Congratulations on your recent purchase of a SlimeWire™/V!SCiD™ Aseptic Digital Slime Line (ADSL) subscription! You and your family are joining a burgeoning community which you are reminded you cannot publicly talk about.

How it works

• Existing municipal water pipes are coated with a thin layer of Teflar™ nanobeads and U.S. MIL-STD-810H KY Jelly, maintaining low Reynolds numbers even at high rates of discharge.

• Depending on the infrastructure of your residence, your ADSL connection may operate on a Slime To The Nodule (STTN), Slime To The Curb/Gutter (STTC/G), or Slime To The Premises (STTP) principle.

  • Slime To The Nodule: Slime is pumped to a municipal nodule. Special electrodes carry signals between your house and the nodule, via traditional twisted-pair copper wires. Slime nourishes the nodule with certain obscure nutrients, modified ylem, and small amounts of data. You may experience minor bolus loss at times of high geomantic stress or during distributed denial of slime (DDoS) attacks. Whilst truly marvellous, you are not permitted to look upon the nodule under any circumstances.

  • Slime To The Curb/Gutter: Slime is pumped to the perimeter of your property. You must provide your own bucket brigade. It's not our problem.

  • Slime To The Premises: Slime is pumped directly into your house. Hook the slime hose to the slocket on the Slime Processing Unit (SPU) inside your computer. If you live in a cool climate the slime will help cool down your computer. If you live in a warm climate the slime will help warm up your computer. This isn't complicated.

• Leveraging the same technology used to create multicoloured toothpaste, superlaminar slimecasting ensures that packets boluses are always received in the correct order, and without scrambling.

• Most users will typically consume much more 'downstream' slime bandwidth than they transmit. On account of some law (?), the responsible disposal of this excess slime is technically up to the subscriber.

• Do not dispose of slime down domestic plumbing. Neither the slime nor the plumbing can take it.

• Consider routing excess slime into an unused room or the least valued room in your home.

• Check to see if your home has a dedicated slime basement.

• Slime is edible, and you are encouraged to surreptitiously feed it to other people. Don't use force unless absolutely necessary.

• Drained swimming pools, bathtubs, sunken lounges, buckets, empty food and drink containers, etc. may make excellent stopgap storage measures. Then again, perhaps they won't.

• Storm drains can take a reasonable amount of slime but don't overdo it because it wrecks the environment. Future generations will judge you.

• You need to stay on top of this. Don't let it spiral out of control like everything else in your life.

• Once the slime has exited your computer, static mixers and quasi-random injections of the same dye used to create anti-breeze banknotes ensures the privacy of your communications.

• If you see what looks like tiny (between 1 and 2 cm long) filamentous organisms moving within the slime, you are mistaken and you need to get your fucking head checked.

The history of ADSL

1903: George Stokes invents slime and is assassinated by agents of French military intelligence.

1937: Ludwig Prandtl's infamous 'Schleimtraum' memo is suppressed on the orders of Göring, but continues to circulate among underground myxology circles both during and after World War II.

1960s–1990s: Long-running but small-scale experiments in slimenetting are performed by the enthusiast slime hacker ('slacker') community.

1998: Recognising the implications of quips in IT circles about 'the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes', the Honeywell Fluidic Computing Research Unit commences a program of R&D seeking to leverage existing hydraulic networks to achieve the bandwidth of a pipe full of slime. Rumours regarding parallel research involving filling station wagons and other motor vehicles with slime are unsubstantiated.

2000-2002: Early experiments in Spatially Modulated Slime (SMS) messaging prove that ultrahigh data encoding densities are possible: just add glitter.

December 2002: Following retroactively illegal experiments in either Vietnam or Laos, the South East Asia/Oceania/South Pacific Catastrophe Exclusion Zone (CEZ) is established. 0.4% of all SlimeWire™ subscription purchases go towards the completion of the Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson Memorial Mega-Revetment and Oceanic Mobile Bulwark System. Remember: the Catastrophe Exclusion Zone extends all the way down to the Earth's core, and almost all of the way to space.

2003: Honeywell enters a partnership with Nickelodeon.

2004: The SlimeWire™ network launches, making ADSL available to the general public for the first time.

2005: SlimeWire™ competitor Gurgle (later rebranding as Grrgl) launches.

2006: SlimeWire™ is integrated with V!SCiD™, revolutionising Slimecasting.

2006–2010: The era of Big Slime.

2010–2016: The era of Deep Slime begins, with the first hypo-cthonic slimeholes and suboceanic gak-tubes drilled between North America and Western Europe. These gooey megaconduits pointedly avoid the North Atlantic poles of inaccessibility for reasons that will be declassified no earlier than 2072.

2017–present: The age of the gunkpunk. In apparent fulfilment of senator Ted Steven's cryptic final prophecy, the Internet is now by and large a series of tubes, and those tubes are full of slime.