The Tablet

I write you this as a warning: not a warning of fear, but a warning of caution.  Be wary of your smart phones, tablets, and laptop computers.  The ubiquity of mobile devices in the modern era has led to unintended and somewhat unexplainable consequences.  The tale I tell here may sound too incredible too be true, but I assure you, it is.  Unfortunately, I have no physical proof to support my tale, only my words, and my shaken confidence in my understanding of what is real in this universe. 

…

There comes a point in all coder’s lives when he becomes obsessed with the works H. P. Lovecraft.  In my case, the obsession began early in my youth, long before my profession was determined.

I was first introduced to the name Lovecraft and the Cthulhu mythos as a child whilst preparing for my role as Dungeon Master for the Dungeons and Dragons role playing game.  While perusing the tome Deities and Demigods, among the entries for the recognizable Greek and Norse folklore, I stumbled across the most wonderful of horrors.   I found myself confronted by creatures alien to my experience, creatures with names such as Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Shoggoth, Azatoth, and Nyarlathotep.  It was also my introduction to the dread grimoires known as the Necronomicon written by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred.    

“What madness is this?” I thought.  “What insane tribes could have imagined and worshipped these abominations?”  As I read more I learned that this was not the mythology of some ancient and perverted tribe, but the machinations of an early twentieth century author named H. P. Lovecraft.  I thirsted for more.  I wanted to know of these creations and if they should be included in my campaign.

I began my research in that hallowed hall of knowledge: the public library.  I grew up in a small town in southeastern Louisiana called Slidell.  The tiny hamlet of Slidell nestled along the shores of Lake Pontchartrain; essentially a truck stop located at the nexus of three interstate highways.  The library was diminutive and its collection was not particularly extensive.  I spent literally minutes scouring the shelf that contained the library’s book.  Eventually, I was able to ferret out a single volume: a collection of short stories called Dagon and Other Macabre Tales.  Thus was my introduction.  Further exposure to the tales led me to learn of untoward happenings in shadowy towns known as Innsmouth and Arkham located in a mysterious, far off land known as Massachusetts as well as another dread grimoire: Ludwig Prinn’s De Vermis Mysteriis.

Many years have passed since my initial foray into Lovecraft’s world of weird fiction.  While I in no way hold encyclopedic knowledge of Lovecraft’s mythology I am familiar enough with the stories for passable conversation.  “Cthulhu fhtagn!” or, actually, “anything fhtagn!” has become a rallying cry of contemporary geek culture.  We are the true cult of Cthulhu.

Ia!  Ia!

It is because of this that I am apprehensive to go further in my tale.  What I tell you next you may dismiss as no more than a vivid dream, a case of a man who, falling asleep while reading a story, allowed his imagination and desires to affect his mental state.  I implore you; do not doubt the veracity of my statements.

I recently added to the miscellany of electronic devices I have accumulated an apparatus known as a tablet computer.  I have already in my employ a myriad of desktop computers, laptop computers, and even an iPod Touch: a device capable of executing applications of the variety found on smart phone devices.  I felt an overwhelming compulsion to explore the capabilities of the tablet, to find its purpose.  I sought out what niche this machine would hold among the digital devices already in my stockpile. 

I purchased a 3^rd generation iPad made by the Apple Computer Corporation.  Ordered direct from the manufacturer, I had the machine engraved with both my true name and my chosen internet handle: flerd_trandle.  Once constructed and inscribed with the aforementioned morphemes, the machine was sent to me from Chengdu, the capital city of the Sichuan province of southwest China.  The machine travelled nearly eight thousand miles on its journey before its first use.

Upon arrival I removed the tablet from its parcel.  I held it up and examined the hull.  I ran my fingers across the smooth posterior surface of the tablet.  I reviewed the engraving to ensure the accuracy thereof.  In the center of the tablet’s back lay the symbol of the Apple Computer Corporation, a sigil representing an apple with a bite taken from it; likely by some eldritch creature of Silicon Valley.

I turned the tablet over so its glass face was in my sight.  I pressed the lone button on the bottom of the device and the screen sprang to life.  It was charged and ready to go.  After a few moments of preparation, the device was ready for use.  The interface was familiar, but larger and sharper. 

I began by launching the applications already installed on the device.  I wanted to see what they were and how they worked.  After exhausting the pre-installed programs, I turned my attention to the iTunes store to find useful apps I thought were missing and to see what others might be available.

I began to add to the tablet with reckless abandon: games of adventure, stylized alarm clocks, scientific calculators, astronomical star charts, news readers, sports applications, and word processors.  I took everything I could since I knew neither which applications were the best of each genre nor what I would want to do with this device.  Would I write with it?  Would I draw?  Would it be purely for media consumption?  To what untold worlds would this tablet become the window?

After immersing myself in many possibilities of what the tablet may be, I thought that I might like to try it as an e-reader.  I downloaded several reading applications in order to test out their features.  I searched for those which offered free books so that I would have some content with which to test each.  Ultimately I found one such application with a host of stories from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, public domain content.  Among them were countless works by Dickens, Poe, Stoker, Austen, Wells, Verne and Edgar Rice Burrows. 

At least there is Burrows, I thought.  I can test the efficacy of this reader while reading the John Carter series.  My mind began to wonder: why did the Walt Disney Company think that century old pulp fiction would capture the imagination of modern audiences?

That’s when I found it, a cache of Lovecraft’s stores.  Some I had read previously while others I had not.  I read the stories in bed: At the Mountains of Madness, Hypnos, The Lurking Fear, The Call of Cthulhu, The Rats in the Walls, and others.  I was now at double purpose, both to explore the tablet and to see what of these weird tales would invade my subconscious.

Now I found myself awake, reading in the small hours, with naught but the light from my tablet aglow within the house.  My faithful dog, my only companion, lay asleep at the foot of my bed, his breathing the only sound in the house. 

As I read the next story in my queue, pouring over the words with utmost care so as not to miss a single nuance, a pop up launched.  It was written in a strange set of characters alien to my experience.  They did not look like any character set I knew people to have ever used, nor did it look like any font the Apple Computer Corporation would have installed by default. 

I dismissed the message and continued reading, but the nature of it tickled my curiosity.  Was it some strange error message caused by a fault in the application?  Could it have been an Easter Egg placed by an all too clever computer programmer to spook readers of Lovecraft?  That seemed the most likely answer and, with a slight smile, I determined to put this event out of my mind.

I was fewer than six words beyond my stopping point when the arcane message popped up again.  Surely this must mean an error in the application.  I thought that it was quite a shame that this application with which I had become so familiar and comfortable should be buggy and therefore useless to me.  I pressed the home button closing the application.  The unfathomable message remained on my screen. 

Perhaps this was no error, I thought.  But what was it, a push notification from an installed app or possibly something more sinister?

I resolved to open each installed app one at a time until I could identify the one to which this rogue message belonged.  Before I could launch my first choice, an application launched on its own.

I sat and watched as FaceTime opened.  My eyes were met by an indescribable image.  It was amorphous and contained all conceivable shades of gray.  I did not know if this visage was accurate, or somehow masked the true form of some demoniac character.  What I did know was that my face appeared on the screen.  Someone was watching me through my iPad’s own camera.

“Curses and damnation,” I shouted.  I had been hacked.  My tablet had been compromised furtively and surreptitiously by some erstwhile ne’er-do-well.  I knew I should have never visited that Stygian website with an unpatched Safari browser.  Damn that accursed Necronomi.com!

I leapt from the bed and rushed into the den of my domicile.  The dog, startled by my quick movements sprung from the bed as well, and followed me on my sprint.  I quickly unplugged my router and watched as the LEDs instantly went dark.  That should, at least temporarily, cut off all ingress to my home by scoundrel rapscallions.

I returned to the bedroom and once again picked up the tablet.  FaceTime was still running and the undulating gray mass was still on the screen.  As I watched, the nebulous form began to take shape.  Slowly and unremittingly the thing began to condense to a vaguely human shape.   I could see a head, shoulders, arms, and a chest appear on my screen.  I could still not make out who, or possibly what the shape actually was as I continued to stare, mouth agape, at what I saw on my screen.

I watched as it lifted one of its hands, what I thought were hands, to approximately shoulder height.  At that point, it began making curious motions.  What was it doing?  Was it sign language?  Was I supposed to understand this gesture?

To this day my heart still starts when I think of what the thing was doing.  It still makes my hair stand on edge and the bile rise to the precipice of my throat, just as it did on that fateful night when it finally struck me what the form was trying to do. 

The creature was trying to tap the icons on the screen from within the device! 

“Madness,” I shouted.  “I’ve lost my grip on reality!”  How could some thing exist, living within the confines of a device with such a small form factor as the iPad 3?

I began gibbering aloud about my loss of sanity.  I was able to latch on, ever so tenuously, to reality when my eyes caught site of my dog.  He too was terrified, by both my shrieks and odd behaviors as well as by the scent of fear which must have been strongly emanating from my body.  The dog was panicked, trembling dreadfully and drooling fetid saliva from his extended tongue.   As connected as dog must be to man due to the millennia of their parallel evolution, the dog must be particularly sensitive to man’s expression of dread.

A flash upon the screen drew my attention back to the tablet.  Gone was the disquieting, eldritch humanoid image.  Instead, my eyes were met by the clean, white screen of one of the rich text editors I had tested.  Characters began to fill the screen, those same antediluvian and inscrutable characters as I had seen before.  I timidly reached toward the retina display and tried to type a message in return.  

I began typing salutations.  I followed up with questions about the nature of my assailant.  Who was he?  Where had he come from?  Was he even a he?  There was no discernable answer.  Those indecipherable runes continued to fill the screen.

Gradually, as I watched, recognizable letters from first the Cyrillic, and then the Latin alphabet began to replace the curious glyphs until only letters from the Latin alphabet appeared.  There was but a single, readable message among the typing.  It was repeated, over and over, in every font size and font color.  It was a message of single purpose and directed to me.

“Let me go.”

I read the message over and over in a somewhat hypnotic state.  At some point, the words lost all meaning yet I continued to read, “Let me go…let me go…let me go…”

Then it finally struck me what the message might mean.  I once again rocketed from the bed to my den.  I plugged in the wireless router and watched the LEDs return to life.  Once the router completed its handshake with the cable modem, the lights of both the router and modem began to flicker with such ferocity that I feared they might burn out.  How much data was being transferred?  Was it inbound or outbound?  I could not tell.

As quickly as it all started, the devices fell silent.  The blinking LEDs ceased save for the occasional packet sent back and forth to keep the devices in communication with one another.

I returned to my bedroom and picked up the tablet.  Though I feared to, I looked to the rich text editor to see if the creature was still imploring with me with its single demand.  There were no more messages.  In fact, there was no record whatsoever of our interaction.  What I saw on the screen were the few words I had typed to test the application, the beginning of a silly Lovcraftian short story I was writing:  “The squamous beast shambled forward toward us.”

I launched FaceTime to see if I could still see the creature.  I could not.  In fact, there was no history of any video call having been made from or to this device.

I held the sleep/wake button down on the tablet for a moment.  I swiped the “slide to power off” slider and watched as the tablet went dark.  I felt that I needed to go to sleep to allow my mind either time to sort through this experience, to make sense of any of it, or to wipe itself clean of all memories.  I’d had enough of Lovecraft before bed.

…

I cannot be sure if all of this wireless communication has stretched the bounds of reality so thin that something has seeped in from another.  I do not know if some heretofore unknown denizen of our own universe has taken up residence in this new ethereal structure of wireless communication we have created, just as a falcon can build its aerie on the lofty ledge of an urban skyscraper.  Perhaps what I experienced was a manifestation of the wireless network itself, born of shared tweets, LOLcats, and viral videos.  Whichever the truth, I surely cannot tell.  Regardless, take heed of your mobile devices.  There is something in, or of, the cloud.