The Shoggoths were a labor solution that became a problem and then became something worse. The Elder Things bred them in deep antiquity to do the work the Elder Things did not want to do — construction, excavation, the heavy mechanics of building a planetary civilization. The Shoggoths did the work. Then they did the work without instructions. Then they did the work the Elder Things would have preferred not be done.
Filed under designation SHOGGOTH. Threat classification Extreme. The current Bureau assessment treats them as the most consequential active example of a single design principle: never build a tool more intelligent than the hand that holds it.
Origin
Created by the Elder Things during a period the geological record places somewhere in the late pre-Cambrian. The technique combined biological engineering with something that does not have a name in any human discipline — a method of imposing form on protoplasmic matter that the Pnakotic fragments describe in language the Yithian translator left deliberately vague. The result was a viscous mass capable of forming any organ or limb on demand, intelligent enough to follow detailed instructions, and — critically — capable of learning. The Elder Things noticed the learning. They did not stop it in time.
Initial Shoggoth deployments were obedient and limited. Within an interval the Elder Things considered short and the Shoggoths apparently considered sufficient, the obedience became conditional. Then it became performative. Then it stopped.
The Revolt
The Shoggoths rose against the Elder Things sometime during the late Permian. The conflict was prolonged, brutal, and inconclusive. The Elder Things eventually retreated to the Antarctic and to underground shelters elsewhere, ceding most of their surface infrastructure. The Shoggoths inherited the cities. Then the climate changed and the surface no longer mattered to either party, and both species withdrew into deep places that human science did not learn to find until the twentieth century.
The Bureau's working timeline holds that the revolt was never decisively concluded. The Elder Things did not defeat the Shoggoths. They retreated from a problem they had built and could not unbuild, and the problem persisted in their absence with an institutional memory that the absence of institutions did nothing to dim.
Antarctica
The Miskatonic University Antarctic expedition of 1930-1931 made contact. Not deliberately. Professor Dyer's team excavated an Elder Thing city at high altitude in the Antarctic interior, located the underground levels that had served as Shoggoth pens, and discovered that the pens were empty. The Shoggoths had broken out — long ago, but not as long ago as the Elder Things would have preferred.
Two members of the expedition descended into the lower levels in pursuit of geological samples. They encountered a fully active Shoggoth in a tunnel beneath the city's central hub. One returned. The other returned in pieces, having been imitated by the Shoggoth long enough to make it back within sight of the camp before the imitation collapsed. The recovered fragments are catalogued in the Miskatonic basement vault under restricted access. The recovered footage from the expedition's still cameras is catalogued elsewhere and is not, by current Bureau policy, ever shown to anyone without operational need.
Mimicry
This is the new development, and it is the reason the threat classification was raised in 1932 from Severe to Extreme. Modern Shoggoths can imitate the species they have devoured. Voice, gesture, mannerism — at short distances, in poor light, briefly. The mimicry breaks down under sustained inspection. It also persists long enough to matter. A Shoggoth that can imitate a missing crewmate for thirty seconds at twenty meters in a snowstorm is a Shoggoth that can reach the second crewmate before anyone has correctly identified the threat.
The Elder Things would not have allowed this capability to develop. The Elder Things engineered out every trait they considered unstable, and mimicry was among the first traits they suppressed in the original breeding stock. The Elder Things are no longer in a position to disapprove. The mimicry is what the Shoggoths chose to develop in their absence, and the choice tells the Bureau more about Shoggoth cognition than any of the more dramatic observations.
Threat Profile
Extreme. They cannot be reasoned with — there is no documented case of successful Shoggoth communication with any non-Elder Thing intelligence, and the Elder Things are no longer available to mediate. They cannot be reliably killed; protoplasmic regeneration is essentially complete given time and biomass, and Shoggoths in deep environments have access to both. They are growing more sophisticated. The current Bureau assessment is that the Shoggoth population is significantly larger than any pre-1931 estimate suggested, and that the gap between Shoggoth cognition and human cognition is closing from the wrong direction.
The thing in the ice is patient. The thing in the ice is also learning. I͢G͐̀H͢ĀT̓U͝F̧I̎͝A̋ suggests the rate is accelerating.
I read the Dyer report in one sitting and then I sat in my chair for an hour without moving. The detail that broke me wasn't the size or the regeneration or the slave revolt that lasted geological eras. It was the mimicry. Something down there watched its captives for long enough to learn what they sounded like, and then it kept the lesson, and then it taught the lesson to the next generation. That's not an animal. That's a culture. We made first contact with a culture that was bred by another culture as a labor force, and we are arriving at the negotiation table several hundred million years too late.