I Don't Seem So Bright in a Well-Lit Room

Chapter Eight

Vibloblblah Ooze was (almost) everywhere.

He had been there watching Potto get gutted for the final time on Tractos by gentleman/psychopathic killer Budgher Lempshop. He was on the Shiv when it left, moments before the prison moon accidentally imploded.

At The Node's bounty hunter briefing on Lyme Node, he sat at the back, (almost) unnoticed in plain sight, just a few chairs over from Potto, who had complimented his hat.

He watched as Aye had walked off the elevator (and off the back of a dead Blankton) with bits of self-help paper stuck to his face. He watched as the Topher tripped over the sandwich board sign and into some inconveniently located sick (almost) without laughing. He watched as Aye got his ass handed to him by the recognisable Kancorian Gekko.

And still he had made it back in time for a quick salad and to stowaway on the Muse while Potto was being pointlessly interrogated by Teeg.

He was also in K'ween's throne room when both Potto and Aye were dragged off to the barracks, and he now watched over those barracks, poised to be attached to the Muse again when the idiots were eventually (and hopefully) rescued.

Vibloblblah Ooze was almost everywhere because he could go almost anywhere. He was a master at stealth. He was an expert in surveillance. He was the maestro of patience.

By all accounts he should have stuck out like a sore thumb. He looked like a sore thumb. To be more precise, he looked like what once was a thumb but now was just excruciating pain and raw flesh and perhaps the last thumb anyone would consider using for hitchhiking.

Once upon a time, when The Node was but a boy, Vibloblblah Ooze was a humble philosopher monk, and had been for what seemed like forever and ever. In fact, he was one of only five philosopher monks from a very small and secretive planet called O-Bode, deep within the very secretive Pantheist System. He was of a species that had been one of the first in the entire universe; born out of the nothing. Born for only one greater purpose...to consider things.

At one time in his life Vibloblblah Ooze knew every religious practice practised throughout the galaxy, but these days he couldn't even remember what he once practised, much less what everyone everywhere else practised. Even with all that practice. Back then he also went by a different name. He couldn't remember that either. Probably on purpose.

These five monks had gone down in history as "The Brave Five". They had all died saving the universe from a young programming genius-turned-megalomaniac that had created an artificial intelligence microchip that threatened to bring down the entire universal web by blowing this young programmer (and themselves) up.

They saved the universe from a threat created by The Node before he was even The Node. Back when he was just Ernie Watson Jr. from a pre-mall Denver, Colorado.

Unbeknownst to the Brave Five (and almost everyone), they were actually directly responsible for Ernie's onslaught and takeover of the universe many years later when it was discovered he had survived.

He had survived, reinvented himself as The Node, and was integrated into the giant armoured suit he wore to this day and kept him alive forever. If the monks had, in fact, destroyed him the first time, the universe would have probably been a very different, more peaceful place...but at least everyone had their electronics.

Before being blown up by the monks, young Ernie had downloaded the program he had come up with to take over the entire universal web onto a single flash drive.

This drive was thought to have been destroyed in the explosion. The Node couldn't seem to recreate it, so he had to take over the universe the old-fashioned way...fear, war, hate, brute force, robotic armies, guts, gore, propaganda, hospital food and the displacing of any planet that opposed him. Much later there were seventy of these planets. The Seventy Lost.

As far as anyone was concerned Vibloblblah Ooze had died along with his fellow monks. But not only had he survived, but he also had the flash drive. Or he had had it. Like the Seventy displaced planets, it was lost, presumably forever.

The only reason he had saved it from the fire was because the A.I. program on it could not only take over the universal web, but he foresaw that it could destroy the future Node, and only Vibloblblah Ooze, other than The Node himself, knew that it would be the only thing that could. For this reason he called it The Achilles Chip, and he spread rumours about its existence to put a little fear into The Node's cold half-mechanical heart.

~~~

There was a time, before the Brave Five had become the Brave Five and Vibloblblah Ooze had become Vibloblblah Ooze, when he was considered a handsome man.

He had, after so many eons, given up his vocation and left the monkhood. He had fallen deeply in love with a woman, a fellow Oian. Both had lived almost forever and both wanted to spend the rest of forever together, but this whole messy Node business had ruined all that. It temporarily drew him back to the monks for what was supposed to be a quick and easy take down of Ernie Watson Jr. Things, obviously, didn't go as planned. One look at Vibloblblah Ooze now was proof of this.

Where once he had a handsome face, he now was that sore thumb. He was scarred so badly that he wore a black scarf wrapped around his face to keep all those that came across him from suffering from night terrors for the rest of their lives.

He was so scarred that he had to wear protective goggles just to hold his eyeballs in. He wore a long black coat that made sure his twisted humanoid shape could not be seen, and a large very wide brimmed black saturno hat (that Potto had loved) and black gloves that accommodated his missing fingers.

The name he went by now was created by those very few people that had actually seen him (probably thinking him to be a ghost) and it was more of a description than a name. It was a translation of the Kancorian word for "hideous" (vibloblblah), and the English Earth word for, well, ooze.

His natural aptitude for stealth was enhanced by his genius for electronics, and his invention of a device that he had swallowed and sat anchored in his colon that made his body heat undetectable by both computer sensors and snakes.

~~~

Vibloblblah Ooze wasn't a sad man despite all the tragedy in his long life. He had used up all his sadness and self-pity. He was well beyond that. His scarred skin was not only numb a great deal of the time, but his emotional scars were numb as well. His self-esteem issues had been permanently put on hold. His feelings were unhurtable, his anger steadied, and his clarity untangled.

His ship was brilliantly designed to look like garbage. Not just any garbage, but unsalvageable shipwreck garbage even the most desperate salvagers wouldn't salvage. His ship was nameless, though for this reason a good name for it would have been "Not Worth The Resources".

Oh, but it certainly was worth the resources. It was worth far more than all the resources. It had technology well beyond anything most of the known universe had ever seen. It had cloaking technology only seen before on old Earth science fiction television shows that didn't actually exist in any future.

It had a laser so powerful, destructive, and precise that it could split the delicate feather on a tiny fedora worn by a runt-of-the-litter thief ant in half from many light years away, or carve the long-gone Mount Everest to look like a multi-faceted and extremely intricate fractal tree in less time than it took to write out "multi-faceted extremely intricate fractal tree" (or look up "thief ant" for that matter). And it had surveillance nanobots that were as small as the Life Core nanobots of Tractos, but equipped with high-definition cameras that could easily make the day-to-day life of that fedora-wearing thief ant look like hyper-coloured virtual reality.

~~~

It was very rare for someone so intuitive and unseen to not see something coming, but as Vibloblblah Ooze hid in the shadows of the K'ween's barracks, something he could have never predicted was about to hit him like a tonne of bricks. His uncomplicated personal mission was about to get much more complicated, and a hell of a lot more personal.