Everyone’s A Critic

I thought I might post here bits of a Sci-Fi thing I’ve been trying to get off the ground for a bit. See how it fares. It has aliens, space ships, cheeky mutant bacteria, grand villains, car chases, smart-ass animals and even a bit of romance. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, say hello to The Rats. They’re almost my favourite characters.

The Fantabuloso All-Rat Groove Tango Choir

Miraculous Update! 06/09/10 Well, it’s not the promised Sci-Fi story I promised, but, hey, who’s keeping tabs? Here be a wee account of how the Shoggoths came into my life and of the wonderfully successful partnership we entered into & all that. I hope you enjoy it.

Things That Go Blob in the Night

A Brief History of Shoggoths, How They Were Forsaken by The Elder Ones and How They Were Subsequently Adopted by The Gorgon.

In The Very Beginning there was plenty of nothing much. Even the Void was still too fuzzy and sluggish even to think of coming into existence. As for Time, it hadn’t quite dawned on it that it could step onto the scene and become a dimension. That’s how non-eventful things were back then.

Presently, a little before The Beginning, the Void finally got its act together and manifested just enough for entities like The Mother of Bumba and so forth to have a medium to bob and float and generally muck about in.

The Mother of Bumba and her Voidmates were pure notions, at that point, not even potentialities. But bye and bye they coalesced into emanations and energies (more or less) and they started being and doing. Well, sort of. Mostly they were doing not a great deal, and the-universe-as-we-never-knew-it looked a bit on the under-populated and under-used side. Still, compared to what had not gone on before, the plot was picking up.

Along with The Mother of Bumba there were other emergences. Most prominent amongst them were: The Things, The Other Things and The Elder Ones. Our story is concerned with this last set.

The Elder Ones were not so much an unruly lot –no rules at all in them days, really, but more in the way of a universal irritant to everybody else. They were, in the much-quoted words of the ineffable Paranoid Cat of Glenda II: “The Neighbours from Hell. A branch of Chaos gone wrong. A ghastly quantum accident. Barely-dimensional … things. Items of no specific yet hideous substance that fumbled and shuffled and scuffled and scrabbled and scrambled, and eked out a half-living in the remotest outer boundaries of the Void, where they were banished almost right from the start for uncommonly bad behaviour. They are mean, nasty, brutish, greedy, aggressive, stupid, stubborn, bad tempered and very, very dangerous. They seem to be unable and unwilling to learn anything at all; they’ve no taste whatsoever and they lack a sense of irony. They keep gruesome pets. And they smell! Nobody likes them and only a fool would trust them.”

No need to elaborate much further on the Elder Ones at this juncture in the narrative. They bitched and bickered with everybody (and when they ran out of bodies, amongst themselves), and generally got on everyone’s tits for an eternity or two, until all the other emanations lost patience, ganged up on them and banished the aggravating little buggers to the aforementioned outer limits of the Void, where they were kept in prophylactic isolation by some very powerful force fields and a rather clever spell devised by The Mother of Bumba.

Henceforth all was relatively well and a few more eternities went by quite peacefully if a bit tediously.

In due course the Big Bang and Time and Gravity and Matter happened and everything became more complicated and more scattered and, for a long time, inordinately muddled. In the ensuing extra chaos, the Elder Ones escaped and made their way to that no-longer-so-void part of the universe that a few aeons later would become our galaxy, worse luck.

(But that’s altogether another story, told better and more extensively by other, better storytellers.)

As the Paranoid Cat of Glenda II said, the Elder Ones kept some pretty shocking pets. (Not quite as repulsive, I hasten to say, as they themselves were.) Some of these pets were called Shoggoths, and they were not so much pets as slaves, pure and simple. Chattels, indentured serfs, dogsbodies, servants, paspartouts, peons; semi-biological machines of hard labour. And when required, cannon fodder.

Shoggoths were unpleasant-looking all right, no question. Amorphous and protoplasmic, with no fixed shape, organs or limbs but capable of producing any amount of these items, or any given form, as required, they appeared to be of a substance both rubbery and gooey, of a most unattractive snot-green shade of black; a repulsive iridescence coated their outlandish hides. They gave the disturbing impression of being made up of an infinite number of slimy bubbles that were always on the verge of becoming transparent, or al least translucent, but never quite fulfilled that horrid proposition, which was a bonus, I dare say, as the mere though of what that increased visibility might reveal would have threatened the composure of even a seasoned Mossad operative.

They were tireless, implausibly strong and all but indestructible. Without a mind of their own to speak of (or anything vaguely resembling a mind, period), and genetically engineered to obey, they had, nevertheless, a dangerously unpredictable, volatile side that had to be kept constantly in check by means of remote hypnosis.

‘… and yes, we built mighty R’ lyeh for them. And unknown Kadath, aye; and the Nameless City, and fuck knows what else, we forget, we built so very many things for the sodding bastards. “Do this”, they would say, and we’d do it. “Build us a couple of fortresses here and another two there. And when you’re done building, here’s some more digging to be done; we need some extra tunnels and we’re getting short of bottomless pits, so get with it and be sharp about it, we haven’t got all day, you know!”, they would say. And we heard and obeyed and did their bidding; and we dug and burrowed and fetched and carried and built…and built…and built.’

‘And later, during The Time of The Great Discrepancy, we were ordered to destroy. And we destroyed and smashed and engulfed and steam-rolled over entire species and civilisations, and chocked the life out of all and sundry, until every ounce of our poor protoplasmic bodies ached with our own unbearable boredom and with the pain and the sorrow we absorbed from those we destroyed.’

‘And then, their own Chapter of Much Lessening was upon them. And they began retreating into their last strongholds, which became less and less and more and more poky and cramped, and there was no room for us except in the crummiest and poxiest of the minor dungeons, and we were practically starved to death and nearly killed with the tedium of inaction. And come The Day of The Last Scramble, they all just took off, to go and live in dark Yuggoth, and we was left behind to rot in some frozen, forlorn underground citadel in the middle of nowhere, in the most emaciated of continents, on a thoroughly godforsaken little planet. That day we swore two dread oaths. One, that we would never-ever-ever be servants to no one, god or demon. And two, that if one day we had the opportunity to do so, we’d beat the living shits out of the sodding Elder Ones. There.’

Thus spoke to me the Shoggoth I found, one windswept October night, very near the northbound southern approach of the Blackwall Tunnel, where my car had broken down, and while I was waiting for the recovery truck to show up.

A dark night it was, and turbulent, as I’ve said, but very mild for that time of the year. The wind alternated between short, violent blasts and long, powerful gusts that made the orphaned plastic bags either rush past in wispy streams or rise up in the air in atomized geysers of detritus.

The recovery people had told me that they couldn’t possibly be there for at least another hour, with luck, and had advised me to lock myself inside the car and try to become invisible, or, at least, hide under a travel rug.

But I am improvident as well as reckless. I do not carry a travel rug as part of my regular equipage, and the night was stormy and very alluring.

So I locked the car, put on my trusty woolly hat, and went off for a wee stroll towards the gaping murky maws of the tunnel.

Not ten yards from the entrance I found the Shoggoth.

It was trying to catch stray plastic bottles and turn them into … I really don’t know what. Art, perhaps? It would jump clumsily and gracelessly, shoot a rubbery limb towards the nearest discarded bottle, try to grasp it, fail, fall back on the ground with an eerie muted thud, sulk a bit, and then star all over again.

I watched it do this for quite a long while, for it was a spellbinding spectacle, and not one you’ve got the chance to enjoy every day, you’ll agree. But after a time I began to feel sorry for the creature and its ineffectual endeavours. I put out both my hands, and in no time at all I had captured two bottles, which I offered to the presumed budding sculptor. ‘There.’ I said.

The Shoggoth seemed to look at me. I say seemed, because right then it had no eyes to look at anything with, not that I could detect, anyway. It turned the top part of its blobby mass towards me and stood still. We stood there for a bit, perhaps appraising each other.

‘Well’, said I at last ‘Do you want them or not?’

It “looked” at me some more and, suddenly, it produced one single bulging eye, right in the middle of what I decided it could possibly be its face.

‘Yeah, OK, thanks.’ It said with a very odd, thin and deep and gurgly voice.

‘Don’t mention it. Want me to get you some more?’ I volunteered.

‘’Oh, that’d be nice’ it said.

So we hung around the tunnel’s mouth, me catching bottles, and it piling them up and rearranging them, and losing them again to the fierce night winds and me catching some more. Thus we passed a most pleasant time, until we both tired of the game and we went to sit down on a nearby incinerated car wreck and swapped life stories.

‘Azathoth was the worse.’ the Shoggoth concluded the sorry ass story of its life. ‘Tell you, girl… We ever get our collective appendages on the scumbag, we show it was hard times really are. Oomph…’

‘Quite.’ I agreed.

We sat there some more, in meditative –and from my part, speculative silence.

‘So, what happened after they left you, up shit-creek without a poxy paddle, stranded in Antarctica?’ I asked after a moment or two. ‘What did you do?’

To save time and effort, the creature downloaded that particular story straight onto my brain. He could do that.

And a right proper tale of woe it was, too, that particular saga. And nearly as heroic and long as any as I’ve ever heard. As long as were the longest marches across unimaginable wastelands, and howling deserts, and cruel mountain ranges, and other madness inducing geographical bits and pieces. And the hunger and the loneliness and the sense of futility, even from their dim, basic minds and their barely incipient consciousness. And the hostility encountered when they finally found other living, or sort-of-living beings. The xenophobia; the persecutions; the pogroms; the Spanish Inquisition (the Spanish Inquisition, not a metaphor for intolerance); their countless Wounded Knees and Waterloos and Black Holes of Calcutta…

By the time it got to the part when they had just discovered the sheltering –if meagre- possibilities of the river Thames, the lights of the recovery truck were blinking in the distance. I looked at the blobby blob squatting at my side, which, by now, had managed to sprout three sparking emerald-green eyes and one very badly drawn ear. It looked at me.

‘I’ll wait for you. When you’re done we can go have a drink somewhere and I’ll tell you all about the Battle of Camden Town Tube Station.’

‘ ‘s a deal.’ I said. And went off to interact with the recovery folk.

It turned out that the breakdown was due to a very minor electrical failure that could be –and was- repaired on the spot, and in less then 20 minutes the remedial roadsters were on their way to their next mission.

I drove slowly to the cremated wreck. The Shoggoth was still there, waiting for me, as it’d said it would.

‘Hop in, then.’ I said. ‘There’s a very nice pub not 300 yards from here.’

On the way to The George and Orange, the protoplasmic entity attempted to alter its appearance to one more generally acceptable to our insular human mind, with restricted success. By the time we got there, it looked like a rather misshapen and very ungainly slate-coloured hairless bull terrier. However, this being South London, neither its unorthodox appearance, nor the fact that it demolished two pints of Guinness in ten minutes, raised more than half an eyebrow amongst the staff and patrons of the establishment, although one of the old faithfuls went as far as expressing his guileless opinion that my dog would “never get even a quick sniff at the backside of Crufts”. I replied that I didn’t care for such trivial worldly matters and that I loved it just the way it was. The old guy approved the sentiment with a nod. The Shoggoth beamed at me. It did that by contorting its already wonky mouth into a hideous grin and squashing its little blobby eyes into tiny rugby balls. Then it proceeded to tell me all about the Battle of Camden Town Tube Station (which they, the Shoggoths, fought against a rather large contingent of also-left-behind Gugs) and its ramifications, namely the Chalk Farm Incident (against the NeoZombies) and the Whittington Muddle (against the Gugs, the NeoZombies, the Metropolitan Police Special Task Force and the chaps from Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise Black Ops Division).

And if you think all these sordid wars, little or large, that you half watch on your tellies over your organic mushroom fettuccine, waiting for Strictly Come Dancing to come up, are brutal and cruel, you should have heard Boom-Boom’s account of the Cotswolds Campaign…

Yes. Boom-Boom. For in the later stages of our pub visit my rubbery companion had acquired, nay, had insisted on acquiring a name.

You see, by the time the landlord, an unusually tolerant and patient man, always keen on selling that last extra pint, had put his tired foot down and chucked us all out, my gelatinous new friend and I had entered into a most unconventional covenant. And the name was one of the sub-clauses.

Enslaved, exploited, neglected, discarded and finally abandoned by their makers, redundant and bereft of purpose and without a real mind to call their own, they had wandered the Earth like so many lost souls for all the long aeons, feared by all and hated by most of the other denizens of this our green and pleasant planet. But with the passing of the ages a germ of awareness sprouted -perhaps spontaneously, perhaps as a resonance of other consciousnesses around them- and it took root and grew within them, and in due course it burst forth as collective rudimentary intellect; and with intellect, came knowledge. (A staggering amount of knowledge, actually, as I found out when I got to know them better.)

It was this proto-consciousness, coupled with their natural (or genetically engineered, if you want to split hairs) mimetic talents that had allowed them to expand their remarkable language skills. (Skills they used almost immediately to formulate their dread oath of retribution and, later on, to play silly pranks upon unwary travellers of little-frequented woodlands and dark city alleys, as a mild form of revenge for all the cruelty and snobbery they had endured from their fellow planet-dwellers.)

What they hadn’t quite got around was acquiring distinct individualities and thus personal names. They didn’t need them to communicate amongst themselves because they were telepathic, and since nobody ever bothered to talk to them, unless it be to curse them, abuse them, or scream in terror at them, the notion had never crossed their communal mind, said my glutinous pal.

But tonight was unlike any other night in the long and wretched Chronicle Of All Their Dreary Nights. Tonight a human being (a human being, Great Void!) had not only not recoiled in horror at one of them, but actually had taken the time to communicate, collaborate and, incredibly, to play with one of its breed. Tonight was henceforth to be a Night to Remember, a radical departure from their usually lacklustre norm. To celebrate this, the faux bull terrier requested another pint of Guinness and a name of its own. It asked me to produce both, since it had no money to buy the pint with and it thought only fitting that I, who had actually initiated the connection, should pick a suitable name for it.

I considered the matter of the name for as long as it took me to buy the pint. I though of how its odd little voice both gurgled and boomed inside my brain. I came back to our booth and whispered: ‘How about Boom-Boom? It’s a nice name. A fighter’s name. And it suits you, I think.’

‘Boom-Boom’s splendid. Ta.’ it said. So Boom-Boom it was. And Boom-Boom it’s stayed to this day.

Much was made of it when later, after we had been chucked out of the pub, we went back to the tunnel and I was shown a secret entrance to the Shoggoths’ domains, taken down endless labyrinthine corridors to a vast underground cavern and introduced to the rest of the tribe, which at that time consisted of some 300 more or less discrete entities.

To cut a long story short: the orphaned “monsters” and the yours truly got on like the proverbial house on fire. And the deal struck with one of them at the pub became a deal with all of them.

I offered them tea & sympathy, companionship & love, alternative –or holiday- accommodation in my small cellar and a rather fetching model shape that, whilst still expressing their basic fluid but blobby essence, would make them vastly more attractive to the human eye. And work.

The work bit was crucial to them. As I’ve said, they had spent aeons doing bugger all and that’s not proper. A Shoggoth must work. It was created for this purpose and, one way or another, work it must.

I suggested several projects that may appeal to them because they included unadulterated labour -often hard toil, so that their prodigious strength will not go waste- and, at the same time, would satisfy the artistic urges that had, unbeknownst to themselves, germinated and developed in their blurry little souls during the past few millennia.

(Another thing I did, more for myself than for them, was to assign genders to most of them, according to how they felt to my human perceptions. Boom-Boom felt distinctly male, very young and very mischievous. Whereas one I called Flora had a decidedly female and matronly quality. Grumpy, thus named by my good friend Kay, was very much a male of the elderly, cantankerous and disrespectful persuasion. He has a miraculous talent for the insulting phrase, the scathing curse and the skin-flailing sarcasm.)

Not one of them refused my offer. As a matter of fact, they all merged briefly into one single, massive, awesome unit and with a big voice that boomed and resounded and reverberated down the depths of the cavern, they said:

‘You’re on, baby!’

And so it was that the Shoggoths found a homeland of sort in a modest two-up-two-down little flat in South Hackney.

And that’s why my garden grows and thrives and looks fit for a Heritage Trail exhibition, as does the once sadly neglected park nearby, and the local common, and every tiny patch of green for 10 miles around my home, for the Shoggoths have discovered they have an enormous talent for growing green things. Something to do with their alien chemistry, they tell me.

And that’s why my scruffy little flat is no longer scruffy but clean and neat and tidy and exquisite in a minimalist sort of way. And all my neighbours wonder at my seemingly boundless energy, for both my flat and my garden change appearance every so many months, and each last incarnation seems to them more aesthetically pleasing.

I smile demure smiles and say:  ‘I have nice friends who come and help…’

The Shoggoths and I are extremely happy together and we bless the wise fate that put the gremlins on my car’s engine, one stormy night, many Octobers ago.

The Mother of Bumba is very, very astute and always, always knows best.

The End (for now).