who could foretell such a future, anyway? The past pulls a thick black veil of complacency and denial over our all-too-willing-to-forget minds, until we are afraid to pull it aside and see the truth—the truth and the lies spread about by countless generations past and countless generations to come, all convening in one crowd to pull that veil across, all working against us, and us against the world. Thus begins the perpetual battle of life, the war that we wage day in and day out, never calming nor respiting, always flowing, always churning, always attack attack ATTACK, battle and warfare grinding at our life, grinding at our souls until we grow old and frail and we drop into a perfectly sizeable 6x2x6 hole. We are all born to die. We drop out of our mother’s womb and land on the beaches of this ceaseless Normandy, crawling slowly up the sand and bloody water, scaling the sheer cliffs under a hail of gunfire, and reach the top only to find a barren land, devoid of everything but a headstone carved with the name of yours truly and an antecedent hole yet to be filled.

And it all begins with the singularity from which anything and everything sprang. The golden ember shining in the endless blanket of nothing, the golden ember containing everything. The pressures and terrors of the universe built itself up inside, the pent up life and death and living and loving and dying and birth and all that comes between slowly building the psi inside until life forced itself to break free. The world and the universe spills out into nothing, over the cascading Niagara into endless void, filling the infinity to its limits and pushing it outward, never again to be compressed. The centuries flow out, time and space and dimensions one through three, raw energy churning like smoothly melted chocolate, enjoying the freedom of utter entropy. But alas, the entropy slowly starts to fade, and law forces its way among lawlessness and begins to organize, as law always does.

The energy condenses itself and dances itself into cosmos, galaxies twirling and frolicking into the mystique and puffing purple and blue nebulae from their Cuban cigars. And inside the puffs of galactic smoke, the most enormously minute pinpricks flare to life, singularities for universes all of their own. All these new worlds are yours. Use them together. Use them in peace. What’s going to happen, Dave? Something wonderful. And each of these singularities does what singularities do best, and from each springs forth a following, circling like good little ducklings around their enormously tiny mother.

Enter the Parasite—a fungus sprouting from the fruit of knowledge and eventually wrapping itself across all of Eden. Broken rules, broken vows, and broken morals allows it to spread, to encompass the good little duckling, feeding of her sustenance and using her own body as perpetual breeding grounds to spawn. And like all worthy Lice do, eventually one of them will jump ship and come to land on another little duckling’s back, breeding and starting the process all over again until the entire flock is infested and dying. Brown and desolate, broken and deranged, the family will die. They’re not ugly ducklings waiting to become beautiful swans—they’re swans fallen in their prime by the unconquerable. The ultimate underdog story of sick infestation…but