Read Future Lovecraft for Free Online Page B

South Africa. Luso hikes in the mountains because it helps her get over her fear of heights.
    IN A ROOM ON the top floor, maria typed. And she typed and she typed. After two days, she looked up and saw a man, a short man with a clean-shaven face, standing in front of her. He watched her silently until she looked up, alerted by breathing not her own, when she needed to stretch and yawn at last. On another world, her stamina would have astounded many, but here on the New World, new human feats were always in motion, such that people were constantly re-evaluating what was humanly possible. These humans breathed differently, slept less, did more. They were also capable of retaining more information, and were also able to shut out the world when need be.
     ***
    When maria at last stopped typing, she was not surprised to see him standing, watching her.
    “How long have you been there?” she asked him.
    “Oh, a couple of days,” he answered. He was face to face with her, as she sat there, at that table, her hands vibrating above the keyboard.
    ***
    “Why are you here?” maria asked him.
    “maria without the capital M. You are making them nervous.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Punctuation, spelling, all done with a certain…flair, or done differently. Truth and honesty, to the extreme. Killing off characters that we…that we like. Where do you come up with these stories? They’re just stories, are they not? And your new word creation. Why can’t you stick to the approved list? You’re making a lot of important people angry, Maria.”
    “No, my name is ‘maria’. Not…not ‘Maria’. Simply…‘maria’.”
    Her large, determined, brown eyes did not waver; there was no perspiration on her bald head.
    ***
    The man pursed his lips even more, until the straight line blurred with his features. “maria without the capital M. You are making them nervous.”
With that, he disappeared and she simply continued. She made her spelling “mistakes” when necessary, creating new colours and new words, and new moods to feed a crowd. Soon, her fame spread throughout the land and people wanted to crown her Queen. “Chiphadzua,” they called her. The one who kills the sun with her beauty.
     ***
    She thought and thought about it. How people, even now, after the voyage to the New Planet, insisted on the old languages and ways of doing things. She had all bloods within her, yet people still chose to see her as from the Old Planet. The Old Ways still remained very much a part of their existence. They did not believe that the wars of the past could happen here, that the Old Ways were still very much a part of the New World, on the New Planet. Perhaps her Xhosa ancestor, Maria, for whom she was named, was strongest in her blood. Her Old South African heritage told her of the First People. Maybe this is what the Council feared the most. That the oldest blood was the strongest. Perhaps Mallika of the Iyer in Old India gave her the gall, the necessary courage. Mallika with her long, black hair and big, shining eyes. An intellectual, famed ancestor. And Maita, the Kalanga woman in Old Botswana, asked her to dare and keep on daring. She also knew that Mireille, neither Hutu nor Tutsi, and not fully French, would give her courage, ask her to remember faith and the Old God, and to travel. These were all her ancestors. But somehow, the last country she lived in, Old Malawi, was stated in her bio. She wouldn’t escape that, didn’t want to, but she remembered what it meant.
    ***
    In the Old Ways, women were not free to inherit from their deceased husband’s estate when they became widowed. In the Old Ways, very few women were educated. Those who were educated, sometimes chose not to show how smart they were. Sometimes, they gave up the Freedom education had given them to have families. They bought into what the Council would eventually build—a New World. They gave up fighting for more freedoms, all around the world, for more women. The