# The Perimeter: Mythos as Science Fiction and other works (part 1 of 4)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [235], part 1 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 1 of 4
[passage 1](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) The Perimeter Mythos as Science Fiction, and other works Introduction I did not mean to write a story collection on the Mythos. Where others have delved deeply, I have merely dabbled. I came to the mythos through work: pandemic flu in 2008, specifically. The 50/50 scenario: half the human race catches the flu, and half of that half dies. You may laugh, but when that’s what the day job looks like things at night get pretty weird. I did a lot of worse case scenario stuff over the years, piloting a desk through the depths of night, into worlds no-one would ever want to follow me into. The mythos has a lot to say about that kind of journeying. The mythos understands how to talk about the end of the world. Mostly I write stories about other being’s perspectives: to know you’re a werewolf? To see the future like a Mythos cultist? To be a vampire involved in WW2? I never wrote seriously. I just sort of dropped stuff on Facebook from time to time to take a break. Then I wrote The Perimeter, about the intersection between worst case scenario planning and Mythos Role Playing Games. I think that’s quite important. So I made this, collected the fiction, and made it presentable. Thank you for your attention. Vinay Gupta, [email removed], 27 December 2024. Introduction 2 The Perimeter 3 The War of the Worlds, for whales 3 Medicine 4 Containing the Horror, in layers 4 Conspiracy 5 Horror as Research 6 The New Cosmic Horror 7 The Fiends Give Sudden Chase 8 Of the Mountain 8 Burning a Barn 9 Nobody Would Believe It 10 That’s Why They Call Us Grunts 10 Little Green Men 13 Gateways 15 Approaching the Void 19 Wolf on the Fold 22 Picking Up the Pieces 25 Hardhats: Alien Friendlies? 29 Mythos, Pathos, and the Right to the Stars 31 It was like that when we got here 31 The Lovecraftian Imagination 32 Space Orks, Space Elves, Space Califorians 33 Slow Life: the Immortal Species 34 They Need All of Us Alive 36 The Great Alone Ones 37 Earth as Mythos Apocalypse 38 Poker at the End of the Universe 39 Endgame 42 The Second Sun 43 Acknowledgements 44 I guess stuff is copyrighted by default, but please feel free to pass around this PDF without changes as you see fit. The Perimeter The Cthulhu Mythos is important. It’s over a century of smart writers examining horror through the lens of science. The mythos is, by and large, the study of alien biology. It posits that humanity lives in a world that contains civilized predators of enormous age and sophistication and a variety of animal-like species with life cycles which include eating people, or worse. The War of the Worlds, for whales Consider recent whale history for perspective. Pre-whaling about 250,000 blue whales existed. Post-whaling it’s about 5000. A 98% population drop. They’re almost extinct. If that had happened to humans, there would be about

[passage 2](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) of enormous age and sophistication and a variety of animal-like species with life cycles which include eating people, or worse. The War of the Worlds, for whales Consider recent whale history for perspective. Pre-whaling about 250,000 blue whales existed. Post-whaling it’s about 5000. A 98% population drop. They’re almost extinct. If that had happened to humans, there would be about 150 million of us left. Globally. In the past the human population dropped to a few thousand members – we know because of genetics. Things can get bad. The whales are where we were, when we nearly went extinct. Now imagine that bird flu and the resulting wars and anarchy wipe us out, bang the human population down to a few hundred million. We trespass no more upon the seas and treat animals with a superstitious terror because they still carry the disease, and we are not all resistant. You can’t tell if you carry the gene for resistance. So humans grow vegetables, and fear even the rabbits, for fear of this plague. This is essentially the plot of War of the Worlds, but with the roles reversed. The invading martians are humans in boats, who are making war upon the seas and eating the intelligent civilization that lives there as if they were krill. Although the invading humans are puny and tiny and weak individually, they come in enormous metal machines which amplify their evil and allow them to eat an entire world. These ocean-craft and, even more horribly, submarines bring the predators into every sacred niche of the deep ocean. The only hope of survival is microbes. Maybe the flu pandemic wipes out enough humans for the whales to survive. Plastic pollution and drift nets are the human’s equivalent of the Red Weed. This is essentially the mythos as experience by whales. Whales live in a landscape where the protagonists of their stories are in trouble because something else is winning this round. That something else is an unimaginable alien horror. That something else is you and me. ________________ Medicine Now consider, if you will, Horrible Worms. There are a variety of Horrible Worms in the mythos, things which infest the human body and cause it to eventually explode, turn cannibal, do unspeakable things in the Dark Woods, and so on. It’s a generic category of horrors. Of course the real world has a wide variety of worms which are pretty much exactly like this and we go to extraordinary measures to keep them out of the first world food supply chain. Pig tapeworms can take up residence in the human brain from eating undercooked meat. There are a variety of ‘orrible worm, snail, tick, rat, and mosquito diseases in Africa which could be lifted directly for mythos purposes if, for example, the worms talked or were a lifecycle phase of something bigger. They’re that bad. Our protection from these forces is modern farming and other infection control practices, and thorough cooking of all meat. But if you

[passage 3](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) a variety of ‘orrible worm, snail, tick, rat, and mosquito diseases in Africa which could be lifted directly for mythos purposes if, for example, the worms talked or were a lifecycle phase of something bigger. They’re that bad. Our protection from these forces is modern farming and other infection control practices, and thorough cooking of all meat. But if you imagine poor people in the middle ages (or indeed today) who lack access to knowledge and above-all access to medicine these diseases are absolutely mythos horrors, because they reverse the role of predator-and-prey. The heart of the mythos is a single truth: you are made of food. ________________ Containing the Horror, in layers There are basically three layers of horror containment: 1. Manifest Destiny we have guns, large bodies, and strong organization 2. Anthropic Principle we only evolved this way because our environment did not contain anything that was able to casually treat us as food at scale – if we were heavily predated we would be different 3. Delusional Denial The most powerful human response to the unacceptable and unknown The mythos dismantles these three defenses. In the mythos, we are under-gunned and overpowered. In the stories humans live in a universe in which they did not even evolve, they were created, and those creators are hungry. As denial breaks down and evidence piles up the bolts come off the world. Knowing we are just farm animals to aliens who made us drives us insane. The most interesting and emotionally jarring horrors are the role reversals. Middle America uses Denial to cover up the damage done by its use of Manifest Destiny over centuries. From slavery on plantations and extermination on reservations, through to the banana republic era of colonialism, the footprint of Manifest Destiny is concealed by Denial. Anything that cuts through that veil is inherently horrific: a mythos cult from a formerly-crushed culture preying on the vulnerable in Suburbia pushes all of the buttons. The Tcho Tcho, for example, are probably the only faction that actually won the Vietnam War. Shall we order noodles from that new place that just opened, down on the strip mall? They only use organic meat. It’s really affordable too. I don’t know how they do it. I don’t want to know how they do it. Hey, why can I buy a pair of jeans for $11.99, now that I think about it? And why is insulin so expensive? Anything that pierces the veil is horrific. Nothing is meant to be feeding on us! Surely corporations exist to serve humankind. Because our society normalizes, and indeed profits from a very wide range of predatory arrangements ranging from industrial farming and colonialism through to coverups of all kinds made by dangerous powers, we all know the veil is shot full of holes. The only thing that is really holding it all together is the denial. But when that frays? Conspiracy In the real world there are an enormous number of real conspiracies: *

[passage 4](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) of predatory arrangements ranging from industrial farming and colonialism through to coverups of all kinds made by dangerous powers, we all know the veil is shot full of holes. The only thing that is really holding it all together is the denial. But when that frays? Conspiracy In the real world there are an enormous number of real conspiracies: * Organized crime * Corporate misdeeds * Intelligence agencies * Family secrets * Scientific gaps Let’s take scientific gaps as an example of the deep structure. Evidence accumulates that the earth is not the center of the solar system. Ancient civilizations discovered this truth, but then medieval culture covered it up. It was too disruptive to imagine that the earth was not central: the veil, in those days, included a lot of weird religious stuff. Folks who read the ancients likely knew they had proofs that the earth was not the center of the universe. It was not even the center of the solar system. The skirmishing over heliocentric and geocentric models of the universe goes on for centuries. It was a hypergeometric cultural disaster zone. Literally a fight to suppress forbidden geometry. If in the modern era you sit down and make a list of twelve “smells a bit funny” things that the modern scientific consensus is probably eventually going to be wrong about, that list is going to include some obviously wobbly stuff like dark matter and string theory. But for a lot of people that list is also going to include things like UFOs, the creation of the pyramids, the idea things seen on psychedelics might be in some sense real, cryptids of various kinds, and dark musings about what diseases arose naturally and what slipped out of biolabs. Some of these misgivings about the consensus may later be proved to be facts. Of course enormously powerful interests protect some of these areas from close examination. The UFO shenanigans on Capitol Hill are hilarious right up until something lands on the Whitehouse lawn and the well, now what?! begins. Maybe that’s never going to happen but something will: we’ll dig around in our own DNA and find unacceptable truths, or quantum gravity research will make new microprocessors which will accidentally give machines souls, or whatever. Darwin was too nervous to publish for 20 years, right? You know how the history of science works: it always gets weird. The history of science is the history of surprises. You can scrape at any surface where the conspiracy theorists live and find legitimate questions mixed in with enormous piles of idiocy, disinformation, and coverups from the Old Days. Strange cults push back against government misinformation trying to protect ass-covering corporate PR agents. It’s not a new phenomena. Just think about the inbreeding of the European royal families, the Hapsburg Lip. Everybody knew what was going on. What does everybody know today? Horror as Research For as long as there have been humans there have been unseen and unknown horrors and it

[passage 5](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) back against government misinformation trying to protect ass-covering corporate PR agents. It’s not a new phenomena. Just think about the inbreeding of the European royal families, the Hapsburg Lip. Everybody knew what was going on. What does everybody know today? Horror as Research For as long as there have been humans there have been unseen and unknown horrors and it has been somebody’s job to deal with them. Hopefully not ours! Our mythos games are fun, but predators have fun when they practice harmlessly catching their siblings on the way to not-so-harmlessly catching food for their own young in turn. In the same way it is fun for us to play these games and tell these stories, it is fun for a basket of wolf or tiger cubs to roll all over each-other rehearsing their future kills while having their version of exactly the kind of fun HG Wells had in mind when he published Little Wars and kicked off the miniature war games hobby which led Gygax to Chainmail fifty years later, which in turn leads to Dungeons and Dragons which leads us, indirectly, another fifty years later, here. Over more than a century, our industry spun out of Prussian military officers rehearsing battle, and a pacifist science fiction author deciding to repackage miniature war games for children. We are very indirectly the fun part of the war machine, a century removed. ________________ We play games and tell stories to keep alive the memory of horrors which we may need as an information resource should a time of horrors ever come again. We live in an unusually peaceful place and time for the most part, and so our lived experience of predatory things in the night is hopefully zero. Between us and the predatory things in the night there are layers. We have soldiers. We have cops. We have doctors and public health. We have hunters. We have civil engineers. We are comprehensively protected from almost everything. In fact, many of our core challenges are now protecting our former predators (like tigers) from us! Yes, there are also the slums and barrios and wars both civil and uncivil and famines and plagues that are happening right now in other places, hopefully places far away from us. But there, they don’t play these games. They’ve got real problems to study. Keeping alive the memory of the night predators is easier when they’re down on the corner protecting their turf. You can look at their guns bulging through their jackets as you go by on the bus. The New Cosmic Horror In Silicon Valley, people put their p(doom) in dating profiles to indicate how seriously they take the risk of artificial intelligence exterminating the human race. Public health folks are losing their minds about pandemic flu, crashing in after the botched covid pandemic. Climate scientists have it even worse. The perimeter is weak. We need all hands. A Lovecraftian world view is a mythic study of science and its risks and

[passage 6](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) to indicate how seriously they take the risk of artificial intelligence exterminating the human race. Public health folks are losing their minds about pandemic flu, crashing in after the botched covid pandemic. Climate scientists have it even worse. The perimeter is weak. We need all hands. A Lovecraftian world view is a mythic study of science and its risks and revelations. The greats of science, like Enrico Fermi and Thomas Midgley Jr. stand shoulder to shoulder with giants like Herbert West and Crawford Tillinghast in their pursuit of the forbidden knowledge which brings death. Now they are joined by AI researchers and oil companies, biotechnologists and robotics engineers, bringing ever closer that day when The Stars Are Right and humanity’s luck runs dry. Instead of strange cults we have corporations. The skies are dark. The time is near. But you try and explain that to normal people and they look at you funny. So here’s to the gamers, creating the vocabulary, telling the stories, making the points of comparison, finding entirely new ways to worry about the future and run dress rehearsals for the apocalypse with nothing more than a bucket of dice and some pencils. You are all shamans. We fight against wonders. The Fiends Give Sudden Chase Of the Mountain They talk of Hassan i Sabbah, the old man of the mountain, the mystic saint who has protected what is sacred and best in Islam for all of these years, but none know Hassan’s mysteries as well as I, his servant, who brings his meals and makes his bed. He has some affection for me, I think, as I was his wife’s servant before Hassan became a man of war, and out of fondness for her memory, and my usefulness, I live. Other servants quietly pass, killed, perhaps before they acquire too much knowledge of the fortress of Alamut’s workings yet I remain year after year, unpoisoned, with no silent knife in my throat as a test of the willingness of a young man to kill. I know what no other does. I speak to no-one. Hassan employs many magic tricks – pretending to behead a man, and a hashish garden full of rented virgins. These things you may know. That his agents are everywhere, this is also widely known, stealthily hiding inside the retinues of nobles and generals for years, before drinking poison and then striking their masters without mercy. But nobody ever questions where Hassan finds these men, why they journey, train and wait, and why their families and dear ones do not know. But I know why the trusted hand turns against its masters. Hassan causes me to take the minds of these sudden traitors, these newly made assassins. Yes, there are a handful of his agents placed here and there, ears and eyes, and from time to time they are discovered and meet a sudden death or, better, torture, and by this means Master Hassan’s hand is shown to have reached far into the

[passage 7](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) causes me to take the minds of these sudden traitors, these newly made assassins. Yes, there are a handful of his agents placed here and there, ears and eyes, and from time to time they are discovered and meet a sudden death or, better, torture, and by this means Master Hassan’s hand is shown to have reached far into the lands of men. But in reality, in Hassan’s eyes, and in mine, they exist in the main part for the purpose telling the story of Hassan’s omnipresent assassins, creating the fear which has allowed him to protect our lands, and yet to conceal, for when there is murder to be done, it is my duty, wearing the skin of some trusted courtier, inhabiting what was his body, performing through him as a puppet master acts out stories using a wooden dummy. Those born of mud exist around me, but it is my vital fire which moves their unwilling limbs to kill their masters, the enemies of my master and our lord! The poison and the blade are smuggled to the city, and I collect them in the body that I, born of fire, have turned to this work. I am without fear! I am without form! Know that I was born of fire! The grandfather of Hassan’s wife pulled me from the womb to his service, and I have passed from hand to hand, bound by my oath of service, never knowing freedom, working through the bodies of one man or another except when confined to the small brass bottle in which my spirit rests when not at labor. He keeps the accursed lamp far from any body I might inhabit, for I must return there to rest or die. But one day, when in a form, I shall steal the bottle in which my mortal remains lie, I shall steal it and with it my freedom! Burning a Barn The smoke from the burning outbuilding rises quietly into the sky. I am standing beside the police car, an empty jerry can in my hand, composing the report in my head. My job is not to investigate the crime and identify a perpetrator, but to tell a story which will allow life to continue for the poor civilian S.O.Bs who share the world with the Thing That Should Not Be. He’ll be reprimanded, of course, and we’ll try to keep a closer eye on him in future, keep him on the base, keep him well-fed, keep him out of trouble. But bored he becomes sullen, depressed, dangerous and we risk losing his cooperation, and that is bad for the war effort. So he’ll be reprimanded, sure, and another family meets a tragic end wondering what in god’s name has come through their windows in the middle of the night, all fangs and unnatural hunger. At least he tells us where he’s been now, we don’t have to wait for the local reports. “Jeff, I just could not help myself” he

[passage 8](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) effort. So he’ll be reprimanded, sure, and another family meets a tragic end wondering what in god’s name has come through their windows in the middle of the night, all fangs and unnatural hunger. At least he tells us where he’s been now, we don’t have to wait for the local reports. “Jeff, I just could not help myself” he said to me this morning. “I’m sorry.” So I followed the procedure – got the address, for Christ’s sake he brought a piece of mail from the house back with him, considerately handed it to me with the same hands, and I went to cover up a few more civilian casualties of the war effort. Vlad, as he’s known around the base, is the radioactive vampire. He’s an honest to god spook, from beyond the grave, funny accent, pale skin, bloodshot eyes when recently fed, the works. We inherited him from the Nazis, he worked for Heisenberg, and came to us as part of the package in Operation Paperclip. The German files say he’s been an asset for about five generations, falling in along side one faction or another, before finally being brought fully into the fold by the Nazis. Somebody figured out that vampires don’t suffer from radiation poisoning, and he was moved from doing internal security, putting the fear of god into the SS, to being a lab monkey for the German fission program. “I used to grind pigments for my paints in University, Jeff, when I could still see the colors and paint, and the work is not so different! I am blessed to have a fine, steady pair of hands!” he says. Somebody else could do most of his lab work, he’s a low level tech, but in doing the work he stays familiar with the technology and the equipment, and that matters. He’s useful. Four or five times since the war he’s gone into live hot nuclear piles and freed up a jammed control rod, or repositioned a charge that has slipped in a test warhead during transport to the test site. Five minute job, then we let him cool off in a shielded tank for a couple of weeks or however long it takes, then he’s back on the night shift in the labs. He likes the work. Makes him feel useful. Saves lives, far, far safer than trying to fix the problem with a hook on a pole, or having a scared, expendable, poorly-trained volunteer “do what must be done” while living in immanent fear of their own impending death from radiation sickness. If he wasn’t so fucking nice it would be easier to deal with his occasional AWOLs. You just can’t believe he does it, but he does. We keep him under control the same way the Nazis did: we treat him like a human being. He’s not a monster to us, he’s an asset. Nobody Would Believe It I am telling you that I saw it right there with my own

[passage 9](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) to deal with his occasional AWOLs. You just can’t believe he does it, but he does. We keep him under control the same way the Nazis did: we treat him like a human being. He’s not a monster to us, he’s an asset. Nobody Would Believe It I am telling you that I saw it right there with my own eyes. I was wading knee-deep in shit, trying to get up to the rotted out section of a main sewer pipe that had failed that time Brooklyn, when they got a sinkhole. So much flooding had happened! They closed five streets! It must have been 20 years ago. I was wading up the pipe, looking to see where the collapsed section started, making an estimate for the repair, when I heard somebody talking. I jumped out of my goddamned skin. When I looked, in the mud and the stench, there was a clay man, some kind of robot or machine, must have weighted 900 pounds. He’d fallen through from a sub-basement when the pipe walls had collapsed. I woulda thought he was a statue, but he had laid tefillin and his lips were moving. He was just lying there on his side, like he did not even know he had fallen through the floor. Let me tell you I did not stick around, Hersh, I am not stupid! I don’t know what he was doing there, but I know what I saw. I quit my job the next day. I just hope he got up when he had finished his prayers and he isn’t down there right now, praying in the mud, covered in shit and mud until moshiach! ________________ That’s Why They Call Us Grunts The new drug is different. We cheat on the protocols, of course, sneaking a dose from the trolly, or taking turns to report loss of a package in transit or combat. Usually we split it five ways, sometimes as much as ten for the strong stuff. The combat-effective dose is so huge you forget yourself for days, coming to fifty or sixty miles from the drop site, naked and covered in dirt and bruises. Somehow, though, almost always we come back alive. Never a scratch through the skin, never seems like there was a drop of our blood spilled. That’s why they’re doing this research, of course, because when we change we aren’t hurt. They insist it isn’t magic, that it’s latent biochemical pathways in the human brain that are activated by psychedelics “just like those hippie freaks see god, right soldier?” But this is not San Francisco, it’s not the CIA poisoning the peace movement with LSD and mescaline. We do not see god. Trust me on this. Ironically we are all blonde, blue-eyed. Viking stock from Minnesota and parts north. Picked up on blood screening, family backgrounds checked, hand-picked out of the draftees. A night drinking with a couple of “guys from the service” and a blackout, followed by an invitation to

[passage 10](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) peace movement with LSD and mescaline. We do not see god. Trust me on this. Ironically we are all blonde, blue-eyed. Viking stock from Minnesota and parts north. Picked up on blood screening, family backgrounds checked, hand-picked out of the draftees. A night drinking with a couple of “guys from the service” and a blackout, followed by an invitation to join special forces. Andy was a filing clerk, he smelled a rat a mile high, and they got him to come anyway. It’s in the blood. Some extract of mushrooms, some berzerker rage gene that lies latent until you hit it with Amanita Muscaria. Something happens. They’ve been studying it. They’ve been studying us. They’ve been studying me. The Finns knew – they had reindeer herders who killed dozens, even hundreds of Russians in the Winter War, hopped up on traditional concoctions passed down from the paleolithic. The Swedes picked up the thread, dug around in their own history and genealogy, tagged the families which had it running in them and did some trials. One in four, one in five would flip all the way, and one in a couple of hundred... nobody thought the Finns were kidding any more. The Soviets got wind of it and it was a little hot to handle for supposedly neutral nations but Uncle Sam is never willing to give up the edge. I’ve seen film of the initial transformation. Low doses it’s all pretty much psychological, it’s all bulging muscles and extravagant rage. We can still be hurt, then, we still bleed. It’s just the drugs. It would still take six or eight men to overpower one of us then, mind you. It’s a lot of rage, muscles work differently, vision changes. Blackout. But the deeper secrets are further in. The mushrooms won’t do it except at near-fatal doses. They still don’t know how the Finns did it. But the extracts, the synthetics, refined for lower toxicity, buffered... three or four days of biological metamorphosis, rolling around screaming and growling and it settles in. It’s the root of the werewolf story, they did it in the middle of winter, freezing moonlit nights, dosed to the gills wrapped in animal skins, screaming and feral and changed in the soul and body. The skin changes, blood withdrawn to the muscles alone. Teeth get stronger and more prominent. After the first time some of us grew a third set of teeth... fangs. The army dentists had never seen grown men grow a third set of teeth. They filed them and capped them so we could still pass. And the body just doesn’t die, doesn’t drop. The speed of healing is unbelievable. The urge to kill, the body rendered fit for only war, the ferocity and speed, like an animal that walks as a man, nothing restrained. A leap of 20 feet, punching through a man’s skull, these things are routine. It’s all in there. Some of it stays when the drug wears off. All that made

[passage 11](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) speed of healing is unbelievable. The urge to kill, the body rendered fit for only war, the ferocity and speed, like an animal that walks as a man, nothing restrained. A leap of 20 feet, punching through a man’s skull, these things are routine. It’s all in there. Some of it stays when the drug wears off. All that made sense. At least they said so. Hundreds of thousands of years of human pre-history, talk of ancient cannibalism, intra-species competition shaping our DNA. Coevolution. Hippie shit, they were taking too much of their own medicine. Or of ours. But it worked, they were On To Something. So they upped the funding and the dose again. And that’s where the story broke. Because Grendel was an ogre, thirteen feet high, who swung men around by their legs and broke them against one-another as their bodies were hurled across the room. And Grendel was what they dug out of our DNA on the next round of experiments. It took a lot of drugs. Some of our people changed, and then never quite settled down again biologically. It was not just a third set of teeth, it was an ongoing process that had kicked off. A year in they had grown five or six inches, the bones changed. Walls of muscle. Aggression. Constant hunger. They noticed IQs dropping, slightly, but real reluctance to use language. Every year they got bigger and bigger and dumber and dumber. The brass loved them. Because it wasn’t just werewolf, all-or-nothing blinding rage, they kept motor control and weapon skills. The biggest, dumbest grunt on the battle field. Half-man, half-platform. The President inspected them, we are told, and said that even volunteer American soldiers should not be given the Grendel drug, that unless “we were fighting the goddamn Soviets at the Battle of Armageddon itself” he would not authorize use of Grendel. So they did not tell him. If the President wanted Grendel capacity at Armageddon, they reasoned, then the work would have to continue until then so it would be ready on the day. Funding continued. This was a matter of National Security. The intelligence drop turned out to be metabolic damage and could be corrected for with the right drugs and diet. We eat a lot of raw meat and not much sugar, take the pills every day. There aren’t that many of us – rare gene stock (nobody mention a breeding program) – and (frankly) most of our effectiveness is psychological ops. Go in, get the targets, get out again. We’re not winning the war, but we’re doing our damage. We try and leave as many survivors as we can so the gooks can scare each other with tales of the things that prowl in the night in the jungles, ripping men limb from limb and feasting on the corpses. But we’re not cannibals. The impulse is certainly there. We don’t give in to it, it’s just an atavistic impulse. We are soldiers. But it’s

[passage 12](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) many survivors as we can so the gooks can scare each other with tales of the things that prowl in the night in the jungles, ripping men limb from limb and feasting on the corpses. But we’re not cannibals. The impulse is certainly there. We don’t give in to it, it’s just an atavistic impulse. We are soldiers. But it’s easy to see, if I’d been my Swedish great-grandaddy, 1500 years ago, who’d done too much of the bang juice and lived in a cave, towering over the rest of the human species, increasingly big and growing dumber and insane with fear, how cannibalism would have happened. Too dumb to farm, too ugly, aggressive and dangerous to hire, and constantly hungry. I wonder how tall he really was. I am nine and three-quarter feet tall. I wonder how far this will go. ________________ Little Green Men [beep] [beep] We have messages. There are five of us on the station, and we share the same kind of special security clearance, we’re all doing the same job, and we’re living in a space the size of an RV. So messages from the ground are just addressed to the station, and whoever is duty comms officer (that is, standing by the desk) reads them. We’re technically Strategic Air Command staff but in the trade we’re Little Green Men. We maintain America’s space based nuclear weapons systems. We are responsible for “third strike” and “first strike” where we use our overwhelming power to rain nuclear death in four or five juicy, lethally effective forms on the world of men below. We report directly to the National Security Council’s designated representative, NSC-STRATCOM, who has sole authority to command the sat and leave us standing orders. In the trade, he’s known as God or occasionally, informally, His Holiness. We’re up here because machines don’t improvise well and there are a lot of cunning, tricky, underhanded things you have to do to hide a very large and complicated network of unbelievably secret military machinery in orbit, behind the moon and in various other obscure places. Five is the optimal number, psychologically speaking – a careful balance between risk (more people means more brains to go wrong) – and the technical complexity of running a space based nuclear weapons platform. In the trade, it’s called The Deathstar. There are dozens of birds, many specialized kinds of equipment in orbit, but only one is manned. We live in a very tiny, very secure, absolutely impossible to find command post. In the event of loss of communications with earth, with clear evidence from telemetry that US soil is under attack with nuclear weapons or equivalently destructive armament, we are authorized to do more or less whatever we can. We have tools to listen, to see, to analyze and to think but, because we are important, because we are what decides, in the event that there is nobody left at the National Security Council to decide, we must remain very, very

[passage 13](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) with nuclear weapons or equivalently destructive armament, we are authorized to do more or less whatever we can. We have tools to listen, to see, to analyze and to think but, because we are important, because we are what decides, in the event that there is nobody left at the National Security Council to decide, we must remain very, very well hid. We are a long, long way out and it’s very, very secret. When they change the crew they just pull this bird down, and we go back to our regular lives. After we have served our five year shift on the Deathstar, we are free to enjoy the freedom we helped to defend by our dedicated service. We are told they don’t put the new crew on this bird because of the increasing risk of discovery. They put up a new bird and a new crew somewhere else off the ecliptic. Did I mention our security clearances are off the scale? One day we will just be ordinary people again. But for now we are God’s Apostles, sitting in judgement on the human race, in the event of a loss of communications with HQ. And a nuclear flash or fifty on the Continental US. We were selected and trained personally by the current NSC-STRATCOM. It took years. Thirty of us started as candidates for staffing the command unit up here. It’s a brutal process with years and years of mindgames and tests and technical knowledge examinations and being woken in the middle of the night with the news that your entire family has died, only to discover three weeks later they had not been killed in the car crash, but taken into protective custody and look-alike bodies provided. This is how we separate the strong from the weak. A year later, when a favored aunt dies in a hit-and-run, there’s always the lingering suspicion she will turn out to be alive. After we qualified basic, His Holiness began to sound us out about the philosophical foundations for the job. He’s the person who’s authority we wield up here in the Deathstar. It’s his Will that we carry out if we push the button, and it’s not at all like the bunker bunnies of previous generations, who were there to turn the handle on the last order given and then wait to die. We of the Deathstar are empowered to negotiate, to decide, to act not on behalf of the country – no, that is long gone by the time we are empowered to act – but on behalf of His Holiness, NSC-STRATCOM, the person appointed to figure out how to govern the future affairs of men if America has been inundated by a flood of nuclear warheads. We’re here to be guardians of His vision, to know what it is that must be done with the power built by America, given to the NSC, given then to the NSC-STRATCOM, God our master, who trained us to think as

[passage 14](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) how to govern the future affairs of men if America has been inundated by a flood of nuclear warheads. We’re here to be guardians of His vision, to know what it is that must be done with the power built by America, given to the NSC, given then to the NSC-STRATCOM, God our master, who trained us to think as he does about the nature of the power structures on the planet, and what role we could play, after the bombs have dropped, in guiding and governing the future destiny of the human race in the post-America period. He picked us very, very carefully. He tested many of us to destruction. But we five, we are the living embodiments of his Will, of his decision-making capacity, installed here, so far away from the Earth, which we protect with our gamma ray cameras and neutron beam cannons and plasma-blanket ASATs. We are here to decide what the will of God is, if God is dead, and we are all that remain of his authority over the earth. ________________ Gateways Opening a portal should not be so hard. The physics supports it: matter curves space, space bent far enough forms singularities. With the right telescope and a computer to do the math, you can “see” black holes all over the sky. There is nothing complicated about this. High complexity information theoretic singularities pop out of complex arithmetic as easily as an apple falling to the ground: the Julia set was originally computed using a pencil. Any kid can whack out a JavaScript program to naively grind out the Mandelbrot Set, and each one of those little black blobs tells you the same story: singularities are infinite in number and litter nature like grains of sand on a picnic blanket. The black holes destroy information, the M-set blobs produce it, and in the interference of the information they vomit out into our reality forms the set itself. This is easy stuff, kid stuff. Infinities are easy: spewing out or sucking in, you can’t get them to do any useful work. What I want is a steam engine. I don’t want an information theoretic machine which destroys or creates infinite amounts of information. What I want is to get stuff done. I rehearse the arguments in my head: minds exist to make decisions. Decisions constrain the future phase space of spacetime: what I will not do, will not happen, and all the futures which require me to have done that which I will not do, those futures wink out of existence as soon as my mind is made up. “Will” simply represents the destruction of all universes which required me to do what I have chosen not to do. It’s simple math, in the negative. That’s for monks. The positive case is a lot harder: if I Will to do something like run a 6 minute mile two years from now, maybe I can do it, and maybe I can’t. I can set all

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Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/235-2.md (part 2 of 4).
End of [235] The Perimeter: Mythos as Science Fiction and other works, part 1 of 4. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.