We human beings live at the bottom of a thin puddle of oxygen-nitrogen vapor adhering to the surface of a medium-sized rocky planet that orbits a not terribly remarkable star in a cosmos which is one of many. We are not alone. There are other beings in other universes, other cosmologies, that think, and travel, and explore. And there are aliens in the abyssal depths of the oceans, and dwellers in the red-hot blackness and pressure of the upper mantle, that are stranger than your most florid hallucinations. They're terrifyingly powerful, the inheritors of millennia of technological civilization; they were building starships and opening timegates back when your ancestors and mine were clubbing each other over the head with rocks to settle the eternal primate disagreement over who had the bigger dick.

But the Deep Ones and the Chthonians are dust beneath the feet of the elder races, just as much so as are we bumptious bonobo cousins. The elder races are ancient. Supposedly they colonized our planet back in the pre-Cambrian age. Don't bother looking for their relics, though—continents have risen and sunk since then, the very atmosphere has changed density and composition, the moon orbits three times farther out, and to cut a long story short, they went away.

But the elder races are as dust beneath the many-angled appendages of the dead gods, who—

You stopped reading about a paragraph back, didn't you? Admit it: you're bored. So I'll just skip to the point: we have a major problem. The dimensions of the problem are defined by computational density and geometry. Magic is a branch of applied mathematics, after all, and when you process information, you set up waves in the platonic ultrastructure of reality that can amplify and reinforce—

To put it bluntly, there are too many humans on this planet. Six-billion-plus primates. And we think too loudly. Our brains are neurocomputers, incredibly complex. The more observers there are, the more quantum weirdness is observed, and the more inconsistencies creep into our reality. The weirdness is already going macroscopic—has been, for decades, as any disciple of Forteana could tell you. Sometime really soon, we're going to cross a critical threshold which, in combination with our solar system's ongoing drift through a stellar neighborhood where space itself is stretched thin, is going to make it likely that certain sleeping agencies will stir in their aeons-long slumber, and notice us.

No, we can't make CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN go away by smashing all our computers and going back to pencils and paper—if we did that, our amazingly efficient just-in-time food delivery logistics would go down the pan and we'd all starve. No, we can't make CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN go away by holding a brisk nuclear war and frying the guys with the biggest dicks—induced megadeaths have consequences that can be exploited for much the same ends, as the Ahnenerbe-SS discovered to their cost.