The creature now goes through much shorter sleep/wake cycles. While it sleeps, it simply turns off, drops to the ground, half buried under it, half towering above. Immobile, looking almost dead. The first time it did this, people celebrated. Poor souls thought they’ve finally killed it and the menace was over. Unfortunately after a few days it woke up and continued with the old daily routine of grinding destruction. It doesn’t seem motivated by anything, it doesn’t specifically target populated settlements. There are large holes in the ground in that part of the earth, littered all around. Some steam from beneath, as the monster has drilled so deep it has reached the burning hells that earth contains. Some say it has emerged from there, but that’s an outrageous presumption based on zero proof.

While the creature is dormant, it seems to pay no attention to people, as they utilise every weapon in their arsenal to destroy it. Guns, cannons, artillery, nuclear bombs, lasers, nothing worked. Its skin sometimes simultaneously appears rock solid, indestructible, and yet meat like a sharks skin. With every failed test that used more destructive weapons, the world released a deeper sigh and burned through a bit more of the last shreds of hope.

Whenever it is closely inspected, it still retains its unfathomable shape, and is as strange to the touch, as it is to look at. Touching it causes even more neurosis than just seeing it. The brain recognises a flurry of past experiences with shapes and textures, and the brain doesn’t know how to interpret that haptic experience. It simultaneously feels slick, elastic, rough, prickly, painfully hot, with an agonising vibration frequency, and a sheen of metal. Again, all these perceptions of the skin are multiplexed to the brain in unnerving speed, and most simply let go of every notion of reality right there. There are people sent along with the recent teams that are shielded from perceiving any sense, touch, smell data from the outside, and rather indirectly interact via cameras that are placed out of their suits. These people are the ones charged to retrieve those that have lost their grip on reality, or their bodies. Many question the need for sending people out there since humanity is losing their brightest and most hopeful minds to insanity.

The introvert researcher, aware that this is a present threat to his way of life, and the whole of humanity, employed his mind and tools towards discovering a way to remove this threat, and while doing that, realised that the horrifying monster of incomprehensible shape and size, is actually sentient and capable of perceiving thought of lesser forms. It actually understands that the small organisms littering the ground, huddled in bunkers, shooting toothpicks at it, are afraid and don’t want this to happen to them, but it is entirely uninterested, and guided by more complex motives on its path of obliteration.

The researcher learns more about the creature through a digital mechanism that could only be erroneously explained as symbolic fractal reasoning, where complex ideas far beyond the reach of the usual capacity of a human are interpreted efficiently and are iteratively represented by smaller or bigger placeholders, that themselves represent other concepts. Him being tied through an intensely efficient wireless network back to his server farm enables him to delve deeper than anyone before. This system and structure of thought is so efficient that it enables him to partially capture a glimpse of the immense intellectual power of the behemoth that lays waste to half the earth.

Enchanted by its brilliant intelligence he is motivated to bet his own life and try to establish some form of contact with the fluid, immensely sentient mountain.