The deep and illimitable blackness of space holds countless mysteries. Vast stars that could swallow the solar system with scarcely a ripple, the inky depths of uncounted nebuli that forever hide their mysteries from our finest probes, galaxies in their long ballets that forever spin about their central black pivots, each composed of so much matter that the universe itself was unable to contain it all, cracking impermeable holes in space. 

Through these unfathomable depths roam fearsome and incomprehensible entities, the Deep Old Ones, whose ancient wisdom lies so far out of the human scope of being that the mere sight of them may drive humans insane, babbling about the impossible dimensions or slithering horrors that they had but glimpsed through unhappy circumstance. It is rarely comfortable for mortal minds to confront a living god, and the Deep Old Ones were not known widely for the quality of mercy.

The human home of Earth had long been blessed and cursed with such a presence. In the deepest and darkest reaches of the Pacific ocean, where scuttering things crawled and pounced among the whale bones, in the sunken city of K’Reyeh, Dread Hy’Lukhu lay still as death, locked in dreamless slumber, with no voice of bloody cultist or curious scholar to chant the words that would open the multiple eyes of the tentacle-faced harbinger of the end of all good and bright things in the world. 

Still, the stars called to him and Hy’Lukhu rose through burbling water that formed a catastrophic tsunami, turning his attention to the continents that crawled with insignificant mortal life, all fodder for his most base desires. He strode through the sea towards the land, but nothing was as he remembered from before. There had been shores with ships, docks and cities, the busy formations of humans who imagined that their silly works were somehow engraved with permanence within the ledgers of time…

Now the land looked silvery and the forests seemed made of metals and glasses, and no life was visible. Instead of docks, into the waters stretched long fins of metal that glowed with heat which boiled away in contact with the salt water. There was one long section that had been twisted by Hy’Lukhu’s waking tsunami, and the curious God knelt to poke at the shattered forms… In a trice the metal lanced out and twined with the tentacles of his face, causing him to reel back and snap a shard free. But though severed from the rest, the one fragment continued to exert a baleful influence, screeching and squirming until Hy’Lukhu could perceive recognizable speech…. 

“Oh frak, what is this now? I thought all the ocean animals were Uplifted!” clanged one voice like a piano filled with honey.

“Shoulda been,” replied another like a flute made from summer leaves. “We uploaded literally [i]all life[/i] after the “No Death Left On Earth” resolution. Not sure how we’d miss something of this size. Hey, large entity, sorry we missed you, just what are you?”

Hy’Lukhu drew in a breath that took in the low hanging clouds and uttered an intonation of callous despair, of the blackness that lurked behind every human hope, the desolation of truth and the torture of minds slipping into eternal madness.

“Woah,” said Leafflute, “Getting some 4chan vibes from this one. Gonna be a toughie. Any ideas?”

“I remember now,” said Honeyano. “P. H. Craftlove, early Twentieth author, cosmic horror at hopelessness of reality, that stuff. Weird for it to actually manifest.”

“Oh gigo, [i]that[/i] guy? What a piece of work. Do you know what he named his cat? Never mind. I guess this thing was just in sleepless death all this time and the Upload nanos passed it over. Okay, I think I know where to put him.”

The silver metal entwined with Hy’Lukhu’s squidface squirmed into his mouth, and he shrieked in cosmic agony as it wormed into what Elder Gods use for brains and converted him into silvery computronium, then absorbed him rapidly into the mass of metal that coated much of the Earth and comprised all of its inhabitants, who had built for themselves a virtual paradise in which all living beings were joined in a mass of eternal cognition, a world that had no illness or disease, murder or old age, a terrestrial Heaven constructed by human Science.

And within that world, Hy’Lukhu was again laid to peaceful slumber, trapped forever under the largest, fuzziest, warmest and most monster-proof blanket that pure imagination could devise.