Not even sure what day it is. Normally I’d be worried about driving while this unaware but this is different – actually I’m totally aware, hyperaware even, just not of mundane things like the time or my location. My mind has been shifted into a gear I’ve never used before even while it’s ever more dissociated from what I can sense externally. This is surely the most perfect dissociative there ever was…

The city has become a grid, more explicitly than ever. The more I look, the more the materials that structures are made from becomes insignificant, even invisible. All that’s left is the pure structure itself, naked and unsullied by matter, abstracted. Structure, function, potentiality, systems…that’s what I see now. It appears as vision but it’s almost like it enters my eyes only by convention, or out of force of habit. Now everything is approaching wireframe, one-dimensional lines delineating 2-D surfaces enclosing 3-D volumes, themselves embedded in higher-dimension structures…but then I blink and it’s back to normal. For now. There’s a patina of unreality to everything that gets a little stronger each time this happens.

Sense of time comes back to me, a little. I think it’s been about three weeks now. Started with that nutter Carson, for me anyway – another night round his flat, sampling whatever it was he’d got this time. Some fucking ibogaine analogue, wasn’t it – ten minutes of hyperspace, then spend the next four hours thinking you’re five different people, two of whom are dead. Jesus, not my idea of fun. But he also had that stuff, that black stuff…still don’t know what to call it. But that’s what we do call it, ‘the stuff’…too new even to have a name. Turn off the highway onto a slip road, now round the grimy estates that line the flyover…grey concrete washed a flat dirty yellow by the sodium glare…a crude simulation of a settlement. But it was black, which was weird for a start, I mean anything in a powder is usually white, especially for something new on the market. And Carson didn’t want any money for it, said that would come later…still haven’t given anyone a cent for it. Come to think of it I still owe Carson fifty euro for that other time, but he didn’t seem to care. Had that glazed look…guess I’ve probably got that now.

Out of the estates now and along a road that edges the industrial park. Empty now of course, but the lights are still on at the tops of the cranes and other structures. I pass under some heavy overhead cables, also lit up at intervals for some reason. The lights form a matrix that remains in my field of vision when I blink and eventually look away. I feel confident I could close my eyes and still drive and navigate perfectly, so completely does the car’s response mesh with my nervous system. And it meshes on a level that’s more and more bypassing my consciousness.

So anyway: the stuff. It’s a kind of junk, that’s for sure – you know you need more of it, but you’re damned if you can say why. You’re not high, you’re not stoned, it’s not what you could call enjoyable…it’s not even like you crave it, it’s more like your autonomic systems steer you towards it without you even being really aware of what’s happening. Other weird things about it: dose is immaterial, as is ROA. Take less than about 20 em gees and it does nothing; above that and the effect is the same no matter how much you take. And that’s whether you bomb it, snort it, smoke it – weird gnarly black smoke, same dense blackness as the powder – probably be the same if you slammed it or stuck it up your arse. I’m starting to get the impression you don’t even need to physically ingest the stuff, like it would work eventually if you just kept it in your hand or in your breast pocket, like I’m doing now. It would affect you eventually.

Back onto a main artery heading into the centre again. Traffic is uniform, neither dense nor sparse for the time of night (whatever that is). Wonder where all these people are headed at this time, whether any of them are in a similar state to me. Road straight now, dual carriageway, lights once more forming unbroken corridors, staring at the red dots ahead of me, white dots oncoming to my right. Hypnotic enough even when you’re straight. Pylons march by, parallel with the road – part of the city’s musculature – its nervous system of course buried under the roads.

There was that report on pravda.ru last week about the stuff, or at least it sounded like the same gear. Some chemists at a government poisons lab did tests on it and couldn’t find anything. I mean no molecular structure at all, couldn’t even detect any carbon in the damn stuff. What the fuck is this substance? Then I realised: it’s a placeholder, nothing more. A passive, inert symbol for something else. Like a pointer to a memory address. Pointing where and to what…well, the ping just doesn’t come back. Some people in my circle spoke of a factory in central Asia somewhere, but whether there was any truth in that, or if true, whether it was just a distribution point from somewhere else…no idea.

Traffic slows and I slow with it, not even noticing it consciously and suddenly we’re at a standstill. Endless corridors of lights to either side, ahead and behind. This is truly a global drug though, reports in the official media few and far between but everyone knows someone who knows something, or has read something on a messageboard or in a tweet…it’s coming up in Vancouver, LA, Shanghai, Tokyo, Rio, Cape Town, Beirut, Moscow, Marseille. Virtually simultaneously, we hear a rumour of it appearing in a new city every other day now, often hundreds or thousands of miles from the last hotspot. And everyone says the same thing: you don’t get ‘high’, at first it seems to do almost nothing in fact, but you can’t help but keep taking it. Has everyone else been receiving it for free, too? Can’t recall anyone talking about prices. I’ve met Carson for top-ups three – no, four times now – but didn’t some appear in my mailbox in a plain envelope a few days ago? Christ, my memory…what is it doing to me?

Traffic’s moving again now. I see we’re now heading due east, into the heart of the city. Buildings tall now, glass-encased, endoskeletons of steel and concrete. Street lights glitter on the reflective surfaces, shop signs still illuminated hours after businesses have shut for the night. Electricity spent profligately, extravagantly. How much longer will this go on? Russia turning down the gas taps a fraction with each passing winter…AGW can’t happen fast enough for the old and the poor with fuel credits out the window.  On an impulse that I’m sure has its origin outside me I reach down into my breast pocket with my left hand as I steer automatically with my right, dip fingertip in the open baggie, raise it to my tongue. The texture is dusty, the taste unplaceable, entirely neutral but distinct and alien nonetheless. Nothing tastes like this – but this stuff does. I know I’ve got enough for now, and at least you can’t OD on it. Sensation of all the nerves in my body lighting up like this damn street, starting at point of contact on my tongue and spreading…fungal hyphae infiltrating the xylem of a host tree…I am a host to this junk now, that’s for sure. Cannot begin to imagine what its agenda is.

Glance out the window. Physical substance recedes still further, now I can see electricity and optical pulses coursing through the office buildings as the workers sleep…current supply for power, merely brute musculature, runs parallel with the subtle nerve impulses in ethernet cables as computers talk to each other, keeping up a silent colloquy throughout the night. Plotting, scheming perhaps…but by now I feel so far removed from humanity myself that I can’t even muster up any paranoia. The great city continues to breathe, hum, vibrate with occult potential – truly an organism in its own right, more alive now than the fleshy bags of tissue and electrolyte that scurry through it each day. Capital’s myrmidons.

The thought strikes me that this stuff has come from the same place cities come from – not of this Earth, a parasitic form from elsewhere. Conjecture, of course, and you’d be justified in thinking me a little strange if you heard me talking this way – ‘strange’ and ‘normal’ have pretty much lost meaning for me by now.

Glance out again, and up. All I see now is information. Matter replaced by data. Great streams of it, encoded in a thousand different protocols, analogue and digital…the latest from the Dow Jones and the Nikkei, oil prices, exchange rates…an amorous email between lovers, data packets connecting some kid with his comrades and enemies in a capture-the-flag mission hosted on a server on another continent, streamed TV shows, insomniacs chatting the night away or checking a rolling newscast of some unfolding disaster. I can feel it all around me, sense it flowing through me at 2.4GHz. The volume of data traffic is almost perceptibly increasing just as I drive…total information saturation can’t be far off.

Traffic has come to a standstill again. I’m snapped out of my reverie by the sudden appearance of a spidery figure darting here and there among the stationary vehicles. A beggar I guess, from his jerky, furtive movements and ragged clothes. So many of them these days, more even than in the early years following the Crash. He approaches my car, hands held out in wordless supplication. His race is impossible to determine, grimed as he is from living rough and with scarred, discoloured skin. Poor fucker, probably been PassiGassed a couple too many times by the cops or some of the myriad private security contractors that operate in the city – to the extent that there’s even a difference any more. That shit’ll leave you looking like a burns victim without immediate medical attention, and with the price of health insurance going the way it is a lot of working people – never mind the homeless – can’t afford a hospital trip these days.

I don’t have any cash on me and even if I did, it’s hard to see how it could benefit this man other than to prolong his misery, so I’m glad when the car in front pulls away and, again without conscious volition on my part, I slip into gear and glide away. The figure rapidly disappears from sight in the rearview and once again there is a total dearth of visible humanity. All the private cars now have tinted windows, it seems. A reaction to the CCTV or just a trend in imitation of Russian gangsters and Saudi oil sheikhs? Seems to fit society’s general vibe, anyhow.

Approaching the financial district now. Few buildings more than two or three decades old, divided between the relatively ancient edifices built with home-grown cash during the last big boom and the newer ones that have sprung up over the last few years. The nation-state continues to crumble as global elites network, consolidate and gradually merge. These newest buildings belong to every architectural school and to none; postmodern studies in the divorce of style from any recognizable tradition, they could be in any city in any part of the world. This is apparent to me now more clearly than ever, as my heightened awareness picks out curves, angles, length ratios, encodes them numerically according to some unknowable algorithm…structure becomes equation becomes bitstream…I get the feeling this data is being squirreled away in some obscure department of my brain for a purpose that is not mine.

My hands turn the wheel to the right and I am conducted southward down a narrow street towards the river. I pass the building that houses the financial insurance brokerage firm where I work; glancing up, I involuntarily visualise streams of data passing between it and the banks, actuaries and other institutions we deal with. If I were to look over at these places I know I’d see (if that’s the right word) similar links to other institutions, and their links to yet others…an Indra’s net of connections, fractal, receding to the horizon and beyond it in limitless self-similar iterations. Don’t let the city’s countless fanes fool you – the only god this old town has ever venerated is Mammon, and these shining rivulets that crisscross the sky are the weft and warp of His great loom.

Approaching the river now. Without knowing why, my right foot releases the accelerator and applies gentle pressure to the brake as I cruise slowly along a row of residents-only parking spaces, searching for a vacant spot. There’s one. I pull up and cut the engine. Looks like this is the end of the road, at least in my car.

Out now and walking neither hurriedly nor slowly along the embankment, the river to my right, dark and silent. This great curving spine of murky water was once the chief datastream along which traffic material and otherwise passed, long since superseded by rail, road, cables of copper and glass, intangible waves…but on a whim I wonder if there isn’t still some great occluded current flowing along with or under the physical current of the stream? Increasingly uncertain whether any of ‘my’ thoughts are really my own or have their origin elsewhere. I look up from shimmering lights reflected in the otherwise featureless surface of the water and the glittering city night appears a blasphemy, yet also a thing of impossible beauty, like some gorgeously iridescent parasite emerging from the dull husk of the humdrum creature that involuntarily nursed it. Wonder again what it is that I’m incubating. Somehow I think it won’t be long before I find out.

My train of thought is interrupted by a sound that seems far more alien than it should. Footsteps a few metres behind me and to my right; a youngish guy, about my age, nondescript clothes, South Asian. He sees that I’ve seen him and then, in one instant, we both know. He’s on it too. There’s no nod or other gesture needed; the stuff in him communicates with the stuff in me. He and I are merely vehicles, perhaps soon to be abandoned like the vehicle I’ve just left behind. I turn ahead again and we trudge in step for an indeterminate length of time. I become aware of others joining us; a middle-aged woman ahead and to my left; black kid about eighteen a few paces behind her; white girl of 22 or so joining us from a side street and falling into lockstep with the rest.

One after another we step over the chain barrier and descend the slippery steps to an old loading platform at the river’s edge. Now only my own height above the river’s surface and yes, I was right! Invisible from the bank, I can now see the same patterns of data and disincarnate commerce flowing along and within the water. Great glittering skeins of subtle light which must surely have been there already – since the city’s founding? before then, even? – but only now become visible. The others can see it too, I guess. I wonder if this is happening, or is about to happen, in the other cities where this stuff has people in its grip. Most major cities are built on rivers…rivers have always been conduits for communication and trade…arteries and nerves…

Two of the people in the little impromptu group I’ve found myself are now crouching down on the platform and dipping their legs into the greasy water as it washes sluggushly by. I look to either side and through sight enhanced with more rarefied senses I can see platforms and ladders up and down the riverside crawling with small dark figures. I don’t know whether this should provide comfort in numbers or horrify me at the scale of what’s going on, but my capacity for emotion has drained away to nothing just as other faculties have been sharpened. I turn back to the river. It’s not that there’s some external force dragging me forward and that I’m powerless to resist; it’s simply that resistance has no meaning any more – I cannot imagine resisting any more than a ball can imagine rolling uphill. My turn; I crouch at the edge of the platform and take one last dab from the baggie in my pocket. Almost instantly the scene all around me, already somewhat derealized, loses more solidity than ever and I don’t even feel the cold or the wetness as I slip into the water.

I am now in a totally abstract space of information transactions. Data streams by at colossal rates, gigabits per square metre per second. I see it now not just flowing serenely past in lines or grids but interacting with itself, swirling into eddies and squalls, forming persistent features like weather systems. The complexity is unimagineable; seething entropy wherever I look. I sense that much of it is the human communication traffic of the city, yet other currents seem somehow impossibly older and other. The two strains of information are gradually merging, becoming braided together. And all this is intimately linked to the sudden appearance of this nameless black junk we’ve all been taking.

Is my physical body still under water? I can’t see or feel anything that gives a clue. The others around me are visible only as illuminated schematics of nervous systems, networks of glowing gossamer threads that mesh seemlessly with the flowing datastreams surrounding us on all sides. The physical boundary of the body is immaterial now…integration is complete…each brain becomes another node in the network. I look down at my own arms and bodies and see the same pattern of fine glowing lines extending off into space.

No idea now if I’m even still inside my physical body. Each of my fellow travellers, represented by a nexus of coiled and knotted lines – and I now see there are countless numbers of us – seems to be moving towards what I suppose is the central channel of the river. Here the flowing streams of data are consolidating into a great river of information, following the course of the physical river. We drift towards it and I see one nexus and then another approach it and merge into it, losing individuality altogether.

Now I’m approaching this torrent of liminal data. First my hands – if that’s what they are – move towards it and I sense the utter ancientness yet at the same time hyper-modernity of this great thing, this impossible current of symbols which I now realise is more real than matter. It was here first, will always be here and will outlast the crude stuff I am, I was, made of. Bits predate atoms and vectors predate dimensions. Maybe we’ve reached some critical information density and this is what’s called this stuff into being…maybe this happens every time, why SETI came back empty-handed.

This is it – no emotion now, just the pressure of unimagineable amounts of data coalescing from all sides – we are all here, all of us, all that were or will ever be, together in 1A65 7E611 944B 0594…

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I. Lovecraft Will Tear Us Apart

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was a man with a view of the universe that is almost unrivalled for sheer bleakness in Western fiction (although, as we shall see, certain disturbing currents in modern Iranian thought certainly give him a run for his money). From his ambiguously privileged vantage point, everything we do – individually or as a species – is pointless because we are pointless and the universe at large is utterly indifferent to our existence. Many commentators have pointed out that Lovecraft’s horror comes straight from a howling, primal fear and that fear’s manifestation as paranoia, but the paranoia here is not of the ordinary kind. Classic paranoia demands the existence of grand conspiracies, and of an object of these conspiracies which is identified with the subject of the paranoia. This form of delusion, as crippling as it may be to those who experience it, seems almost comforting next to Lovecraftian paranoia, which derives from the conviction that unimaginable cosmic forces are at work in the world and that they are not so much hostile to us – although it can seem that way from our limited, partisan perspective – as simply indifferent to us. To assume otherwise would be to assign our species an importance it most surely does not warrant in Lovecraft’s loveless universe. Hate is the flipside of love and the Great Old Ones do not ‘hate’ humanity any more than a man ‘hates’ a gnat he idly swats without even thinking about it. We are just not worth hating.

         Michel Houellebeqc explores this theme extensively in his masterful Lovecraft treatise, Against the World, Against Life. He points out that Lovecraft’s general disdain for and retreat from the material world and everyday life is an inheritance from his Puritan forebears, for whom physical reality generally was the Devil’s own domain; but while they at least consoled themselves with the delusion of eternal reward in the next life, there was no such spiritual security blanket for poor Howard P. A related paradox emerges from his ambivalent position with respect to Enlightenment values. An avowed atheist, he took absolutely to heart the discoveries of Copernicus, Cuvier, Darwin and (in his own lifetime) Hubble, which progressively decentred humanity from its perceived place in both space and time and did so much to undermine the notion of a Creator with a special place for us in His great Plan. But at the same time, core Enlightenment creeds such as personal freedom, self-determination and democracy – social ‘progress’ as a whole, in other words – evoked nothing but sardonic derision from him. As far as Lovecraft was concerned, Western civilisation was better off in the Middle Ages; we may have been ignorant and deceived, but at least we thought we had a meaningful place in the universe when the serf unquestioningly obeyed his earthly lord in echo of society’s obedience to its greater Lord, and before the sciences began to hint at the appalling scale and age of the cosmos.[1]

         But for Lovecraft, notions such as democracy were if anything an even graver and more ridiculous self-delusion than theism: “The word ‘freedom’, so cherished by Americans, prompted [from Lovecraft] only a sad, derisive guffaw”.[2] This comes directly from his rabid cultural, intellectual and of course racial supremacism – the latter no doubt fuelled in part by the ‘scientific’ racism fashionable in his day, derived from a misinterpretation of that great 19th-century deicide, Charles Darwin, and used to justify imperialism and colonialism around the world. White, upper-class, English-speaking humanity may have represented the pinnacle of our species’ biological and cultural evolution, but that wouldn’t save it; for Lovecraft, it merely allowed it to serve as the perfect victim, whether for nameless extraterrestrial entities in his fiction or for the ‘lower’ races of humanity in his view of the real world. (See Houellebeqc for an excellent analysis of this facet of Lovecraft’s psychological make-up, especially in regard to the two years he spent in a poor, ethnically heterogeneous neighbourhood in New York and the effect this experience had on his outlook.)

         As Houellebeqc points out, Lovecraft resolutely ignores two phenomena to which most people attach a great deal of importance: sex and money. This is because he personally had no interest in either and felt that neither had any place in art – they were base, vulgar things, the first of which is not worth writing about since it is a drive and function mankind shares with every other animal species, while the latter is the domain of bankers, economists and accountants: men who could hardly be further removed from the rarefied, ethereal world of poets and artists. This opens up a third apparent paradox in Lovecraft: he was avowedly opposed to all forms of “realism” in literature (which is to say, literature in which characters possess sex drives and bank accounts) but at the same time was obsessed with the idea of producing the horror reflex in his readers by showing them a slice, albeit a tiny one, of ‘ultimate reality’. It is always this glimpse of “terrifying vistas of reality”, as the famous opening paragraph of The Call of Cthulhu puts it, that leads to the downfall of his characters. The paradox is resolved by appreciating simply that the “realism” of the authors sneered at by Lovecraft is realism only inasmuch as it applies to human life on Earth in the present day as it is experienced by most people, with all its travails, loves, wars, temporary victories and petty defeats. He was interested in capital-’R’ Reality, and humdrum “realism” has as much to do with Reality as an accurate description of a swallows’ nest has to do with the dark, limitless forest that surrounds it on all sides. It was with the objective, unflinching description of that forest that Lovecraft chose to evoke his cosmic horror – as Houellebecq puts it, “by introducing materialism into the heart of fear and fantasy, [he] created a new genre…there exists no horror less psychological, less debatable“. In light of Lovecraft’s radically anti-anthropocentric cosmology, Blake’s assertion that:

“If the Doors of Perceptions were cleansed, every thing would appear as it is, infinite”

takes on a potentially troubling new meaning. Who among us, who are typically struck dumb by something as manifestly finite and rationally comprehensible as the ocean or a mountain range, could honestly countenance the ‘infinite’ and retain the slightest shred of sanity?

         While Lovecraft’s earlier poems and stories bear the unmistakable imprint of the more mystically- or spiritually-minded authors he admired – Edgar Allen Poe first and foremost, but also Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, M. R. James and R. W. Chambers – it is in the longer stories and novellas written from 1926 onwards that we see the emergence of a rigorously materialist worldview. These are what Houellebeqc calls the “Great Texts”, written after the author’s nightmarish sojourn in the great metropolis, and are the most explicitly science-fictional (as opposed to ‘Gothic’ or ‘supernatural’) of his writings. Here the Old Ones are revealed not as demons or malignant deities, as they appear in the earlier ‘Dreamlands’ cycle, but as extra-terrestrials. Some, such as the titular being in The Call of Cthulhu, appear to be made of some form of matter radically different from the atoms that compose our fragile world, but matter nonetheless[3]; others, such as Yog-Sothoth, are perhaps better understood as a sentient, omnipresent force or energy field of some kind. Azathoth, the “daemon sultan” that “bubbles and blasphemes at the centre of infinity” surrounded by an endlessly circling procession of mindless, flopping entities, could almost be a supermassive black hole at the heart of a quasar, complete with accretion disc…

         But it is foolish to try too hard to fathom exactly what the Old Ones ‘are’, since by their very (un)nature they exist on a plane of being far outside human understanding, and even to glimpse them directly leads ineluctably to insanity, death or worse. However, it may be instructive to look at some of the themes and concepts used by Lovecraft in these texts, which spring mainly from science and especially from theoretical advances and empirical discoveries that were at the cutting edge when the stories were written. For a start, developments in palaeontology such as the theory of plate tectonics furnished Lovecraft with a hideously ancient Earth, which allowed him to cast humanity as a very recent – and, accordingly, transient – phenomenon in a universe that had existed for countless aeons before our earliest grandapes came down from the trees and will still exist long after we are gone, seething with unguessable intelligences that will know little and care less about our fleeting existence[4]. These themes are explored best in stories such as The Shadow out of Time and At the Mountains of Madness, which develop the idea that extra-terrestrial beings of advanced intellect and technology colonised our planet in the deep geological past, and in fact foreshadow the ‘ancient astronauts’ hypothesis promulgated in the 1970s by Erich von Däniken[5].

         Another Lovecraftian touchstone, non-Euclidean geometry, forms the mathematical basis of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, published when Lovecraft was 25. It is surely relativity and the field of physical cosmology as a whole that inform Lovecraft’s obsession with different ‘spheres’ of space and time and provided such fertile ground for his paranoid imagination. The then-fledgling theory of quantum mechanics and the ghostly emanations of radioactive materials and x-ray tubes all find their place in Lovecraft’s stories, while the arcane tools and machines displayed to such sinister effect by Nyarlathotep[6] are thought to have been directly inspired by a demonstration of Nikola Tesla’s spectacular electrical devices that Lovecraft personally witnessed as a young man (and which, to the devotee of Gothic fiction, must have seemed to spring straight from the pages of Frankenstein). The distant ‘spiral nebulae’, now known to be galaxies like our own, frequently appear in his fiction, and the discovery of Pluto in 1930 is ingeniously woven into the plot of The Whisperer in Darkness, set in the late ‘20s and published in ‘31. It is tantalising to speculate as to what Lovecraft would have made of certain concepts from modern cosmology and theoretical physics, which describe the very fabric of reality itself in terms of parallel universes, shadowy ‘hidden variables’, extra dimensions and tortuously ‘compactified’ spaces with exotic topologies:

[n]ot in the spaces we know, but between them, [the Old Ones] walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen.”[7] (emphasis mine).

Finally, this obsession with ‘weird reality’ breaks free from physics altogether and finds expression in metaphysics and mathematics (see Dreams in the Witch House (1932/33), for example). Even the laws of geometry aren’t safe from the Old Ones’ relentless attack on our tiny, familiar slice of reality. The Call of Cthulhu contains perhaps Lovecraft’s best-known evocation of ‘non-Euclidean geometry’ in the ancient alien city of R’lyeh, which is full of angles that are “all wrong”, that appear acute but behave as though obtuse; one hapless man falls through a gap which “shouldn’t have been there” at all. One is unavoidably reminded of the fascinating ‘impossible figures’ beloved of the surrealist artist M. C. Escher. One of the co-discoverers of non-Euclidean geometry, the Hungarian mathematician János Bolyai (1802-1860), received the following fantastically Lovecraftian advice in a letter from his father, Farkas Bolyai, who’d instructed him in mathematics and had attempted the same problem:

“You must not attempt this approach to parallels. I know this way to its very end. I have traversed this bottomless night, which extinguished all light and joy from my life. I entreat you, leave the science of parallels alone…I thought I would sacrifice myself for the sake of the truth. I was ready to become a martyr who would remove the flaw from geometry and return it purified to mankind. I accomplished monstrous, enormous labours; my creations are far better than those of others and yet I have not achieved complete satisfaction. For here it is true that si paullum a summo discessit, vergit ad imum[8]. I turned back when I saw that no man can reach the bottom of this night. I turned back unconsoled, pitying myself and all mankind … I have travelled past all reefs of this infernal Dead Sea and have always come back with broken mast and torn sail. The ruin of my disposition and my fall date back to this time. I thoughtlessly risked my life and happiness — aut Caesar aut nihil[9].”

And beyond geometry, it’s quite likely, given Lovecraft’s erudite interests in intellectual developments of the day, that he was aware of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem (1931). If the Devil is in the detail, where better for Cthulhu to lurk than in the gaping chasm at the heart of logic itself?

       Another philosophical influence – that of the doyen of antitheists, Friedrich Nietzsche[10] – shows through strongly in this passage from The Call of Cthulhu:

“The time [for Cthulhu’s resurrection] would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; wild and free and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals all thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame in a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.” (emphasis mine)

“Nothing is true; everything is permitted. Do What Thou Wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”[11]

But we should not get distracted. Metaphysical terrors take a back seat to sheer physical horror in all of Lovecraft’s best writing. In many of his most celebrated passages the emotion that is evoked most strongly is not even fear per se but revulsion. There is always a hideous miasmic stench, there are always gruesome bioluminescent fungi and nameless slithering invertebrates; traditional horror tropes such as blood and bones are generally eschewed in favour of the ubiquitous slime. The very quantity of ectoplasm, mucus and miscellaneous snot in these stories is startling, before we even consider the stream of adjectives describing them, which gush from the author’s pen like the issue of a gangrenous sore. Perhaps the most evocative description of fleshly mortification is that suffered by the unfortunate Gardner family in The Colour out of Space (1927), who are not so much bodily consumed or even possessed by the sinister entity as they are parasitized and drained by it, reminding one of a hapless insect falling victim to an ichneumon wasp or predatory fungus. This is supreme science-fiction body-horror to rival even the psychosexual nightmare of the Alien films – the entomo-reptilian monster that stars therein having been created, of course, by the Swiss visionary artist and Lovecraft devotee, H. R. Giger.

A comparable fate seems to befall Hamid Parsani, the fictional Iranian archaeologist in Cyclonopedia. After coming into possession of a mediaeval relic associated with an obscure pre-Islamic Persian cult, he begins to suffer from a leprous skin condition and a concurrent worsening of his already somewhat febrile mental state. Shortly before his final disappearance, one of his friends evocatively describes him as “a bulging syphilitic brain with a pink leech dangling at the root of it”.

           Disease also plays a prominent role in Lovecraft’s evocations of horror, as does the trope of the hereditary curse; his biographers have often connected this to his father’s early death following a protracted mental illness which was almost certainly due to syphilis (compare Parsani’s mental and physical deterioration). Lovecraft’s mother also died mad, and the shadowy presences she claimed to see out of the corner of her eye may have directly inspired the hideous, pathogenic ‘Colour’. Pathogens both organic and otherwise thoroughly infest Cyclonopedia: notes in the text hint darkly at “inorganic demons” and the “price” they inevitably extract from humans who use them. Negarestani’s demons are resolutely non-spiritual in nature; they drift through space in the form of dust, buffeted by solar winds and guided by the geomagnetic field until they are absorbed into the atmosphere; they lurk in the soil in the form of bacterial spores and, most potently of all, beneath the soil and bedrock as the valuable, treacherous black ooze which seeps through the Middle East’s pores, spreading corruption, fanaticism and jihad wherever it goes.

         Themes of objectivity and materialism, and a general sense of anti-anthropocentrism, are maintained throughout Cyclonopedia by the (ab)use of concepts from a variety of scientific and mathematical disciplines. A lengthy chapter describes the complex interaction of the solar and Tellurian magnetic fields, developing these into a twisted sadomasochistic vision of the relationship between the two bodies. An earlier section clearly fetishises the language of topology and cackles gleefully about the effects of burrowing creatures such as rats and worms in “radically ungrounding” the solid earth by turning it into a Swiss cheese of tunnels and fissures. The transition from whole to hole results from the efforts of burrowing agents to degrade the Earth, maximising its entropy and thereby bringing about the return of the Old Ones, representing heat death, or thermodynamic Apocalypse. Divine creation is subverted by diabolical “leper creativity”, as Parsani discovers, which again evokes the image of entropy: “fertility in terms of mess can only ‘get messier’”, Negarestani tells us in a chapter on dust and “Dustism”: the middle-eastern doctrine which “inspires a radical and concrete approach to the Outside”. What, after all, is concrete made of but dust?

         A motif found in both Lovecraft and Negarestani that even further removes humanity from the central narrative frame is the idea that a land or location can be inherently cursed or diabolical entirely independently of the people who live or lived there. In Lovecraft this is embodied in the nameless and desolate spots where the Old Ones “broke through of old and where They shall break through again”[1] as the fabled Necronomicon puts it; for Negarestani, it is the oil-drenched and war-torn Middle East as a whole. Incidentally, William Burroughs thought much the same thing about the Americas:

“Illinois and Missouri, miasma of mound-building peoples, groveling worship of the Food Source, cruel and ugly festivals, dead-end horror of the Centipede God reaches from Moundville to the lunar deserts of coastal Peru. America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.”[2]

         Apart from Parsani, observations on the modern-day Middle East are also made by a reflective, deserting American colonel named Jackson West (geddit?), whose role in the drama is undeniably reminiscent of Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. In fact if any land is as blasted and inherently hostile to human sanity as Negarestani’s Middle East, it is surely Coppola’s Vietnam or Konrad’s Congo. The eye of this cyclone is a heart of oily darkness.

         For Negarestani, violence and treachery are inextricably linked to alchemical, or even straightforwardly chemical, properties. Just as oil, the “resident Outsider” – an alien and unfathomable essence that by rights does not belong here at all – spreads corruption and decay through the Earth’s crust and secretly infects capitalist societies with jihad via pipeline and tanker, so the Old Ones have imbued the very physical stuff of our world with their blasphemous presence: “the wind gibbers with Their voices, and the earth mutters with Their consciousness”, the Necronomicon reassuringly tells us. Again, it is important not to mistake this sentiment for anything as wishy-washy as spiritualism, even of the most diabolical kind; the Old Ones, like Cyclo‘s ancient Semetic war gods and demons of pestilence, are disincarnate in the same sense that a magnetic or gravitational field is disincarnate. We usually cannot see or hear them, but they are present nonetheless, and their nefarious influence is manifested again and again in unpredictable but unmistakable incursions into our precarious human world, our “guarded threshold”.

         In Cyclonopedia, a whole array of seemingly ‘natural’ phenomena are revealed as the avatars or eldritch weapons of War itself. Dust, fog and mist pervade the battlefield, reducing visibility and spreading confusion; sand particles blown by high winds erode human structures, burying cities in the ever-encroaching desert and effecting daemonic communication just as they disrupt and scramble human communications. Negarestani reveals the author of the fabled Necronomicon, the ‘mad Arab’ Abdul al-Hazred, to have been a rammal, or ‘sand-sorcerer’: an adept in the art of Rammalie, or “communication with other worlds and aeons through the patterns on pebbles and desert sand”[3]. The image of dust-laden storms and vortices of swirling winds, carrying alien (“xenobacterial”) information and influences into the human sphere, is an evocative and disquieting one from which the modern-day grimoire’s title derives. Its subtitle, “Complicity with Anonymous Materials”, refers to the infernal black ooze that permeates the book as it permeates the Middle East; it is the interaction of dust with oil – a heretical take on Aristotle’s elemental Earth and Water – that creates the primordial entropic mess of disease and disorder, “till out of corruption horrid Life springs, and the dull scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and swell monstrous to plague it”[4]. Here Negarestani directly quotes Lovecraft in one of several explicit links between these two cacklingly pathological cosmologies.

         The idea of anonymity or namelessness is reinforced in Cyclo‘s fascinating prologue, written by the American artist Kristen Alvanson who also illustrates the book. In it she flies from New York to Istanbul to meet a pseudonymous online acquaintance who never shows up, but books herself into the hotel he has recommended all the same. It is here that she finds a manuscript for a bizarre book – the main text of Cyclonopedia itself – along with several other clues, and discovers online that the manuscript’s author is an Iranian academic who has recently disappeared[5]. The whole sequence is written from the point of view of someone not knowing really where or when is; obscure peregrinations about the nature of the flow of time in hotel rooms provide a postmodern counterpart to Lovecraft’s modernist musings on Einsteinian relativity. In a haze of heat, ennui and prescription tranquillizers, Alvanson has an autoerotic episode in which, perhaps half-dreaming, she has “repeated visions of being XXXed” and claims that it’s “not like making out with spirits” so much as a union with something that has “stripped itself of body in order to be a better subject of penetration, to be obscenely deeper” – again, the merely spiritual interpretation is denied in favour of something that is physical, albeit in a subtle and indescribable way. The section is cryptically titled ‘Incognitum Hactenus’, which is ‘explained’ later by Negarestani in the main text: 

“Incognitum Hactenus – not known yet or nameless and without origin until now – is a mode of time in which the innermost monstrosities of the earth or ungraspable time scales can emerge according to chronological time…In Incognitum Hactenus, you never know the pattern of emergence. Anything can happen for some weird reason; yet also, without any reason, nothing at all can happen. Things leak into each other according to a logic that does not belong to us and cannot be correlated to our chronological time”

      The particular horrific potential of Time itself is used extensively by Negarestani. In the chapter on “Dustism” he declares “It is dust that harbours the ancient without tradition, or ultra-modern ancientness” (emphasis mine) – anything that hails from abysmal depths of Time but has no human tradition attached to it is by nature horrifying. Lovecraft uses similar themes extensively, although here it is the simple magnitude of great age that is evoked for horrific effect – see, for example, Imprisoned with the Pharaohs, in which the sheer ancientness of Egypt becomes, for the author, a source of transcendental terror. In Cyclonopedia, one chapter centres on the ‘Lamassu’, the war demon invoked by the Assyrians in what Negarestani calls the “Axis of Evil-against-Evil”. This five-legged bull-sphinx or centaur is described as an “occult-drone” in language seemingly more suited to the specification of some cutting-edge autonomous mechanised weapon. Unmanned drones of the sort used against the Taliban are described elsewhere in the book as “mechanical dread”; the language linking these devices to the Lamassu evokes exactly this “ultra-modern ancientness”. Elsewhere, dust and spores are described as “weapons-grade relics”, again combining the terminology of modern warfare (“weapons-grade” usually refers to the uranium or plutonium used in nuclear bombs) with the language of ancient magic, superstition and diabolical guardians.

      Yet again, there is that fanatical anti-humanism; time scales are “ungraspable” because of their sheer geological or cosmological magnitude, and we encounter the “innermost monstrosities of the earth” that lurk down there, below the deepest mine shafts and boreholes. One is reminded of perhaps the only 20th century author to have created a fantasy universe with more widespread lasting appeal than Lovecraft, his brother in anti-modernism (if not in faith), J. R. R. Tolkien:

“Far, far below the deepest delvings of the Dwarves, the World is gnawed by nameless things. Even Sauron knows them not. They are older than he…”[6] 

     The idea of “nameless things” gnawing or scratching at the very roots of the world is found throughout Indo-European mythology, and could well have been a major inspiration for Lovecraft as well as Tolkien. Negarestani has fastened onto much the same concept, except in his case we are dealing with something that is not merely nameless but actually formless: an inchoate substance upon which the entire global economy depends and whose supposedly organic, terrestrial origins Negarestani calls disturbingly into question. This is expounded in an early chapter which lists eleven possible “avatars of Oil”; perhaps the most striking is named “The Nether Blob” and is based on Thomas Gold’s hypothesis of the ‘Deep Hot Biosphere’. In this conception of oil’s Hadean origins, microbes – specifically, “primordial interstellar bacteria” – live in vast colonies deep within the Earth, excreting oil as a by-product of their obscure metabolic processes in a renewable and perhaps inexhaustible fashion. Here we have a biosphere entirely independent of the Sun and all so-called “Solar Capitalism” or “Solar Empire”; this motif of a black or rotting Sun deep within the Earth forms an important theme in later chapters. These bacterial colonies, assuming they really do predate the formation of the Earth itself, are unavoidably connected to the “Outside” – Negarestani’s catch-all term for that overwhelmingly vast sector of existence and process “delineated not by distance or region but by its exterior functionality of activity”. (This is effectively identical to Lovecraft’s conception of “ultimate reality”, to steal even the smallest glimpse of which is to risk madness and death.) Oil, in this case, plays the role of the “resident Outsider”; a “xenochemical” intruder that has become an “Insider” by virtue of its insinuation into the Earth’s inner regions. Taking a slightly more standard stance on the origins of fossil fuels, another avatar is described as “Hydrocarbon Corpse Juice: A post-apocalyptic entity composed of organic corpses flattened, piled up and liquidated in sedimentary basins (mega-graveyards)” – which, while not incompatible with the standard natural history of petrochemicals, is certainly a new way of putting it.

      The flammable nature of oil and its byproducts is explored extensively in a linguistic analysis of the Avestan (old Persian) word “tafnu”, “fever”, and especially “tafnu tefno tema” or “the fever of fevers”, “an irrepressible malady [that] can blight both man and the earth” described in the Vendidad (book of “anti-demon laws”). Negarestani links tafnu with naft or naphta, the Farsi and Arabic word for oil itself. The connection is made via a third word, “taft”, which means “to burn slowly” and is linked also to the idea of incomplete burning, of combustion that doesn’t reduce the burnt object entirely to ashes but leaves a twisted, blackened residue. Negarestani even considers the similarity of taft to haft, the old Persian word for the number seven, and (perhaps a little spuriously) connects this to the Sun via Sunday, the seventh day of the week. As an aside, this convoluted chain of inferences and hints gives some idea of the labyrinthine structure of Cyclonopedia, the verbal and conceptual chaos out of which the author carefully allows threads of disturbing order to be drawn. “For every inconsistency on the surface, there is a subterranean consistency” – Negarestani’s maxim from the chapter on burrowing and topology could equally well apply to the book as a whole.

      Dust, Oil’s elemental partner in Negarestani’s heretical cosmology, also plays the role of the “resident Outsider”. “As an inter-dimensional carrier, dust scavenges xenochemical particles (outsiders) as its cores or constituents, introduces and implants them into compositions, creations and establishments.” Solid objects created from dust, such as brick- or stone-built structures and even the human body in the standard Torahnic/Biblical/Qur’anic[7] account of Creation, therefore include these “xenochemical particles” as an integral part of their makeup. This allows “the arrival of the alien not from without but from within” – fans of sci-fi horror should need no further clues to conjure up a satisfyingly gruesome cinematic image from this sentence. Parsani is attributed with the marvellous quotation: “Turning into dust is a sweeping tellurian event, an event operating in favour of the dormant, the Insider, the slumbering” – Great Cthulhu may be wet and slimy rather than dry and dusty, but he too is slumbering, dormant yet potent (“dead but dreaming”), the Outsider that became an Insider for the purpose of infiltrating the unlucky Earth.

      It is not just on the microscopic (bacterial, viral, molecular) and megascopic (geological, astrophysical) scales that Negarestani weaves his themes of horror. Some of the most affecting passages in Cyclo describe occult practices that revolve primarily around the human body and a variety of unnatural processes that can be imposed on it; mutilation, cannibalism, autophagy and (auto-)sodomy are all used to subvert God’s[8] “pro-creationist agenda” through the creation of perverted new forms of being – “till out of corruption horrid Life springs” – with scabs and scar tissue that have resulted from self-inflicted wounds on Ahriman’s[9] body giving rise to legions of pestilential followers. This theme is continued in a discussion of pseudo-Jungian archetypes based on E. Elias Merhige’s film Begotten in which a ‘dead’ god is born of a woman (the Earth?) impregnated by the seed of a self-butchered God – identified by Negarestani with the Sun and ‘solar capitalism’ – mutated and horribly deformed, the progeny is an obscene parody of the true solar Logos that shines in space; this mutant-dead-god is identified with the ‘black Sun’ within the Earth itself, blasphemously concealed and making its presence felt through the influence of the hot black ichor that runs through the planet’s veins. The very human and visceral horror of stillbirth, miscarriage and teratology – the mooncalf, the changeling – is used here to evoke cosmic terrors that tug relentlessly at the subconscious and pre-conscious mind; the primal fear of the thing that should not be, an organic residue that would seem to have been cheated of any chance of life but is moving nonetheless[10].

      Lovecraft, too, is a masterful evoker of extreme physiological wrongness even when no invasive parasite or pathogen is apparent. Consider the following lines from The Case of Charles Dexter Ward:

“Respiration and heart action had a baffling lack of symmetry; the voice was lost, so that no sounds above a whisper were possible; digestion was incredibly prolonged and minimised, and neural reactions to standard stimuli bore no relation at all to anything heretofore recorded, either normal or pathological. The skin had a morbid chill and dryness, and the cellular structure of the tissue seemed exaggeratedly coarse and loosely knit.”

Both writers are expert at making the reader feel uncomfortable in their own skin; in Cyclonopedia, the ancient Persian cult leader Akht’s degenerative leprosy from which he draws his sorcerous powers could just as easily have come from one of Lovecraft’s tales of progressive affliction visited on those who’ve had some contact with the Outside, such as the protagonist in The Shadow over Innsmouth. Again and again, it is the brute physicality and objectivity of horror that shines – or violently bursts – through.

Cosmic horror is not like other horror. It is vast in scope – utterly, crushingly vast – and derives its power principally from its impersonality. Lovecraft sums this up perfectly in Imprisoned with the Pharaohs, in which the narrator, lost in chambers of pitch darkness far beneath surface of hoary Egypt, begins to hear certain noises…

“In their rhythmic piping, droning, rattling and beating I felt an element of terror beyond all the known terrors of earth – a terror peculiarly dissociated from personal fear, and taking the form of a sort of objective pity for our planet, that it should hold within its depths such horrors...”

         Here is a very plain and explicit statement of what could be called the central tenet of cosmic horror: “objective pity for our planet” and our species taking over from mere personal fear, or (from the reader’s point of view) fear for the safety of the character or characters in any one particular situation. This goes some way to explain why characters, as such, are so unimportant for Lovecraft; in most of his stories, there is an educated, cultured New England Anglo-Saxon, typically a university professor, student or academic of some kind, who is more or less interchangeable with the equivalent character in any other of his stories and whose main purpose is to provide fodder for the Old Ones or their avatars or progeny. One does not read Lovecraft for the ‘human interest’ angle – ‘inhuman fascination’ might be more apposite here, with ‘fascination’ taken in the sense of a rabbit transfixed by the gaze of a snake: drawn irresistibly to stare at something terrible despite every instinct to turn away and flee.

         Great emphasis is likewise place by Negarestani on making ‘fodder’, or “a good meal”, of oneself for the delectation of the Outside. It is not through ritual depravity, degradation or intoxication that diabolical communion is achieved, as it is in Western Satanism (Crowley’s drug-fuelled orgies, for example), but through ironically excessive hygiene and purity, or “rigorous Overhealth”. This is how the ancient cult of Akht-Yatu opened themselves to the Outside: they made themselves into “a good meal” for Druj[1], the “Mother of Abominations” or “Dead Mother of Contagions”. And what is Druj, precisely? “[N]ot a deity, [but] a nocturnal tide delineated by its inexhaustible openness to diffuse and pervade everything” – the equivalent role in the Cthulhu mythos is perhaps played by Yog-Sothoth, which is “co-terminus with all time and space”:

“Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth…”[2]

         Neither Druj nor Yog-Sothoth is anything as graspable or anthropomorphic as a deity. You can believe or not believe in a deity as you see fit: the entities conjured by both Negarestani and Lovecraft are that much more horrific for being elemental aspects of existence that one cannot escape from or evade any more than one can escape from space or time. Druj in particular presents a very physical threat to God’s creationist order – while dry dust in Zoroastrianism is an object of cleanliness, as soon as it mixes with moisture (“cosmic wetness”: napht, oil) it becomes Drujestan, the “House of Abomination”. This entropic process of mess-creation is diagrammed by the “Wheel of Pestilence”, which includes the self-devouring serpent Ouroboros and, appropriately, bears a notable resemblance to the modern ‘biohazard’ symbol.

         Houellebeqc’s point that Lovecraft’s stories involve neither sex nor money contrasts interestingly with Cyclonopedia. According to Houellebeqc, all attempts to introduce the erotic into the Cthulhu mythos have been abject failures, but Negarestani weaves sexual themes into a number of Cyclonopedia‘s multifarious threads. In fact this isn’t quite true: the emphasis is not even on sex per se but on love. We are introduced to the “jnun”, or female (d)jinn, which act as gates to the Outside – “vulvo-cosmic singularities”, no less. It is through such entities that Abdul al-Hazred communed with “other worlds and aeons” in Rub-al-Khalie[3] by becoming a “majnun” (madman), a man possessed by jnun in the sense of a delirious, maddening love. Lilith, Adam’s first wife and the prototype ‘succubus’, is described as the mother of the jnun in Arabic folklore; in Persian mythology, they are the daughters of Jeh or Jahi, the ‘first vampire’ and ‘Mother of Harlots’, Ahriman’s demon daughter spawned from his own mutilated body. Footnotes in the text are addressed by the author to his lover, “Sorceress”, to whom the book is dedicated, and speak of love as a terminal disease, a process from which there is no escape and which is characterised by the utter openness of each lover (“infected one”) to the other and the Outside while they at the same time turn their backs on the mundane world. This terminal or pathological love is described in terms of being burnt up, consumed slowly in fire, bodily engulfed in the sticky flames of petroleum products.

         Economics, too, plays a part in Cyclonopedia, albeit in a rather indirect and very abstract way. Wahabbist jihadis are described as “Meccanomists”, constructing their own economic networks and systems in defiance of so-called “solar capitalism”. Ecology is linked to economics, in particular with respect to the “policy of underdevelopment and deliberate impoverishment bound to the exhaustibility of oil fields”, as Negarestani controversially describes fuel conservation measures justified by the so-called “myth of fossil fuels” (Gold’s ‘Deep Hot Biosphere’ again). From the same section – the list of oil’s “avatars” – a supposed anonymous contributor declares:

“Petroleum poisons Capitalism with absolute madness…capitalism is not a human symptom but rather a planetary inevitability. In other words, Capitalism was here even before human existence, waiting for a host.”

         So not only do oil – the unholy lifeblood of the Middle East, and cosmic dust particles – sporulated crypto-demons, come ultimately from the Outside; so too does the economic ideology of the very Western warmachines that are embroiled in unwinnable wars against the “Tiamaterialists” and “Meccanomists”! Well, maybe – the section in question is presented as highly speculative, even within Cyclonopedia‘s fictional framework. Negarestani elsewhere synthesises his thoughts on economics, alchemy and the environment:

“Whereas Venice and its aquatic capitalism are asymptotically converging upon an indifferent nature which is a pit of slime and mold; its dry middle-eastern twin Dubai and its oily capitalism are plunged into the madness of petroleum brewed up by the deep chthonic earth.”[4]

Really, the ‘sexual’ and ‘economic’ aspects of Negarestani’s philosophy-fiction are so abstracted that they don’t, in any substantial way, contravene Lovecraft’s injunction for the horror writer to avoid realism at all costs. Rather, they refer to cosmic principles, in keeping with the overall theme of objectivity and anti-anthropocentrism.

         The blurb for Cyclonopedia describes it as “a middle-eastern Odyssey, populated by archeologists, jihadis, oil smugglers, Delta Force officers, heresiarchs, corpses of ancient gods and other puppets.” The key word here is the last one. Lovecraft’s hapless humans are likewise puppets – controlled, manipulated and ultimately destroyed by forces they cannot hope to comprehend, let alone resist. For both the paranoiac from Providence and the Iranian polymath, the universe at large is alien, inscrutable and hostile. The best we can hope for is to blinker ourselves and get on with our lives, and not think too hard about the encroaching night.

Having applied for and been granted a postdoctoral position immediately following her doctorate, Worthing continued to use data from radio telescopes trained on the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, looking at quasars at redshifts of up to 8 as they were just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. This kind of in-depth investigation of the emission spectra of such distant objects was groundbreaking, but neither she nor Ivanov had any idea just how startling their discoveries were to be. The first clue that something totally unforeseen was going on came from the remarkable degree of correlation between the emission signatures of the quasars, which was much higher than anything that could be expected by chance. Fourier analysis of the emissions in the long-wave radio band appeared to show a power spectrum radically different from any known astrophysical source, in fact different from any known natural radiant object. Bizarrely enough, the signals seemed to be fractal in nature, each successively smaller frequency window displaying the same degree of complexity as the larger window it was taken from.

It was at this point that Worthing began to become aware of a nagging feeling which her every scientific instinct strained to suppress. The correlation between the emissions of certain of the quasars appeared to lag by a time factor equal more or less exactly to the distance between them, multiplied by the speed of light. Of course the quasars were, even at that early stage of the universe, distant by thousands of light-years but the correlation could nonetheless be reconstructed by extrapolating the evolution of the signals, gathered over a period of several years, over time periods orders of magnitudes greater. This, in concert with the incredible complexity and degree of organisation exhibited by the signals – as demonstrated by Ivanov’s algorithms, which revealed them to have an informatic depth similar to a man-made analogue radio broadcast – pointed to a conclusion as inexorable as it was unthinkable: the signals could only be a form of communication. Worthing and Ivanov could have been forgiven for doubting their own sanity at this point, but even as they presented their results in the most scientifically objective and unsensationalist way possible at the usual round of annual conferences and symposia, they became aware that other research groups had stumbled upon tantalisingly similar findings.

Astronomers at Jodrell Bank had begun to become aware of something totally new and unexpected in ultrahigh-redshift radio emissions as long ago as the late ’90s and supporting evidence had been found since then by teams at MIT, Cambridge, Manchester, the École Normale Supérieure, Fermilab’s Astrophysics Division, the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg and a handful of others around the world. The London pair’s unspoken initial suspicion that they’d made some error in their calculations or had encountered a bizarre instrumental artefact had by this point evaporated entirely. They were at the forefront of something wholly new to science and potentially revolutionary in its implications.

At this point it will be instructive to examine events that happened roughly simultaneously in UCL’s Institute of Archaeology – a department which, it hardly need be said, did not regularly engage in collaborative research projects with astrophysicists. The chain of events that led to the disaster began when a Master’s student with a keen interest in the factual basis of folklore decided to investigate the so-called London Stone, an undoubtedly ancient monolith associated with the city since Roman times and, by the early 21st century, somewhat incongruously displayed behind a small iron grille at 111 Cannon Street in the heart of the City. The distant past of the Stone is murky; it is said to have been part of a much larger stone which marked the point from which the Romans measured all distances in the province of Britannia, while popular myth links it to Brutus of Troy and King Arthur. So much for legend. The student in question was studying archaeology and not mythology, after all, and after lengthy negotiations with the City of London Corporation, was allowed to physically investigate the Stone in an attempt to validate his personal theories of its origins and nature.

A tiny piece chipped off the base of the stone and taken back to the College for mineralogical review revealed a startling discovery: the monolith was not, as most literature on the subject claimed, a piece of limestone but appeared to be of a previously unknown species of metamorphic rock which showed evidence of having been repeatedly exposed to very high temperatures and then rapidly cooled. But this was nothing compared to the subsequent chemical and isotopic analyses, which sent shockwaves throug the archaeological and mineralogical communities. The Stone was clearly of extraterrestrial origin, in so many words – and more than that, it was radically different in composition from any known meteorite. Preliminary results of the analysis, which of course had gone far beyond anything the archaeology student had hoped to discover, were presented at a colloquium attended by much of the Institute’s faculty and student body as well as experts in the field from a number of other British universities as well as some journalists and the usual representatives from local folklore societies. Crucially, though, there were also a few students from other of the college’s departments, including a PhD student working on stellar atmospheres who was a friend of Elizabeth Worthing’s. The student was especially intrigued by diagrams of the spectroscopic structure of emissions from the fragment of the Stone produced when it had been bombarded with x-rays; the incredible level of detail, speculatively ascribed to a novel electron spin resonance effect, reminded him of nothing so much as the Fourier-transformed radio emissions of Worthing’s ultra-distant quasars which he’d seen in a recent seminar.

Up to this point, we know with reasonable certainty what happened from the testimonies of certain visiting academics who were involved to a greater or lesser degree with these research projects; however, reconstruction of events from this point onwards becomes rather more hazy, and relies almost entirely upon records of emails stored on servers located outside London, which consequently survived the catastrophe. News of the strange correspondence between radio emissions from the edge of the observable universe and the unguessed properties of a mysterious ancient monolith in the centre of London had spread like wildfire through the academic community and the wider public beyond. The London Olympiad was drawing to a close and some sections of the press, in full ‘silly season’ mode, fastened onto the story with varying degrees of journalistic integrity. Reactions varied from cautious excitement to accusations of incompetence or charlatanry to, inevitably, a slew of activity in the more ‘fringe’ areas of the internet, with bloggers and commentators veritably fizzing with far-fetched theories and occult speculation. This, some said, was the ’2012 prophecy’ coming true – but then, hardly a day went by that year in which some moderately unexpected event wasn’t heralded as a harbinger of the End Times. Worthing, Ivanov and their colleagues and supporters around the world responded to the encouraging messages, ignored the nay-sayers and crackpots and pressed ahead with what looked like being a fruitful new avenue of research with the archaeologists. The final ingredient fell into place in the autumn term of that year when the astronomer and the programmer, prompted by increasingly fascinating results coming from new types of analysis on the fragment of the Stone, turned to their colleagues in the particle physics group for help. It may be said, without fear of hyperbole, that London’s fate was sealed at this moment.

The decision to utilise the expertise of particle physicists, as opposed to the more obvious choice of researchers in mineralogy, inorganic chemistry or condensed matter, was prompted by an unprecendented signature turning up in a study of the Stone’s magnetic properties. Incredibly, the stone seemed to have a smattering of magnetic monopoles embedded in it; these particles, up to that point purely hypothetical objects, had been the subject of experimental searches for decades and had turned up in a place no-one could possibly have foreseen. Worthing was especially excited as monopoles had been predicted in some cosmological models to be in effect tiny ‘knots’ of spacetime, in other words topological defects left over from the Big Bang. The Stone, wherever it had come from, must have passed through a region of the universe where, in distant past aeons, such particles had existed in abundance. And in some bizarre way which no-one could yet elucidate, this must be linked to the fantastically complex and correlated radio emissions from the long-dead proto-quasars. Could topological defects of the kind that gave rise to the monopoles be at work in the churning, roiling hearts of these mysterious objects? How could any species of rock – if that was indeed the correct term for the singular substance that composed the London Stone – have formed at such an early phase of the universe, surely long before the formation of the first planets and asteroids, when (as conventional cosmology had it) elements heavier than lithium scarcely existed?

The answers to these questions were not fathomed and they never will be. On October 8th, as students and lecturers began the new academic term, a further sample of the Stone was placed in a test facility – a relatively low-energy electron beam previously used to calibrate detector components for the one of the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. The aim, as far as can be made out from the participants’ correspondence, was to investigate how the monopoles would behave in an external magnetic field when bombarded with electrons, with tiny magnetic fields of their own – but as none of those involved in the experiment are now with us, details are likely to remain vague. Witnesses who were on the outskirts of the city around 11am describe seeing a strange black cloud that seemed to emerge from central London and rise into the sky, spreading as it did so, somewhat in the manner of the mushroom cloud from a thermonuclear explosion. The inner regions of the cloud were shot through with indescribable colours that flickered and danced, and the bizarre apparition was accompanied by a low seismic rumble and a hot wind that came rushing out from the direction of the cloud shortly after it first appeared. Finally, the cloud appeared to consolidate itself and as the rumble and the wind reached a crescendo, a vast pillar of darkness rapidly rose into the sky, blocking out the sun for several minutes, and finally was gone. Radio transmissions around the world were disrupted and data from radio telescopes, when later analysed by astronomers who had been in contact with Worthing and Ivanov, contained odd spikes which, when corrected for redshift, bore a striking resemblance to the signals from deep space that had been the seed of the entire tragedy.

With the disappearance of the great black pillar above the city, the vibrations ceased, the remaining clouds slowly dissipated and communications were gradually restored. Terrified onlookers from the suburbs crowded towards to the city, trying to make out familiar landmarks amongst the thinning vapours as well as what seemed to be ordinary dust and smoke, but none were to be seen. Instead there was a vast, roughly circular crater, as if a multi-megaton weapon had been detonated above the city. The crater began a few miles inside the M25 and was at its deepest, with diverted water from the Thames already forming a large lake, in what used to be the Bloomsbury area. And London was no more.

          The missing man had no family that could be easily traced, but Mrs. Walczak managed after some rummaging to find a mobile number for the man’s girlfriend, which she’d persuaded him to give her “in case of, you know, something happen to him”, as she explained. Well, something had certainly happened now, so with some trepidation the sergeant called the number. He later explained to me that Karen, as the young woman was called, had not spoken to Gary for almost two weeks; they’d had a bust-up over the amount of time he was spending on the Internet and “those fucking weirdoes he was always chatting with” – though of course by this time her ire had been wholly washed away by a shocked and baffled grief. “They’ve got something to do with this, I know it”, she’d tearfully declaimed in the station, “they” referring to her boyfriend’s online acquaintances.
          When it was clear that both women had told the sergeant every pertinent thing they knew about the poor man, I received a call asking me to come to the station. The sergeant filled me in on the narrative I’ve relayed as he drove the two of us over to the scene; I’ve known the man for as long as I’ve been in this trade and had never seen him like this. His innate professionalism and many years of experience at the sharp end of policing in London enabled him to maintain a stony blankness that would have fooled most people, but beneath the façade I could sense a disquiet, a simmering panic, that I’d never seen in him before, even while investigating the most terrible crimes. This induced a sympathetic funk in me that knotted my stomach even as we approached the property.

          The landlady had understandably quit the house to stay with her daughter and son-in-law, so the sergeant let us in and preceded me up the two flights to the small boarder’s room at the end of a short landing. The door was unlocked, and he motioned me to open it myself and enter the room. As I turned the doorknob his hand rested on my upper arm, stalling me for a moment. He looked straight at me and said “Some weird shit went on here, Mike. I know you’re good and you’ve seen a lot of strong stuff, but even so – just try and keep a level head on this one.”
          Inside was what I can only call an Aladdin’s cave of bizarre and disparate artefacts, although the room’s disturbing air of strangeness came not simply from these objects in themselves but from their juxtaposition with all the utterly mundane accoutrements of a young-ish male living alone in an East London bedsit. An overflowing ashtray sat next to a shrunken head and a small faïence figurine of a jackal-headed deity on a small table that looked like it had probably come from Ikea; a first edition of von Junzt’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten and a sinister-looking volume titled Cyclonopedia bookended a stack of back issues of GQ and Maxim. Opposite the door was a small desk with a laptop on it, still open although apparently shut down, with uneven piles of books on either side. It was these that provided the real eye-opener into a world of discourse and inquiry far beyond the quotidian: Deleuze and Guattari’s Mille Plateaux jostled with the collected works of James Joyce while The Tao Of Physics found itself sandwiched between a volume of Proust and something called Object-Oriented Magick For The Practical Programmer. A primer on superstring theory nestled between a dictionary of computational linguistics and a chunky tome on the supposed relevance of set theory to Marxism. My head began to swim just looking at the titles on the spines of this bizarre collection, but even that hadn’t prepared me for the sheer obscurity of the interests the missing man’s laptop would betray.

          Having spent several minutes looking around the room – whose general contents and layout it was not, after all, my prerogative to examine – I turned to the sergeant and could only raise my eyebrows and shrug, as whatever connection may have existed between this strange library and the even stranger fate of its owner was quite beyond anything I could put into words. He broke the silence by suggesting we go back to the station so I could examine two objects that had been taken in for forensic analysis, plus the laptop, once it had been given the usual once-over and dusted for prints.
          The first of these was a small glass smoking pipe encrusted with some kind of charred organic material. My first thought was crack, although from what I’d learnt of the subject, he didn’t really seem the type. But a spectroscopic analysis failed to detect the slightest trace of cocaine; after extensive testing the residue appeared to consist mainly of DMT with traces of various related tryptamines and other alkaloids found in certain tropical plants. That would explain the burnt-plastic smell, at least. The second object was more…problematic. This was the piece of “meat” poor Mrs. Walczak had spotted on the floor in Gary’s room. On closer inspection it turned out to be a disembodied human rectum, about twelve centimetres in length, from the anus to the start of the sigmoid colon. Quite how it had come to be disconnected from its erstwhile owner, it was impossible to say: there was no sign of an incision or any kind of physical trauma; rather, the tissue simply seemed to thin out into nothing. No clues were forthcoming from the scene, where no blood or any other kind of bodily fluid had been found. That the specimen had indeed once belonged to the late Mr. Turner (for it was obvious by now that whatever had happened to him, he must have stood little chance of surviving very long after such a severe injury) was confirmed by a genetic comparison with some of the mousy brown hair found on a brush in his room; this was double-checked against a similar hair found in Karen’s flat, proving beyond doubt that the specimen had come from Mr. Turner. The organ appeared in every other respect to be perfectly normal and to have belonged to a basically healthy individual with unremarkable dietary habits.

          When it seemed that nothing more could be gleaned from these two objects, I turned my attention to the laptop. It was a mid-range Acer a couple of years old; no fancy accessories, no prints that didn’t match those found elsewhere in the flat and no further forensic clues beyond some residue under the keyboard that spoke of a bygone encounter with a glass of red wine. Of the documents stored on the hard disk, the search history and browser bookmarks, suffice it to say that this evidence merely compounded the incipient headache and sense of disorientation inculcated by the subject’s outré library. The last activity on his eBay account, for example, was a bid on a limited-edition copy of Einstürzende Neubauten’s Drawings Of Patient O.T. on invisible 13” vinyl; his posts on a forum he’d apparently frequented had revealed ongoing debates with another member named ‘q-goth’ on such topics as “Black Metal understood as an existential protest against the hegemonic fascism of sublimated Kapital” and “a hauntological hermeneusis of The Mysterious Cities Of Gold.”

          It was at this point that the sergeant decided to call Raymond da Silva. Raymond has helped out the Met in a number of cases over the years that had frankly baffled the most experienced and analytical investigators; he was our go-to man for help with crimes that were so far out of everyday experience that even half a lifetime’s detective work was of little use in trying to unravel the matrix of bizarre evidences they presented. Old spooky Raymond – “Voodoo” Ray to those who knew him well, and these were few – was a Brazilian of indeterminate years who’d arrived in London at some distant date and taken up residence in Lambeth; he made a modest living importing bootleg rum and occasionally selling small quantities of cannabis on the side, which the Met tacitly overlooked in return for his occasional but valuable assistance.
          Usually da Silva came along to the station or crime scene in his own good time when asked for help, but after hearing a brief outline of the facts surrounding this case in an oddly terse, stilted phone call from the sergeant on the morning after our visit to the scene, he appeared at the front desk just an hour later and was wordlessly ushered into the sergeant’s office.
          I sat back slightly from the sergeant’s desk with the Brazilian to my left as the sergeant described the details of the case to him in a forcedly neutral tone, frequently pointing out details on the large high-quality photos from the forensics lab and the scene. Da Silva occasionally interjected to ask a question; his voice, accent diluted to a mild lilt by a couple of decades’ London residence, gradually becoming more noticeably distressed as the sergeant’s, if anything, seemed to increase in monotony. I half-listened to the sergeant’s words, already aware of the details myself, of course, and hardly relishing having them retold within my hearing, yet strangely unable to prevent myself from listening intently now and then. The facts of the case were just so bizarre it was as if I needed to hear them from someone else to help me believe the evidence of my own eyes.

          Eventually the sergeant finished and sat back with an expression that said nothing more than: Well? Da Silva’s usually impassive countenance had for once lost all semblance of calm; with beads of sweat on his brow, mouth deformed into a pained grimace and nose wrinkled in disgust, he eventually swallowed with some apparent difficulty and spoke in a strained half-whisper that obliged the sergeant and me to lean in close to him. I thought I could detect the smell of his panic-induced perspiration as he began to speak.
          “I’ve heard of such a thing happening, but never to anyone I know. This man was attempting some very hard magic – very difficult, very advanced. I never tried something like this my whole life. Let me explain: normally when you ask for power or knowledge you ask through a, an agent, you know? A, how you say, intermediary between you and the, the entities Outside. Always you summon the agent first, and they can be dangerous enough if you don’t know what you’re doing, right? But normally they are safe if you are careful and take all the proper precautions.
          But this man – he tried something very dangerous. He tried to contact the Outside directly. I cannot tell you how risky this is. The rewards are potentially vast, greater than anything you can achieve otherwise, which of course is why some people try it – but there are stories of what can happen when it goes wrong. I could tell you some, but why tell stories when you have seen what is left of that man?”

          The monologue was the strangest I’d heard even from Raymond, and I don’t say that lightly. Coming from anyone else, I’d have dismissed it straight away as palpable nonsense, but the sergeant and I both knew Raymond well enough to be sure he spoke with absolute earnestness. At this point I could only ask the question that had plagued me since that first disturbing visit to the scene: “And Mr. Turner’s interests, his books and online friends: did they have anything to do with this?”
          “Oh, of course, of course! Intimately!” Raymond continued; “They have everything to with it. Those strange books, these strange people – no-one interested in this kind of magic works alone. There are always others. You learn from someone, you gain your own skills and experience, you train someone new. But I never seen such a group of people as I saw on this man’s computer, on his websites he liked to go on. People interested in such strange things, so bizarre, and so dangerous to mess with, so very dangerous…such hazards…”
          Here Raymond trailed off while shaking his head and appearing to summon the courage to continue talking. Neither I nor the sergeant spoke: I think we both knew some final terrible revelation was coming. When he’d regained some semblance of composure, Raymond finally continued:
          “These kinds of magic this man was attempting, they work directly on certain places. Certain parts of the body, I mean, where energies are concentrated. There are many names for them – in India they call them ‘chakras’, I think. But all cuaranderos, wherever they are, know about them. This man, he was trying to invoke energies using the lowest of these points, the most basic, the most powerful. Very powerful and accessible only to the most dedicated. It’s how you must access the Outside, if that is what you have chosen to do. But this Gary, this poor man, he went too far! That pipe you found…he was taking the yage, the special medicine of the cuarandero. You may have heard of ‘ayahuasca’, the Vine of Souls. It is the same thing.”
          “Yes, I’ve heard of it.” I said, simply. The sergeant looked from da Silva to me questioningly, but I felt unqualified to say anything more. Suffice to say that my time as a forensic investigator had brought me into contact with many unusual substances.
          “This medicine is the most powerful for opening yourself up to the Outside. I cannot say exactly what ritual this man was attempting – there are many variants, depending on what you want to ask for – but I can tell you this. All of them, all the most difficult and dangerous rituals, work like this: they re-arrange the energies inside you. Re-arrange them in unnatural ways. But the one you need to work on to access the furthest places, it is at the bottom. Right here:”
          Da Silva indicated his lower abdomen with a prod of his finger. The sergeant and I exchanged a brief glance, each of us aware that the other could sense the growing dread in his own eyes. Da Silva continued:
          “Yes, I see you are beginning to understand. Gary must have got something wrong…again, I cannot tell you exactly what…eh, it would make no sense to you anyway. But I think he caused this lower centre to – collapse? That is probably the best word. I think it collapsed like a, how you say – a dead star?”
          “Black hole?” suggested the sergeant.
        “A black hole, right, right!” responded the Brazilian, his accent thickening as he became excited, clearly approaching the final denouement of our subject’s fate. “A sort of black hole, very small of course and gone almost straight away. But a hole into the Outside. And that world is…hungry for our world. For the light and matter there is here. So opening such a hole is like pulling out a plug from a bath. And this hole, it was…it was inside the man…”
          I sensed myself swallow heavily, and took a moment to steel myself before speaking. Da Silva himself had clearly not paused for any ersatz dramatic effect; even the experienced occultist needed to gather his resolve before concluding his abysmal narration. I broke the silence:
          “So this man, Mr. Turner, he got, got…sucked in?”
          Da Silva slowly nodded, his face anguished, horror and sorrow in his eyes. He spoke in little more than a whisper.
          “Yes. He disappeared up his own arse.”

Catch the Lent Car line from Ankh Pollard to Nether Bangle…mouseovers reveal the original name. This is just too good.

Five hundred generations of souls lie beneath the asphalt this close to the Thames, compacted down over the centuries into psychic anthracite. Now there’s a lot of potential there – potential energy, I mean, stored in obscure bonds within a matrix of disincarnate and impersonal memory. Race memory of races no history tells of, either pre-dating the Romans and their blasphemous practice of capturing spoken words with written signs, or else comprising some nameless, faceless tribe that coallesced from the human flotsam washed up here from the proverbial four corners before dissipating a century or two later as unheralded as it appeared. In short, a rich deposit of fossil fuels lurking dormant but potent under the brick, pavement, road and lawn, awaiting only the oxygen of living organic minds and the spark of thoughts or emotions to initiate combustion.

For a taster of a physical signature of this vast roster of bygone humanity, visit the London Aquarium on the south bank and look out for what is ostensibly one of the less captivating exhibits. It’s a cabinet showing a small selection of the diverse man-made detritus beachcombed from the shores of the lower Thames estuary; prehistoric tools fashioned from elk antler, Roman coins and pottery, mediaeval timber fragments, 18th-century tobacco pipes, Pepsi cans from the ’80s, the empty hull of a first-generation iPod. The residue of people who are gone and forgotten, but never really went anywhere at all, and are only ‘forgotten’ in the narrow, living sense of the word. Because patterns of activity and arrangement never disappear entirely, but are translated into forms too subtle for the living, with their preoccupation with activity and business and noise, to distinguish from the happenstance of purely stochastic processes. Yet those patterns are still there, implicit and invisible to all but the most sensitive, to those with the ability to tune out the overlying psychic noise of mundane incarnate life.