Post by Deleted on Jun 15, 2010 18:42:30 GMT -5
Only after swallowing a borderline overdose of marinol can I write this in a manner even somewhat relaxed. The stars are all the light in the cosmos and all else betwixt them spirals in clockwork madness and darkness that we can never hope to know. We fumble at the sciences like toddlers with their mobiles, except with the arrogance that we can accomplish more than just pokes and nudges. But unlike the innocent babe, we may understand our stellar mobile someday; as a result, we shall have little else to do other than plunge into the depths of ultimate madness, or discard all our technologies, and embrace ignorance so as to protect our future generations from the evil light of knowledge.
My name is James L. Crommick, astronaut and professor of Quantum Mechanics at the Miskatonic University. It was October the 4th, 2030, and I had been called by the International Space Association to assist with the SC2 Martian Colony, the first one habitable by humans on the red planet. Having some experience with SC1 on the moon, I graciously accepted the offer, primarily due to a naïve excitement of new lands, but also because the will of my grandmother had been lost along with the statement therein of my notable monetary inheritance. Lacking the gift of foresight, I invested a bit much in this potential income, and worked up a rather embarrassing debt with Chevrolet involving an ocean blue Camaro.
I landed after an exhausting four month voyage and was rather famished from having spent the last reserves of my meals two days prior. I disembarked at what looked to be about nine in the morning in Earth hours. Deciding to breakfast before doing anything else, I immediately ventured to the kitchen to fix something when I met Yehoshua McDonnell; a lax intellectual of a curious mix of pureblood Irish and Saudi Arabian. He looked to be in his early fifties, with a short silver beard crumpled out from leathery skin and a deceitful crown of peppery hair. His blue eyes were alight with an explorative energy, his Gaelic heritage compelling him to greet me like family.
I selected a stock of choice cuts and red lettuce, with a small touch of mayonnaise. The humble delicacy satisfied the ache in my bowels, and I requested the strangely-bred man to proceed with a tour of the base and its operations.
The first fact to astound me was just how small and cramped it was. The ceilings were six feet high at their tallest, and some passages merely three foot high crawlspaces. Each of these had a skeleton of achromatic structural steel struggling to hold in its bulging organs of wires and pipes that snaked through the facility every which way. The most open room was the garage wherein rest a six-wheeled rover armed with a weak mining laser to clear the crumbling terrain of the red planet. But even that room was hardly large enough to house the rover, let alone the fuel lines and spare batteries.
Our assignment on the morrow was the foothills of Olympus Mons, about four miles east. The speed of the rover, I was told, averaged around 120 miles per hour with full devotion to locomotion, and 90 miles per hour with some energy lent to the mining laser. An Australian physicist, Lawrence Docherty, crunched these numbers along with an unheard of multitude of others. He was bright, though prone to moments of profound arrogance; not excitable, but certainly not the strong and silent type. Aside from this duty, he was what might be considered a navigator on a vessel – he was the pilot of the rover, oversaw the rates at which this or that task was accomplished, and generally kept all the mundane functions from being at sixes and sevens.
The missions themselves – the meat of the expedition – were overseen by a Ukrainian astrophysicist, Mykola Shevchenko. Therein his icy soul laid the ambition and excitement of the settlement. Rude as it may appear, this is the only description befitting the archaic creature: he appeared to be dead and gone to hell already; his ancient grey eyes were sunken deep into his skull, giving them a grisly fire. He was balding with only a dozen or so greasy white hairs waving unkempt from his wrinkled skull. Both his legs were replaced with prosthetics, his torso and arms appearing as ancient celery near them.
It was difficult to sleep with the memory of his wasted frame and ocean-foam eyes etched into my fears. Though with patience, and a small amount of aid from the pharmacist, I slept through the night.
After helping myself to a disappointing helping of artificial bacon and egg beater, I reported as ordered to the garage. Seeing just McDonnell there, we chatted for a short time about nothing in particular. I found out that Shevchenko had ordered several hundred missions to Olympus Mons since his first time there, and focused on absolutely nowhere else since. The man emphasized to me that is wasn’t a normal obsession – even when Shevchenko was exhausted, or his medication was due, he always, always returned to Olympus Mons. At one point, Docherty had almost been injured due to lack of preparation in Shevchenko’s haste. His desire to venture into the Grecian seat of the gods surpassed all human lovings and longings I have ever known.
Docherty arrived about twenty minutes later, assisting Shevchenko down a set of steep stairs that more resembled a ladder. We then boarded at the sharp command of the human relic, and set for Olympus Mons at best speed.
The venture was longer than I anticipated (approximately ten minutes) but surprisingly smooth. Docherty explained that he had driven to the mountain so many times, he had nearly cleared out a road to it. McDonnell also noted that this explorative was about to finally break into the region that Shevchenko had been hungering after since he first stepped on the accursed soil of the mountain.
With shovel, jackhammer and mining laser, we pounded against the thinned stone of Olympus Mons. On Earth, any other mountain would have been ripped through over a dozen times, but the red world is selfish of its secrets, and is thick in composition. It was an unbelievable drudgery of dig, pull, scrape, push, dig, pull, scrape, push, dig, pull, scrape, push, dig, pull, scrape, push… Until at last, my shovel met thin air instead of the ruddy Martian earth.
Shevchenko seemed to appear out of thin air with the haste in which he was beside me, gazing hungrily into the newly discovered abyss. He shouted at us to widen the gap with foam at his mouth and bloodshot eyes. Fearing this devilish visage more than my exhaustion, I resumed the digging with renewed vigor with my companions. With such fear goading us on, we widened to hole to approximately three meters, and were lashed inside by the sharp tongue of Shevchenko.
We followed a wide tunnel with unnaturally smooth sides for ten minutes, though it felt like ten hours with the strangling darkness and damning silence. Not even out footsteps made any sound; I remember McDonnell dropped his jackhammer by accident, but even that didn’t make so much as a whisper of noise. What was this place?
When we exited the passage, there lay a pedestal with a colossal tome upon it, and behind it, the largest and most confusing array of non-Euclidean geometric shapes, all pressed against each other in some damning, blasphemous construction. It was neither pyramid, nor square, nor any sensible shape that the human eye was meant to discern. The cyclopean structure was not restful to the eye, and mine at least began to become very sore the longer I gazed at it.
Readers, I acknowledge the impossibility of what I am about to relay, but believe me when I tell you, that book that lay upon the lectern? That unbelievably massive manuscript that natural physics declare should not be able to hold together? I say to you now beyond the shadow of a doubt, it was the Necronomicon! And what’s more, it seemed to be the original copy, written in Arabic by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred!
McDonnell had learned Arabic from his mother, and so he and I gingerly opened the hideous book with trembling hands, and found a relatively recent note, inserted only what seemed to be weeks ago. As McDonnell has translated,
Before we could react with more than shaking fear, Shevchenko beat us both aside with a strength that belied his age. He skimmed the note, and with all his might, ripped the book open and a sickly green light exploded from it. The muddy green light was filled with a hundred thousand sigils and alien marks that were as disturbing to see as the maddening structure before us. I saw among those confusing and mesmerizing marks devils, wires, gargoyles, gaunt giants, tentacles, numbers, claws, tongues, fire, veins, bone, teeth; machine and man had been bonded in several earthly scenarios, but never in the images I saw – arteries pumped violet ichors into revolting information slates with the same damnable shapes on them as the chaos surrounding them and before us.
Docherty ran. I wish I followed him.
Crawling out of that horrific matrix of maddening shapes emerged an uncountable flurry of tentacles, stingers at their ends and dripping with a foul green muck that sent my flesh crawling. But one of these appendages found McDonnell and struck him square in his face; I believe he died instantly – I pray he did, based on what happened next.
The stinger glowed, and I could see clear as day his body turning dry as the desert that composed this world. Within mere seconds, all the liquid had been sucked entirely out of his body to serve a purpose I do not know, nor verily desire to. The tentacle threw the dry carcass unceremoniously on the ground, and red dust exploded from the gaping hole in the man’s face – the musty remnants of his blood.
As if it were possible, more and more tentacles were even now rupturing from every which way of that geometric mockery, from crevices and holes I did not even know existed until now. Shevchenko was wide-eyed in what seemed to be a twisted joy of man who had forsaken his soul for all the pleasures of the known and unknown universe. The tentacles wrapped around him as though to embrace him, and they carried him to a tremendous height before carrying his ecstatic body into the mad prisms.
How I escaped, I know not. All I know is I must have gone into shock halfway out the tunnel, and fainted in the garage after violently unstitching myself from the rover. After all, what does it matter? This is the point of my even writing this, reader.
Mars was Earth. Over trillions of years ago, mankind must have been here! The canals, the polar caps, the seas, the volcanoes, it is a prototype of sorts for Earth! But what happened? That devil in Olympus Mons happened. Mars was never a red desert until it came for the water. And we are primarily water!
The red sands of Mars is the blood of the first humans!
My name is James L. Crommick, astronaut and professor of Quantum Mechanics at the Miskatonic University. It was October the 4th, 2030, and I had been called by the International Space Association to assist with the SC2 Martian Colony, the first one habitable by humans on the red planet. Having some experience with SC1 on the moon, I graciously accepted the offer, primarily due to a naïve excitement of new lands, but also because the will of my grandmother had been lost along with the statement therein of my notable monetary inheritance. Lacking the gift of foresight, I invested a bit much in this potential income, and worked up a rather embarrassing debt with Chevrolet involving an ocean blue Camaro.
I landed after an exhausting four month voyage and was rather famished from having spent the last reserves of my meals two days prior. I disembarked at what looked to be about nine in the morning in Earth hours. Deciding to breakfast before doing anything else, I immediately ventured to the kitchen to fix something when I met Yehoshua McDonnell; a lax intellectual of a curious mix of pureblood Irish and Saudi Arabian. He looked to be in his early fifties, with a short silver beard crumpled out from leathery skin and a deceitful crown of peppery hair. His blue eyes were alight with an explorative energy, his Gaelic heritage compelling him to greet me like family.
I selected a stock of choice cuts and red lettuce, with a small touch of mayonnaise. The humble delicacy satisfied the ache in my bowels, and I requested the strangely-bred man to proceed with a tour of the base and its operations.
The first fact to astound me was just how small and cramped it was. The ceilings were six feet high at their tallest, and some passages merely three foot high crawlspaces. Each of these had a skeleton of achromatic structural steel struggling to hold in its bulging organs of wires and pipes that snaked through the facility every which way. The most open room was the garage wherein rest a six-wheeled rover armed with a weak mining laser to clear the crumbling terrain of the red planet. But even that room was hardly large enough to house the rover, let alone the fuel lines and spare batteries.
Our assignment on the morrow was the foothills of Olympus Mons, about four miles east. The speed of the rover, I was told, averaged around 120 miles per hour with full devotion to locomotion, and 90 miles per hour with some energy lent to the mining laser. An Australian physicist, Lawrence Docherty, crunched these numbers along with an unheard of multitude of others. He was bright, though prone to moments of profound arrogance; not excitable, but certainly not the strong and silent type. Aside from this duty, he was what might be considered a navigator on a vessel – he was the pilot of the rover, oversaw the rates at which this or that task was accomplished, and generally kept all the mundane functions from being at sixes and sevens.
The missions themselves – the meat of the expedition – were overseen by a Ukrainian astrophysicist, Mykola Shevchenko. Therein his icy soul laid the ambition and excitement of the settlement. Rude as it may appear, this is the only description befitting the archaic creature: he appeared to be dead and gone to hell already; his ancient grey eyes were sunken deep into his skull, giving them a grisly fire. He was balding with only a dozen or so greasy white hairs waving unkempt from his wrinkled skull. Both his legs were replaced with prosthetics, his torso and arms appearing as ancient celery near them.
It was difficult to sleep with the memory of his wasted frame and ocean-foam eyes etched into my fears. Though with patience, and a small amount of aid from the pharmacist, I slept through the night.
After helping myself to a disappointing helping of artificial bacon and egg beater, I reported as ordered to the garage. Seeing just McDonnell there, we chatted for a short time about nothing in particular. I found out that Shevchenko had ordered several hundred missions to Olympus Mons since his first time there, and focused on absolutely nowhere else since. The man emphasized to me that is wasn’t a normal obsession – even when Shevchenko was exhausted, or his medication was due, he always, always returned to Olympus Mons. At one point, Docherty had almost been injured due to lack of preparation in Shevchenko’s haste. His desire to venture into the Grecian seat of the gods surpassed all human lovings and longings I have ever known.
Docherty arrived about twenty minutes later, assisting Shevchenko down a set of steep stairs that more resembled a ladder. We then boarded at the sharp command of the human relic, and set for Olympus Mons at best speed.
The venture was longer than I anticipated (approximately ten minutes) but surprisingly smooth. Docherty explained that he had driven to the mountain so many times, he had nearly cleared out a road to it. McDonnell also noted that this explorative was about to finally break into the region that Shevchenko had been hungering after since he first stepped on the accursed soil of the mountain.
With shovel, jackhammer and mining laser, we pounded against the thinned stone of Olympus Mons. On Earth, any other mountain would have been ripped through over a dozen times, but the red world is selfish of its secrets, and is thick in composition. It was an unbelievable drudgery of dig, pull, scrape, push, dig, pull, scrape, push, dig, pull, scrape, push, dig, pull, scrape, push… Until at last, my shovel met thin air instead of the ruddy Martian earth.
Shevchenko seemed to appear out of thin air with the haste in which he was beside me, gazing hungrily into the newly discovered abyss. He shouted at us to widen the gap with foam at his mouth and bloodshot eyes. Fearing this devilish visage more than my exhaustion, I resumed the digging with renewed vigor with my companions. With such fear goading us on, we widened to hole to approximately three meters, and were lashed inside by the sharp tongue of Shevchenko.
We followed a wide tunnel with unnaturally smooth sides for ten minutes, though it felt like ten hours with the strangling darkness and damning silence. Not even out footsteps made any sound; I remember McDonnell dropped his jackhammer by accident, but even that didn’t make so much as a whisper of noise. What was this place?
When we exited the passage, there lay a pedestal with a colossal tome upon it, and behind it, the largest and most confusing array of non-Euclidean geometric shapes, all pressed against each other in some damning, blasphemous construction. It was neither pyramid, nor square, nor any sensible shape that the human eye was meant to discern. The cyclopean structure was not restful to the eye, and mine at least began to become very sore the longer I gazed at it.
Readers, I acknowledge the impossibility of what I am about to relay, but believe me when I tell you, that book that lay upon the lectern? That unbelievably massive manuscript that natural physics declare should not be able to hold together? I say to you now beyond the shadow of a doubt, it was the Necronomicon! And what’s more, it seemed to be the original copy, written in Arabic by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred!
McDonnell had learned Arabic from his mother, and so he and I gingerly opened the hideous book with trembling hands, and found a relatively recent note, inserted only what seemed to be weeks ago. As McDonnell has translated,
Dear [untranslatable],
This is the tome you have requested from me, unblemished by any different languages. Your – our – Master may be called by the symbols and signs detailed on the seven hundredth page therein. Along with [untranslatable], it shall be a simple matter to align the [untranslatable] for Him to awaken.
Perhaps the great [untranslatable] cannot be awakened yet, but that does not mean His brethren cannot enjoy the materiel universe before the stars are right.
Ph’nglui mglw nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah nagl fhtagn!
Abdul Alhazred
This is the tome you have requested from me, unblemished by any different languages. Your – our – Master may be called by the symbols and signs detailed on the seven hundredth page therein. Along with [untranslatable], it shall be a simple matter to align the [untranslatable] for Him to awaken.
Perhaps the great [untranslatable] cannot be awakened yet, but that does not mean His brethren cannot enjoy the materiel universe before the stars are right.
Ph’nglui mglw nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah nagl fhtagn!
Abdul Alhazred
Before we could react with more than shaking fear, Shevchenko beat us both aside with a strength that belied his age. He skimmed the note, and with all his might, ripped the book open and a sickly green light exploded from it. The muddy green light was filled with a hundred thousand sigils and alien marks that were as disturbing to see as the maddening structure before us. I saw among those confusing and mesmerizing marks devils, wires, gargoyles, gaunt giants, tentacles, numbers, claws, tongues, fire, veins, bone, teeth; machine and man had been bonded in several earthly scenarios, but never in the images I saw – arteries pumped violet ichors into revolting information slates with the same damnable shapes on them as the chaos surrounding them and before us.
Docherty ran. I wish I followed him.
Crawling out of that horrific matrix of maddening shapes emerged an uncountable flurry of tentacles, stingers at their ends and dripping with a foul green muck that sent my flesh crawling. But one of these appendages found McDonnell and struck him square in his face; I believe he died instantly – I pray he did, based on what happened next.
The stinger glowed, and I could see clear as day his body turning dry as the desert that composed this world. Within mere seconds, all the liquid had been sucked entirely out of his body to serve a purpose I do not know, nor verily desire to. The tentacle threw the dry carcass unceremoniously on the ground, and red dust exploded from the gaping hole in the man’s face – the musty remnants of his blood.
As if it were possible, more and more tentacles were even now rupturing from every which way of that geometric mockery, from crevices and holes I did not even know existed until now. Shevchenko was wide-eyed in what seemed to be a twisted joy of man who had forsaken his soul for all the pleasures of the known and unknown universe. The tentacles wrapped around him as though to embrace him, and they carried him to a tremendous height before carrying his ecstatic body into the mad prisms.
How I escaped, I know not. All I know is I must have gone into shock halfway out the tunnel, and fainted in the garage after violently unstitching myself from the rover. After all, what does it matter? This is the point of my even writing this, reader.
Mars was Earth. Over trillions of years ago, mankind must have been here! The canals, the polar caps, the seas, the volcanoes, it is a prototype of sorts for Earth! But what happened? That devil in Olympus Mons happened. Mars was never a red desert until it came for the water. And we are primarily water!
The red sands of Mars is the blood of the first humans!
