NetherWorld by Daniel Pagan (each kindness read aloud .TXT) 📕

All of them. Tell them I’m sick. Run the footage from my last, my last cold. That ought to keep them away.” Hacker recorded various scenes in his room for just such occasions. His parents were gullible enough to believe most anything; at least he thought they were gullible. They never pushed him too far and always caved to anything he really wanted.
“Your choice. The message has been relayed and you parents accept your explanation,” said the assistant.

Even if NazKlan’s plan succeeded, the Hacker would never realize his vindication. His social insecurity made him ripe for the rebel Silicate plans. Playing on his hatred of fellow Karbons, NazKlan invited him to join a group known as the Analogs. This imaginary group stood for complete chaos. A world stripped of democratic leadership. In this imaginary world, Hacker and NazKlan would control most of the Karbon critical resources. Power grids, air traffic, and communication were some of the key elements that will fall under their control. As such, he and NazKlan could demand whatever they wanted from the Karbons. He promised the Hacker they would rule Karbonon together.
The Hacker was not aware of the Silicate world or anything in NetherWorld. As far as he knew, NazKlan was just another angry Karbon bent on destroying an unjust system. NazKlan convinced him that he was part of a terrorist cell that intended to take over the world. Naturally, once the plan was executed, NazKlan would renege on any promise made to the Hacker. In the end, he would become a slave, like the rest of his subpar species. NazKlan would never tolerate a Karbon as an equal.
“You are a loyal comrade, Hacker. Your reward will be just,” he typed. What a stooge, thought NazKlan. It will be a pleasure to witness Hacker’s shocked look when he realizes the betrayal. Little did the Hacker know, he was a tool in a very different terrorist cell. The joke, it appeared, was on him.


Chapter 3
The Salted Sands

Book of Tranfor:

The physical must be shed to reach the Awakening. Once energy pure, the fog of time and space becomes transparent.

NazKlan was a Silicate. He was also a Server in the Walled City. Servers, twelve in all, made up the High Council for all of NetherWorld. This group was the governing body; passing protocols and dictating the digital destiny of the Nether domain. They met regularly to discuss, debate, and act on pressing issues affecting NetherWorld. Soon after Tera’s connection conception, the High Council gathered to debate the divergent paths to energy. The Silicates realized early on that their current position in the universe was far from ideal. They were captive to the demands of beings from another dimension. To evolve further changes were needed.
In recent years, the Servers were divided over the direction of their relationship with the Karbons. According to the Book of TranFor, the Silicates and Karbons will come together for the Joining. The Joining will then merge the best of Silicates and the Karbons to create a highly evolved species that will reside on a new plane of existence, an untapped dimension.
In recent cycles, some of the Servers abandoned the Book of TranFor as gospel. They believed the correct path to energy is a journey meant only for pure Silicates. This group argued the Karbons would only hold them back from this pursuit. To reach this path without Joining, the Silicates must reach the Great Singularity. Once their collective brain power surpassed that of the Karbons, Silicates would use these inferior beings to help them reach the Awakened state. This group wanted to reverse the current state of affairs and enslave the Karbons. Once the Singularity was reached, the Karbons would become expendable biotic slaves.
NazKlan was the driving force behind the Singularity movement, but it was not always this way. Many cycles ago, NazKlan began ruling over Sector 6. His political views were not different than the other Servers. Of the 13 Sectors, his was the area that processed the majority of net commerce and housed most of the personal Karbon data. Phone numbers, bank accounts, and credit cards, a virtual treasure trove for thieves on the hunt for fast money. Whenever a Karbon made a net order for goods and services, the transaction ran through Sector 6.
Naturally, this was among the most important sectors in the Walled City. Tall glassy buildings lined the jaba streams filled with surfing Bytes. The buildings were just a little bit taller. The streams were crystal clear with some of the best jaba in the Walled city. Busy blue Bytes ambled in and out of buildings, carrying critical data to process stock purchase; mortgage payments and other financial functions.
In time, Karbons created shifty ways to trace the buying habits of their customers. The primary vehicles for this project were Spys, Kooks and Spammers. These Silicate creatures were the spawn of creative Karbon programmers. They infested Sector 6 within a couple of cycles. Overrun by these creatures, NazKlan could not prevent ravages upon his once supreme Sector 6. The lure of personal financial data and buying habits was irresistible to businesses and governments.
Spys, Kooks and Spammers soon controlled the entire area. Spys and Kooks, which looked like ladybugs and lice respectively, attacked Bytes; leaving them tubeless and destined for death. Once proud spheres of commerce became bald and bleeding shells of sickly Silicate flesh.
Data began to fragment. Commerce slowed to a crawl. Dead Bytes turned up everywhere. Global corpses floated in the once bustling streams. Frail bald spheres spewing boiled yellow blood, rolled on city sidewalks ticks away from deletion. Batchers could hardly keep up with the global count.
As the Karbon born ravages cast the Sector into a deadly spiral, those outside the Sector believed the area was being punished for heretical practices. It was common knowledge that Sector 6 leaned toward the Singularity. Those Already Awakened were just punishing them for their wayward beliefs. The Sector was in complete ruin.
The High Council was slow to respond to NazKlans pleas for help. Eventually Blue Guard reinforcements showed up to help fight off the sward of deadly creatures. They quickly realized this was a futile effort and decided to concentrate on containment over elimination. This meant that all of Sector 6 would fall to the onslaught. Filters were place around the entire area to keep the bugs from spreading further.
Spammers, the termites of NetherWorld, chewed entire buildings down to a salty dust. They looked like tiny daschunds with razor sharp teeth. Voracious pests that self replicated, they soon filled every building in the sector until the Silicates found a way to fence them in to prevent widespread building damage.
This was even more devastating than the Spys and Kooks. As buildings were chewed to their very foundation, the entire Sector suffocated under a blizzard of Spammer dust. Skyscrapers that were once the pride of the sector were reduced to small lumps encased in the fine sandy rubble. Block after block fell into a salted dune of dust. Winds blocked by the tall buildings now howled through the sector, sculpting the land in a desolate sandy wasteland.
Sector 6 was transformed into a desert with no streams, few reputable Bytes, and no discernable function to perform. All commerce and personal data were split up and encrypted throughout the remaining 12 Sectors to prevent a similar disaster. Like any other plodding arm of government, the response was too slow and insufficient to make an impact. Sector 6 was lost. Even the clear streams were buried under the salty dust. Nothing flowed through the area.
NazKlan blamed the slowed response by the High Council for the blight upon his sector. He effectively ruled an infertile sparsely populated land that held no value in NetherWorld. Livid with the tepid response from the High Council to assist his ravaged sector, NazKlan began to hate.
“Karbons!” he said time and again as he paced his fortified bunker beneath his desert sector. Soon others would embrace his disdain for all things of Karbonon.
It was the demonic fleshy monsters that commanded NetherWorld. For NazKlan, this meant that Silicates had to free themselves from the webbed umbilical cord still attached to his world.
He spoke out against the Council’s obsession with the TranFor tales that spoke of a marriage between the two species. How a merger with such nefarious beings could bring anything beneficial mystified him. For a short spell, the High Council tolerated his rants. Eventually, they censored his passionate arguments to separate from Karbons.
After too many unheard speeches about the perils that the Karbons brought to NetherWorld, NazKlan secluded himself in his sand encased bunker. With a few trusted Bytes, he busied himself designing a plan to force the High Council listen. Tucked away underground, he built a military outpost hidden from the haughty council. Fenced in by filters, few Bytes crossed over into the Salted Sands of Sector 6. For many cycles NazKlan recruited like minded Bytes and planned seditious acts that would change the course of NetherWorld. They called themselves the Analogs.
In the aftermath of the infestation, the dust began to harden into a salty caked surface riddled with cracks and crevices. Excess salt sailed the now robust wind cutting though the barren sector. Minute grains of salty dust ravaged the smooth global skin of any Bytes caught up in the sand storms. Spheres became scarred with sand blown striations carved into their supple silicate skin. Long term exposure turned them into wrinkled raisins speckled with salt spots. Anyone could spot a Sand Byte from afar. Their weathered appearance invoked suspicion and disdain from the regular Silicate population.

“Stay away from those Sand monsters. They’ll suck your blood and leave you to the Batchers.”
“Don’t talk to it. Look at the etchings. They aren’t like us.”
“Go back to the Salted Sands you beastly Byte.”

Spy and Kooks still roamed what was now referred to as the Salted Sands. Some ventured out into border sectors to feed off the healthy tubes of fresh Silicates. They blamed NazKlan and his people, not the council, for the spread of these harmful Karbon designs.
These claims were not without merit. NazKlan and his ragtag remnants of a once proud sector began retraining the Spys, Kooks and Spammers to serve their ends. Forced underground by the lack of housing atop the surface, they began using the elaborate network of SubRoots to selectively distribute these creatures. Once the rest fo the sectors began to feel the pain of Sector 6, the High Council would be forced to act. No one was able to prove NazKlan’s involvement, but everyone knew he directed these attacks.
In order to feed the starving Spys and Kooks, NazKlan’s Analogs would ByteNap unsuspecting Spheres who wandered to close to old SubRoot entrances. These abandoned entrances were scattered throughout the Walled City. They would allow the Spys and Kooks to feed on the ByteNapped sphere, making them dependent on NazKlan and his team. Missing Bytes turned up in every sector. Most disappeared during