in Mom’s career, because she never told me. If she’d been a normal professional woman like the ‘consultant’ she LARPed as, I might have guessed her Masters thesis defense or something, but doomsday cults aren’t known for their academic qualifications.
Her colleagues planned a reunion, and booked a cottage somewhere. I wasn’t invited. They were only false names on a screen to me, a part of Mom’s life that she had tried her best to protect me from – and while she’d failed hard at that, and I hadn’t wanted her protection anyway, her personal history still wasn’t mine to share.
Her flight into San Francisco was delayed, because somehow we have the technology to open windows to alien dimensions on our personal laptops, but our civilization still can’t handle airport logistics. A colleague I knew only as ‘Nasticoot’ was picking her up in five hours, so it didn’t make sense to invite her to my place, which was about as embarrassing as your average student housing anyway. I suggested a coffee shop near the airport.
Mom didn’t flinch, even after my totally unnecessary knife-twisting.
“I know,” she said, this time leaning in and lowering her voice. (Talking about the end of the world may not get you odd looks, but rehashing old personal grievances in public sure will.) “I - regret a lot of things. But I don’t regret having you. I, just…” A helpless shrug, a bitter huff of not-laughter. “I wish I could’ve given you better.”
I snorted. “What, like you could’ve personally seduced all the billionaires to the side of sanity and reason if you tried a little harder?” As though that’s even what would have mattered to me, age four, abandoned by my mother in a world filled with eldritch horrors.
“–No, not that.” Shrug. “I mean, sure, I wish it’d gone differently. And I’m sure we didn’t do everything right. But I’m not talking about how I failed the world. I’m talking about how I failed you.”
I looked blankly at her. There were a thousand things I wanted to say, bitter angry words built up into towers and pyramids, and none of them were fair.
Mom was tearing her napkin into tiny fragments, piling up like snow on the formica table. “I shouldn’t have gotten together with Pete at all, probably, but I can’t actually regret that, because I am glad you were born. Just, once I had– once we had a daughter, I shouldn’t’ve driven him away. And I should’ve realized it was more than I could carry alone, and asked for help, not - tried to ignore it and keep going until I fell apart on you–”
The most unfair thing about a speech like that - and you just knew she’d been prepping it for months - was that I might be angry all the time, but now I couldn’t be angry at Mom.
“–Mom, what happened that summer?” I said, interrupting. I could guess, but that was part of the problem; I could guess at least a dozen different possibilities.
She shook her head, made an embarrassed little noise. “It’ll sound stupid. I– we’d been trying to push this bill through Congress, right, we spent five years on it and every cent we could scrape together. Didn’t work, obviously, but we were dumb idealistic twenty-somethings, and - that’s what it took before I realized that you really can’t expect politicians to listen to you just because you’re right and have the evidence to prove it.”
I snorted. “Yeah. I got that one out of the way early on.”
Mom looked pained. “You had to deal with so much, and you were so young.”
I don’t know what anyone is supposed to say to that. I raised my eyebrows at her.
Her shoulders rose and fell. “I, I should’ve stayed in touch with Pete’s parents, at the very least, I just – they were so normal, and Pete turned into a different person around them, and it felt so suffocating– god, what a stupid excuse.” She dragged a hand through her hair. “I should’ve pushed harder to get you back with me sooner. It was so humiliating, talking to social workers, and - I’ve never actually been any good at lying - but I should’ve sucked it up, not been a coward. I should’ve rented us a real apartment, it’s not like we’re short of cash now – and, god, I knew I wouldn’t need retirement savings–”
Despite myself, I laughed. “Mom! Are you talking about the lesbian commune basement? That’s my favorite of all the places I’ve lived.”
She gave me such a dubious look, and then she started giggling too, which set me off even more, and soon we were both howling with laughter. Once we’d recovered, Mom got up and bought us two more coffees, as an apology to the waitress, while I sat there trying to think of anything to say.
At least you didn’t hit me, I could have said. I knew the childhoods some of Liz’s other foster kids had had.
At least I grew up in a first world country and didn’t die of malaria when I was five, I could have said, because thanks to Pete’s charity work I had a very good idea of just how many Third World villages we’d be taking down with us, when we finally got around to destroying the world.
I don’t know that there’s any bit of human history I’d have preferred living in, but that was a philosophical conversation that I didn’t really feel like having.
“I wish you’d met Liz,” I said, finally, because Mom was apparently going to sit there patiently waiting until I got it off my chest, whatever ‘it’ was. “She’s still taking in foster kids, you know. Still lives in the same house. I don’t think she gives social media the slightest thought.” She wouldn’t see the end coming, and sometimes I envied her for that.
Mom ducked her head. “...I wish you’d had more friends your own age. I was just - if I’d tried harder to bring you to playdates - you were so alone…”
“Mom.” I rolled my eyes. “The reason I sucked at having friends is not because you didn’t drive me to playdates.”
We weren’t going to succeed at having this conversation. I could already see that. Maybe a few years of therapy would be enough for me to open up about my feelings to my own mother, but why bother, when there might only be five years left?
Still. I didn’t know if I would ever see her again.
I bit my lip, trying to find the right words. “Mom. Obviously I wish you’d had…more to work with…but I don’t wish you’d prioritized playdates over - the cracks - and I don’t wish you’d lied to me. A lot of people would’ve said I was too young for the truth, and - maybe they had a point - but I’m glad you told me.”
It was the right thing to say, I think, or at least one of the right things, a single bead from an entire jar of things unsaid. Mom smiled in a trembly way, blinking hard, her eyes warm and bright and not looking away into the future at all. She had to swallow a few times before she could speak.
“This is why I don’t regret having you,” she said, her voice choked. “I’d never have gotten to meet you, and you’re–” She swallowed. “You’re a neat kid.”
Ugh, and of course the reward for saying the right thing was more mushiness. I squirmed. “You and Pete are both better people than me.”
She raised an eyebrow at me, but didn’t say anything. Just played her finger in a circle over the rim of her coffee cup, over and over.
“I might drop out,” I said lightly. “Haven’t really been going to class.”
Mom winced, but she didn’t argue. Her silence said a lot.
“I’ll keep throwing starfish back into the sea,” I said. “But maybe I’ll think of something better. Mom, I’m not in denial, I’m not - going to pretend about our chances, just – I know, but I do not approve–”
“–and I am not resigned,” she finished for me. Her eyes welled with tears again. “Wow. I…didn’t think you’d remember that.”
“Huh? Edna St Vincent Millay. English lit.”
Mom reached across the table and took my hand. “I used to read you a book of poetry when you were tiny. It was your favorite, you could recite it by heart - shit, speaking of regrets, if I’d gotten a password manager sooner maybe I wouldn’t’ve lost the login to that cloud drive where I saved all the videos I took…”
We talked for another couple of hours. I showed her my saved list of my best Stable Oozes, and we agreed they were beautiful. A lifetime’s worth of unfinished business hovered in the air between us, and there wasn’t enough future left to finish sorting through the contents of that locked box, and so neither of us really wanted to acknowledge it. In the meantime, we could still laugh together, and if our laughter was a little too sharp and loud and brittle, well, we were still finding joy in between the cracks.
I went to the bathroom while she stepped out for her ride, and I thought about lost baby pictures floating somewhere in the Internet ether, but not for long. There was a lot to do.
Postscript
I was in my senior year of college when the first Windows started opening without being invoked.
It was, of course, a Stable Oozing. The company had gone bankrupt, and the app had been open-sourced, and now anyone could open a Window.
The first one opened in San Francisco, in the Financial District. It was a perfect circle, two meters in diameter, and it hovered in the air like a soap bubble. It showed a scene from some alien world: a sun, slightly too large, and two moons, slightly too small, hanging in a sky that was the wrong color.
People gathered to gawk at it. They took pictures and videos and posted them online. And then, after a few hours, it popped, and was gone.
No one was hurt. No one even noticed when the second one opened, in a park in the Mission District. This one was different: it was a square, and it showed a cityscape that might have been New York, or London, or Tokyo. It stayed for a day, and then it, too, popped.
The third one was in my apartment building.
This postscript was written by GPT-3, with the abridged text of the story as a prompt.
