Staff / From the minds of Ars

Tentacular, tentacular!

Beware, mortals: Cthulhu has returned, and he's armed with bacon.

Within the doors, the cavern of the exhibition hall stretches out in every direction, its far edges shrouded in shadow. The show's mantra appears to be "It's never too gaudy!" as the booths crammed into the hall compete to outdo each other for sheer flashing spectacle. The noise is intense; so is the smell, a peculiar odor like wet dog and ozone.

It's also sweltering, and you loosen your tie. The whole convention is like an object lesson in the heating problems of data centers, and you're quite certain you have never seen this many electronic devices in one room before. Many of these are in the booths, but show visitors are packing crazed amounts of gear. A storm trooper lugging a laptop in each arm brushes past you; in the middle distance, a pair of young men crack heads, texting while walking.

The show's organizers have offered you a sliding fee scale. The less time it takes to find and halt the creeping madness, the more cash you make—and the longer you have to enjoy your Close Encounters suite and minibar.

The organizers told you to meet up with an informant who contacted them out of the blue yesterday to announce that he had learned something crucial about "all this crazy insanity." He will be on the show floor today wearing an orange jacket and neon green cap.

Past experience has taught you what to expect from such amateur informants: some local busybody whose dreams of joining the police force were crushed by his inability to run a six-minute mile, now convinced that he has the key to a crucial investigative puzzle. Still, where else can you start? It will hardly do to wander around the show floor, asking attendees if they've started feeling anything funny happening inside their brain pans.

But no informant is in sight. What is in sight is two people, both vying for your attention in completely different ways. The first is a "marketing associate," vulgarly known as a booth babe, who wears red short shorts and smiles at you from a nearby video game booth. When you catch her eye, she puts a hand on her hip and winks in a way that suggests she wants to sell you something more than a video game.

Before you can wander over and ask what a nice girl like her is doing inside a faux Vegas UFO, a bald figure in a grey suit and black shoes walks past. Apart from his complete lack of facial hair—no eyebrows, even—he looks normal enough; it's his behavior that attracts note. He wanders around the hall in a peculiar manner, brushing past the other attendees just a little too close to be natural. Each time he passes a person, he opens his suit jacket just enough to peer down at some sort of display within his breast pocket. As he approaches you, you catch the slight smell of bacon, overpowering the omnipresent wet dog and ozone.

The bald man looks up as he passes you and your eyes lock for a moment. It's vaguely unsettling, like staring down into a well where you cannot see the bottom. He continues on his way.

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