Title : Strange Aeons Indeed
Author : ‘Goji’ Rob Morris
Series : The TOS-based AU, The Ancient Destroyer Cycle
Type : Lovecraftian exploration story set in the prehistory of the AD Universe
Part : 1/1
Characters : An early starship crew of unknown species
Rating : PG13, for violence and unenlightened attitudes
Summary : Ages before Kirk and company, an intrepid Captain of a city in space leads his brave crew into one of the first places formed after the Big Bang. There, they encounter a nameless horror that chases them into the primitive hinterlands of creation, for purposes known only to itself.
Strange Aeons Indeed
By Rob Morris
CAPTAIN’S LOG
Stardate Emergence Era Exoain 3.1415
Our esteemed well-seasoned crew moves now for the fabled First Places, where the heat from the Creation has still yet to fully dissipate. As per treaty declarations, we sail in the company of Commander Sargon and Lady Thalassa, aboard the RTY Ship Highmost. I have had to discipline members of my staff, for using racist words like ‘compacted’ to describe the people of the Highmost. That they are odd to our eyes is beyond dispute. But
Sargon’s brother, Lieutenant Commander Hanock, let slip that many of his kind feel the same way towards us. I do wonder how they get about in those tiny things, yet I recall the war this treaty ended as well.
Somehow, they managed to hold even us at bay, and that could be no accident. I am often struck by how these poor creatures have virtually no scent, and comparatively little physical presence. It is often hard to tell one of them is even in the room. They are that easy to overlook. Even the android servants we built in their image as a final tactic in that old war cause more awareness.
Yet perhaps those tiny forms force them to see things our sort overlooks. It was Lady Thalassa who first found the signs of the First Places. I consider it a disgrace that our kind was so wrapped up in superstitions and talk of places we ought not go, that we overlooked something so primal. We are said to be a patient sort and born explorers, and yet talk of something older than we makes us shudder. Our dominion over the province of knowledge is absolute, save for this one area of creation. Ours will not be a species, and it will not be a crew, that tolerates limits.
I order all speed ahead, as we seek the secrets of the first emergence.
--------------------------------
A concern arose after the barrier surrounding the First Places was breached. Sargon’s crew was assaulted by energies largely harmless to us. Many were lost. Others experienced what can only be regarded as a form of rapid evolution. Suddenly, these odd beings possess abilities to manipulate matter, energy, time and space, and profess to understand the feelings of superiority we once bragged of openly, as regarded their kind. The abilities alone do not concern me, so much as the attitude that seems to have emerged with them. That, and the silver sheen of their small eyes now unnerves me. Sargon, among the most powerful of his group, says that the day may come soon that they will be called gods.
How odd, that when they were so unlike us, I found them tolerable. Now that they claim to have joined us in certain cosmic mundanities, I feel wholly thrown off. When Sargon announced their withdrawal due to casualties, I fought back secret delight. They claim that they will seed the larger galaxy with life like their own. That may be a thing I find that I cannot tolerate. Even sentient, intelligent ants can be a problem, if their numbers grow too great.
---------------------------------
My ever-astute Science Officer spotted the object first. What a disappointment to come all this way and find what appears to be the largest, most empty cylinder ever made. Twice as large as our own vessel, its outer shell is composed entirely of the purest grade of neutronium ever scanned. I order towing drones to haul this marvelous artifact out to an inhabited star system. There, this inert wonder—a work of ancient art?—may be fully studied and appreciated. Yet if it was some manner of vessel once, whatever did it use for fuel? Was it equipped with some manner of defensive weaponry? I am confident that scientists in the Angilas sector, with over forty planets worth of our finest knowledge repositories, can find a definitive answer.
----------------------------
I had thought that cylinder was discovery enough to firm our place in the firmament, so to speak, and yet this new thing may well eclipse that, even though it be the oldest thing of all.
Professionally, as I would never allow otherwise under my command, each member of my senior staff explained to me the organic matter we had found in a place where no life as we know it or could speculate of it could or should exist. Their ultimate conclusion is nothing short of belief-breaking. This thing we have found, this beast with three separate cranial appendages, may in fact have already been here when the universe formed. Its very DNA may provide crucial clues to how the universe prior to ours met its end, and thereby show us how to keep ours alive indefinitely. Have we, pioneers and explorers, made a servant of Entropy and forcibly neutered Death itself?
---------------
Our discoveries have taken a dim turn. While the cylindrical artifact was confirmed to have arrived in Angilas, that sector has since gone entirely silent, and a great gnawing fear arises in me. Further confounding my soul is the finding that the information gathered from the creature shows an exact mirror of the prior cosmos in its dotage.
Was this creature some manner of repository for the energy of that dying universe? For the scans reveal nothing less than the sobering thought that, as that place’s energies decreased, those of this bottom-feeder increased. Is it merely then a sewer parasite of the end times? How sad to breach the halls of creation itself, only to find a largish tapeworm. I have begun to find the massive thing repulsive, and members of my crew who have analyzed it have begun to show signs of stress, and in some cases mental aberrations. No one, even to myself, dares to view it directly.
---------------------
Horror has followed upon horror. I was informed of the final report mere moments before the worst of it. This thing, this golden, scaly three-head of insane proportions and architecture was not merely a survivor of the previous universal cycle, nor is it a bottom-feeder that happened to suck upon that place’s teat as it grew cold. The conclusion was inescapable. The monster before us is not the innocent castaway of the wreck of the ultimate vessel. Rather, it is the pirate that survived killing all aboard, and then drilling holes in the ship, while using its material to build a safe haven for itself. This beast, this Ancient Destroyer Of Worlds murdered the prior universe and lived to tell the tale.
With a hideous synchronicity, it chose the time right after my reading to at last awake, and begin its work on a young universe, that it finished on an old one. We barely leave in time as the First Places vanish into its vacuum-like maw.
The implication, that this thing only awoke when we broached its lair, haunts us in our retreat, this rout of civilization, this massacre of life-kind.
-----------------------
Exoain civilization has fallen and is no more. The cylindrical construct was after all, a weapon, and the worlds we poured into its opening have fed it to slowly seek more. We now realize how doubly foolish we were to send it into the heart of our being. It was very likely a weapon created by those in the prior cosmos to try and kill the thing that is now our dogged pursuer. Why does it not catch up with us and finish what it started, when it wiped away half my crew?
Sargon’s civilization fared no better, in its newfound arrogance. Worse still, Hanock proved as great a villain as space has ever known. On all the lesser-developed worlds, he seeded a cult. But it is not a unified cult across these worlds. No, it teaches intolerance and hate towards all life not like itself, and moves to attract the great tri-beast, who they call King Ghidorah, to their systems, each believing that they alone will be spared its wrath.
So far, none have been, including Hanock’s own. I no longer even wish I could have seen the looks on their faces, as the end came. I now despair over anyone or anything surviving this onslaught, and I would not begrudge a sworn blood enemy its ability to do so. It was born outside our cosmos, and therefore may scoff at laws of physics as much as laws of morality and conduct. It only knows killing, even when that murder is of an ideal.
--------------------------
In our native quadrant, nothing remains, not even the fabled UltraMen we once warred with. In another, the shattered survivors of assault are gathering together in some manner of hive mind, assimilating all others in their wake, to prepare for the creature’s next pass. In another, a hunted group turned the beast back through a great linking of its power, but the gratitude of the other species was short-lived. The leader-mind of this linking has regretfully chosen that their only choice of survival is to seek dominion over all those that threaten it.
One last wild quadrant remains, and in it a wild hope may dwell. My able if argumentative Healer has posited that, if this monster was present when our universe was formed, then surely the universe must know this and is somewhere forming an antibody, a defense against this disease called Ghidorah. A certain set of conditions would need to exist in order for this theorized defense to evolve and grow. My Science Officer, asked to use his innate ability to calculate future probabilities, has seen that a small remote system’s third planet will produce a creature whose name translates as stone, or rock. All seems lost, so we move for this distant place with only prayer to whatever gods might truly be that we reach our goal while dodging our pursuer, there to find the rock to throw to break those hideous teeth.
--------------------------------
The other species we encountered were of little help to us in finding our goal, this distant planet that contains the last hope. They have instead seized on the calculated speculation of my Science Officer, as concerns their so-called ‘Rock Of Prophecy’. On so many worlds, adherents to this misaimed prediction war on and are warred on by the hateful who have joined this Order Of The Ancient Destroyer, with Ghidorah the only winner.
Upon arriving at our goal, we observed a raw world we might shape to our own dwelling, after the beast is dealt with. Great sauronoids wander its surface, including our quarry. Brownish grey with a series of spinal dorsal fins, it possesses DNA that is a direct counter to that of Ghidorah. In short, both are nearly immortal until they encounter the other. If sufficiently evolved, this new lizard could even best Ghidorah.
Above this young world hover its three guardians. One is a great beast with a half-shell on its back. The second is a great moth, with colors bright and vivid. The third is a more bat-like moth. We have communicated with them, and together, we will turn back Ghidorah when that time comes. We will protect this last hope, and then Exo will sprout again in the fertile earth beneath us.
I in fact welcome our chance to rebuild from the best material, and start all over again. The corruption and foolishness of what was will not be repeated. Perhaps it can even be said that this Ghidorah did us a favor, by clearing us all of our excess populations, those foolish enough to believe in the simplistic, and the superstitious. Yes, we are well rid of all of them.
--------------
I watched the great guardians fall from the sky, their dead carcasses striking my ship as they went down to the waters. Though my Science Officer confirms the existence and survival of offspring in deep hiding, the antibody creature also fell after a battle that drained Ghidorah to the point of retreat. But it has slowed its retreat briefly to find my fallen ship, my city in space.
I am the Captain. I assume full responsibility for all that has followed, and if my name, when discovered, falls into infamy and shame, and even worse than this, I know that it is fully deserved. So let this foolish Captain still sing the praises of his loyal crew, as the beast’s pecking slowly finds its way through the hull.
To Science Officer Nyarlathotep. To Chief Healer Dagon. To StarGuide Yog-Sothoth. To Historian Recorder Hastur. To Stability and Safety Officer Shub-Niggaruth. To Maintenance of Motion Officer Tsathoggua. You were the finest crew ever to sail the stars. That you were one and all undone by something elder and unspeakable was the fault of your commanding officer. Where your spirits walk, do so with pride. Mine, I think, will walk at the bottom of this thing’s gullet. The pounding on the hull is so loud now, it is almost a comfort, an obscene lullaby from which I think I shall never awaken.
END CAPTAIN’S LOG
CTHULU, COMMANDING EXOAIN PROTECTORATE H’PL-CLASS STARSHIP R’LYEH
Author : ‘Goji’ Rob Morris
Series : The TOS-based AU, The Ancient Destroyer Cycle
Type : Lovecraftian exploration story set in the prehistory of the AD Universe
Part : 1/1
Characters : An early starship crew of unknown species
Rating : PG13, for violence and unenlightened attitudes
Summary : Ages before Kirk and company, an intrepid Captain of a city in space leads his brave crew into one of the first places formed after the Big Bang. There, they encounter a nameless horror that chases them into the primitive hinterlands of creation, for purposes known only to itself.
Strange Aeons Indeed
By Rob Morris
CAPTAIN’S LOG
Stardate Emergence Era Exoain 3.1415
Our esteemed well-seasoned crew moves now for the fabled First Places, where the heat from the Creation has still yet to fully dissipate. As per treaty declarations, we sail in the company of Commander Sargon and Lady Thalassa, aboard the RTY Ship Highmost. I have had to discipline members of my staff, for using racist words like ‘compacted’ to describe the people of the Highmost. That they are odd to our eyes is beyond dispute. But
Sargon’s brother, Lieutenant Commander Hanock, let slip that many of his kind feel the same way towards us. I do wonder how they get about in those tiny things, yet I recall the war this treaty ended as well.
Somehow, they managed to hold even us at bay, and that could be no accident. I am often struck by how these poor creatures have virtually no scent, and comparatively little physical presence. It is often hard to tell one of them is even in the room. They are that easy to overlook. Even the android servants we built in their image as a final tactic in that old war cause more awareness.
Yet perhaps those tiny forms force them to see things our sort overlooks. It was Lady Thalassa who first found the signs of the First Places. I consider it a disgrace that our kind was so wrapped up in superstitions and talk of places we ought not go, that we overlooked something so primal. We are said to be a patient sort and born explorers, and yet talk of something older than we makes us shudder. Our dominion over the province of knowledge is absolute, save for this one area of creation. Ours will not be a species, and it will not be a crew, that tolerates limits.
I order all speed ahead, as we seek the secrets of the first emergence.
--------------------------------
A concern arose after the barrier surrounding the First Places was breached. Sargon’s crew was assaulted by energies largely harmless to us. Many were lost. Others experienced what can only be regarded as a form of rapid evolution. Suddenly, these odd beings possess abilities to manipulate matter, energy, time and space, and profess to understand the feelings of superiority we once bragged of openly, as regarded their kind. The abilities alone do not concern me, so much as the attitude that seems to have emerged with them. That, and the silver sheen of their small eyes now unnerves me. Sargon, among the most powerful of his group, says that the day may come soon that they will be called gods.
How odd, that when they were so unlike us, I found them tolerable. Now that they claim to have joined us in certain cosmic mundanities, I feel wholly thrown off. When Sargon announced their withdrawal due to casualties, I fought back secret delight. They claim that they will seed the larger galaxy with life like their own. That may be a thing I find that I cannot tolerate. Even sentient, intelligent ants can be a problem, if their numbers grow too great.
---------------------------------
My ever-astute Science Officer spotted the object first. What a disappointment to come all this way and find what appears to be the largest, most empty cylinder ever made. Twice as large as our own vessel, its outer shell is composed entirely of the purest grade of neutronium ever scanned. I order towing drones to haul this marvelous artifact out to an inhabited star system. There, this inert wonder—a work of ancient art?—may be fully studied and appreciated. Yet if it was some manner of vessel once, whatever did it use for fuel? Was it equipped with some manner of defensive weaponry? I am confident that scientists in the Angilas sector, with over forty planets worth of our finest knowledge repositories, can find a definitive answer.
----------------------------
I had thought that cylinder was discovery enough to firm our place in the firmament, so to speak, and yet this new thing may well eclipse that, even though it be the oldest thing of all.
Professionally, as I would never allow otherwise under my command, each member of my senior staff explained to me the organic matter we had found in a place where no life as we know it or could speculate of it could or should exist. Their ultimate conclusion is nothing short of belief-breaking. This thing we have found, this beast with three separate cranial appendages, may in fact have already been here when the universe formed. Its very DNA may provide crucial clues to how the universe prior to ours met its end, and thereby show us how to keep ours alive indefinitely. Have we, pioneers and explorers, made a servant of Entropy and forcibly neutered Death itself?
---------------
Our discoveries have taken a dim turn. While the cylindrical artifact was confirmed to have arrived in Angilas, that sector has since gone entirely silent, and a great gnawing fear arises in me. Further confounding my soul is the finding that the information gathered from the creature shows an exact mirror of the prior cosmos in its dotage.
Was this creature some manner of repository for the energy of that dying universe? For the scans reveal nothing less than the sobering thought that, as that place’s energies decreased, those of this bottom-feeder increased. Is it merely then a sewer parasite of the end times? How sad to breach the halls of creation itself, only to find a largish tapeworm. I have begun to find the massive thing repulsive, and members of my crew who have analyzed it have begun to show signs of stress, and in some cases mental aberrations. No one, even to myself, dares to view it directly.
---------------------
Horror has followed upon horror. I was informed of the final report mere moments before the worst of it. This thing, this golden, scaly three-head of insane proportions and architecture was not merely a survivor of the previous universal cycle, nor is it a bottom-feeder that happened to suck upon that place’s teat as it grew cold. The conclusion was inescapable. The monster before us is not the innocent castaway of the wreck of the ultimate vessel. Rather, it is the pirate that survived killing all aboard, and then drilling holes in the ship, while using its material to build a safe haven for itself. This beast, this Ancient Destroyer Of Worlds murdered the prior universe and lived to tell the tale.
With a hideous synchronicity, it chose the time right after my reading to at last awake, and begin its work on a young universe, that it finished on an old one. We barely leave in time as the First Places vanish into its vacuum-like maw.
The implication, that this thing only awoke when we broached its lair, haunts us in our retreat, this rout of civilization, this massacre of life-kind.
-----------------------
Exoain civilization has fallen and is no more. The cylindrical construct was after all, a weapon, and the worlds we poured into its opening have fed it to slowly seek more. We now realize how doubly foolish we were to send it into the heart of our being. It was very likely a weapon created by those in the prior cosmos to try and kill the thing that is now our dogged pursuer. Why does it not catch up with us and finish what it started, when it wiped away half my crew?
Sargon’s civilization fared no better, in its newfound arrogance. Worse still, Hanock proved as great a villain as space has ever known. On all the lesser-developed worlds, he seeded a cult. But it is not a unified cult across these worlds. No, it teaches intolerance and hate towards all life not like itself, and moves to attract the great tri-beast, who they call King Ghidorah, to their systems, each believing that they alone will be spared its wrath.
So far, none have been, including Hanock’s own. I no longer even wish I could have seen the looks on their faces, as the end came. I now despair over anyone or anything surviving this onslaught, and I would not begrudge a sworn blood enemy its ability to do so. It was born outside our cosmos, and therefore may scoff at laws of physics as much as laws of morality and conduct. It only knows killing, even when that murder is of an ideal.
--------------------------
In our native quadrant, nothing remains, not even the fabled UltraMen we once warred with. In another, the shattered survivors of assault are gathering together in some manner of hive mind, assimilating all others in their wake, to prepare for the creature’s next pass. In another, a hunted group turned the beast back through a great linking of its power, but the gratitude of the other species was short-lived. The leader-mind of this linking has regretfully chosen that their only choice of survival is to seek dominion over all those that threaten it.
One last wild quadrant remains, and in it a wild hope may dwell. My able if argumentative Healer has posited that, if this monster was present when our universe was formed, then surely the universe must know this and is somewhere forming an antibody, a defense against this disease called Ghidorah. A certain set of conditions would need to exist in order for this theorized defense to evolve and grow. My Science Officer, asked to use his innate ability to calculate future probabilities, has seen that a small remote system’s third planet will produce a creature whose name translates as stone, or rock. All seems lost, so we move for this distant place with only prayer to whatever gods might truly be that we reach our goal while dodging our pursuer, there to find the rock to throw to break those hideous teeth.
--------------------------------
The other species we encountered were of little help to us in finding our goal, this distant planet that contains the last hope. They have instead seized on the calculated speculation of my Science Officer, as concerns their so-called ‘Rock Of Prophecy’. On so many worlds, adherents to this misaimed prediction war on and are warred on by the hateful who have joined this Order Of The Ancient Destroyer, with Ghidorah the only winner.
Upon arriving at our goal, we observed a raw world we might shape to our own dwelling, after the beast is dealt with. Great sauronoids wander its surface, including our quarry. Brownish grey with a series of spinal dorsal fins, it possesses DNA that is a direct counter to that of Ghidorah. In short, both are nearly immortal until they encounter the other. If sufficiently evolved, this new lizard could even best Ghidorah.
Above this young world hover its three guardians. One is a great beast with a half-shell on its back. The second is a great moth, with colors bright and vivid. The third is a more bat-like moth. We have communicated with them, and together, we will turn back Ghidorah when that time comes. We will protect this last hope, and then Exo will sprout again in the fertile earth beneath us.
I in fact welcome our chance to rebuild from the best material, and start all over again. The corruption and foolishness of what was will not be repeated. Perhaps it can even be said that this Ghidorah did us a favor, by clearing us all of our excess populations, those foolish enough to believe in the simplistic, and the superstitious. Yes, we are well rid of all of them.
--------------
I watched the great guardians fall from the sky, their dead carcasses striking my ship as they went down to the waters. Though my Science Officer confirms the existence and survival of offspring in deep hiding, the antibody creature also fell after a battle that drained Ghidorah to the point of retreat. But it has slowed its retreat briefly to find my fallen ship, my city in space.
I am the Captain. I assume full responsibility for all that has followed, and if my name, when discovered, falls into infamy and shame, and even worse than this, I know that it is fully deserved. So let this foolish Captain still sing the praises of his loyal crew, as the beast’s pecking slowly finds its way through the hull.
To Science Officer Nyarlathotep. To Chief Healer Dagon. To StarGuide Yog-Sothoth. To Historian Recorder Hastur. To Stability and Safety Officer Shub-Niggaruth. To Maintenance of Motion Officer Tsathoggua. You were the finest crew ever to sail the stars. That you were one and all undone by something elder and unspeakable was the fault of your commanding officer. Where your spirits walk, do so with pride. Mine, I think, will walk at the bottom of this thing’s gullet. The pounding on the hull is so loud now, it is almost a comfort, an obscene lullaby from which I think I shall never awaken.
END CAPTAIN’S LOG
CTHULU, COMMANDING EXOAIN PROTECTORATE H’PL-CLASS STARSHIP R’LYEH
