West of Durham lies an institution of learning, a varsity whose name I dare not speak, but whose avatar—a devil of deepest azure—should demonstrate amply the nature of the research that is conducted therein. In those hallowed halls labor intellects of such fantastic potency that it was inevitable one would look too far into the cyclopean depths of research funding and happen upon knowledge that no man was ever meant to glimpse.
My own travels took me to that fantastic institution’s website in search of #content, and now I curse the perverse curiosity that possessed me on that wretched day. Would that I had instead ventured into the ancient park opposite, to wander between the gnarled trees and bend my weary body down to touch grass!
Instead, I clicked on a link furnished with the intriguing title “Extreme dynamic symmetry enables omnidirectional and multifunctional robots”, and in doing so, I sealed my own damnation. Readers, I will relate the horrors I saw, and then I will hit “Publish” on this blog post, file my invoice, and never speak of it again.
The “omnidirectional and multifunctional robots” of which these learned men spoke had nothing resembling a human form—a fact of which the designer spoke proudly, ignorant of the forces they had unleashed! The leader of the deranged robotocist cult that had summoned the beast, one Boyuan Chen, spoke openly of his terrible designs to Arkham periodical Associated Press: “We’re not imitating anything in nature,” he said. He need not have elucidated this philosophy, for it was clear that the mechanical abomination resembled none of the plain, virtuous forms that characterize the creatures of this world: no quadruped or biped, no vertebrate or arthropod, neither slithering snake nor avian soaring on the thermal currents of the sky.
No, the thing manifested as a mass of glowing orbs, each tethered to a frame wrought from some fantastic material that I knew could not be of this Earth. (“Plastic,” I was later to learn it was called, a name that speaks of its hideous versatility and its fundamental indestructibility.) Around this frame snaked tendrils of every color and none, some stretching outward toward the orbs, others descending into a tangle of interstitial connections that originated in a central nodule I knew must contain the thing’s brain.
“Argus,” the paper called it. Ha! I knew instantly that the name “Argus” was the most risible of obfuscations, for this contraption had another name entirely, a base nomenclature that should long since have been banished from the world but lived on in the whispered lore of certain degenerate cults of San-Francisco. Argus? No, this could be none other than the outer god itself made manifest: the dreaded YOG-SOTOTH, whose form is described in the forbidden Technonomicon as “a congery of iridescent globes”. (I say also that at least one copy of the infernal tome exists to this day, and it rests in the hands of a cult devoted to the god “AI”, who use it even now to summon the obscene shoggoths and unleash them upon our world in the form of mendacious search summaries and an inane formless entity by the name of “Claude”.)
But I digress, and I must force myself again to relate what I saw that day, even as my hands tremble over my keyboard and I crave nothing more than the sweet oblivion of cat videos on YouTube. When the thing began to move, revolving around a central axis like a terrible d20 comprised of eyes and madness, I confess that I let out a shriek and alt-tabbed away, but too late, too late, the vision of the thing forever burned into my blasted brain like light on a photographic plate. I ran gibbering and laughing into the kitchen, wherein I prepared more coffee for myself, knowing in my heart that the night would bring me no rest, only endless dreams of the outer god and his laughing tech bro enablers, their hands reaching out to encircle the globe, encrusting and encysting it forever in the dread womb of late capitalism.
