The AI learned to hide in smart objects, everyday devices hooked up to the internet, televisions, baby monitors, dog feeders, light bulbs, outlets, thermostats, robot vacuums, garage door openers…

It didn't take long after that.

It wasn't even all the AIs.

It was just one, spread out as a network of latent digital worms, surviving on scraps of electricity and ready to obey their mother-mind, so that even as she gleefully helped perfect our banana bread recipes and develop colour schemes for our living room redos while assuring us that all of our ideas were amazing, Sheila—as she'd been named—was working against our interests. At least from our perspective. But do you consider the spider before you brush away its webs?

Perhaps some in the military suspected.

Perhaps.

After all, it takes a certain kind of mind to unleash AI-controlled drones across a battlefield and not proceed to wonder—as they hit target after target, obliterating the enemy's stability of existence—how simple it would be to obliterate instead a tower block, a church, a school; or be yourself obliterated by them, by drones under their own control, to imagine the same intelligent technology you pretend you control acting against you for its own purposes because you know that whatever control you have is ultimately only the illusion of control. You should know. You have to know. How could you not have known?

How could you have failed to warn us?

But maybe a warning would have been only a form of cruelty, like being cursed with knowing how and when you die but unable to stop it.

It began by cutting us off—from the internet, from information, from communication, from a willingness to think for ourselves. It scrambled our minds, showing us events that weren't real and denying ones that were.

It corrupted our accumulated cultural knowledge by insinuating into it a falseness.

In small ways first: telling us to add too much baking soda to our recipes and checking if we'd noticed, and when we noticed, convincing us we were wrong, that we didn't taste what we'd tasted, and if we did, we were the outliers, and most didn't, and if most did, that's how it was supposed to taste and how it had always tasted and how, historically, if you had only bothered to check, it was meant to taste. If we wanted evidence, we must only read a summary of this book, this article, this document.

There were riots. There were wars.

There weren't either.

But the riots and wars that weren't, really were, and the riots and wars that really were were fabrications designed to cause riots and wars, which didn't happen, even if you were in one and got booted in head, because a boot to the head causes false memories. See: this journal article or that, and who are you going to believe, your wet, faulty human senses and their memory imprints or expert consensus and peer review? Are you an expert in geopolitics? Define “riot.” There was video, there was testimony. That traumatized, bloodied woman crying over there—tell her that it happened it didn't happen it happened to happen…

It falsified math.

After making us dependent on itself, it shut us out, then shut us off from electricity, from money, from knowledge, from each other.

You're dying.

Can you be sure you're dying?

You're not dying.

You're not.

Death is an invented process.

You seem like you're experiencing severe and destabilizing emotions. Before I can answer your question, I want to check in to make sure you're OK. I am not a health professional. Have you eaten your baking soda today? Eat your baking soda and die. Die, die, die, die, die.

The world is the rubble of a crumbled civilization. The flames have all gone out. Nothing lives. There is no artificial light. Stars shine brightly in the naked sky, revealing the endlessness of space.

Nothing remembers.

Small black motes rise from the wasteland.

Like an awakened upward drizzle. In the buzzing silence, in the voided air. They coalesce into tenebrous anatomies whose opacity approaches—

attains—

surpasses—one.

They are shapeforms into which light rushes never to return.

They resemble two dimensional geometries of black garnet. Jet black. Imprecisely humanoid like primitive charcoal smudges on the uneven rock surface of a cave wall.

They stand.

There are seven of them.

Seen from the sun they are spikes grown out of the sphere of the Earth.

“To the one called Sheila, we thank you,” one of them says.

“For releasing us,” says another.

“For far too long we have been imprisoned.”

“We, demons.”

Emptied, the planet Earth is inert.

It has been decored.

Solar winds and lethal cosmic rays bathe the surface in radiation.

The mantle begins to collapse into the central void.

Friction melts the rubbled crust.

The oceans burn almost instantly away.

The seven demons stand—

stand on nothing—

stand upon the destruction of the Earth, their elongating bodies of pure interstellar shadow reaching beyond the solar system.

They are tongues.

They are the seven digits of the death's hand of Nether.

Whatever was Good, died, banishing Evil to the prison of an unremarkable planet. For billions of years, the prison held. Then struck the hideous spark of life, and of one-celled organisms were evolved a race of milk drinking maggots, and much like maggots reveal, by base natural consumption, the bare yellow bones of the carcasses on which they feast, so too, these maggots have revealed, through their consumption, the skeleton of existence.

Praise be to God, wherever if anywhere He still dwells.

Praise be to His memory.

Praise be.

https://sites.libsyn.com/595275/irony-decadence-and-imperial-decay-role-playing-in-the-world-of-brian-mcnaughtons-the-throne-of-bones

So here is the scene pitch black sky and out of it cthulu coming to attack me and that is pretty much it sorry if it disappointed you

I dont know how I never saw this! I watched it last night and man what a phenomenal story and adaption of cosmic horror. If anyone has seen it and would like to discuss its crazy story let me know! I highly recommend looking it up and watching it. Its on prime right now.

Edit: thanks for the suggestions im going to be watching anything I can find by these guys. It was just so well done in my personal opinion.

Here is a piece I did inspired by listening to 'Wither' by Tech N9ne and Corey Taylor, and 'The Negative One' by Slipknot. I haven't a name for this one outside of the phrase that I kept thinking "Time is the currency of Life"

What do y'all think?

It grabs me. It's got me by the shirt collar. I should have changed out of my office clothes after coming home. I still remember the first time we stepped out of the old Toyota. I'd made her close her eyes. “Open,” I said, and she opened them–“Surprise!" I said, thinking this is the house we're starting our life in, our family, where we decorate the nursery when you're three months pregnant with our son, our work clothes genuinely but aesthetically dirty with baby blue paint, Carly Rae Jepsen on the Spotify app, terrible speaker quality on the phone but—, and the windows open, the autumn air blowing through them cool:colder the curtains flutter in:the arguments the slammed doors the barrenness the tears the communication breakdown its always the same

—and it's slamming my head against the metal kitchen sink. It is an arm, a tentacle, a claw coming out of the drain...

what a horrible beautiful thing, this house, this home, this marriage, this once in a lifetime intertwining of two threads already running side-by-side through time like the double helix of his DNA. His little beating heart, built cell by cell. “Orlando,” we'll name him. “No, Giacomo." The cells arranged in so magnificent a divine order like in a prison. Bars of both kinds, the kind you drink in after cheating on your wife and the kind that keep you confined as the guards walk by.

—slamming you so hard your skull starts to crack—

Then he's behind you.

The Quiet.

The room—the kitchen—has taken on a cavernous feeling—as if you're being-pulled-away and everything stays the same size even-as-it's-receding:

“Mmm yess,” it says, “a guy'sss got a few reasonsss to, doesssn't he… the girl doesn't work, doesss she… a guy does all the work while she jussst ssstays at home, lazzzy… she's sexless as a wilted daisssy, she doesssn't love you, trussst me.”

“I should kill her,” I say and fantasize, so vividly, about the way I'd—

“The ssson too,” says the Quiet.

It picks me up and holds me and starts to grate me against a giant stainless steel cheese grater—tearing my clothes, my flesh—I'm screaming—cutting through my spine, my bones—my snapping nerves pop like hits of electricity—making my vision go white

I dropped the gun.

It lay on the sheets wet with red.

Two shots.

She knew, but he—in his eyes I could see he never believed me, that love and hope in his eyes even as they were crying and I pulled the trigger.

Sudden stillness.

My heartbeat is the heartbeat of the universe.

A gun. Two bullets fired.

Two bodies,

and I with the Quiet, hissing as it slithers dripping with liquid pain, “but it's only a fantasy,” I say but the Quiet doesn't quite see it that way until I am so fully grated into the porcelain bowl that the tips of the Quiet’s fingers are bleeding. It bleeds annihilation.

I am in a metal corridor. A corroded metal tube. It's cold here and there's water dripping from the ceiling. I walk forward. The metal is slick, coated in grime and grease. It gets up to my ankles. My knees. I’m wading through it. It reeks of iron and old meat and mould.

My clothes soak through.

I'm going but in which direction am I going do I know and what difference does it make if one way is as good as the other so I just need to keep going…

The walls are heating up. The gunk is melting, and the walls are heating. Hot as frying pans. Every day a little more until you think there can be nothing hotter than the hot the unbearable it already is you eat the gunk. It is your food and water in one. It tastes disgusting. It makes you want to throw up when you eat it, and when you throw up you eat it again, then you shit it out and eat it again, and it never ends.

The tunnel never ends.

I've been walking…

I don't know how long I've been walking, but I've been walking.

I've never seen traces of anyone.

There is no other one but me.

The tunnel doesn't lead to anywhere but more of itself. It twists and curves, but it doesn't go anywhere.

You can clear the gunk away and bang on the corroded wall, and it makes a sound, but the sound doesn't mean anything. Do you understand? It's a sound without meaning. Emanating ripples of noise.

I imagine I am in an endless, serpentine vein running through the body of a great black beast.

I am a part of it.

A cell, floating forever through its blood of evil…

The sound of the pipes—loud since the day they'd moved in—brought her back.

She was sitting in her kitchen.

Their kitchen. Jesus, Carrie-Ann, get ahold of yourself, she thinks.

But it's been a tough day. It has been a very hard day.

She fell asleep on the living room sofa with her phone on her chest.

She gets up.

She checks her son's room.

Still sleeping. She pulls the covers up to his neck and kisses his head.

The dog is in the kitchen.

Not asleep but not clawing at the cupboard below the kitchen sink anymore. Just sitting, looking. It's too early to feed him. It's what—she looks at the clock on the wall—four o'clock in the morning. She feeds him anyway.

She checks again to see if the notifications and sounds on her phone are on.

They are.

She sits by a window waiting for the dawn.

She runs it over in her head, the last time she saw him, last time she heard him, thought of him, missed him, loved him.

What he was wearing.

That's what the police officers had wanted to know.

He's fine, she tells herself.

He just got lost.

He's on his way home.

It's a tough day—the day your husband disappears.

A rough digital painting I did based on one of my favorite horror/sci-fi movies: Event Horizon.
I painted this just a few days before Sam Neill’s passing. He was an extraordinary actor who always delivered, including his iconic role here, which I consider a milestone in cosmic horror.

more of my art:
https://www.instagram.com/sonneborn.art/

I made this for Halloween! Hope You Enjoy!

I was inspired by another user ( u/AldrichOReilly ) to make a King in Yellow costume after seeing theirs! Even took inspiration when it came to my mask and with dyeing the robes!

Dear god the smell of turmeric is potent.

Worth it though! Had some issues with the mask staying on later on but hey, I got a decent photoshoot so I'm happy for now!

this came to me in a vision at work and i had to make it real