Cthulhupunk
With his mad, half-unseeing eyes, Calinob Dis stared into the eternity.
The man and women of the Corporation would say he was not insane, but he was. Not in the slightly unbalanced, unhinged way of the living, but with the uniquely alien way of those already dead.
For even though his breathing was steady and his pulse was the same, maching-regulated calm of ever, he was not alive in any real sense of the word. His heart had been carved out, his hormonal system replced with a steady cocktail of machine-ingested chemicals. His brain was awash with man-made neurotransmitters, his electronical hippocampus bulging messily from the back of his head and connecting to the databanks holding his memory. Had his mind been anything like a human's, he might have mourned the way he was now eternally linked to the machines, unable to ever leave his massive life supports.
This floor was for them, the private sanctum of those sacrificed for the cause. You could not look into the universe, could not truly comprehend its intricate and horribly beautiful patterns lest you lose your sanity. And still there were those who would yearn to try, those insatiably curious or just plain foolhardy. For them, the Corporation would offer a way.
Only the best suited would be chosen, only the most disciplined would be put under the neurosurgeon's cutting laser. They would be trained and operated on, prepared so they could gleam out the universe's mysteries. The computers now connected to their brains could record what they saw but couldn't make it suitable for mortal eyes. Lest no scientist be driven mad by what was recorded, the minds of the scryers themselves would be transformed into living computers. What they saw they would process, the last vestiges of their humanity picking out the things they could relay on without endangering anybody's sanity.
And process the information they would, gather endless minute details for the Corporation to use. The terror of the universe that had driven mad so many would not touch them, the humanity of their minds lost under the laser scalpel long before they got this far.
This work is by Kaj Sotala and is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.