Chapter 67: Carcosa

-Alexander POV-

A blinking light in the corner of my eye rouses me from the task of methodically laying down brickwork. With a thought the nanites attached to my eye show me the cause for the interruption.

Oh! My drone had arrived in Jinzhou.

The military build-up around the smooth depression that ha once housed the city of Jinzhou made me frown slightly as I took it all in. Much like me, they seemed intent on studying the breach. Monitoring equipment surrounded the emptiness, set so fine they could probably detect how many hairs a fly had if it buzzed past them.

All useless, of course. As was the Tinkertech they were using, their readouts spewing nonsense and corrupted data every time they tried. The Shards tended to like their privacy, after all.

As for how my efforts were going…

My lips spread in a slow, pleased, smile. The sensors were definitely cutting through the interference, the specialty algorithms tuned on what to ignore and what to focus in on. Scion’s countermeasures against surveillance still recognisable to what ShardPunk had taught me.

Which was sad, in a way. It was more efficient, and had far more energy directing the effects than even I had thought, but at it’s core it was still the same methods they had used on that grey world of theirs.

The number of truly novel effects added on were tiny, and easy to mitigate.

It was a flaw of the Entities method of growth. Just because you outsourced your creativity to others didn’t mean you knew the best ways to apply the new methods you had gained. That would require allowing those with creativity to play around with critical systems, which the Entities would never do.

Oh well, I shrugged. Makes it easier for me.

The scans continued unabated, the drone piggybacking on the magic now present in Shardspace to begin scrying. What I found was both disheartening and unsurprising.

“Christ, there’s a lot of you,” I murmur, watching as hundreds of signatures were logged every second – with no end in sight.

Eventually the scan stalled out, the magic not having had enough time to diffuse to the more distant parts of that realm.

54,321,654,812 was the number that stared back at me.

54 billion shards, and that wasn’t even all of them. It might not even be close.

I let out a laugh regardless, for this was still a win by any metric.

With this I could observe how the Shards interacted with each other, could listen in on their exchanges, could peel back the layers and see what made them tick.

The Shards in that non-space might not be the Shards in full, but it was enough. Already I was picking up on refinements to their forms, computing substrate that seemed at odds with what I knew of them, architecture that didn’t fit.

The scans would also get better with time. I could send another drone, one more equipped now that I knew the exact countermeasures. The increase in magic over that time would also aid me greatly, the scans would reach farther and would gain greater detail.

The only issue now was properly managing it, because I could already tell that would be a full time job for me, even if I utilised all of my processing power, and considering that I needed that time to experiment and occasionally terrorise an empty city? Not happening, it couldn’t be me.

It couldn’t be an algorithm or V.I. either. The sheer complexity of the task would be too much.

Yet, after what happened with Taizong, the idea of creating a super-intelligent being to help me with manage this was unappealing.

I had enough awareness to know that my excuse of Taizong being ‘too smart’ to talk down rationally was justification after the fact. Yet it was a justification that still held some truth to it.

I would essentially be birthing something I couldn’t understand for a task that was too important to fail.

It almost made me feel-

No, wait, scratch that. I didn’t feel sympathy for the Dragonslayers, that was fucking stupid. Regardless of how dangerous A.I. could be their treatment of Dragon was…

Wait, could I get Dragon to do this? I’d definitely feel more comfortable if she was the one going through this. Hell, it wouldn’t even have to be her, I bet I could reboot a copy of her from one of her fallen suits!

I consider the thought, excitement building before slowly dimming as I realise something. I couldn’t, as much as it pained me, I just couldn’t.

Dragon was already connected to a Shard, asking her, or any copy of hers, for help was just begging for the enemy to become aware of my plans before they’re ready.

Which left me back at square one.

Fantastic.

Deciding to shelve that, for the moment, I quickly noted the specific interference parameters and quickly coded a patch in my head before creating another drone. The ground before me rose and quickly took on the form I desired. It was fast, easy. The design had already been made, after all.

With a thought the programming was updated and off the little drone went, first teleporting back to the surface and then quickly flying north.

With that done my eyes turned back to the row of houses I had made. They weren’t identical, but they were certainly derived from the same basic template. Stone and wood made up the foundation, with narrow windows and sharp edges. They were the definition of unwelcoming, the cracks that ran through the structure certainly didn’t take away from that impression.

They were the standard for the middle class housing I was building. For, you see, I had stratified this city, to a certain extent. There were districts that were more affluent than others.

This was rather unlike my other works, which had been comparatively egalitarian in nature. With this city, my concern wasn’t housing people. It was crafting a story.

Thus, it was less uniform, more chaotic and natural. There were slums in the outer reaches of the city, fragile things made of discarded wood and fabric. The section had been blocked off from the rest of the city, segregated and sept under the rug in the way humans do to all things they find unpleasant.

Then there were the slave pens. Yes, I was making slavery a part of the fake lore I was peddling, let me cook.

In a city that practiced human sacrifice and the worship of dark gods, I thought a little bit of thraldom fit.

That section was full of squat building, made of solid stone and filled with cages. The cobbled path in this part of my creation was noticeably more worn, as if it had been marched upon more frequently than any other part of the city. Attached, but not a part of, this section was a grand amphitheatre, where the wealthy and the cults would come to inspect their potential sacrifices.

Naturally I made it gaudy as hell, just to rack up on the evil points.

Then there was the section of the city I was currently working on, or rather was working on. Rows of houses set up near an industrial centre I had created that was meant to evoke imagery of the Industrial Revolution. Lots of gears, pulleys and heavy metal. Naturally I had tapped heavily into my CyberPunk specialty for the maximum amount of OSHA violations.

So yes, this city was also supposed to be shitty to the regular working joes.

There was only one last thing to build before the skeleton of the city was complete. The wealthy part of the city. Which also doubled as the religious part of the city.

Because yes, the cult and the rich assholes were one and the same here.

Just to give you a sense of perspective, everything I’ve done up until now, minus the massive church, took up half the size of the city. Which meant the affluent got half all to themselves, the rest of the city locked away from it by foreboding palisades.

And let me tell you, this next section? It was a blast. I used none of this space efficiently whatsoever. It was like every dystopian nightmare ever, squalid conditions only a few kilometres away from a private garden and pool.

Naturally, It was all in disrepair as well, but even then the sheer resources placed into each mansion would be enough to make many weep. Gorgeous dark marble pillars, lined in gold, stood to support the massive structures. Within the skinned rugs of nearly a dozen animals lined the floors. Each room was a marvel in and of itself. Massive libraries, decadent bathing rooms, luxurious living rooms, spacious balconies and more.

I created perhaps fifty mansions throughout that entire area, all separated by the enormous grounds that each home called their own, with several private sacrificial sites of their own.

And with that the main work was done, an incredibly creepy, incredibly abandoned city, that worshipped eldritch monstrosities in unethical ways was complete. Or, almost.

Because, for a city designed to be reminiscent of H.P. Lovecraft’s work the city was too…mundane. Awful, to be sure, but only humanly so.

For my first trick I wove a ward around the city, thin as gossamer and just as delicate. It took me four attempts to get it just right, the weave otherwise failing at inopportune times. The first part of the magic was simple, it caused the occasional auditory illusions.

Footsteps, whispers, laughter. Always right on the verge of being unrecognisable, just to plant that seed of doubt. ‘Am I just hearing things? Maybe it was just the wind?’

But the real illusions started happening the moment you began using exotic methods of sensing your surroundings. The average human’s sight, sound, touch, smell and taste wouldn’t pick up on anything but echoes, but the moment you went beyond that?

Thermal would show tentacles weaving in an out of the city.

Night vision would show still figures, surrounding you.

X Rays would show garbled static and the symbols of the cult I had created.

As for Parahuman powers? Let’s just say it wouldn’t be pretty.

With the more subtle spookiness out of the way I moved on to something more…obvious.

By this point I was an old hand at spatial manipulation, I understood the mechanics thoroughly, and compared to expanding a cavern to encompass the size of a city? What I planned to do next was nothing.

I began with the homes I had built. Some were given more volume than their outside dimensions would suggest while some were given less. For some I randomised the exit points of doors, leading them to different rooms, or even different houses.

Streets were made longer, some curved in incomprehensible ways and others abruptly stopped where they shouldn’t – areas of stilled space capable of cutting a man to ribbons from the frozen atoms.

Houses bulged unnaturally, slanting in directions that should have had them collapse. Instead they stood, defiant of Euclidean geometry and physics both.

But it was the church that I messed around the most with.

Spatial projectors were manufactured by the dozens, and I had to run constant calculations in my head – measuring angles and geometries to perfection – in order for this to work.

With a fine eye observing the process I activated the machines, and the inner dimensions of the church plunged down into a black abyss. The walls gained a black, oily, quality that hadn’t been there before, space folding in and out of itself so much that the light within was spread out over incalculable distances. From the windows of the church, if you looked out, you would see nothing. Literal nothingness.

It was something I had created using inspiration from Shardspace, creating a structure that was half in the real, and half not.

The specifics would go over most peoples heads, a mix of quantum and dimensional manipulation to render the space superimposed. It literally existed within a pocket dimension and in normal space at the same time.

I had no idea how that would look to a human, but just being around the church made me nauseous. Both my eyes, and my more unique senses giving me absolute nonsense whenever I turned my gaze towards it. Because I could see both.

Words can’t describe it, perhaps the closest would be kaleidoscopic, but even that fails to capture the awful beauty of it.

With a light shudder I turned away from the church, averting my eyes from it and making a mental note to create my private lab far away from this place.

Yet there remained one final aspect of this city that I had yet to complete.

The occupants.

Let’s run down the list.

They needed to be scary.

They needed to be able to manoeuvre in areas of warped space.

They needed to be deadly.

They needed to vary in some way.

Immediately shoggoths came to mind, yet that struck me as rather uninspired. Yes, they were a classic, but they didn’t fit. I hadn’t crafted a city built by the Elder Things, I had made a city driven to madness and barbarism by the very cult that lead it.

No, if there were to be monsters here they would need to be people themselves, at least visually. And, given how often I had referenced Hastur while constructing this place, those ‘people’ would have to be creative types. Artists, scientists, philosophers, and so on.

At that a memory emerged from the depths of my mind, of a place of learning that descended into madness. I hadn’t played Bloodborne in years, but it seems some parts of it stuck.

The Slime Scholars of Byrgenwerth would serve as the primary source of inspiration, yet that alone would not do. Slow movement and throwing slime at people was, well, not too scary.

Upgrades were required.

Flesh erupted before me, twisting and turning upon itself – writhing under invisible constraints. The from would be adaptable, variable. Entirely made up of specialised stem cells capable of transforming into other cell types and then reverting when given the appropriate chemical signal.

This was not unlike the work I had done on my dogs back in Hyderabad, except a couple steps above in complexity. Unlike the hounds there would be no static shape for these creatures, only occasionally shifting body parts to resemble the forms of a human, before reverting back into a protean mass.

I paused as I realised that I may have unintentionally created a Shoggoth, despite actively trying not to.

Oh well, in for a penny.

With will alone I implanted patterns, designs, upon the very DNA of the creature itself. Pre-Prepared weapons etched into their very essence. Talons, teeth and spikes of bone. Deadly neurotoxins and miasmic breath. Hide that could occlude the senses and confuse the unwary.

And, most importantly, an organ capable of sensing the shifts and currents of space itself, which I had actually stolen wholesale from the Entities and made it a bit smaller.

It was actually the one part of them that couldn’t shift or change in any way. Even their brain was heavily distributed, but this organ needed to be in one place to function.

Naturally that was a weak spot I had done everything I could to shore up, making it more durable and even self-healing. Yet, it remained a chink in the armour I couldn’t quite remove.

The finalised form of the creature solidified before me, twisting and striking out against the invisible shackles that held it in place. Distorted face shrieked at me, writhing and cackling madly even as they attempted to disembowel me.

Oh, right.

With a thought I tweaked the genetic code of the being before me, rendering it docile when exposed to a specific pheromone – one which I added a faint trace to my body seconds later.

The change in it’s behaviour was obvious and immediate. The amorphous blob of silver ceased it’s struggles, relaxing. The harsh whip-like tendrils melted into putty, slowly being drawn back in to rejoin the main mass.

Note to self: spray Renji with the Pheromone before he comes down here. The man may be Japanese, but I’m guessing he wouldn’t enjoy what would happen otherwise.

With that crude thought, I began producing more of the things, first one, and then two, before stopping at just shy of three hundred.

A number that would make the creatures uncommon, yet unavoidable if you wanted to cross the city.

My creations quickly scurried away, some one chitinous legs, some on writhing tentacles and others on far stranger modes of transportation. Most, I knew, would hide as inanimate objects around the city, patiently waiting for prey despite lacking the need for sustenance.

Others would take a more direct approach, patrolling the city and hunting for intruders.

I eventually noticed that, despite being one of the best hiding spots in the city, none drew closer to the church – avoiding it entirely. Even the more active and aggressive specimens kept a wide berth of the structure, occasionally hissing at screeching at it.

Naturally, that made me curious and snooping around the grey matter of one of those specimens while it was near revealed why.

That organ I made for it? The one that allows them to perceive space? Yeah, turns out it did not like the superposition I had subjected the church to. Or, rather, the brains attached to the organs didn’t like it – unable to comprehend what they were sensing.

It was a mistake, but one that undeniably added to the mystique of the place.

Just imagine! Weary survivors running through the city! Trying to escape the horde of horrors descending upon them! Only to stumble upon a place even they wouldn’t tread! Would they see it as a blessing? A curse? Oh, I was so hyped!

Well, reasonably so, it’s not like anybody would willingly enter this place.

I paused.

‘Wait, did I jinx it?’

I shook my head in denial, yet my paranoia remained in spite of that.

‘…Maybe I should add a few extra wards to scare off any potential visitors.’

I stopped, eyes gazing back at the church despite the nausea it caused.

‘But, without my discount Shoggoths, the church is undefended. I really don’t want to leave this unfinished!’

I bit my lip, eyes darting between the church and the various entrances strewn across the cavern – all leading to the main gate.

‘Oh, what’s an hour? It’s not like it’ll make a difference!’

I fully turned towards the church and began walking towards it, stooping only briefly to curse as I realised I had just jinxed myself again.

AN: And the underground city is done! Mostly. Alexander will be adding some final defences to the church, but that’ll be done off screen. What do you think? Cool city?

Also: Alexander becoming more paranoid genre savvy! Let’s give him a round of applause guys!

Thanks for reading, please leave a comment!