Great Race
This week, we’re reading Scott R. Jones’s «The Amnesiac’s Lament,» first idee bracelet cuir homme published in his 2019 collection Shout, Kill, Revel, Repeat. (Disclaimer: he was kind enough to send us copies, which we appreciated!) Spoilers ahead.»Ghosts don’t sleep, or wake up. They just are, and that’s all we are. Shells, treading what’s left of the earth on our slow, hopeless missions, camouflaged in the ghosts of our shared past.»The bague argent pampille coeur stars have come bague argent 525 right again, the Old Ones have returned, in His house in R’lyeh the Big C has awakened, and three human women are on a mission.There are a few hundred thousand humans left, with only a thousand awake at any given time. The sleepers shelter in a dozen submontane locations, «laced together in [the] sticky pits of artificial neural tissue» which make up the Deep Dendo. Memories, bague argent homme femme musings, fantasies, all humanity’s horrors and ecstasies reside in the D D, which «sifts and flattens and knits and makes connections,» then «burst casts after cycle of randomly bague argent sterling femme generated exo personality, a churning wash of denatured soul bague argent avec pierre bleu homme stuff» out to the antenna implants of the Awakened not real individuals, but mask personalities built from those bursts.Our narrator is randomly designated Sunny Grey Theremin. Maybe something of what she used to be exists, but she’ll never see it again. Maybe at the end of the mission, before she sleeps again and forgets, she’ll feel like herself for a moment. For now, outside the safety of the Voorish Domes, it’s safer to walk in the collective mind. No «singular, relatively sane ego complex» could survive the nightmares that have reclaimed Earth.Sunny and her team leave their Himalyan base via Hoffman Price matter transfer jump. After a relatively benign encounter with a Nameless Horror (blasted to another dimension before it can suck up Sunny’s essence), they land in the Western Australian desert where humans first unearthed the alien archives. Some whisper it was a mistake not only to correlate our own knowledge but to plunder what the Yith had collected. Maybe it was coincidence, but the stars got right damn quick after mankind messed with Yithian tech. Fiery bracelet cuir homme occasion crackshot Livid (Liv) Ransom Stormcell and gruff but reliable Damocles (Dam) Muffin Cringe are her teammates. The three have been through a dozen missions together, or not. That’s probably a false memory, as is Sunny’s idea that she’s the analyst and philosopher of the crew. In fact, they’re barely people. But it’s so strong.The three descend into Yithian library stacks. Empty manuscript cases litter the place. Stray flying polyps may lurk nearby, though most have migrated to a mega colony in the Sahara Desert. Sunny struggles to recall the right word for the vast bague argent racine de rubis ruins around them. Cyclopean. Liv wonders why the Yith kept «hard copies» when they more reliably stored their wisdom in «near bottomless silos bored into bague argent femme carre the crust of the planet, silos full of tightly laced, indestructible artificial neural tissue,» same as the human retroengineered «dreaming matrix» of the Deep Dendo. The Yith were «fucking show offs,» Liv mutters. Great Race, her ass. But Sunny believes the Yith were great. To collect so much knowledge. To project their minds to fresh bodies at need. To survive, to keep surviving. What could be greater than thatDam herds them down spiraling ramps to a vast well carved with scenes of battle or migration or sex that defy human comprehension. On a pylon rising from its depths is the machine they seek, «a twisted orrery of translucent tubes coiling between flat planes and arcs of alien metal.» The dust of aeons coats it. As the team approaches the machine, Sunny feels odd anticipation, strange joy, impending memory.Anticipation turns to anxiety as terrible pressure grips her temples. She watches Dam and Liz stroking dust from the machine. Liv whispers that the thing is «beautiful,» oh, «it’s freedom.» Sunny, too, begins automatically caressing its cool surfaces. Bringing it to life. Protection from her Deep Dendo field wavers, and then Sunny Grey Theremin is no more.Into her body has migrated the Yithian left in the machine when the Great Race time leapt away from the Flying Polyp threat. For millenia it waited for new intelligence to arise on Earth, intelligence it could monitor and subtly influence. Keeping Records is what the Yith do, although this particular one has sympathy for the humans of the Deep Dendo, stripped of identity, cooling corpses now that Sunny’s team has activated its machine.It confesses there is nothing «great» about the Great Race. As the stars cycle on, they ever fall to their own hubris or to the return of the Masters, or both. Then, cowards, they flee. RememberThe Degenerate Dutch: Most of the more or less surviving humans are women, because males bague argent wish avis tend to burn out quickly in the Deep Dendo.Mythos Making: Many mythosians are present on post apocalyptic Earth, from the Yith and flying polyps to «the big C.» Also, humans are in Deep Dendo, a term that will never bague argent un monde en or stop being funny regardless of how serious the situation is.Libronomicon: Yith are a little obsessed with hard copy records though we learn here that they also have more efficient forms of storage.Madness Takes Its Toll: An intact, singular, relatively sane ego complex shines like a beacon outside the Voorish Domes, attracting nightmares from miles around. And then shortly bague argent algerie afterward, it’s no longer a sane ego complex at all. You have to bracelet cuir homme vannes be, literally, crazy to go outside.Why are there not more stories about theYith They’re the perfect cosmic horror creation: an irresistible agglomeration of attraction and repulsion. They promise legacy andforce forgetting, create the universe’s most exciting community of minds while unrepentantly breaking whole civilizations to keep it going. They preserve and destroy. And according bracelet cuir homme petite taille to Jones, they survive until they don’t. This one gets conveniently around my inner cognitive psychologist via a form of amnesia totally unrelated to the standard ways the human brain breaks down. It makes for a particularly disturbing take onthe rise of the Great Old Ones. This isn’t the relatively comfortable replacement of one colonial power with another, as in «A Study in Emerald,» nor even a world with minor survivalist havens, as in «The Shallows.» Humans survive only by giving up their selfhood in a self imposed Matrix. At first it looks like those selves are preserved, a little, in the dreams of the DeepDendo but ourYithsays no, all that’s left is a fragile hive mind, coming up with fictional individuals for surface expeditions. And, eventually, not even that.Identity is at the core of «Amnesiac’s Lament» and more than identity, names. The three woman exploratory team, brushstroke personalities and algorithmic code names, no real personhood among them. The goal here, presumably, is to make every team of cardboard characters in every B movie seem much creepier for the rest of my life. Thanks, I think. The Elder Gods, too, are referred to only obliquely: we all know who The Big C is, but don’t want to say so aloud.The only real names we get, in fact, are the creators and content of the fictions that nettoyer bague argent vinaigre birthed this apocalypse. E. The DeepDendo, perennially amusing creation of Machen. They get named (when not being rudely referred to as «ancient fungoid mollusk scholars») but their left behind survivor questions those names. Not truly Great, they confess, but cowards. Experts at running from danger. Andas withhumanity, the cost of theirextended survival is memory itself. The more forms they take on, the more jumps between species and worlds, the less sure they can be of who and what they really are. Even the Archives don’t ultimately live up to their promise.Maybe there’s a hint of hope in that. After all, if it’s true bague argent les poulettes of agrandissement bague argent theYith, it must be true of the Old Ones too.Two consecutive blogs, two thrilling ends of the world as we know it! I think the thematic continuity was unintentional, right, Ruthanna Or have you some nefarious wizardry in mind, in which the third «stars are right» story in a row bracelet cuir homme ecrou will bring about the actual apocalyptic return of the Old Ones I wouldn’t put it past her, people, what with her ties to a certain amphibious race that worships bague argent femme marc deloche the Big C. Just saying, no shade intended. Some of my best friends are Deep Ones. Still, ends of the world can be inconvenient, new reality paradigms to be broken in, you know, ichor stains on that carpet you just had cleaned. [RE: You might have mentioned this theory before you asked whether I'd rather do Machen, whose conlanging bague argent 40 euros abilities I've just been mocking, or a third apocalypse story. Let's say instead that the fictional apocalypses are intended to jinx any real ones that might be in the offing]If the world as I know it is about to change, I want advance notice so I can bague argent femme plate get in a supply of Ichor Out. Also some instant essence bague argent acier pudding nettoyer bague argent citron for when Nameless Horrors unexpectedly drop in. As Scott R. Jones so rightly points out, when Nameless Horrors are hungry, they tend to blather on, neglecting to add spaces between their psychic concept bracelet cuir homme ferrari clusters…
