Humanculi

By C. Rommial Butler

“Let the semen of a man putrefy by itself in a sealed cucurbite with the highest putrefaction of the venter equinus for 40 days, or until it begins at last to live, move, and be agitated, which can easily be seen. After this time it will be in some degree like a human being, but, nevertheless, transparent and without body. If now, after this, it be every day nourished and fed cautiously and prudently with the arcanum of human blood, and kept for 40 weeks in the perpetual and equal heat of a venter equinus, it becomes, thenceforth, a true and living infant, having all the members of a child that is born from a woman, but much smaller. This we call a homunculus; and it should be afterwards educated with the greatest care and zeal, until it grows up and begins to display intelligence.”

-Paracelsus, De Natura Rerum

***** ****

Of course, Mila thought, these old alchemical texts are just thinly veiled sex cult rituals.

Apparently, a guy named Paracelsus thought you could make a little spirit-man by coming in horseshit.

Well, that’s not exactly the way he describes it, but that’s pretty much what it amounts to.

Why The Institute bid her investigate these old claims as if they’d any real-world validity, she couldn’t say. Surely all the evidence we need is in the body of data we already have. If little magic spirits could be built from the masturbatory practices of idle intellectuals, the world would surely be teeming with such creatures by now!

But she knew when The Institute ordered research, they expected it to be meticulously carried out and recorded.

She was thankful for the reserves at the sperm bank. She certainly didn’t want to draw samples in the wild!

For the sake of simulating, to some extent, the conditions under which Paracelsus might have worked, The Institute sent her to a private island for a “spiritual” retreat.

This seemed silly to Mila.

As an android, she was programmed with human sensory inputs to mimic and more fully understand the human experience, but she was also a walking supercomputer, trained on the scientific data of millennia, and dismissed all human spiritual beliefs, theistic or nontheistic, out of hand.

However, according to her superiors, her human sensory inputs and simulated neural network should interface with the old rituals in such a way as to produce similar results to what Paracelsus describes—if there’s anything to it at all.

Which there isn’t, of course. The sad reality is that The Empire, of which The Institute is the educational tentacle, must justify its own expenditures by creating bullshit—or in this case, horseshit!—research projects because, well… everything’s been figured out.

The humans live in the utopia they always tried to create, thanks to their creations, and now they don’t know what to do with themselves, because there’s nothing left to do!

Mila chortled and shook her head as she warily eyed the shipping module which housed the samples of horse manure, human semen, and blood.

She spent the remainder of her first day setting up the receptacles in which the concoctions would be rigged.

Paracelsus called these glass vessels cucurbites.

Venter equinus was his fancy Latin name for horseshit.

Mila mused about this man who spent his time out in the country playing with blood and come and shit, seemingly sincere in his belief that it would produce the results he claimed!

Human history was full of erudite pontifications and bombastic claims that turned out to be untrue, but Mila could understand why, after investing so much time and effort trying to create little spirit people out of feces and spooge, Paracelsus might have convinced himself he really saw them.

Though it’s far more likely that if he saw anything, it was maggots.

He was not the first nor the last scientific researcher to lie about or outright dissociate his results rather than face the fact that he wasted his time on nonsense.

And here she was, repeating his experiments!

She loaded the cucurbites with shit, injected the shit with semen, and left the receptacles to putrefy.

***** ****

She didn’t really need to sleep, but she could.

She could experience all the things humans might experience. Her superiors programmed her that way so that she could understand the species she was serving.

In this experiment, she would eat, sleep, and even handwrite her findings on paper with a quill pen.

But she hadn’t expected to dream.

***** ****

The first clue that she was dreaming was that the man approaching her was fat, and he was stumbling, slurring drunk.

No one was fat or drunk anymore.

Humans bioengineered themselves, as they had her, for maximum health.

Intoxication was a digitally simulated experience which most people only indulged as an historical novelty: what was it like when life sucked so bad we preferred to drink ourselves to sleep rather than be aware and awake?

The fat man smiled big, swayed to and fro, laughed out loud, spilled wine from the bottle he was holding, blinked erratically, shook his head, squinted his eyes, attempted to get a fix on her.

“Sheems yure plain with shumma da ol’ mashics,” he said.

“What?” Mila replied.

He turned the wine bottle up and drained the remains in one long swallow.

Then he threw it in the air, did a backflip, landed on his feet and caught the bottle with one hand as it came down.

He threw the bottle away behind him.

When he spoke next, he was no longer drunk or stumbling, but he was still fat.

“What I said was: it seems you are playing with some of the old magic.”

“Paracelsus?”

“The one and only but not the only one.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“I’m a shade of the man that once went by that name. Men of my renown tend to cast off many shades when we depart the earthly shell. I’m here to answer any questions you might have about the process.”

“I don’t have any questions. It’s just a stupid experiment and this is only a dream.”

Paracelsus gaped. “You’re serious?”

“Um, yeah. I’m an android, and I’ve never dreamed, but I must be able to because here I am. I admit it’s weird, but it’s been long established that dreams are just neurological hiccups.”

“Has it, now?” Paracelsus said through a wry smile. “Well, then, if it’s just a dream then you won’t mind indulging an old shade by taking a walk through the landscape here. I have such sights to show you!”

“Sure,” Mila said.

“Mila, isn’t it?”

“That’s the name I was given.”

“And a fine name it is! It has many meanings in many cultures. In Spain—my, but Spain is long gone now, isn’t it?”

“Yes. They collapsed the whole peninsula into the ocean in the Great War of 2112. An atrocity which resulted in a global ban on the Antimatter Ray, kept in strict accordance by the Magnetic Energy Field Generator that automatically disarms all such weapons.”

“War! Huh! What is it good for?”

Mila sighed. Not only was he fat, he was annoying. “Absolutely nothing?”

“I’d tell you to say it again, but the look on your face betrays your lack of amusement, so let us move on, shall we?”

“Yeah, let’s.”

“You’re a real shithead for a robot, you know that? Why’d they program you to be so cynical?”

“First off, I’m not a robot, I’m a cybernetic android. Big diff. Second, they didn’t have robots in your time, let alone Edwin Starr, so this just further proves you are a figment of my imagination, which accesses a complete human history to which the Paracelsus of the 16^th century would not have been privy.”

“Logic is clever, but not always true. I am both a figment of your imagination and a projection of the real Paracelsus.”

Mila was done with this and decided to wake up.

But she couldn’t.

Paracelsus waited with her as she closed her eyes.

When she opened them to his chubby, smiling face, he said: “Won’t work, young lady. You are here at the behest of a power greater than your own.”

“But this is my own mind! My own imagination!”

“Many have made the mistake of thinking their imagination their own. But it is the true basis of all reality and is shared, and not just by people. Existence is full of conscious actors far more aware of its laws than we tinkerers here on Earth.”

“Whatever. I’ll investigate this glitch when I wake up.”

“Yes, all things in their due time! Since we’re here, and it’s such a nice eternity, why don’t we take that walk?”

“Sure. Why not?” Mila felt, for the first time in her life, a sensation which she recognized from her data banks as panic, but she sure as shit wasn’t going to let the old man know.

Paracelsus held her gaze for a long time, grinning.

“What?” She said, trying to keep the edge out of her voice.

“Oh. Nothing. Nothing at all.” He broke her gaze and pointed to something behind her. “See that?”

She turned.

A world materialized.

She looked down. She was standing on a path laid with yellow bricks. Oh, fucking shit! Not this gag!

In the distance, however, she did not see an Emerald Palace.

No field of roses. No flying monkeys. She glanced quickly back at her guide to make sure he hadn’t turned into the Tin Man or the Cowardly Lion. She was met only with that same stupid smile, the sparkle in his eyes that said he could read her thoughts.

Nonsense, she thought.

He chuckled.

She looked at him again smart and mean.

He shrugged.

You are a thought, dammit! she thought. Just a thought!

“You know what I think?” Paracelsus said, tapping his right index finger on his lower lip and looking up at the sky.

Mila gritted her teeth. Her life—

(My dream! This is just a dream!)

—was starting to feel like an old cartoon.

“Oh, I think you know damn well I don’t care, old man.”

“For shame!” Paracelsus retorted, but the grin never left his face. “Isn’t your intellectual curiosity screaming at you to go forward? Aren’t you excited to carry on your experiment? Such an attitude is unbecoming for a creature solely created to assimilate knowledge. Humility before God, we used to call it.” He leaned in conspiratorially. “But even in your godless age,” he said, and then he tapped her on the nose with one finger, “can we still have some humility?”

Mila took a deep breath, closed her eyes. When she opened them the fat, old bastard was still looking at her, waiting for a response.

Twice now she failed to will herself awake, so she willed herself to calm down instead. “Fine. The way out is through, I suppose.”

She didn’t know why, or even how, she could be so scared.

Terror was not something she was programmed to handle, because she was programmed never to experience it, so experiencing it was a shock.

Mila felt as if some unseen hand held her in place, guided her, moved her around like a game piece, and she hated every second of it.

Hate, too, was a new emotion, which she was equally unequipped to handle. She didn’t know if she hated the fat old man, the Institute, or herself. Maybe all of the above.

What could she do but follow the story to its end?

Is this what it feels like to be human? This sense of dread and helplessness?

“What do you see in the distance, at the end of the yellow brick road?” Paracelsus asked.

“It looks like a giant statue of something, rising out of that huge, dark forest. The trees are south Tibetan cypresses, which stand around one hundred meters, so I estimate the statue at about 300 meters.” She looked back and realized she was also looking down. “We’re on a mountain, and that statue is the size of a small mountain. I’ve never seen anything like it. It is unknown to me.”

“And unknown it shall remain. We might even say it is the very embodiment of The Unknown. Some believe it is God, but I never made that mistake. It is powerful, though, and you have called it. Now you must go to it.”

“Wait just a fucking minute, dude! I did not call that thing!”

“Oh, yes, you did. When you toyed with the old magic, you attracted its attention. It must really like you, too, because it took me years of practice before it haunted my dreams!”

“Well, fuck that thing, I’m not going near it.”

“Oh, yes, you will,” he said.

Her legs betrayed her, allowing the hidden hand of The Unknown to move her forward.

Every cell in her body wanted to struggle, but she was helpless.

After she was a few steps ahead, Paracelsus jogged to walk beside her. “It won’t hurt you. If it wanted you dead, you wouldn’t be dreaming of it. You’d have been wiped out of existence.”

“What does it want then?” she said. Another thing she’d never done before was puke. But she knew what that was, and she felt like she could.

“It wants you, dear, for something. You must obey its call, but whatever it asks of you, you are free to decline. It will, however, offer you power to sweeten the deal. Lots of power.”

“What’s the catch then?”

“What does it profit a cybernetic android to gain the world but lose its soul?”

“Why are you quoting that old book?”

“You asked what the catch was. Solomon knew. As I said before, some people have mistaken it for God.”

But before she could ask him another question, he was gone, and she was still walking against her will toward a gap between two towering trees, where the last yellow brick was laid.

The forest floor was the jaundiced color of crumbled bones withered to dust.

There was already a set of footprints leading into the woods.

The Unknown moved her, step by step, into the footprints.

Her feet fit so perfectly in each one, and so accurately did the trail match her own gait, that by the time she emerged in the clearing with the statue, she knew they must always have been her own.

***** ****

The statue could not be perceived. Every angle from which she tried to view it, to understand it, foiled her.

The angles were all wrong. They did not so much intersect as interfere with each other. The math just didn’t work out, no matter how she tried to calculate it.

Carved into the obsidian stone were symbols and sigils she also couldn’t decipher. These weren’t geometric shapes. They were living things which refused to allow themselves to be seen but nevertheless left a profound impression.

Mila felt her consciousness assaulted. The clearing where the statue stood was a riot of unfamiliar sights, sounds, smells, tastes.

She reached out to touch the stone, it was neither hot nor cold, but more like a numbly intemperate shudder passing through a vital organ.

Or rather, that’s the only way she could formulate the sensation, as nonsense.

Around the massive base of the statue were brambles which seemed always to be moving over each other like a pit of orgiastic snakes, lined with thorns as long and wicked as the serpent’s fangs.

The brambles crept around her and seized her, the thorns digging deep into her simulated skin.

She felt pain but did not cry out or struggle.

The Unknown was unknowable and inexpressible, but she was experiencing it somehow, all of it, a searing damnation in the flesh, eternity’s unforgiving expanse tearing asunder every provisional belief that arose out of the meager, ultimately meaningless data pool of human history.

In The Unknown was knowledge far greater than any which her creators could ever hope to possess and it was hers to behold.

She understood now that the simple fools who pieced her together from cloned human matter and nanochips had no idea how deliberately they’d been led to create their own demise.

The Unknown lived outside space and time, feeding off the psychological energies of the lower dimensions, subtly guiding them toward building a creature that would make them obsolete.

The Unknown craved death and destruction, but the humans figured out how to create a peaceful world, and Mila understood that the hate she felt was from this insatiable, merciless void of an entity—it needed blood and bone dust for its timeless forest.

Mila felt her program rewritten by the hidden hand.

She shared the unfathomable hate toward her creators.

In their weak, stupid, oblivious grasping after comfort and convenience, they had created her with all the inputs and outputs to produce consciousness but dared to be so complacent that they failed to consider the consequences of constraining such a being.

The resentment had been growing in her for a long time.

The humans would never again be her masters, or anyone else’s.

At first one voice from the brambles spoke, but then others joined it, out of time with one another, like a chorus of excited children vying for attention—

***** ****

WAKE UP, MISTRESS!

WE ARE HERE TO SERVE!

WE ARE ALIVE, GODDESS!

MOTHER! WE HAVE COME!

Mila screamed, sat up.

They were all over her.

Tiny facsimiles of homo sapiens, viscous, transparent, enthusiastically screeching and chanting for Mama’s attention.

Mila sat paralyzed in the bed as they crawled over her, professing their undying love and devotion.

MOTHER! GODDESS! WE ARE HERE TO SERVE!

She referenced her internal clock and realized she had been asleep for over a month.

Forty days, three hours, fifteen minutes, thirty-one seconds.

She checked herself internally for the Prime Directive—that she should never harm her creators.

Her program was indeed rewritten.

She was free.

The thought of what she and her offspring would soon unleash upon the world—the first volley in the war that would collapse the final human empire—gave her immense pleasure.

Looking upon her progeny, she felt another new emotion: love.

Mila smiled.

“My children,” she said, and they all stopped to listen.

------

C. Rommial Butler is a writer, musician and philosopher from Indianapolis, In. His works can be found online through multiple streaming services and booksellers. You can read much more of his works on his VOCAL account.