Cohost Sapphic September 2024 writing prompt: 07 — Girls who pilot a machine
The year is 1985, and Emory has a terrible sense of déjà vu as she punches the sedenion transform into the mil-rugged Endpoint — all scuffed flight-case aluminium, MOLLE webbing, and the back-breaking weight of whatever the fuck inside powers it. The flip-down panel hides some rotary knobs, a matrix of mechanical decade counters, a few rocker switches, and the Big Red Button: the kind they usually use for emergency stops because it latches in when you hit it, and you have to physically rotate it until it pops out to toggle it back.
The Endpoint is not the kind of device you want turned on accidentally.
“Double-check me,” Emory says brusquely to the Captain, who takes Emory’s place in front of the Endpoint and checks the transform against the numbers they got from their contact, reading them out — digit from the paper, digit from the decade counters — reciting check! after each match.
“All good,” the Captain says, and Emory folds out the spread of grab handles on the top of the backpack-sized box, locking to an upright position: one for each of the rest, on the far side out of Emory’s way, and one handle on her side, above the controls.
“Everybody on,” Emory says, and they grab, one at a time: secure, check! — Mills and Greer and Bonner and the Cap. Emory grabs, too: “Secure, check! Arming!”
She twists the Big Red Button until it pops out, ready to be punched.
“Clear to transform,” the Cap says.
Regs say that Emory should issue a Transform in—! and count it off, three two one go. But Emory did her basic training in the 2020s; they’re so deep behind enemy lines that friendly faces haven’t been born yet. She slams the Big Red Button with the heel of her hand.
Category: Threats, Non-Euclidian — Section 2.2: Subject KTLU
The Pacific Entity — Subject KTLU — has been held in confinement by Operation Elder (and precursor black projects, under the auspices of the League of Nations) since 1928. It was last interrogated, by means of a higher-dimensional derivative of the Abyssinian Engram, in early 1972. At that time, emergency analysis showed that memetic operational safeguards were no longer correctly functioning, and their last-good state could not be verified.
Pop-cultural depictions of Subject KTLU continue to proliferate; it is no longer possible to determine whether the Entity is directly responsible, or this is simply memetic fallout. Any sightings of the Entity outside the containment silo should be presumed to be the result of latent memetic poisoning becoming symptomatic; personnel reporting sightings should be quarantined immediately and monitored for signs of cult-formation meme complexes.
2.2.Addendum: Eyes Only/UNAPEST (Unauthorised Access Penalty: Summary Termination)
SHOGOTH STRAT-ANALYSIS has repeatedly asserted that Subject KTLU is not meaningfully contained — although their information model is not tractable to conventional analysis, and operational command is resistant to the idea at the highest levels.
We have known for decades that the kaiju in the Arizona silo is a 3-manifold section through a larger thing — merely the bulbous tip of a questing paramanifold tentacle. In the centre of a writhing, medusan, higher-dimensional tangle of these tentacles is the true organism: KTLU itself.
R’lyeh is also, itself, a paramanifold structure. Our forerunners deemed it a prison, perhaps an inhospitable dwelling; how much of our current idea of Subject KTLU is inherited from obsolete assumptions made in the 1920s, by people with no possible concept what they were dealing with?
Are KTLU and the R’lyeh complex parts of the same, larger entity? Was the Subject’s confinement always a joke — like the high-security imprisonment of Flatlanders, drawing extra thick circles around one sole of a human’s feet?
In March of 1925, a yacht, the Alert, stumbled on an uncharted island at or around 47°9′S 126°43′W. A suppressed account, allegedly by one of the few survivors, suggests that some entity was released from its containment there.
No account exists of the second expedition, sponsored by the League of Nations, to the oceanic pole of inaccessibility; it did not officially take place. There is, therefore, no official record of what they brought back, nor what they needed from Ethiopia to command it, so badly that Italian armed forces ignited the Second Italo–Abyssinian War in order to obtain it. Nor of Turing’s secret work on conversational engines. The world’s teeter on the brink on nuclear annhiliation is public knowledge; the memetic war waged by the Pacific Entity which spurred atomic proliferation, and nearly succeeded in antiterraforming the planet to its specifications, is not.
The AI winter, as you know, was simply the withdrawal of funding from unproductive and overhyped research dead ends; definitely not the hurried cancellation of a global propaganda program designed to make fabricated intelligences palatable to the public, in the light of that program’s likely total subversion by the Entity. The modern resurgence of the AI field is definitely not the tip of the iceberg of the Machine Mind program, restarted against scientific advice with allegedly strengthened safeguards against memetic contamination.
If Operation Elder existed, its leadership would still be refusing the knowledge that they have been outflanked by their captive’s schemes for our extermination.
The year is 1978, and Emory has a terrible sense of déjà vu as she punches the sedenion transform into the Endpoint. In the midcentury future, planet-killing amounts of energy are burned to fuel each paramanifold rotation; the cost, and opportunity cost, of each act of time travel is enormous. If they fail, if they fuck up, they are burning the future they came from and not even installing the one they desperately need. The one in which the Pacific Entity does not win, as it already inevitably had by the time Operation Elder leadership conceded that nuclear fire had been a feint and climate change was the extinction blow. The long domino of cause and effect was too far gone; human extinction only a matter of time.
The pinnacle of Operation Elder’s unhistory is SHOGOTH: the Synthetic Hybrid Organism General Occult Threat Haruspex. A miracle of interdisciplinary science; a fusion of biotech, computational devices, arcane paraphysics, and human volunteer, SHOGOTH-I first divined the failure of the conceptual firewalls surrounding Operation Elder, and the coming doom of the human race. Units II-V were quickly brought online, bringing to bear the greatest concentration of cool, inhuman, paracausal intellect this side of Subject KTLU itself.
Death is coming. But in sufficently strange aeons, might even death die? And what stranger aeon could there be, than that expounded by SHOGOTH: the urgent construction of the universe’s first device for time travel, the infiltration of the past, and a dangerous game of spies and sabotage across the hidden history of the Twentieth Century, to re-fight the war for the survival of humanity — while, and even before, it was fought and lost the first time.
Greer’s dead, killed by something wrong of the enemy’s; Bonner never made it to the rendezvous. Mills is strung out on morphine. The year is 1980, and Emory has a terrible sense of déjà vu.
“Check me,” Emory says, hands shaking.
“Emory,” the Cap says, and Emory glances up over the Endpoint, accidentally catches the Cap’s eyes, pointed down at her.
“Check me,” Emory whispers, gesturing to the numbers on the machine.
“We’re gonna make it through,” the Cap says, and she reaches out; runs a knuckle over Emory’s lengthening buzzcut. “Hang in there.”
“Please check the numbers,” Emory whispers, retreats around the machine so the Cap can circle the other side, go over the transform.
Instead, the Cap reaches out and snags her on the side she’s approaching, hooks through one of Emory’s belt loops, tugs her, stumbling, a little closer.
“I need you to hang in there,” the Cap says, very quietly. “I need you to.”
Emory’s started to be able to taste unstable time rolling in. They need to be gone. “You need to check the numbers,” she says. “I’ll grab Mills over, okay, but now, Cap. We don’t have—”
The constant joke, overused past the point where it’s just queasy. What don’t they ever have? That’s right, babe—
The Captain palms the back of Emory’s neck. “We’re gonna make it through,” she says, and lingeringly lets her go.
It’s 2018. Emory’s just been recruited, right out of federal prison; not by the Feds — whoever they are, the stiffs who recruited her, this is far too fucking weird to be the Feds — for a “black ops archaeology” program; something about submarines and undersea structures and data extraction.
Whatever, right? It’s on the outside, it’s a paycheck — a big paycheck; doesn’t matter what kind of bizarro creationist pseudodig “R’lyeh” is, or even what the job actually turns out to be. Can’t be the end of the world, right?
