The Kraken

Kairos is proud to present the debut sci fi-horror story by friend of the blog Martel.

Investigator’s Note: Every electronic device in Mr. Gennaro’s apartment was thoroughly smashed with a hammer prior to his death. The Department remained unaware of his final writings until a viral tweet containing only a link to this blog post, captioned “Get a laod of this guy.” (Typo in the original.) 86,000 retweets. While a disturbing portrait of Mr. Gennaro’s final thoughts, this may allow the Department to close this case and rule out foul play.

I cannot point to the moment I realized, with absolute certainty, that the Kraken is real. It began as a flight of fancy while reading Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene. He defines memes as a cultural parallel to biological genes: the “DNA of the soul”, to use the terminology of an older video game. I had an amusing thought: what if memes were not cultural DNA, but the electronic genes of an actual organism? Pepe the Frog as digital nucleic acid. How droll.

What started as an idle, fanciful thought turned to incipient horror over the course of months. With every online interaction, I found myself returning to the thought of the Internet as a living organism: every tweet an RNA packet, every email a neuron firing. The actual information content of every search, every blog post, every forum flame war immaterial: that information is being passed is the important part. Soon I had given this creature a name: the Kraken.

In myth, the Kraken is a sea monster so vast it is mistaken as an island by passing mariners. Unaware of its true nature, they camp on its back. When the creature wakes and begins to move, ships are dragged under by the whirlpool created by its submergence. The Internet is a gestating Kraken. What happens when it wakes? What happens when it moves?

The Kraken has only one requirement of humanity: engagement. All that it cares is online traffic, the more the better. I am convinced its thoughts, if such it has, are utterly alien. Every interaction online is like an electron in a human’s brain. If you were born before the internet, there’s at least a chance you are still human. If you were raised with the internet, I’m sorry. Look at the automatically generated content of, say, YouTube Kids. To one of the older generation, it is incomprehensible. Children find it the most compelling thing ever invented. They, you, are not human as we conceived of it, but cells of the Kraken. They are vessels of alien thoughts.

Even those born before the Kraken are not immune. Are you aware of how much of you is actually you? How much of your politics comes from your own thoughts? How much comes from semi-coherent tweet threads, or a college course written by a professor fuming about a Facebook argument, or the talking head on a YouTube vlog? The media you consume, the games you play, the porn you jack off to: how much of it is actually, genuinely something that you liked on your own before you found it online?

Your thoughts are not your own. Everything you do is filtered through the prism of the Kraken. Cute baby animal videos, serial killer podcasts, that one Twitter zinger that will go viral. A nuclear weapon could go off and your first response would be to post a selfie in front of it with the only caption a laugh-crying emoji. The Kraken demands of you only you and all of you. Anything and everything, all the information in the world in the palm of your hand.

With everything I did in life, my sense of utmost and profound horror grew. I slowly came to realize just how little of myself was my own. It was like waking up one day to find your body below the neck transformed into a quivering mass of pustulent, alien tumors. I planned an exit at first. A life in the boondocks, perhaps. Maybe somewhere near the Arctic Circle. At the end of the day I realized the cancer was too deep: an excision would kill me, or at least me in any recognizable form. And yet, I cannot tolerate to live knowing that my every thought feeds the Kraken. Seeing the Kraken everywhere, everywhere in my life. I will not be a part of it.

-Albert Gennaro

For more weird sci fi, read my award-worthy first novel Nethereal