Mind Plague

 

When They arrived, it seemed obvious that we needed to study not only their technology, but their biology as well.  They were cooperative, and a half-dozen deep black government-sponsored projects were instantly erected around the goal of learning as much as possible from the volunteers from among Them who had opted to stay.  Progress was made on all fronts, but it wasn't until the startling discovery last year that we realised the chilling truth.

Their technology and their biology aren't separate things: The little machines They use constantly in daily life aren't accessories - they're part of Them.  And much of what we had mistaken for natural was actually highly engineered.

Including Their minds.  Including Their thoughts...

It started slowly at first.

A few of the scientists working most closely with Them started behaving oddly. It was assumed that the strain of making the mental adjustment to comprehend what they were learning was having its impact.

And then it was noticed that some of the people working in these facilities were also acting strangely...even though they weren't even highly enough cleared to know They were here, let alone living on the compound.

But really, it wasn't until after Thanksgiving that we realised the horror that had been unwittingly unleashed:

Families started to change as their members' minds started to crumble under the onslaught of self-replicating, engineered thoughts.

Children were most vulnerable of course, and the most dangerous:

School.

Now we know the risk, but is it too late?

###

Source:

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/04/how_dangerous_viruses_could_escape_from_laboratories.html

Tools of the Ancients

Two lives lost because of the detritus of a pointless war long ago.  

But the weapons deployed by humans pale beside the cunning devices wielded by the Ancients in the war that ultimately led to the end of the First Age of Earth civilizations. Our "Great War" was a pillow fight in comparison, if translations of the few Progenitor tablets thus far found can be trusted.  What strange things were left hidden in the Precambrian muck, buried under kilometers of sediment, and only now working their way back to the surface as we delve ever more deeply?

Would we understand how such things work?
Would we be able to defuse them, or even contain the forces unleashed?

Would we even recognise them as weapons?

And what happens when someone inadvertently triggers one?

Or wakes it...

###

Sources: 
http://io9.com/the-first-world-war-claims-two-more-victims-1548135450
http://aphilosopher.wordpress.com/2008/02/25/pre-human-civilizations/
http://www.amazon.com/Before-Atlantis-Million-Pre-Human-Cultures/dp/1591431573
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/6/5/7320/94554

The War Overhead

They dismissed it when I warned them the first shots would be fired.

But then the Galactics fired the first shots - bombarding the rebels' lunar installation from their kinetic weapon platforms in Jovian orbit.  Even then, they tried to explain it away - tried to make the naive public think it was just business as usual.

Then came the firefight high in the Van Allen belt, with dozens of ships ripped into nothing more than ionized particles as the Galactics extracted vengeance for the rebels' sins.

Even now, the public are in the dark, completely unaware of what is happening high overhead, lied to and tricked into believing the fallout is simply a natural phenomenon.  But the world's governments are trembling.

Why?

Because the rebels' sin was sharing their knowledge with us - how else do you think we advanced so quickly over the last few decades?

But now the Galactics are here, and who knows what they will do to us once the rebels have been dealt with...

###
Sources:
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/technology-science/science/video-shows-moment-huge-meteorite-3180949
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/alberta/Reader+Photos+Northern+lights+shine+over+Calgary+southern/9529820/story.html

They mostly come out at night. Mostly.

She wept with relief when they found her, hidden behind the closet door in a hole-in-the-wall apartment.

It was six years ago when it started in a lonely, boring town in Alaska.

Just a group of kids playing with a ouija board.  Then pendulums.  Then seances and channelling.

And then she found The Book: an old, leather-bound tome that had fallen down behind the stacks at the library so many years ago.  The pages were dark with the scrawl of half a dozen hands and twice as many languages. Yellowed slips of paper jutted at every angle, covered with comments and notes, strange diagrams.  Sometimes so arcane they almost seemed written in code.

Poring over the pages, using musty 50-year-old dictionaries and the internet to find meaning in the pages was dorky, maybe, and a little weird.  But to bored teens in a small town who had already shocked parents and peers with goth styles and vampire personas it was the best. Puzzle. Ever.  

When at last they started to make progress in their translation, they tried one of the rites they deciphered, thinking of it as just another LARP.

But it worked, and the thrill of discovery made them want to try more.

Again and again they tried: first flashes of light, then a mysterious moaning voice. Then action at a distance. And boils to plague that girl.

And then they did it.

They wanted revenge. 

He'd touched her, threatened her.  Made her do things. He was a bad person.  But The Book told them there was a way he could be punished. A summoning.

They tried it, and the thing that came plagued their nightmares for days afterwards.

But it worked, as horrible as the punishment was to watch.  And there were others who had scores to settle.  Other knives to grind.

So they did it again.  And again.

But what they didn't know was that the things they had woken, the things that came when they called and seemed to do their bidding were old.  

They were hungry things that had dwelt in the sunless steppes of the arctic since before humans had come to this land. They were the dark things that even the Elders had feared.

They were wendigo, and now that they were awake they were hungry.

And they didn't really care about the sins of their prey.

They just. Wanted. More.

###

Source: http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/02/16/accused-craigslist-killer-says-shes-murdered-more-than-20-people-since-she-joined-satanic-cult-six-years-ago/