The Unseen Band

A Work Of Fiction From The `Holodeck`

The Feeding

I thought I was dreaming. A viscous, oily black blob, the size of my trunk, adhered to my side. From its shifting mass, slick tentacles leech onto my face, the side of my chest, and my thighs. A cold that wasn’t temperature, but a drain of vitality, seeped from their points of contact.

Revulsion surged through me, a primal, human need to be free of this thing. I tried to hit it, my fist swinging in the dream-slow way fists do, but it simply… disappeared. It didn’t vanish with a pop, but more like a radio signal fading from one station to another, leaving only the static hum of its presence in my mind.

“We are just from another `band`”, the creature made its introduction.

The thought came not as a sound, but as a knowing, planted directly into my consciousness. It was trying to reach me via my linguistic module, a clumsy translation. And I, in turn, knew it couldn’t read all the symbols relatable to my language. We were both partially blind and deaf to understanding each other, but that creature is one notch up. It can communicate by `relaying` thoughts. It is akin to a hacking plugging and eavesdropping into our network. Only that in this case, it taps into our nervous and neural system.