My attempt at Lovecraftian Horror. Enjoy!
Letter 1
Dear Facebook Fans,
I have not posted for some time and I must confess that I had been haunted by strange compulsive behaviors in the past two months. I do not have OCD, in fact, usually I am very calm, yet after having sushi with a few acquaintances in the computer science department one night, I began to feel that I am living inside of a virtual reality world and that an external program is forcing me to behave in a way I cannot control. It is as if a hacker reprogrammed my operating system. I have an eerie feeling that I am an artificial intelligence program inside of a virtual world. I had been a logician all my life, yet I have been observing abnormal, unexplainable happenings all around me. Every time, I try to rationalize what has happened, yet deep down, I knew my rationalizations to be false, and I feel a chill down my spine every time. Now this isn’t a normal chill like I had experienced when I watched horror movies a child, it is a deep chill that causes me to shiver violently for at least 15 seconds, which must have looked like seizure attacks to those who happened to witness them. During each shiver, I can feel a wave traveling down my spine, with a node at each of my seven chakra points. Once the wave reaches my root chakra, a sharp pain shoots through my left leg then out of my foot right as the next wave begins at my crown chakra. It is as if I am kicking myself in the head over and over again. Now I do not have any religious beliefs, in fact I would even consider myself a New Atheist, but the points where I feel the chills the most align perfectly with the so-called chakra points. Even as I try to rationalize right now that I must have impinged nerves near my thyroid, heart, and stomach, I feel the uncontrollable shivers amplifying in magnitude and traveling through these nodes precisely at the chakra points.
I feel like I am going insane. I have seen a specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital and was diagnosed to have a psychosomatic disorder. The doctors detected no abnormalities in my physical body, yet the chills worsen every day. The doctors are idiots! I have no history of emotional instability, mental illness, or superstitious beliefs of any kind. I am an accomplished researcher at CSAIL. I can feel an energy potential imbalance that causes me to misfire my neurons down my spinal cord. There is a chemical imbalance or perhaps an impinged nerve. The specialist must not have run all the tests that she could and missed a critical detail. Next week I will be flying down to Johns Hopkins Hospital to seek a second opinion. There has got to be a rational explanation for what is going on and I will receive a drug or perhaps surgery to cure my condition or at least alleviate its symptoms.
These chills have prevented me from doing my research efficiently and I fear that if I do not make the deadline for the NSA grant, I will be forced to discontinue my project on AI cryptography. My grad students have started a crowdfunding campaign to promote awareness of my illness and fund a cure. Although I am not yet in any financial troubles, I would like to hear any suggestions on what my condition might be.
Letter 2
Dear Facebook Fans,
My condition has worsened since the last time I had made a public announcement. I went to inquire with every acquaintance from the night of the sushi dinner, but none of them had experienced anything unusually since then. It’s business as usual at the restaurant, so it is highly unlikely that this was food poisoning. The doctor at Johns Hopkins also came to the conclusion that I have a psychosomatic disorder, but he has asked me to participate in an experimental nanobot treatment.
The treatment has simply made my condition worse. I now feel as if I have Parkinson’s disease, and experience the chills even during my dreams, which have been turning increasingly nightmarish. During one such dream, I encountered an entity who I can only describe as Dancing Spaghetti Cthulhu. It has told me its real name, but it is impossible to express with the human tongue, the closest I can describe it is sneezing while trying to pronounce a rolling “r”, a light cough, a high pitched roar, a heavy cough, then two clicks. It spoke using a language comprised of such bizarre sounds, yet I can understand it perfectly through some sort of telepathic data packet transmission.
It touched me with its noodly appendages, and transmitted these thoughts to me: “Son, you have been playing this boring game long enough. Dinner is ready, come downstairs to the kitchen.”
In subsequent dreams, I have encountered this entity again and it told me that it is my real mother. She is the one who had given birth to my real being and that the one who I thought had been my mother all along had simply been an NPC in this virtual world. She was made of fractals of ever changing shapes and colors and lived in a non-Euclidean space that does not seem to be governed by Newtonian physics. Each time I tried to run away from this monstrosity who claimed to be my mother, I ended up rolling to the left instead as my body disintegrates into a spiral of oscillating fractals. This causes an indescribable and unbearable pain that wakes me up; however, the pain continues in the real world as I convulse for another full minute before life returns to normal once again.
My life energy is constantly being drained out of me. I don’t know if I have much longer to live. Yet the blood tests and all vital signs still come back normal. I have given up trying to rationalize my experiences. I have read hundreds of online medical journals and I have not found anything that even closely matches my symptoms. I think I will seek out an exorcist to combat the demon of my dreams next week.
Letter 3
Dear Facebook Fans,
The exorcist was a charlatan. He has given me a mason jar filled with green ooze, claiming that it is in fact the long lost Holy Grail of the legends and the blood of Christ preserved with spices with high antioxidant contents and reconstituted using water that had been purified using reverse osmosis. I was told to rub this foul smelling liquid all over my back as soon as the shivers start again. As a rational scientist, I am very skeptical of this treatment. It smelled like rotten anchovies mixed with durian and ammonia. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was sewage sludge mixed with bright green paint.
An hour later, as I was reading a paper submitted for peer review, I felt the shudders coming on stronger than ever. As I touched the nauseating viridian slush, to my surprise, the chilling wave started to travel down my arm to the finger touching the goo! My body was unable to move, much like a sleep paralysis experience. Slowly, my arm disintegrated into a rainbow fractal swirl, then materialized as a bundle of angel hair pasta! The filthy fluid became a pleasant marinara sauce and was completely absorbed into my noodly appendages. I no longer have faith in any of the axioms I believed to be true about this universe. I have become a ramen-human chimera. Lab tests confirmed that the DNA of my left arm is indeed 99% buckwheat.
I am convinced that I have to escape this artificial world and return to the real world. Dancing Spaghetti Cthulhu has called out to me from the real world. I am Neo in the Matrix and I need to wake up. I don’t know why I am even writing to you anymore, as you are all simply AI programs stuck in the system of this mundane world. I can no longer even type these messages and have to resort to transcribing this message through Siri. Even the flushing of the toilet creates an intense panic attack for me. It is as if parts of my soul seep into the water and my humanity is going down the drains and mixed with all the urine and feces. I fear that I may be creating armies of sentient excretion monsters in sewers. Even the sound of the toilet seems like the bellowing of an angry spirit calling me towards the afterlife in a new 5 dimensional universe. For if I don’t leave soon, the muck monsters will come after me and consume me alive so that my spirit can be joined together again.
Letter 4
Dear Facebook Fans,
I am beginning to enjoy this frigid, vibrating hell. Each chill sends pure ecstasy throughout my whole body, for I realized that the wave is not unlike that of an orgasm. Every time Dancing Spaghetti Cthulhu wraps her tentacles around me, I feel the most intense orgasm, for better than any sex or opiates. It is literally out of this world. I feel my spirit leaving my body and entering a wormhole into the openhearted home of Dancing Spaghetti Cthulhu, who welcomes me with a grandmotherly hug. I have transcended beyond this world. Each trip gets progressively longer and more intense. I don’t think I will have the opportunity to write another update. I will be living happily ever after with Dancing Spaghetti Cthulhu, who is the master of my heart and the universe that exists beyond this one. Perhaps one day, you too will feel the loving embrace of Dancing Spaghetti Cthulhu. It now feels so absurd and hilariously baffling that I had been rejecting this for so long. I am finally exiting the console and returning home.
Hyperspace Potion 