# The Perimeter: Mythos as Science Fiction and other works (part 4 of 4)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [235], part 4 of 4. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: document (Text), 2024-12-27 (from the career record), https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit. Text: document text
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the great powers step (Multipolar Realpolitik, 2024), the latest step.
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Side fiction whose stated origin is the 2008 pandemic worst-case planning; not part of the build plan.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - The Fiends Give Sudden Chase (2011): Five very short horror stories, written after reading Charles Stross's The Atrocity Archives.
  - The Perimeter: Mythos as Science Fiction, and other works (2024): Story collection: worst-case scenario planning meets the Cthulhu Mythos, read as science fiction about...
  - A little insight into the Gupta Doctrine (2014): His "very conservative vision" for global change: six or maybe eight machines everyone on earth should... (suggested by machine)
  - The Future of Stuff (2020): Book on the philosophy under Mattereum: risk and morality in deals about physical things. (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - fiction draws on: The work that fed the fiction.
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - environment / green capitalism: Green economics: from oil efficiency to markets for facts about products. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - standard SKUs: A survival kit built only from standard, mass-produced parts. (through a work suggested by machine)
- Topics: The Perimeter / fiction — immortal species, mythos races, mythos (58%); Fiction-led: Mother of Hydrogen — harry, yevish, president (15%); Fiction-led: Mother of Hydrogen — peter, harry, cadets (12%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: Swarm (17 here; 29 sources in all, earliest dated 2008); The Perimeter (7 here; 9 sources in all, earliest dated 2007, 1 undated); The Fiends Give Sudden Chase (2 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); science fiction (6 here; 37 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); Strategic Air Command (1 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); COVID (2 here; 12 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); pandemic flu (3 here; 32 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated); life support (1 here; 9 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); scenario planning (1 here; 10 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); accounts (2 here; 51 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 1 undated)
- Importance: core-text score 0.43 (1.00 is the top), number 146 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [87] [The Atrocity Archives, and a little new fiction. | The... (2011)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/87.md): same career work: The Fiends Give Sudden Chase
- On the same works, just before: [556] [ETHCC24: 'Selling physical things using NFTs: what we... (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/556.md); [230] [The Man Who Tries to Stop Humanity Destroying Itself (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/230.md); [704] [Vinay Gupta: Liberation, Culture, Conflict and Catastrophe (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/704.md)
- On the same works, just after: [223] [Finding Each other in the Ruins - resilience (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/223.md); [231] [Chit Chat With the Nightmare Destroyer (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/231.md); [545] [Hyper-Liquid Real Estate (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/545.md)

## Reading it

Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it.

Cite as: The Perimeter: Mythos as Science Fiction and other works, document, 2024-12-27, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [235], https://guptaoption.com/texts/235.md.

## Passages, part 4 of 4
[passage 42](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) not some God or Tentacle Godzilla. Us. We’re the monsters, and we need to rein that in. Slow Life: the Immortal Species So let’s straighten this out. I don’t mean make order, but I do mean “make useful science fiction out of pulp horror.” Humans are myths with physical bodies attached. We need much better myths to contain and manage our technological prowess. Fiction is here to help. So let’s make some teams, and tell some stories of our future conflicts. First the intelligent species. There are physical ones, and there are non-physical ones, and there are funny weird things somewhere in between. They’re all animals, even the ones which were made by other species. Shoggoths are people too. The Great Race of Yith and the Deep Ones and the Shoggoths are all functionally-speaking immortal in slightly different ways. Almost anything one encounters in Lovecraftian Deep Time will be immortal, because the probability of showing up at just the right moment and seeing a non-immortal species is as rare in Cosmic Time as seeing a meteor. Time is very, very long for most of the entities in this game. They move as slowly as tectonic plates. Humans are unusual because they are madly, acutely mortal. This is what makes us unique, what makes us special. The Immortal Species can all avoid death for cosmic timescales by avoiding being killed and eaten, but even at our best we get 100 years. We go now! So we are the fleeting ones. The mortals. As befits our status as mortals, we breed like rabbits. The other species are very, very slow to reproduce: either naturally, artificially, or ecologically everything other than humans has the reproductive rate of coal turning into diamond. Therefore their lives are extremely precious and killing them is a huge deal. Earth life in general is fleeting, murderous, and unthinkably fecund. There is nothing else like it in the universe. It is a special jewel. To intelligent Mythos creatures, it is a death world. The monsters are here because this place is unique in their cosmos. It is a Big Deal. But it is incredibly dangerous because they have infinite life spans to lose, and everything in this world is geared for a near-instantaneous “kill, eat, breed, die” cycle which cuts through time like a diamond circular saw blade. They fear it, and they need it. They fear it. They are horrified by it. They find it fascinating. But overwhelming all other reactions is the simple fact: they require certain elements of this ecology to repair their dying species. It might take them two million years to go extinct, but they’re all in the same decline. They have the math. They have the modelling. They have the knowledge. They know their fate. Everything that is Immortal is below replacement. The mythos species all know they are going extinct in a million or eight million years. They have outlived the places that made them and search the eternal universe for a

[passage 43](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) they’re all in the same decline. They have the math. They have the modelling. They have the knowledge. They know their fate. Everything that is Immortal is below replacement. The mythos species all know they are going extinct in a million or eight million years. They have outlived the places that made them and search the eternal universe for a solution to their ageless decline. Nearly all life in the universe is Slow Life. In this model the Deep Ones are not earth natives. They’ve been here a long, long time enjoying the benefits of the ecology of a Fast Life world. But under optimal circumstances it takes 15,000 years for their population to double. Usually they struggle to maintain replacement numbers because the planet they evolved in is long-dead; likely killed by their own folly. They’re going out by degrees, except here, but their hybrids are unstable and murderous. The deep water city dwelling civilized Deep Ones are refugees, and a slowly dying race. Their universe no longer quite fits their biology. Most of their cultural efforts are going into not going extinct because they’re struggling hard to make replacement numbers up, eon after eon. Their homeworld is not only long dead, but long lost. And all the immortal beings are like this. The species which evolve or engineer immortality basically cease to reproduce and it requires huge technical effort to make up numbers. All of them have outlived all the other species in their original ecologies and are now alone and slowly degrading. Every long, long life matters to them. We humans kill like there is no tomorrow because there is no tomorrow for us. We can make up our lost numbers immediately, and we’re going to be dead in the blink of an eye anyway. Nothing to lose. Guts and glory! The Mythos universe finds this unthinkably horrific and their very cells, stable for thousands of years, rebel against it. Growth, the way we do it, is cancer to species that want to maintain a single body in a single mind for eternity. We’re like some semi-sentient infection: a cancer with the printing press. Earth’s Fast Life is the potential source of genetic renewal for the various Immortal Species. But to them being here is like sticking their hands into a roaring furnace: the rate of change in this world is a fire which constantly threatens to consume them. The War of the Worlds contingency. Even worse, Earth is potentially also the source of a future Hegemonizing Swarm, an explosion of humans in space ships which grows to hundreds of trillions of beings in a momentary explosion of Life, sweeping all before it. They fear this potentiality: their own life cycles cannot survive contact with such a swarm. They can’t breed fast enough to fight a swarm. The Mythos cultures know the universe has been hit by several such swarms in its history, all wiped out either before or after they exterminated whatever Slow Life was before

[passage 44](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) of Life, sweeping all before it. They fear this potentiality: their own life cycles cannot survive contact with such a swarm. They can’t breed fast enough to fight a swarm. The Mythos cultures know the universe has been hit by several such swarms in its history, all wiped out either before or after they exterminated whatever Slow Life was before them in that era. There are very few eye-witness accounts. All the Mythos cultures know, usually from their own experience, that sustaining Fast Life requires an entire ecosystem: they left theirs behind. Simply trying to take a single Fast Life species and keep it alive outside of its ecological context for 200,000 years to study it and stabilize it is a scientific impossibility. Fast Life is not in a single species. Fast Life is a team sport. We are only valuable to the Mythos as an ecosystem. They Need All of Us Alive On Earth, Slow Life and Fast Life meet. It is an incredibly high stakes game: we could get exterminated. Aliens could figure out how to use our ecosystem and genes to make up their numbers or even fix their long term biological problems. We could break out technologically, and erupt across the cosmos, killing all of them. We’re not there yet. The Stars Are Not Yet Right. But when they are Right, the Hegemonizing Swarm of Fast Life from Earth – maybe humans, more likely our robots or some hybrid combination, or maybe even some sentient diseases or less imaginable hybrid biological output – could sweep across the cosmos exterminating everything it finds. The intelligent Mythos races are watching the situation like hawks. Destabilizing the situation further, if one of the Mythos species extracts a usable Fast Life biological fix for their falling numbers, they themselves could become that Hegemonizing Swarm: a Mythos species with its ancient knowledge, and the reproductive rate of mammals. This is not a new problem. It has happened before. Everything has happened before. The Great Alone Ones The Earth is also home to the sole survivors of entirely unknown alien species and cultures who are incomprehensible, either driven insane by the isolation over millions of years, or beyond the understanding of anything else alive, including the other Mythos species, because the entire frame of reference for their species has been washed away by eternity. What remains are biggest, toughest, most dangerous remnants of species which spent forty million years going extinct. Beings that watched the light going out: 80 left, and no young for half a million years. Then sixteen. Then four. Then one. Cthulhu came here looking for a way of recreating its species. Cthulhu is alone: the last. Unthinkable capability and power, but so bitter, angry, and dangerous that they tied him down with magic and penned him up in R'lyeh while they figure out what to do with him. The Deep Ones and the Migo are pretty much identical to earth life, when compared by Cthulhu. The Mythos races

[passage 45](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) recreating its species. Cthulhu is alone: the last. Unthinkable capability and power, but so bitter, angry, and dangerous that they tied him down with magic and penned him up in R'lyeh while they figure out what to do with him. The Deep Ones and the Migo are pretty much identical to earth life, when compared by Cthulhu. The Mythos races are unthinkably alien to earth life from our perspective, but the genetic and metabolic gulf between them and us is an infinitesimal fraction of the gap between them and Cthulhu or any of the other Great Alone Ones, the immoral gods who outlived their own immortal species. The Great Alone Ones apply gentle and yet unthinkably enormous pressure to the Deep Ones and the Migo to figure this out and give them usable research on earth Fast Life which they can use to start their own research programmes and attempt the revival of their own dead species, or at least some imitation of it which makes them less alone in an uncaring universe. Many of the Great Alone Ones have done this unsatisfactorily many times, and either continue to herd along the little plasticine robots they made, or abandoned, or wiped out in a rage. Not one Great Alone One has pulled it off as yet, but what choice do they have but to keep trying? They have eternity. Human beings may be the result of such creature-making – who is the God who made us in its own image? Perhaps our lonely creator died here, killed by another who was jealous of its successes? Maybe it was driven off and may yet return. One interesting angle here is humans from the far future, and from parallel earths, providing aid, reassurance, and instruction. Of course no such beings could be trusted, the Yithians are instructive in this matter, but. If there are timelines in which humanity itself succeeds in surviving long enough to become a Mythos race with incredible access to spacetime (here, think Q) they could be protecting us here just as the Yithians protect their own chosen timelines. Humans have few friends in this story. Humans from the future, humans from sideways, Mythos-level creatures which evolved from us and so on are all potential sources of “light” and hope. Somebody is sending back these helpful Terminators. Fast Life has friends in the future perhaps. Earth as Mythos Apocalypse The discovery of Fast Life here was, once, a closely guarded secret. Now Earth is flooded with Great Alone Ones, their emissaries, and Slow Life immortal races. All bring their ancient histories of cooperation, collaboration, and the woven fabrics of collective conflict avoidance, in the name of protecting the lives of entire races of functionally immortal beings. They also bring the memories of war between immortals. That’s why this place continues to exist. Earth is like a deep ocean vent with heat and nutrients roaring out of a rift in the very fabric of time. Life itself pours through, as

[passage 46](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) collective conflict avoidance, in the name of protecting the lives of entire races of functionally immortal beings. They also bring the memories of war between immortals. That’s why this place continues to exist. Earth is like a deep ocean vent with heat and nutrients roaring out of a rift in the very fabric of time. Life itself pours through, as dangerous as radioactivity. Something is going to happen here. Something is going to happen here soon. And the stakes are much higher than the survival of humans. Everything on, in, or around Earth is in danger. Cthulhu is in peril. The Migo are in peril. The Ghouls are in peril. If Fast Life here stops, most of those races will go extinct before the next opportunity for renewal. The Deep Ones will continue to bleed out over the next few million years. The Migo a lot more slowly, but with far less hope. What do the Ghouls eat after we die out? Rocks? Who dreams the dreamlands if not humanity? Everything is dependent on a source of Life. But the most likely outcome, and it has happened so often before, is a Hegemonizing Swarm erupts from the Fast Life world and the surrounding species erase it from history with apocalyptic violence to protect themselves from the Swarm, while knowing they themselves may be doomed to extinction because they have killed their only current hope of renewal. Maybe one of those species becomes the Swarm: the Migo crack it and their population explodes and they drive their enemies before them. Or maybe it’s us. Or the robots. Or we strip a couple of dead Deep Ones down to the atoms, and eventually figure out immortality. We don’t stop breeding in the process of becoming immortal, and boom a Swarm erupts. Here we go again. Poker at the End of the Universe At the end of the day, it’s just a game. This treatment of the Mythos solves a huge number of narrative problems that are implicit in the Mythos stories: the universe is truly gigantic and yet this backwater is jam-packed with Great Old Ones who have somehow not managed to completely wreck the place yet? There’s only one of many of the most important species in the game. Everything is ancient, cruel, unique, and alone. Now we know how they all got that way. The outlived first their ecosystem, then their entire species. There is nothing left. So we makers of games must bundle it into a single question: what is the future of Earth’s life? That’s the table stakes in Mythos games. Great question: we need a future. Our own Hegemonizing Swarm tendencies have eaten the seas and are working, right now, on eating both the jungles and the future of our own species. This is getting pretty horrific if you are paying attention, which most people are not. So we tell a story in which the Earth has not (yet) been wiped bare by the Mythos species or

[passage 47](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) own Hegemonizing Swarm tendencies have eaten the seas and are working, right now, on eating both the jungles and the future of our own species. This is getting pretty horrific if you are paying attention, which most people are not. So we tell a story in which the Earth has not (yet) been wiped bare by the Mythos species or the Great Old Ones, and in which a fragile and delicate balance of power and ecology of long term immortal species interests and fears for their own extinction is all that’s keeping us alive. Earth’s most likely fate is that we or one of the Mythos species digging through Earth’s DNA and organism menagerie shows unmistakable signs of being the next Swarm. They, everything else on earth, is annihilated to stop the Swarm. But until then the chess game: maybe the fertility increases are gradual and the balance of power is maintained as different entities figure out how to fix their own problems. Maybe espionage on more successful rivals helps keep the peace by maintaining the balance. The humans are not yet immortal but every biological scrap they scrape off a Mythos candy wrapper takes them one step closer. Maybe they can join the club without becoming a Swarm in the process. Maybe the Mythos critters could negotiate with the first few thousand immortal humans to keep the rest of the human species reproduction in check, preventing the Swarm and permitting long-term study of the Fast Life ecosystem here. The humans working towards that deal are lethal villains, who believe themselves to be eternal saviours. Or perhaps the reverse is true. Either way, they could make terrible antagonists: allied to monsters, but working for all life on earth, totally certain and logically bound to their evil cause. We wind up with a game setting which is a bit like Cold City (by Malcolm Craig) which was set in Mythos Berlin during the Cold War. Everything is on edge, a super-delicate balance of powers which could erupt into Hot War (also by Malcolm Craig) and the destruction of the fabric of reality. What holds the mythos critters in check is that their own long-term survival rests on their ability to capture the magic of Fast Life, extract from it a single golden thread, weave that into the fabric of their own being, and renew the future of their species. Then they can kill us all so nobody else can follow them. It’s still the Mythos. Still, two things have changed in this Mythos retelling. Firstly, humanity have the potential to become another Mythos race: we got nuclear weapons, we’re working on immortality. We can breed them into extinction if we have enough technology to hold our own for as little as a few centuries. Their diplomatic balance of power and desire to avoid war with each-other and permanent death for themselves as individuals, and maybe their whole species, means they may sit on their hands just long enough for us to

[passage 48](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) immortality. We can breed them into extinction if we have enough technology to hold our own for as little as a few centuries. Their diplomatic balance of power and desire to avoid war with each-other and permanent death for themselves as individuals, and maybe their whole species, means they may sit on their hands just long enough for us to sneak ahead and exterminate them in a few hundred years. Fast Life is extremely dangerous to a creature which remembers half a million years of Monday mornings. They just can’t adapt to the pace: they are chess grand masters defusing a ticking biological time bomb from which they hope to harvest some golden wire. Our numbers and speed are so dangerous. Secondly, there is a concrete balance of power which contains the Great Old Ones, now rendered as the sole survivors of their ancient (and perhaps once noble?) species. They keep each-other in check because they all need something from us and they do not want to die. The Sole Survivors Club is a darkness to which no sentient being would ever wish to become confined and, of course, most beings in that position have committed suicide in the heart of stars hundreds of millions of years ago. Only the most absolutely relentless ones, with the strongest fear of death, have survived into the present. In this treatment, the unthinkable horrors remain unthinkable and remain horrors. Now they have clearer motivations and origin stories which make them dramatically more terrifying and horrendous than they were before. They’re not just there and hungry – if that is all there was to them they would have eaten us already, for sure. Cthulhu’s tied down right now, but the Mythos landscape is crawling with immortal horrors who could end us all. Something should have eaten us by now. Now we know what holds back that day: their fear of each-other keeps us alive. So now we have a story. They are alone. They are terrified of death, having evaded it for tens of millions of years. The only reason we are still here is because they want to recreate a shadow of their past glories, when they were members of a society, not drooling horrors that have not seen a familiar face in 20 million years. I find this Cthulhu much more frightening than the one who just has a sore head and likes to eat people for food. These terrors from the stars now have coherent, if fragile, reasons for leaving us alive and those reasons are somewhat like the Mythos races in general – Fast Life harvesting. But there is also deterrence. The Great Alone Ones can die as the rest of their species did and if they mess up the situation here their peers will end them. They are ruled only by aloneness and fear, they have no reason to fear us, but they fear death more intensely than any being that has ever existed and that fear has kept

[passage 49](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) deterrence. The Great Alone Ones can die as the rest of their species did and if they mess up the situation here their peers will end them. They are ruled only by aloneness and fear, they have no reason to fear us, but they fear death more intensely than any being that has ever existed and that fear has kept them alive and alone for tens of millions of years. Cosmic horror is not just for humans. That fear-based motivation, and that balance of power and that credible threat restore a narrative integrity to the Cthulhu Mythos. Now even the Great Old Ones live in constant terror. Hell is complete. The Mythos has always had a sense of watching reality sliding off a cliff, but nothing ever seems to hit the ground – The Stars Are Never Right and somehow we keep slipping through? There has never been a satisfying answer to why humanity manages to continue to exist in the Mythos. Now we know. A fragile balance of power protects us. Humanity still exists because when Tsathoggua has grown frustrated at how incredibly formless and disappointing The Spawn are and is just about ready to sweep the board clean in a blind rage, the Star Vampires gently remind Tsathoggua that he’s entitled by treaty to eat whatever he likes as long as the humans don’t get startled, notice what is going on, nuke the hell out of him, and start looking for the rest, forcing the confrontation which could well lead to the extinction of more than half of the remaining intelligent life in the universe by the time everything is said and done over the ten or twenty million years the resulting wars take to play out. Fear keeps the peace. Fear keeps us alive. Their fear. ________________ Endgame If it all goes wrong humanity gets winked out of existence in the blink of an eye, tens or even hundreds of millions of people and entire ecosystems will get yanked away into other dimensions as Mythos factions try and grab a working subset of the Fast Life ecosystem to continue to study and extract knowledge from. They will rip the Earth apart to try and preserve their access to some living piece of it, thereby ensuring Earth’s total annihilation, should the day come. In this doom, Earth is literally torn apart dimensionally and the apocalyptic destruction makes the Rise of Dread Cthulhu look fairly pleasant by comparison. Make no mistake this is worse than the regular mythos ending if things go wrong and it all blows out. The downside endgame risk is highly satisfactory: the earth is shattered into shards as the Mythos races and Great Old Ones and Elder Gods and whatever else all try to capture enough of the Fast Life ecosystem alive to continue to study after the Earth itself is dead, thereby ensuring the Earth’s total and utter destruction from dimensional shattering. Surviving fragments are yanked into other dimensions, where they are kept artificially

[passage 50](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) into shards as the Mythos races and Great Old Ones and Elder Gods and whatever else all try to capture enough of the Fast Life ecosystem alive to continue to study after the Earth itself is dead, thereby ensuring the Earth’s total and utter destruction from dimensional shattering. Surviving fragments are yanked into other dimensions, where they are kept artificially alive as long as possible, in little glass bottles, time loops, and vortexes. Carcosa is an example. Humanity’s moves in the face of this scenario are pretty limited: nuclear deterrence against a few, weaker things. Balance-of-power partial cooperation with things which might be less immediately lethal as we buy time. Dodgy deals with various species for samples and bases. Slow-walking our end of potentially-lethal technology and knowledge transfers. Fostering blood feuds between Mythos rivals where specific individuals are still exchanging recriminations about genocidal decisions made a million years ago. Feeding their bitterness. But this treatment also opens up a tiny window of potential survival: some of us become immortals, and we negotiate our way into the Mythos balance of political power, granting limited access to Fast Life tech under our control. We become players and the balance of power puts a stable roof over Earth’s future while we grow to our full stature as a mythos species. That’s centuries of work to get to the first full step on that ladder. Very bad people would do very bad things to protect even the slimmest possibility of that outcome. Especially if they or their kids might be the immortals. Very bad things. Then there are a variety of sell-out options, like the deal with the Greys once was. Different factions, different masters, maybe it works this time. Maybe if humans can’t be in charge, they can negotiate themselves into sheep pens. Parts of this cosmic horror struggle are played out on human timescales, and we can beat the Mythos on human timescales. They take five years to make a decision about where to go for “coffee.” They can’t understand how fast our minds mutate. We are fast, and relentlessly, recklessly violent. We risk our lives and die in waves. They can’t match any of this. We can win a few tactical victories because we are moving fast, ignoring the risk of death, and on our own ground. So humanity’s hope is that Mythos internal politics, slowness, and their history itself ties them in knots just enough for us to wriggle out from under their thumbs. Over time perhaps we can slowly increase our understanding and agency. Maybe we can hold the line. Until The Stars Are Right. Then they kill us, or we kill them, or the entire game moves to some unimaginable new equilibrium after Earth is shattered apart. This is a good place to tell cosmic horror stories. We have upped the stakes of the game. The horror is more cosmic. Still the mythos. Still a cosmic horror situation. But now the monsters are in the same damn mess

[passage 51](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) or we kill them, or the entire game moves to some unimaginable new equilibrium after Earth is shattered apart. This is a good place to tell cosmic horror stories. We have upped the stakes of the game. The horror is more cosmic. Still the mythos. Still a cosmic horror situation. But now the monsters are in the same damn mess we are in: alone, and afraid. This is progress. Nothing escapes the net. This retelling of the Mythos cosmology presents a cosmic horror situation with a coherent and vaguely plausible reason for the human race and earth to still exist, which speaks to modern concerns like ecology and the rise of AI and longevity drugs, and which permits a variety of incredibly nasty factional conflict stories to be told, with representatives of the human race caught in horrific high-stakes crossfire in which they have just enough power to get the earth torn apart in a series of dimensional rifts as the Mythos forces rip Earth apart like Hyenas eating pizza. And I saw this, and called it good. ________________ The Second Sun Twelve million years ago our fathers set their sails. Clad in flesh hung on bone steered by brain. Then as metal they crossed abyssal time in search of their abiding new-found home. There are no oceans in deep space and water is as hard to find as love. Feinting fire, sling in toward the star, seeking that place where the word is to be made flesh. Aeons deep they found our home and reassembled Man, one atom at a time, and Woman beside him. Slowly they came from the womb of the machine. Faltering steps, then a torrent, millions re-enrobed. Souls of silicon restored to breathing life, old frames then stood as building beam and pillar. Fresh nerve and spines as open as the skies, now attune the mind and flesh with wonder. ________________ Acknowledgements Thanks to all the makers and players of this great game, and to the evolutionary biologists and transhumanists and horror authors who have inspired me over the years. Do please feel encouraged to build anything you like on top of this treatment and set of ideas, and please don’t feel compelled to credit me, although I’d love to know what you are working on – culture is an enormous soup and I’m indebted to a series of influences over the years in the creation of this text. One request for help: somebody in the archaic darkness of the past did a Cthulhu-in-Space treatment which treated the entire thing as straight-up science fiction with a functioning economy. The Ghouls were asteroid miners who worked in exchange for corpses, the Shoggoths did heavy industry and had a Union. The Bhyakee did logistics. I think the Migo were the dominant species and they basically had a sort of service economy around them: humans were just another set of hands turning the industrial machinery of Space-faring Civilizations. This has to be 15 or 20 years ago. If

[passage 52](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) in exchange for corpses, the Shoggoths did heavy industry and had a Union. The Bhyakee did logistics. I think the Migo were the dominant species and they basically had a sort of service economy around them: humans were just another set of hands turning the industrial machinery of Space-faring Civilizations. This has to be 15 or 20 years ago. If that rings a bell and anybody knows the author or has the web pages archived, I would be most grateful if you could let me know. It was revelatory to me at the time. Thanks! Life will find a way. Hopefully a way that includes whales, humans, horseshoe crabs, and the rest of our Fast Life ecosystem.

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End of [235] The Perimeter: Mythos as Science Fiction and other works, part 4 of 4. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
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