Republic Hive World
TOI-700 d, 101.4 light years from Earth
May 28th, 2176 A.D.
Owen watched excitedly as the drones responded to the artificial pheromones for the tenth time in a row, and he clapped Dr. Chui on the shoulder, who turned around and gave Owen a crushing bear hug.
“I think we finally did it, Owen!” He yelled enthusiastically into Owen’s ear, causing him to wince.
Owen responded with his own victory yell as they separated from each other before looking back at the drone formation perfectly executing the maneuvers.
For months, a team of Republic scientists had been working on trying to fabricate artificial pheromones and scent markers that would allow for basic control of worker drones without any input from command drones or queens.
When Owen and Emily arrived, Owen asked to be part of the efforts and threw himself into the experiment, rapidly becoming the de facto leader of the effort as his zeal and out-of-the box thinking helped the team get over the many hurdles preventing them from successfully controlling the drones.
It was Owen who suggested pivoting from individual control to mass control. “We will never be able to direct a single drone to install a single component of an engine or to perform an individual task. We need to focus on capitalizing on their hive tendencies and focus on large formations.”
Now, after four months of testing and thousands of pheromone permutations, they had finally multiple drone formations to execute maneuvers and perform joint tasks. The real success was the AI command drones the Republic built and sent to them after input from Bandit and Aurora.
The AI command drones looked just like command drones, had sacks of pheromones inside of them, and by a combination of pheromones and visual signals seen by the other drones, they were able to control hundreds and thousands of drones at a time.
The last ten tests verified the results, and Owen sent the final command to the AI drones leading the formations to release attack pheromones and “assault” a network of enemy trenches in the distance.
This was the final test, and both Owen and Dr. Chui nervously stared at the multiple screens as the AI drones within the 10,000 strong formations took control and charged at the trenches.
Instead of the mass suicide attacks that were seen by the drones during the reconquest of the dead worlds, these drones were following the examples of the AI drones and utilizing cover and fire suppression tactics as they pinned down targets and flanked them.
The hope was for Republic ground commanders to be able to exercise a basic level of control over the allied drones when it came time to fight ground campaigns.
Instead of callously throwing the lives of thousands of drones away in massed wave attacks, they could now be used intelligently in combat formations without relying on only queens and command drones for control and direction.
Aurora and Luna had taught the drones how to respond to the casualty bands around their legs and bodies, and the drones would react to signals from the casualty bands as they were tagged by the harmless lasers of the OPFOR.
Just like the laser-tag games he used to play as a kid, the drones would interpret the signals and respond appropriately to the severity of their simulated injuries. Hits to the thorax or the abdomen were crippling, and the tagged drones would lay on the ground and play dead.
Drones would stop using legs that were tagged, using the remaining ones to continue advancing depending on the extent of their injuries.
Something Owen was truly proud of was the implementation of Emily’s proposal for medic/corpsman drones.
Hundreds of drones were taught the basic triage skills necessary to treat their own unique physiologies by Aurora and the command drones after Emily shared her idea with Aurora and showed her human examples.
Aurora was stunned by the concept of humans willingly putting themselves in harm's way to save others who were wounded, and she became personally involved in the training program, fascinated by the potential of saving drones that would have died from untreated wounds before.
The concept greatly affected Aurora, causing her to withdraw and disappear for almost two days as she became wracked with guilt from the thousands of years of callous disregard for the drone’s welfare on numerous battlefields.
It just never occurred to them to consider trying to rescue and save drones that were left on the battlefields, as they were always considered an expendable and easily replaced resource.
What really shamed Aurora was the level of care and support that Republic personnel received after being wounded in battle, sometimes for the rest of their lives. It was Aurora’s first introduction to the human concept of social welfare for the disabled and afflicted.
Finally, after almost two days of isolation, Aurora emerged from her private chambers and dedicated herself to the efforts. She reviewed hundreds of hours of Republic video footage of battlefield triage going back over three hundred years of human warfare.
She was able to process the footage at incredible speeds, her biological supercomputer mind capable of viewing the footage at almost twenty times the normal human visual processing limit.
Afterwards, she studied human triage and medical procedures at the same remarkable rate, designing treatments that were uniquely designed for Insectoid physiology. Ten command drones were taught by Aurora herself, and they passed the knowledge to their other sister command drones before training the medic drones.
It was an incredible success, and Owen smiled widely as dozens of medic drones crawled to the pretend casualties and started triage procedures and treatment from specialized supplies within the sacks attached to their exoskeletons.
This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
I wish Emily was here; she would love to see this herself, Owen thought as he continued to monitor the assault from the camera feeds transmitted by dozens of overwatch drones.
After a few more minutes, the exercise came to an end as the assault formations captured the least of the trench network and achieved victory with only a 7% casualty rate, far less than the acceptable threshold of 15% as outlined by the Republic war planners.
The formations became more efficient in achieving their tactical objectives and reducing their casualties every single time the exercises were run. They got better at it every time, and fewer drones were being tagged as they became used to the assault tactics.
They are learning far faster than we estimated, he thought to himself as he watched the drones begin to fortify the trench network, preparing to defend themselves from potential counterattacks without being ordered to do so by the AI command drones.
He had seen numerous signs of planning and intelligence from individual worker drones that would assume a command role and continue leading their fellow drones when certain command AI drones were deactivated.
The purpose of deactivating them was to see what the drones would do after the sudden loss of the pheromones and visual signal commands from the AI drones.
Surprisingly, the affected drone formations seemed to have their own way of producing a command worker drone to lead them from among their own ranks and continue the assaults once they determined they were no longer being controlled.
This should not have been possible according to all that was known and verified about the way the Hive mind worked, but the evidence was irrefutable in Owen’s eyes. This needed to be discussed with Emily, and if she agreed, they would then show Aurora.
He had been out here for over two weeks, and now he could finally go back home to his family. He inhaled the cool, crisp air of the sparsely vegetated plains they were in, imagining the smell of lilac in Emily’s hair and Ito’s baby scent as he held them within his arms.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Queen World of the Insectoid Empire
Brood Chamber of the Hive Mother
Fourth Cycle, 384.76 years, Insectoid solar calendar
May 29th, 2176 A.D.
The Hive mother waited impatiently as Bandit-Friend continued to unfurl the strange, flexible device on the floor in front of her. So many new concepts had been taught to her by the yellow-eyed machine animal, and her need to know more only increased as they continued to share thoughts.
It became an almost insatiable desire that consumed both her waking and dormant thoughts, and Bandit-Friend seemed to be an inexhaustible well of knowledge and wisdom, reminding her of the ancestors that dwelled within her.
She had absorbed the animal concepts of their version of mathematics, their social behaviors, and how they defined themselves through shared genetic heritage. Names fascinated her, and she was jealous of her sister being gifted the name of one of their most powerful and revered ancestors.
She must have one herself, she decided. She will share thoughts with her sister and ask her advice on the matter. It would not do for the Hive mother to not have a name when her sister had been honored so by the animals.
She was particularly interested in their concepts of rightness and wrongness and their strange beliefs in all powerful ancestors that would take them to specially created Hives when they died, where they would live for eternity in happiness and love if they lived a life of rightness.
The other place, the Hive of punishment and eternal suffering for those who lived a life filled with wrongness, terrified her, and she became fearful that such a fate could be possible for queens and Hive mothers who lived lives filled with wrongness.
She never knew the animals were such fascinating creatures, and she suffered frequent bouts of despondency as she came to terms with the many unique animal civilizations that were now gone forever because of their swarms.
The cleverness of the animals amazed her, and many times she found herself regretting becoming a Hive mother. The walls of the brood chamber have now turned her into a hostage and denied her the ability to experience the new places and concepts she had learned from Bandit-Friend.
She told Bandit-Friend this during their last sharing of thoughts, revealing her sadness openly to him as she told him of her deep regret for never being able to experience such new things.
He asked for permission to bring her a gift from the cruiser, promising her this new concept would bring her joy despite being a hostage for the rest of her life. She granted it and demanded he bring her this new gift immediately.
It took him four solar hours, and she found herself becoming increasingly impatient as she waited for what seemed like an eternity. Now, he finally was here, and he finished flattening out the strange gift on the stone ground.
Seating himself on the ground and intertwining his two legs, he began signing to her as he explained the concept of the gift. It took her time to grasp his thoughts, though she felt like she had only the barest comprehension of what he was trying to explain to her.
The gift was black, with many individual white pieces that had smaller black pieces embedded within them. Bandit-Friend began to move his claws over the white pieces, and the gift made noises that echoed off the brood chamber walls.
She listened to the strange sounds intently, and within moments, she found herself becoming entranced by it. Her mind expanded beyond the brood chamber, and she became disconnected from the Hive as her spirit untethered itself and drifted freely.
She was in many places at once, her essence resonating with the strange sounds as it caused her to experience many emotions. She became boundless, the sounds giving her a freedom she had never known before in her life.
As she floated in the strange realm the sounds took her to, she realized they had a mathematical component to them, and parts of her mind became hyperactivated as she assigned numerical values to the sounds.
For what seemed like an eternity, she drifted in the endless domain as her spirit felt the emotions the sounds were creating in her. Happiness, sadness, grief, joy, regret, love, hate, and countless others washed over her essence.
She suddenly felt herself hurtling through a black void devoid of meaning before returning to her body in the brood chamber. She felt small and insignificant within the constraints of her physical body, and a deep sadness came over her as she eyed Bandit-Friend.
Within her, she felt her ancestors lamenting the end of the sounds, clamoring to experience them again. A myriad of emotions came from them; they were as deeply affected by the sounds as she was, and they wanted more.
The machine animal shared thoughts with her, telling her the name of the sounds, Moonlight Sonata. He then shared more thoughts with her.
~Hive mother, this was but one song. There are many more songs I could play for you from many different animal worlds. ~
Joy surged within her at the thoughts of Bandit-Friend; she must know how many of these sounds there were.
~Billions, Hive mother. There are billions of songs with billions of permutations. Every solar day, thousands of new ones are created by the animals. ~
Sheer joy sprang up from inside of her, both her own and the happiness of the Hive mothers and queens within her.
Bandit-Friend turned his yellow eyes down to the sound maker and began to press his claws against the white pieces. Soon, the Hive mother was borne away again, drifting in the realm of joy and freedom.