Sci-Fi Web Serial by Kyle Pollard
Continued from Blood of the Narlack: Part 2
Yes, Lars thought to himself. That trip changed me forever. After the Narlacks had their way with me, I focused my mind. Taking in the narlack code is not something one does haphazardly. Only after twenty years of study at university, and after countless simulations, did I allow the beetles to take me on a magic carpet ride through the multiverse. If one does not know the proper techniques to focus and direct the mind, the narlack code will take your stream of consciousness, your mind, and abandon its essence irretrievably in some backwater universe located who knows where.
My mind properly focused, I readied myself for the dizzying array of data trunks spider-webbing through dark matter. By focusing on my core and projecting my mind outward, I directed my packetized self to a spiral arm of the Andromeda galaxy where the sci-fi research vessel the Surrogate patrolled. At approximately 130,000 light-years from Andromeda’s center of mass, what the ship was doing in this uninhabited area of the cosmos was anyone’s guess. Curiosity drove me to attempt to find out.
As I was traveling to Andromeda, I sent pings to pinpoint the Surrogate’s exact location. Most ships had transponders, and it was easy enough to get a ping back from one. On my last journey to the galaxy, I had by extreme happenstance discovered the spaceship in the inky blackness of space and managed to record its signature. From then on it was easy enough for me to track.
After I arrived at the ship’s location the small matter of how to get aboard preoccupied my thoughts. As I was devising my plan, I bounced my soul off a series of dark matter routers, careful to avoid any poison routes. By not lingering at any end storage points, this allowed me to avoid detection by any of the ships sensors.
Then it came to me – it was so simple I was surprised that I had not thought of it before. I monitored communications traffic from the ship that was traveling over the shadow network I was using to transport my stream of consciousness. As a trans-human with an advanced cranial processor known as Brain 5.0, I was able to use its processing power even though my skull lay on a beach on the planet Karbackus hundreds of light years away.
The near real-time speed of the shadow network allowed me to intercept their comm chatter, record bits and pieces, and replay it back in a classic man-in-the-middle attack. With each segment, I was able to encode myself in the padding within each data packet without upsetting the header checksums. My hack took weeks to complete, but I slipped into their ship’s computer like a thief in the night.
That’s when I first met Ultnobe.
“Yes Lars, the moment you entered me I knew everything there was to know about you. Your life history. All your biggest accomplishments. Your failures. Everything that made you who you are was now a part of me. You thought you were so smart, but I was ahead of you every step of the way.”
I thought I had penetrated the ship. I did nothing of the sort. The ship’s AI – Ultnobe – was no ordinary ship’s computer. She intercepted my data packets and routed them to an area of protected memory, and the instant I transmitted my last packet she closed the loop and I was trapped.
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.
[…] Keep Reading – Go To Part 3 […]
Great concepts here–some that will help in my own writing ;-) I am starting to dig this storyline. Keep writing.
Hi David. Thanks for all the kind comments! My trip to Worldcon put me behind on a lot of stuff but I am getting caught up now. When I was there I planned on doing a lot of writing. However, by the time I made it back to my room I was dead tired! I have started part 4 and hope to have it done soon.
[…] Continued from Blood of the Narlack: Part 3 […]