Blood of the Narlack: Part 2

Sci-Fi Web Serial by Kyle Pollard

Continued from Blood of the Narlack: Part 1

Ahhh but dear reader I must digress. How is it that myself and my crew have come to this point in space and time. Why has our AI Ultnobe hacked into everything up to and including web-aware toasters? More importantly, what are our intentions with your shiny blue marble?

To know the answers to these questions, we must start at the beginning. It was not an easy life on Karbackus. As a young wet-wired babe straight out of my father’s womb, I found life somewhat confusing.”

Another ping from Ultnobe, Lar’s stops mid sentence, looks flustered for a second, and continues.

Ultnobe suggests I jump ahead in my narrative just a tad and start from there.

“That’s affirmative, Lars. If you consider moving the story ahead a few hundred years just a tad, then please proceed.”

“Fine, after graduating from University with a degree in Intergalactic Science Fiction of Pre-Contact cultures, I found myself at an impasse.” With many hand gestures and grand theatrics, Lar’s relates how on one early pre-dawn morning he was standing at an overlook on the famous beach Frubia Prime. The beach was almost at capacity. Everywhere he looked were lifeforms laying on the beach, each covered with narlack beetles. The beach looked like red, bumpy, undulating sand with periodic patches of black sand for as far as the eye could see.

Lars walked down near the water’s edge to a small section of beach not yet teeming with narlacks. Laying down, he thought about the conversation he had earlier with his father. After seventy-five years in college dear old Dad fumed that Lars had not yet demonstrated any real willingness to take up a profession. Once hooked on the blood of the narlacks, real-life, physical life, the here and now lacked a certain luster. Besides, Lars thought ruminating on the difference, if any, between the real and the unreal. When traveling the ancient data protocols of the narlacks, one’s soul, extracted from the physical host, is compressed and decompressed as it moves through fat data conduits that interconnect the spaces between baryonic matter. The known elements, the stars, nebular gasses, rocks, and planets are a small fraction of what is out there; it’s the spaces between, the dark matter that teems with infinite life.

Lars started to laugh as the narlacks began to crawl on his body. With billions, if not hundreds of trillions of the narlacks on the beach, the tiny brutes encircle a host and slowly begin piling on until every square inch is covered. The hard part, if you are a being that has active pain receptors as Lars did, was the first hundred or so punctures of the skin. It only takes a few minutes before the infusion of narlack blood overcomes the organic processes of the host body. Perhaps an hour before narlacks begin producing data packets that instantaneously course through dark matter routers that have existed for eons.

Screw you dad was the last thought Lars had before his consciousness tumbled over the event horizon and plunged into the gravity well of screaming banshee quantum data transmutation. The Andalusian’s had created the narlacks as a way to tap into the data carrying ability of what humans call dark matter. At first they used the “Shadow Network” as a way to communicate between galaxies in near real-time. After their civilization had peaked technologically, and their civilization’s singularity pushed aside organic life, it was only natural that the streams of data spiraling through the multiverse started carrying the digital minds of the Andalusians.

Lars received an internal ping from Ultnobe: “Tell them, my love. Tell them what happened on this journey through the multiverse.”

Keep Reading – Go To Part 3

Background Photo Credit: “Best-ever Ultraviolet Portrait of Andromeda Galaxy”
by NASA/Swift/Stefan Immler (GSFC) and Erin Grand (UMCP) is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Image resized and cropped to fit required size.