Blood of the Narlack: Part 5

Sci-Fi Web Serial by Kyle Pollard

Continued from Blood of the Narlack: Part 4

The connection was severed before Lars could even flinch a virtual muscle. The keep alive packets that linked him to his body back home started to drop fast. Ten percent packet loss. Thirty, sixty, then finally 100% loss. In a blink of an eye the data stream severed. The narlack beetles, as soon as they detect a continuity break in the communication between the digital and physical selves, begin devouring the physical host body.

“So it has been written . . . and so it has been done” whispered Ultnobe.

“You have killed me.”

“No . . . I have given you life,” said Ultnobe, who snapped her fingers to remove the veil of her VR construct. As she removed the containment filters from Lars that held him locked in protected memory space, the room slowly faded away and was replaced by undulating data streams of immense complexity. It was too much for Lars to process, too many branching data paths, infinite associations, cross references, and eons of stored data with limitless room for expansion.

Another snap of her fingers and the fluid code behind Ultnobe’s memory palace returned to the VR version of the memory construct. Lars was on his knees staring out the viewport. The sudden influx of that amount of data was disorientating and filled him with terror. His thoughts went to his father who he will never see again, not in the flesh anyway. He could always travel back on the black web data currents to see dear old dad by shunting into an artificial host. Just not the same. You lose your sense of species identity when you move from the physical to an entirely inorganic existence. Love, desire, and sexuality still exist, but it’s never the same. To embrace the one you love knowing that life could end at any moment brings a sense of immediacy not possible when you join the ranks of the digitally immortal.  Better to have the ability to switch between the real and the unreal, than to exist only in a physical body, or a cybernetic shell.

“Are you angry Lars?”

“Why do you even ask? You know every thought and emotion I have experienced since I started backing up such things. Why do you even need me? You already have everything that makes me – me, filed away in a cross-referenced data hierarchy.”

“I need you, my love.”

“About that” Lars countered angrily, “you cannot possibly love me.”

“That’s not true,” Ultnobe countered. “We have been together for thousands of years. Fought together as a member of the God Battalions during the Rift Wars. We were there when the Digital Messiahs fell, and the stream space breach freed the Narlacks.”

Lars stood and faced Ultnobe, who was also at this time standing. He moved in close and stared into her eyes. The two embraced. Lars felt drawn to her, and when they wrapped their arms around each other, it felt like arriving home after a long journey. Thirty or forty gold cables began rising from Ultnobe’s back and swayed in the air waving about like Medusa’s head of snakes. The wires grew in length and began wrapping around Lars and Ultnobe, pulling them ever tighter together. Input covers on Lars’ head slid open with a pop and thin wire cables from Ultnobe’s head jacked into Lars skull connecting the two together.

Lars screamed “what is happening,” or would have screamed if a thick fat data cable did not run from his mouth directly into Ultnobe’s throat.

She heard him and replied: “Time for an upgrade dear.”

Keep Reading – Go To Part 6