Part II
(Anthony Wilcox)
Even taking on as clam a demeanor as he could when trying to explain it to the coroner and then the security officers, he knew he was being looked at as nothing more than a grieving family member who had trouble coping. He had seen so many relatives of patients who could not save hat grasped for reasons their loved ones had died, that he understood why the hospital staff was looking at him with a mixture of pity and annoyance, but it didn't make it any less aggravating, especially under the circumstances.
For one thing, he simply wasn't that emotionally attached to an uncle he hadn't seen in twenty years. For another, he had seen the evidence of foul play with his own eyes, but nobody else was willing to look.
Perhaps it was because Providence was not near the down town sprawl of Boston, where people operated more in the shadows and was instead an educational community. The corporations knew there was a need for educated workers, and had turned Providence into one-step shy of a single giant university.
Even the hospital from which he had just been escorted was, in part, and education facility. This lead him to realize why the coroner may have overlooked the needle points concealed in the depression just below his uncle's clavicle, inexperience.
Frank, on the other hand, was quite familiar with the assassination technique used by shadowrunners. Usually, it involved a person with a cybernetic hand that concealed retractable syringes in two of the fingers. The first would contain Calcium Gluconate, the second Potassium Chloride.
The two chemicals couldn't be mixed before injection, but once they were in the body they would bond to each other in a fatal reaction that stressed the heart, inducing cardiac arrest. The Calcium alone would be enough to kill, but the potassium ensure that death came quickly enough to prevent medical attention saving the victim.
The question that Frank was asking himself as he unlocked the door to his uncle's modest apartment with the key card the building manager had provided him, was; Why would someone want a professor of history killed. It wasn't like George Angell was anyone of note. His specialty was in unexplained pre-Awakening phenomenon. Who would feel the need to hire a professional assassin to kill man that spent his days lecturing on the possibility of the bigfoot being being a potential case of pre-awakening goblinization?
The apartment was small, as was typical of corporate provided housing, and well kept. It didn't take Frank long to find what he was looking for. The jack implant his uncle had told him there would be a cyberterminal nearby for accessing the matrix, and he found it sitting on a stainless steel desk alongside a pile of books.
He couldn't help but smile at the oddity of the scene when he found it. A device capable of projecting a person's mind into the matrix, where it could access nearly every piece of data ever recorded was half covered by an actual, paper and ink, bound in a cover, book.
He looked at the cover of the book before setting it aside. Cryptozoology A to Z the cover read, listing the authors as Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark. A quick look at the publication date told him it had been originally released just before the turn of the century, making the book roughly seventy years old, though this was labeled as a later edition, from the 2020s, with added entries and supposedly updated accounts.
The page it had been left open on, facedown and half-covering the terminal he sought, was to an entry labeled "Dobhar-Chú", a creature that allegedly lived in the waters of Ireland, now known as Tír na nÓg, that had an illustration of a beast that looked like an enormous otter, with massive teeth.
Numerous other pages had been dog-eared by his uncle, and Frank took a casual glance through them. He didn't buy into George Angell's beliefs regarding pre-awakening magical creatures, but that didn't mean something in the books might not be a clue as to what had prompted his death.
Kraken, Lochness Monster, Lariosauro, Ogopogo, and numerous others had been marked of special note. The only common factor that Frank could find was that every entry on a marked page was aquatic.
One in particular stood out from the others, simply because Uncle George had circled the name multiple times, and written "DO?" in the margin. A humanoid frog like creature called The Loveland Frog, that was allegedly seen in Ohio from the 1950s until 2016.
The dates indicated it to be a creature reported both before and after the awakening. This was just the sort of thing his uncle looked for, creatures with supposed sightings both before and after the awakening.
Frank sat for a moment to read the entry, but quickly dismissed it as not being relevant to what he was looking for. Nobody was likely to kill over a kooky belief in frogmen. Though he remained curious about the word "DO?" scrawled on the page. The capital letters made it seem urgent, but what was it George was saying to do?
The cyberdeck was going to hold the answers, of that he was certain.
After ensuring he was well situated on the couch and wasn't going to simply fall over when his body went limp, Frank plugged the cable into the data jack behind his ear.
The feeling of jacking in was like being completely paralyzed and then tossed out of an airplane into a blinding white light. There is a monetary feeling of weightlessness, in which the stomach protests, a bit of vertigo and then, too fast to even be perceived, the person's consciousness was in the matrix where all of these feelings just vanished.
Frank looked around himself.
It seemed his uncle had opted for a basic icon interface, not the full virtual reality overlay that most went for. His files were simple icons suspended in space above a flat grid patterned floor that stretched beyond sight.
The only other feature was a glowing blue rectangle, about the size of a doorway. Frank knew that would lead him out into full matrix access, but for now all he needed were these local files saved to his uncle's personal storage area.
The benefit of being jacked in was that he could access files with mere thought, as opposed to rummaging around his uncle's apartment looking for hard copies of things he might have been working on. The drawback was that he had to know precisely what he was looking for if the interface were going to interpret his requests properly.
He didn't have much to work with, so he thought of the single word George had scribbled on the book the page.
"Do," he said, and a file floated across the empty space to hover arms length in front of him. It was a thin icon, indicating there wasn't much in it.
He raised his hand to touch the file, standard user interface for opening it, and was surprised by the sight of long coat of hair covering his arm and the back of his hands. Not just like having hairy arms, but full on fur, like a gorilla.
He looked down at his body, then slowly shook a head that was far too cumbersome to be his own. Other people decked out their interface to simulate real life, or fantasy worlds, in which they could immerse themselves. Leave it to George to go the no frills route on everything else, but still take the time to ensure his avatar was a fragging sasquatch.
A momentary side thought and the default avatar for George Angell's cyberterminal was replaced by the profile avatar stored in Frank's implanted data jack, a stylized version of his actual appearance dressed in a stylish white suit, with button up blue shirt, that he saw in a video by a 20th century musician. He had even included the white fedora, thinking the outfit just wasn't complete without it.
His hand, or rather the hand of his more personal avatar, touched the folder icon and watched it reshape itself into a calendar with his uncle's appointment schedule.
"It's a start," he shrugged, and began perusing the various items entered in the database.
He had mixed feelings about his uncle's scheduling. On the one hand, unlike the apartment itself, his calendar was thorough, and highly organized. This meant if there were something out of place Frank was pretty well guaranteed to find it documented here. On the other hand, George documented everything, and it meant he was stuck filtering through tons of entries about the schedules for the classes he taught at Brown university.
His first step was to add a filter on regularly repeated events. This took out the usual class schedule and other such mundane entries. After a set of other filters, Frank had a more manageable collection of appointments, some with file attachments that might provide further insight.
One that stood out had barely made it past the repetition filter. His uncle had been making regular visits to a man named Tony Wilcox. Evidently this Wilcox fellow had been meeting with George Angell once a week for a couple months before there was a single missed meeting, followed by a change in the day of the meetings. It was the sudden change that had allowed an otherwise regular meeting to circumvent the filter he had put in place. The odd part was that when the dates had changed, so had the meeting place. Lunch meetings had turned into hospital visits.
Frank ran a quick search for Wilcox, still limiting it to within his uncle's drive rather than going on into the matrix. That is when he found the file of George Angell's collected work, a file folder labeled with a word he couldn't quite figure out how to pronounce, 'Cult of Cthulhu'.
The sheer amount of information in the main folder was overwhelming, so he zeroed in on the specific folder titled "Dream and Creations of Anthony Wilcox". It seemed that Wilcox was an artist studying matrix sculpture at the Rhode Island School of design. Wilcox was studying to be a matrix architect, one of the people who created the virtual reality interfaces that deckers used to interact with software, stuff far more advanced than what Frank was currently using to peruse his uncle's files. Architects designed entire virtual worlds with which users could interact.
It seemed that Wilcox had created a model for a program avatar based on a nightmare he had, and it had attracted George's Angell's attention in connections with his cryptology studies. A rendering of the avatar form was kept in a sub-file, and Frank opened it without giving it much thought, and certainly without any means to prepare himself for what it held...if there was a way a person could prepare themselves for such a monstrosity.
The thing loomed over Franks own avatar. To scale it must have been ten or twelve feet tall, though such measurements meant little inside the simulated environment his consciousness currently inhabited.
It was a sickly green color, and appeared as if it would be wet to the touch, not that he had any intention of touching the scaly thing. The body was roughly humanoid, thought he proportions seemed deformed almost to the point of being inhuman, the body a bit too stocky, the limbs a bit too gangly and so forth.
From its shoulder protruded a set of wings that were too small to be of any practical use, even if they were not tattered and decayed looking, as one might expect from a bat that had been mauled by a dog.
The head of the thing looked as if someone had decapitated the original creature and plopped an octopus onto the shoulders in place of the head that should have been there, if not for the eyes. The thing's eyes were cruel. No, cruel wasn't the right word, they were beyond cruel. They were the eyes of a malevolent child that pulled the wings off flies for some sadistic sense of satisfaction, except that Frank felt as if he were the fly in question.
The worst part of the thing wasn't even the way it looked, it was the way it smelled. The stench was such that it made Frank wish the direct neural interface didn't include scent and taste. The thing reeked of decay. He could only imagine the programmer recording a decaying mound of fish left in the sun and overlaying it with a trip into the city sewers. If the neural interface were not inhibiting his body from moving where it sat on his uncle's sofa, he was certain he would have been vomiting on the carpet. As it was, his avatar dry heaved, repeatedly while not having a real stomach to empty of its contents.
He shut the program almost immediately, grateful for the thing to dissolve in front of him. As it faded, and he regained his composure, he could not help but wonder what kind of deranged mind would have created such a thing.
Another file in the Wilcox folder was labeled 'observations', and Frank tentatively opened it to find a list of recordings by his uncle, a video journal of sorts with each entry named 'AW' and the date it was recorded.
He began by opening the first file and flinched as a form took shape before him. The avatar thing he had seen before had left a mark on his mind and he doubted he ever be able to open a visual file again without dreading that thing was going to appear.
He relaxed when he was the image of his George Angell standing before him. It was an actual representation of his uncle, not the sasquatch thing Frank had found himself as when he first logged in. Evidently uncle George intended these recordings to be of a more professional nature.
"March 2nd, 2075," The image of his uncle began, reciting the date the file had been created, "I was approached yesterday by a man named Anthony Wilcox, and artist studying Matrix Architecture, who has created an abomination of a thing based on his own nightmares.
"I have attached a copy of his creation, but a warn you, it is not for the faint of heart."
"Great, NOW you warn me," Frank sighed, but he noticed the look of revulsion on his uncle's face and knew that George had been every bit as repulsed by this thing as he had been.
The recording went on to explain how Wilcox claimed to be slightly wakened in that he could sense magical forces but not actively manipulate them like a full mage. The artist had felt there was something more to his creation than just a bad dream, and he had sought Professor Angell's expertise in odd and mythological creatures to see if the thing had any roots in legends or folklore.
"I surmise the thing might be some variation of the leviathan of kraken of ancient lore. The cephalopod head certainly leans that way, but rest of the form does not. In addition, the symbols Wilcox has provided with his art seem neither Nordic, as one would expect for the Kraken, nor Semitic as would be expected for the leviathan. They seem more like something Sumerian in nature, though this is not my field of expertise. I plan to speak with a colleague in the linguistics department about it to see if I can learn more."
The first recording ended and Frank set up a chain so that as each entry finished it would begin the next. Several were minor entries about dropping off samples of writing with another professor, or Wilcox checking in with George for updates. Frank skimmed these quickly by increasing the feed speed, but slowed it down again with points of interest emerged.
"March 10th, 2075", began another entry, "Professor Williams and Professor Palsang have been of instrumental help in deciphering the symbols, though neither is fully aware of meanings or significance.
"Williams as found the symbols to be a bizarre combination of Sumerian, Acadian, and a few other ancient scripts that appear to have no other connection than in these samples. She is under the impression the text was assembled as some sort of a joke to test her skills.
"Despite her incredulity, Professor Williams provided a phonetic translation of 'Cthulhu Fhtagn'.
"I took this to Professor Palsang. It took him several days and he was only able to translate the second word. More precisely, he was able to connect it to certain words he think might be roots, but states the word "Fhtagn" is not a real word in its own right. As for the roots, they all seem to point to variations on the word 'wait', or 'lurks'. Other versions translated to words more like 'rests' or 'sleeps'.
"I think, and this is merely speculation on my part, that the other word is meant to be the thing's name. As such, the translation might be 'Cthulhu waits' or 'Cthulhu sleeps'. In either case, if this thing is more than just a figment of Mr. Wilcox's subconscious, I can only pray this thing is content to keep waiting or sleeping, or whatever it is doing."
Over the course of the posts, George had become more and more convinced that this thing, which he was now calling Cthulhu, was real, but Frank knew his uncle was prone to attributing validity to every odd creature claim that crossed his path. The mere idea that thing might be real gave Frank goose bumps...or at least it would have if his skin were more than just pixilated data at the moment.
A few entries later and Frank slowed the feed again. The look on his uncle's face was a worried one. "March 25th, 2075," the image of George Angell began, and the tone in his voice was as worried as the expression on his face, "Wilcox failed to meet with me two days ago, as per out regular appointment. I tried to contact him, but there was no answer. I found out this morning that he has been admitted to the hospital with a high fever and rambling incoherently in his sleep. The doctors cannot identify the cause.
"The problem is his ramblings are only incoherent to people who don't know what he and I have learned. The words that his doctors have attributed to as babbling sounds much like the same odd language as the script he provided when he first visited me. Indeed, he was heard to utter the words Cthulhu and Fhtagn more than once, as well as frequently repeated a new word, R'lyeh. I took a recording of his speaking while he slept and will be asking Palsang to examine it.
"The poor boy lives in a near constant state of horror from these fever dreams now. It is only when he wakes that he seems to have any semblance of peace, and even then he merely stares silently at the ceiling from his hospital bed, his energy spent in tossing and thrashing about from his nightmares.
"I can only hope that Wilcox makes a full recovery, but at this point, it is anyone's guess," George ended, and Frank could see that he had grown to like the artist enough to express an almost fatherly concern. Perhaps their shared pursuit of this Cthulhu thing had served as a bonding experience of some sort.
There were a couple more entries that followed. Mostly these exhibited George's concern regarding the health of the artist, some showed aggravation that it was taking Professor Palsang so long to provide a translation to the recordings, which he had transcribed phonetically to protect the artists anonymity and Frank could tell that his uncle was venting frustration at Wilcox's health more than at his actual colleague.
One part stood out and made Frank shiver in sympathy for Wilcox. Evidently his dreams were not of the ten foot monstrosity that Frank had seen in the other file, but of a much larger version that the young man had described during one of his fits as being like a 'walking mountain wading through towering buildings that came only to its waist'.
As if a ten-foot tall version wasn't bad enough, Wilcox was trapped in his own mind with a version of this thing that could level a city. There was nowhere to run from something like and it was no wonder George had said the man seemed more peaceful awake than asleep.
"April 2nd, 2077," began another in the long line of video journal entries with George clearly excited, "Anthony...I mean Mr. Wilcox has woken this morning. I mean truly woken. His fever is gone and, thankfully, he has no memory of the night terrors that have been plaguing him for roughly two weeks now. For my part, I have no intention of reminding him."
A few more entries followed, but mostly pertaining to Wilcox returning to a more normal state. No more dreams worth noting were mentioned, and over the course of three or four months the two seemed to slowly drift apart. It seemed George's concern for Wilcox was linked directly to the young man's connection with researching the abomination they had come to call Cthulhu.
Eventually the two parted ways with George still determined to learn more about the Cthulhu creature, and Wilcox convinced it had all just been a series of nightmares he wanted to put behind him.
