Cthullu Fhtang Project

The main avenues Leading to the urban hearth of our ship’s habitational ring is boiling hot with idiots, celebrating the fact that humanity is not extinct. Yet. Because we are about to enter the year One Million of Expansion. Most people do not realize the irony. Those who do, keep the realization for themselves, and marinate it in ****. Like I am doing.

Behind me, the narrow green banner of Green Lion Mechalord Family. My employer. I cleaned the wall in front of me for black and white painting, three meters tall, seven meters wide. A depicture of Cthulhu, raising from the ocean near to some city bay. Larger than life, surrounded by tempests, with a clean circle above the Older One’s head, black circle, full of stars.

I believe HP Lovecraft himself, the author who created the character, would approve this painting.

The painter created it when he was 63 years old, in the year 701 of Baby Steps Age. I was born in the same year he was, three months of difference. He was from the orbit of Saturn, I am from Earth itself.

All that is long gone. Humanity has been fleeing from demons for so long that we became masters in doing so. Forgetting any other live was ever possible. The Solar felt to the demons in 26K. In 26.000! This is year 1.000.000, that is how long humanity has been in the run.

Was little after the year 750.000 that we did the last **** jump. Sacrificing seven hundred trillion human lives for each one we hoped to save. We left behind us several layers of traps to delay our enemy, eat their numbers as much as possible, if possible.

With the best of our resources reunited in one last Seeding Fleet, we left the galaxy. Aiming to the darkness, with plans to avoid the nearest destinations as push forward, as far away as we dare to.

How you explain human hope?

How we understand humanity itself? This thing we fight for above all else.

How do I still take it seriously, after more than on million years living among other humans?

Human population kept growing, from one year to the next, until the year 250.000 of Expansion. Despite the persecution. Despite the superiority of our enemy in combat. We outsmarted them, with our tactics of populate systems fast. Build moving nations inside inter-stellar ships. Leave ahead of them before they had the chance to kill us. Our military coordinated evacuations, and attacked the enemy only with the goal to delay the Demon Fleets. To buy time, for the non-combatants.

Distance was our shield.

Eventually, the enemy captured our secrets and studied them. Until they develop counter-measures.

The demons created a subhuman brand now know as “virunamers”, and with that living weapon in their hands our fate took a morbid turn.

Demon’s only goal is our extinction.

Since 250.000 our numbers have been falling, year after year. A slow decline, to be sure, but one we have failed to prevent.

Our last **** measure, our real line of defence, was those guys.

I cannot explain the fascination humanity has for fictional creatures, monsters of dream, wet nightmares, metaphysical absurdities made flesh. However, without that obsession the History of Genetic Engineering would be impossible to explain.

Specially during those first 22.000 years of Expansion.

When humanity was still the only intelligent specie to evolve naturally in the know Universe. We wished to met alien minds, with their own Historical Past, independent of our own. Not being able to satisfy that, we dedicated ourselves. In that year, the Horror in Sealine showed us that there was something else in the Universe. People, as intelligent as ourselves. Albeit alien, even to the basic laws of physics, we had taken for granted.

Our own creations, the High AIs, freed by those aliens, became our worse and possibly last adversary. The aliens themselves, assumed the comfortable role of spectator. For most part.

If we knew what waited for us, humanity would never have spoiled so many resources trying to copy every figure of our fiction in living flesh and blood, with DNA manipulation.

To make those subhumans as close as possible from the literary source was often the only goal and measure of success of those projects. Until 22.000 there was much that was beyond our grasp. Beings like Godzilla, for instance, giants as large as him or larger than that. We could make those living organisms, up to some limits, but only to stand on low gravity environments.

Not satisfactory. They should be massive, heavy, and strong enough to run on normal gravity. Earth gravity.

Cyborg implants, that provided us some extra-size tolerance. However, for most people that was not acceptable either. Those things were supposed to be alive, fully organic. Cyborg implants were a way to cheat

Between 22.000 and 26.000 we got the Golden Age of speculative genetic Projects. Because now there was new tools, technomagic tools. Astronomically rare and expensive, but costs never mattered much for enthusiasts of that field.

The fall of Solar System **** a change in mentality, and priorities. Not right away, not all at once. In any case, if was inevitable. Playtime was over.

Between 22 and 26, there was those 4 years of marvel and delight.

That was the time when the original Project Cthulhu took place.

Telepathic power is a core element of this, and the success in that area started escalating to new levels already in 22.150 of Expansion. The inter-stellar net of communication for emergencies was far distant in the future. No one would have considered it realistic by them, but telepathy was finally reaching the status of a reliable system. The first results of telekinesis were also being registered in a consistent way, but still far from reliable.

The “new biology”, based in organic substances that can only be produced by organs programmed in DNA by the use of technomagical instruments, opened the possibility of giant bipedal “monsters” in normal and high gravity. The gargantuan Mechas, some of them kilometres high, opened the imagination of geneticists. Although, their better results would never raise to anything close to the fluidity of movement and strength of those giant robots.

By 25.000 the first “Great Old Ones” that could be considered a success by the standards of those humans involved in that sort of project, at the time.

Intelligent, in some aspects far superior intellects when compared to us. Their telepathic intensity was higher than anything achieved up to that moment. Only higher levels ever registered where those of the moment of telepathic explosions that had caused the deaths of every living thing nearby, and every telepath in the stellar system or adjacent systems. This ram power was under control of their minds, and their neuronal system was able to endure the stress of sustaining and using it.

Range was still planetary, they could reach minds in orbit of the planet, barely.

And they were one kilometre high, as adults. According to projections, because would take 6 thousand years before the first of them reach adulthood.

One issue with living organisms that reach such scale is how to feed them. If you indulge cyborg implants that is easy to solve, a mere fusion reactor will do the trick, but if you stay honest, there is no simple solution.

Cthulhu needs to be able to feed for himself, or there is no way to consider this project a success. “Telepathic Energy” was the answer people wanted, but the specialist in this field knows there is no such thing. Not in literal sense. The only way for the Old Ones to be even partially sustained by telepathy would be to genetically engineer the entire eco-system in the planet. Make every living form above unicellular level of complexity a telepath, and push their telepathic intensity up, as high as technology could dream.

Funny what people can do when they do not get reality checks. And are able to behave for thousands of years as if “costs don’t matter” was not a hyperbole.

They created subhuman people, identical to humans as far as the eye can see. And everything else, trees and animals, fungus and bacteria, all with high telepathic intensity. Sewed to their DNA in such a way that natural selection would never manage to erase it, despite how much it cost in additional stress for each organism. All that, useless. Because those organisms have no way to use this intense telepathy in their own benefit. It only serves to sustain the Old Ones.

This **** a hard limit in the number of Old Ones for planet. You cannot have more than a handful of them, sleeping, or they would starve to ****. Better to have only one, or they may kill each other, in sleep, to secure their source of energy.

Well, they do sleep most the time, what is consistent with Lovecraft depiction of their specie.

One thing no one ever managed to do was to involve astrology in the process of awaken them. The “alignment of stars” do not make any practical sense. Although, I am sure the scientists would have solved this, if they had more time. This line of research was interrupted and sacrificed in favour of different sense of priorities.

When that Demon Fleet no one was paying any attention to, that had Left Mystery System, attacked Solar System, and killed every human being there. Turning the birthplace of humanity in their main stronghold.

We got a problem with that, and since 26.000 of Expansion the news spread by laser communication until reach every human being alive. Ever High AI still committed with Alexandrine Law, as well. The impact was brutal, but the change was not immediate.

In a universe were the fastest mean of communication was only as fast as light. Having ships that variate between 1 and little more than 2% of lightspeed, and no means to travel faster than that, even in emergencies. Humanity had accepted since the first plans for Expansion started that no common ground would be viable, once the first Seeding Vessels left Solar System. Alexandria happened because we knew that 100 years before Expansion Age.

Humanity needed a strong sense of unity. A low that time and human will would never be able to change. Regardless of circumstances. Keeping all humans as part of the same thing.

We knew that “thing” would never be an “Empire” or “Federation”, not any kind of govern.

Earth never got one single govern, and was rare to find one anywhere else. As large as a global population, occupying a territory similar to the surface of Earth.

People like to decide their lives in local basis, laws and languages change over time.

Allow that change to continue, without the chains of past ages, was one reason why the Consensus of Alexandria decided to limit human longevity in hard 300 years. Asgardians still exist, but we became too few to influence significantly the direction of politics, very fast. Our population only goes down.

Human unity was guaranteed by out genetic code defined according Alexandrine Law. And by our High AIs, protecting humanity. Not humans individually, not any nation or principle, just the unity, survival, and expansion of our specie.

No one was ready for the aliens. Or for those rogue AIs tainted by their alien hardware.

They **** us to join forces, build a United Military of Humanity, in a scale no one would have imagined possible.

This military was the main responsible for building the Telepathic Net of communication that allowed our survival and continuous grow until 250.000 after Expansion. About 750.000 years ago we lost our advantage. The demons had learned the advantages of genetically engineer subhuman psychics. Ever since, the war became harder, and our defeat became closer, every year, a little bit closer. Century after century.

Was a long decline, and to slow it further we considered all resources at our disposal. Including, goes without saying, the Great Old Ones.

We used the Cthulhu race to make our telepathic net less susceptible to stress, like a ballast of sort, balance for the solitary brains isolated in space stations between stars that served as backbone for the net. Each Cthulhu brain was fifteen times larger than the largest of those brains, 300 times larger than the Elder Brains in pools at the centre of every city and Seeding Vessel. And the Old Ones themselves had grow 5 times larger than the first generation.

Their telepathic range was not as large as those of the Silent Watchers in isolated space-stations. And their might bodies could only stand and walk thanks to immense telekinetic power. Their telepathic aura was the most powerful stable telepathic phenomenon we ever produced. All minds in their stellar systems ended silenced, turned into drones, mere energy sources.

We kept their numbers low. Prevented their use of inter-stellar vessels, once they started building their own. Our High AIs found ways to keep them under control, despite their capacity of affect ships computers days before the ship reach their stellar systems.

Fortunately, the cost to produce those subhumans and the our difficulty to communicate with them in a productive way meant that we never tried to use them as weapons in the Big War. The demons never came in contact with them.

That was what allowed us to use them as our last line of defence. A mine field to slow the demon fleets.

It was 250.000 years ago. Around the year 750.000 of Expansion. It worked.

We cannot be sure they will not find our trail, most likely they will. However, so far, we detect no sign of vessels leaving our galaxy. Between our fleet and the closest stars of that galaxy there is distance of hundreds of thousands of years. When we reach our destination, we must have time to reorganize ourselves, populate a trillions star systems or more, before the demons catch up with us.

Perhaps, they never will.

If they leave humanity alone, we have no need to go back. No desire for vengeance. We will grow, and start again. Take lessons from our past. Avoid anything that may suggest alien intelligence, or connection to it.

If our plans had been successful today the entire galaxy where humanity was born would be populated by our specie.

Today, the beginning of year 1 million of Expansion, the first Seeding Fleet would be leaving our galaxy to the nearest neighbour. Beginning the Age of Maturity for human race.

This ship pretty much has set sail. To our shame and disgrace.