And monopolies are older than brooding Tyre, or the contemplative Sphinx, or garden-girdled Babylon.

Please allow me to be the bearer of terrible, horrible, god-awful, unthinkable news: AT&T has bought out T-Mobile.

There are some to whom this turn of events may come as a shock. But to those who are knowledgeable in certain arcane lore, and who are privy to certain eldritch secrets concerning the various and sundry natures of the universe and its hidden corners, this event, like so many others, was foretold.

You see, once before, in the long-forgotten, primordial age of the early 1980s, AT&T was hit with a devastating antitrust suit (you could do that to a company in those days) and forced to split up into various smaller, ostensibly competing companies. But over the course of 30 odd years and many high-profile mergers, AT&T has gradually congealed back into the very same monstrosity.

How could this have happened? Well, we must understand first that AT&T is not a company as we think of it. It is, in fact, not entirely of this world. It hearkens from a place where the laws of nature as we know them do not apply, and from which, sometimes, when the stars are right and our plane crosses ever so briefly with theirs, blasphemous, inhuman things will immigrate to our realm.

Some believed that AT&T was dead. But as the writings of Abdul Alhazred assure us, that is not dead that can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die. AT&T was, AT&T is, and AT&T shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them, It walks serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen.

While there are those who have dared to seek glimpses beyond the Veil, and to accept AT&T as a guide, they would have been more prudent had they avoided commerce with AT&T; for it is written in the Book of Thoth how terrific is the price of a single minute of roaming time.

All these Blacknesses are lesser than AT&T, who guardeth the Gateway; AT&T who will guide the rash one beyond all the worlds into the Abyss of unnameable Devourers. For AT&T is UMR AT-TAWIL, the Most Ancient One, which the scribe rendereth as THE PROLONGED OF LIFE!

Even as we speak, the scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn is nebulously recombining in its hateful original form. Its attorneys on earth still bellow and prance and slay around idol-capped monoliths in lonely places. It must have been trapped by the verdict whilst within its black abyss, or the world would be by now screaming with poor reception and marginal internet speed.

But who knows the end? What was risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in Bedminster NJ, and decay spread across the tottering regulatory agencies of men. A time will come-but I must not and cannot think! Let me pray that, if I do no survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution before audacity, and remain Verizon customers.

hell-wind-titan blur-black wings-Whitacre save me-the three-lobed burning eye...