Begin Transmission 4386
Samaeal Kampier Dioginn, Navi first class reporting at zero-one-twenty-six hours and thirty five seconds on day 236 in the year of two thousand twenty nine Anno Domini or 7 Post-Earth.
Travelers!!! Welcome back to the violently revamped planet formerly known as Earth. Terra is a much better appellation in all respects, implications and, especially, puns of the word.
Across my intended path lies a 4-foot high tentacle of neon green gel-sludge, lighting the area in a putrid shade of puce. It’s slow heaving and lurching looked much like a torpid snake and made my stomach do its own drawn-out flat-spin. I truly HATE neon green gel-sludge to high heaven, even when it doesn’t contain the screaming neo-corpses. Pre-Corpses, actually, that are slowly being dissolved alive. Lucky for the continued containment of my breakfast, the tentacle only contained small vacuoles of unidentifiable material. Well … mostly unidentifiable, urgh.
Shining my repeater, which was set on UV, around showed what I had disgustedly predicted: the damned thing filled the access tunnel. Now I would have to hike back several bloody klicks. Hoping all the way that another sludge segment hadn’t broke the thermocline and centimeter’d its glutinous self down into the Network. I keep forgetting that you folks may not know the stuff we Network Ants take for granted. Like this fact: UV does not trigger a smeggie into a feeding frenzy. Infrared, especially that of a breather like you, the pets and me sets those smegging suckers into a jet of activity that make a carcharodon {great white to you drek-heads} attack look like a sedate game of chess. If sucked, slapped or slurped into that unholy of unholies, you hope you crack and smash your head thoroughly and snuff it. Otherwise the smeggie will surround you in a vacuole and strip your skin with a vicious acid. It doesn’t end there; all fluids are blended from you to the smeggie. All the better to keep you fricckin’ alive as it feeds on your fat and you’re feeling everything during the whole process. A searing process that can last days to years in length, depending on your ‘freshness date’. Here is the ugly truth: You’re stripped down to muscle, tendon, bone and the organs that are required to produce lipids. It can’t gastric-ly process anything but lipids, so it assimilates any biological system, human on down – anything that can produce fatty substances. Your brain is still intact too. At least until you are ‘ripe’, that is. And that is a WHOLE ‘nother disgustin’ dissertation all together. No time to relate, as usual.
For the moment, I have to get moving and report the blockage to the Janitors. By-the-by, those folks are real heroes, so if you meet any - treat ‘em real nice – they are the difference between life and … well, long lasting uber-pain. My job as a Navi {CKA Net Ant} is comparatively easy in relative perspective. Again ‘tho, it is time to move on. Last thought: everybody though ‘the alien blob’ would be congealed blood carmine’iny-ish tinged. It ain’t. You’ll just have to take it from me: ‘Cause I wish you the posi-luck of NEVER having to perceive it up close and intimate-like.
End Transmission 4386
