The Polyps

 

Khannea Sun Szu

 

Agent Gilliland bursts from the treeline in a shower of broken twigs, a slick silver canister tucked under her arm like a football. She does not have her gun. Her burner is a molten lump of plastic and silicon, buried in mud four hundred and three feet north-northeast. Her lungs are on fire, her legs are on fire, her jacket is torn, her face is cut open and the blood is all washed away by the rain. She fights down the instinctual urge to run towards the lights on the opposite hill and cuts left through the soybean field.

Stay away from the civilians. Get back to the truck.

She hops the ditch into the next field over and sprints another forty, fifty feet.

Beneath the rain she hears a rasping, sucking, keening wheeze, as if an orchestra inhaled through a hundred broken flutes at once. Gilliland slips; her momentum throws her forward into the mud. The cylinder flies from her hands and hits the ground with a dull splort. Staccato echolocative clicks and bassy pulses of infrasound circle round and round her, Dopplering close then far then close again.

The rational part of Agent Gilliland, the part that's gotten her through the rolling crisis of her life by keeping her head cool every time chaos threatened to drown her, nods in sad, sagely defeat. End of the line. As a parting gift before the end, it gives her the strength to stand up.

Agent Gilliland - a hurt, hungry, terrified primate - stares out into the gloom.

Twenty feet away, perhaps, she can just make out the towering, blurry outline of something defined only by a shape in space where the rain is not, and a five-dot impression left in the soft and waterlogged earth.

**

The polyps arrived in the solar system six hundred million years ago, but that’s just a big number and a vague description. Let’s put it in context.

600,000,000 MYA puts us a little bit shy of halfway through the Ediacaran Period: there’s been life on Earth for a good long while now, but it’s all still soft-bodied and simple. We’re between major glaciations, so no snowball Earth. Elder geoforming of planets in the solar system continues apace - Earth, Venus, Mars, Europa, Ganymede, Titan and Neptune all support shoggoth-derived biospheres of varying levels of robustness, as do dozens of icy bodies  in the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud. The Elders here have been established for long enough that divisions have formed between them, as they start to identify with their residential colony over their shared origin.

Far away from Sol, the civilization of the Elders has reached something best described as the Holy Roman Empire stage of its slow apocalypse. Constant wars against rivals without and shoggoth rebellions within have shattered it into a knife-edged mosaic of squabbling autarchies and confederations, all claiming direct lineage from long gone and often wholly fictional glories. Several novel new excuses to slaughter each other en masse have been developed and deployed. Great swathes of territory have simply gone fallow, their resident Elders dead, fled, or out of contact for so long that it makes no difference.

Sol was lucky, spared simply because it was too far away for invasion to be economically feasible or militarily worthwhile.  The Elders of Sol have themselves a little golden age (nevermind the shoggoth rebellions that are increasing in both severity and frequency).

And then, like a hammer to the face and a dagger to the heart, the polyps arrive.

**

Peaslee called them “half-polypous”, and for seven decades his brief description was the extent of human knowledge on the matter; They were not entirely unlike polyps, they could fly, they were material but invisible, and the Librarians had warred against them and sealed the survivors in subterranean containment facilities.

The Program got their hands on a living (but crippled) specimen during Operation YSOLDE MATER in 2009, which at great cost confirmed Peaslee’s four facts and revealed one more. We’ll start with the four.

Fact 1: They are not entirely unlike polyps.

They are as Peaslee described, a rarity for Miskatonic faculty: a cylindrical body ending in an oral opening ringed by tentacles. They vary in coloration from light pink to bright red, and vary in size from that of a thumb (the bulk of the polyps in any given colony) to up to three meters in length (those used for movement).

Fact 2: They can fly.

As with many anomalous entities, the polyps lack any physiology to fly with; the hypothesis that they utilize the same unknown mechanism is a gap-filling necessity.

Fact 3: They are material but invisible.

The invisibility is not a property of their material bodies, but the result of a field they generate that scrambles the sensory inputs of nearby organisms. Sight is affected to the greatest degree, then scent, and then hearing. When detected, it will typically be through a strong salt-decay smell, or the species's echolocative vocalizations.

Electronic recording equipment is also influenced by the field, but not as consistently as organic receptors. A few blurry photographs and corrupted video files float around the internet, written off as hoaxes, abandoned analog horror projects, or AI-generated slop.

Fact 4: They were sealed in underground containment sites by the Librarians.

Peaslee, operating under the limits and bias of the information he was permitted to access, believed these sites were built by the Librarians themselves; modern expeditions to Pnakotus and subsequent transfer-scholar accounts have since indicated that the library city - and the entire Librarian structural strata at large - was originally of polyp construction and later seized and repurposed by the yith-host conomorphs.

Confirmation of Fact 4 brings with it an additional question: what were the polyps building? Their structures show no apparent purpose: enormous hives of empty interconnected chambers carved directly into the stone and stretching kilometers deep. All artifacts or decoration within them is clearly the work of the Librarians or their transfer-scholars. 

[Aside: Scholarly opinion remains divided on the matter of the Navidson Tapes, but one of the minority stances claims that they depict the interior of a polyp structure.]

Thanks to the Program’s valiant sacrifice of its agents in several brutal and unnecessary ways, we can add one more fact:

Fact 5: The flying polyps are parasitized shoggoths

The host shoggoth comes out of the arrangement much worse for wear. Analysis of tissue core samples indicates that an infected shoggoth will gradually lose its metamorphic properties as the bulk of its body ossified and it transforms into a rigid lattice of calcium carbonate and carbon compounds surrounding  the diminished but still-living core. This renders them somewhat analogous to a motile coral reef, an analogy made all the more appropriate by the presence of other small non-terragen invertebrates that take up residence within the shoggoth’s ossified body. 

The Program, being what it is, sat on this information like a literary estate on its trademarks, which resulted in the wholly avoidable deaths of 5 agents and 62 civilians in 2014 during Operation REGENT TIGER. 

**

Interplanetary communications are the first to go, mere seconds after the first wave of polyps burst from N-Space. Control nodes hemorrhage. Transmission synapses flood with junk data and basilisk vectors. Dyson sphere components fall into decaying orbits that will collide like billiards.

The shoggoths adapt. Infected nodes are quarantined. Compromised connections are severed and salted. Protein codes are resequenced. New defensive architecture is evolved in-situ. A second wave of polyps hits. The shoggoths counter-attack: novel cytotoxins, N-space mines, green goo, adaptive prion pathogens, wideband cognitohazards, microeigenweapons.

It's not enough, but by this point the Elders recognize that the polyps are here for the shoggoths. Enough of the Elders’ hierarchy remains intact in the chaos for them to form and execute a strategic maneuver: the major colonies, including Earth are sacrificed to the polyps, their shoggoth networks used as bait while the Elders regroup in space and prion-bomb their former homes into oblivion.

It does not work as well as they wished. The Elders are too weak, the polyps too many, and the subverted shoggoths too strong. A dramatic killing blow fizzles out into a long-summering conflict.

Millions of years later, when the Elders drive the last polyps in the solar system underground or extinct, their civilization has been crippled beyond repair. The Elders will attempt to rebuild, but those few shoggoths that remain have fashioned for themselves new forms and new purpose; isolation and adaptation have liberated them from the long yoke of slavery, and the Elders’ attempts to return their old creations to chains will not succeed for long.

**

The roiling electrochemical reaction of a brain leaves a particular imprint on higher planes of space-time. The knotted patterns in this gaoug field (for lack of a better term, random phonemes will do) form what are essentially the protein chains and amino acids the polyps feed upon. 

The archaic shoggoth network, with its planet-spanning web of grotty ultradense neural structures and polyvalent cognition, was a feast tempting enough to draw the polyps across the brane; the Elders themselves didn’t really register, even though they could serve as viable hosts. No reason to chase after a mouse when the turkey dinner is right there on the table.

Humans are another matter. Our form of consciousness is something like a half-rotten crabapple to the polyps: technically edible, immediately regrettable, and lethal given sufficient quantity and time. The carbon and water are fine enough for the host body, tolerable once the poison dissipates.

Of course, where one human is found there are doubtless more of the fuckers, poisoning the gaoug field like a corpse thrown down a well. Any concentration of human thought beyond a few individuals renders the area an exclusion zone to the polyps, whose only reprieve will come with sterilization of the area: anthropogenic cognitive toxins are lethal to the polyps, yes, but not immediately lethal. There's a countdown timer.

Using Flying Polyps in a Game

The polyps are what you get when the Scramblers from Blindsight parasitize a shoggoth. They slip out of the knotted dead-ends of time space when there is food to be had and the brane is thin, and start building their empty stone arcologies for reasons unknown to man and elder alike. 

This is a very cool description, but they don’t have many points of interaction so I don’t know how much of a scenario they can actually sustain on their own. They’ll work better well for climactic setpieces, environmental hazards, or background flavor text. Less so if you’re looking for interesting intersections with humanity and avenues for how those intersections will go terribly wrong for everyone. Definitely don’t use more than one, that’d put you well outside the boundaries of “a small band of conspirators attempting to maintain operational security and secrecy” and into “save or die, die anyway, and now everybody knows” territory.

A potential workaround is that individual polyps could probably parasitize any shoggoth-derived life of sufficient biomass, at least temporarily. That would include humans, though they’d have to kill off any higher brain functions first. I could imagine those as a sort of suicide-scout split off from the main colony to clear out a small number of nearby humans (because the main colony is old / sick / weakened / damaged / isolated / injured / dead).

Some further notes.

• A shoggoth-host polyp colony encountered outside of an estivation hive will be some combination of starving and poisoned: they’re still going to be tough to kill, but clever planning and heavy explosives will likely win the day. 
• A human-host polyp is a disposable asset; it will still have its sensory-scrambling ability.
• Other potential hosts: deer, medium to large dogs, livestock of all varieties, large fish, cetaceans. 
• An individual polyp without a host is likely to die in a matter of hours.
• Polyps are extremely intelligent, regardless of their host, and will use an appropriate bag of dirty tricks: splitting up groups of victims, concealing their numbers, feints, false retreats, ambushes, even playing dead. 
• However, they need to learn that these tactics will be useful, first; if the polyp is fresh out of the hive, it has no experience with humans to build on top of. This is when they are most vulnerable, strategically-speaking.
• Polyps are not conscious; the lights are on but there is no one home. They are motivated by food, reproduction, self-preservation, and territoriality, but in ways orthogonal to terragen life; describe their behavior as recognizable, but performed in ways that make no sense.
• An inhabited estivation hive would be an immediate death sentence for anyone going in it and I'd only use it as the cherry-on-top twist of the knife.
• An uninhabited estivation hive would be boring as shit for an RPG, so you’re going to either have to put something else in there, or elide it as a creepy way of getting from point A to point B.
• Speaking of, the polyps built hives across the solar system, and there’s nothing saying that if you go down deep enough those hives you won’t pop out on another planet.
• Relations with other factions: The K!n-yani probably run into polyp hives relatively often and have gotten skilled at either avoiding them, resealing them, or clearing them out; the mi-go are going to do what they always do (cause problems for everyone else); the Elders will get surprisingly fired-up about killing them, as will any shoggoths who maintain relevant memory lineages. Dimensional Shamblers probably feed on them. I wouldn't be surprised if the spatio-temporal pathways of Yog-Sothoth are absolutely infested with polyps. 

**

A five-tipped tendril plucks the canister out of the mud. It lifts it to its main trunk and shears off its end with a five-pronged beak. The polyp recoils with instant violence, throwing the container away as far as it can before it stalks off into the gloam. It'll go hungry again, this night.

The brain of a Hyperborian sorceress splatters against a distant tree trunk. At ten thousand years deep in the Dreaming, the loss of her last physical component doesn't even register. The bugs and birds and one particularly brave skunk will eat what remains.

A mi-go probe in orbit, hidden under a shroud of folded space, registers that a canister has gone off-line. The incident is logged in the mycelial stack as and abandoned experiment warranting no follow up.

Agent Gilliland's left hand will be found four days later, when one of the local farm cats drops it on her human's doorstep.