I submitted it for The Unspeakable Oath, but the latest one just came out and it’s not in there, so I guess they rejected it? Shame they didn’t let me know, though. I would have put ‘Walk-In Debriefing’ up already if they had. I rather like how it came out.
This is Cthulhu Mythos, mind you, so don’t expect it to be cheerful.
Walk-in Debriefing – Google Docs
Walk-in Debriefing
Look, there’s no point to these handcuffs. I don’t feel like hurting any of you. And if you’re going to give me drugs to talk, give me one that will make me nauseous. I like throwing up on things that are hard to clean. It makes a mark.
OK, wait, stop, save your breath. I don’t care if you threaten me. If you want to bring in and beat up my mother, or kill my dog, I’ll demand a front-row seat. You can’t have anything that I want. So this is how it’ll go. I’ll tell you everything I feel like telling you. Then you’ll probably torture me until I’m dead. Maybe I’ll feel like killing one of you before then. Or maybe I won’t. I don’t really make many plans ahead of time, these days.
But, hey: you want to know what it’s like to be a cultist. And not just one of those sad weirdos who cut up people into screaming piles of blood and crap, right? No, you want to know what it’s like to go and get mounted by the Real Thing, feeling the burn and neurons frying. So that you can “fight us” better.
Well, let’s start there. You’re not fighting us. Fights imply two sides. There’s just one side. You’re not on it, and neither am I. We’re not minions, we’re not puppets, we’re not even anybody’s dreams. We’re all shadows on the wall, defined solely by what we lack. Substance. Permanence. Relevance.
But we are different. You see, I have something that you don’t have. I have had the experience of being used by something that does have relevance. I am a lock in which the key has been inserted, the tumblers turned, and the key removed. You ever wonder how the lock feels about that, afterward? Of course you don’t! It’s a stupid lock. It can’t understand the world that it’s a miniscule part of. By our standards, it doesn’t understand anything at all.
And that’s just how the “Great Old Ones” think about everything in this universe. People like you say that They’re indifferent to us, but you don’t mean it. Your stupid meat brain keeps insisting that They have to at least care enough to bother being cruel to humanity, because that’s so much better than accepting that every interaction, every incursion, every atrocity that They “spawn” is the mildest of automatic reactions to stimuli. But your meat brain lies. Humanity could live on for a billion years. It could snuff out right now. It’s the same thing. It’s exactly the same thing.
And this is the funny part: you think that what I’m saying is “nihilism,” because your meat brain keeps hearing the the squawks that my meat brain keeps making — and nihilism is the closest thing that makes any sense to you. It doesn’t have to make sense for you! Or me, or anybody else that we know. Nihilism is absurd. Plenty of things have meaning, and purpose. It’s just that we don’t have any say in assigning meaning. We’re not capable of having any say.
And again: you and I are different in that we both know this; only I can remember truly mattering for a moment, and you don’t have the guts to follow my lead. You picked the lie, I picked the truth. And the truth has never left me. I can still feel that moment of piggyback transcendance, and I will until I die.
Really, you people should just go home. Trash the files, disband your “government conspiracy,” stop caring about what we “cultists” do. Or, Hell, burn us all at the stake and be done with it. Because it’s not a question of fighting us “when the stars become right.” The stars have always been right. The “Great Old Ones” are not coming back. They never left. And nothing either of us do will ever matter.
So either just kill me, or let me go, or start the torture. If it’s going to be the torture, you should know: the skin on my arms has always been particularly sensitive to pain. You should get some good reactions there.