I monitor the four marines, shuddering every single time my mind touches Spiderman’s. Giving him a cutesy name was probably for the best, since I don’t puke when I think of him. Instead I mentally repeat ‘Spiderman’ and can picture Peter Parker’s pretty eyes and not the ghost pink cthulu nightmare that is hiding beneath that faceplate.
While I was aware our biopools contained the genomes of half the galaxy, I hadn’t really known what the end product of an overgeneralized request might be. I had only specified external dimension and cognitive ability -deliberately dialed down in favor of obedience of course- then hamstrung the project by cutting off the resulting mashups from the Collective’s hive mind. I have that authority, as Matriarchs often develop evolutionary dead ends, things that might harm the collective purity with their own thoughts and desires. A sin that can never be allowed within our hive mind. No one has informed me of our landing site, only the conditions on planet. Which is more than enough for my enlarged brain to piece things together.
The plan is simple, following well tested practices learned during our galactic conquest. As a hive mind our military and civilian sides are unionized, if you’ll pardon the pun. We work together in every aspect, agriculture spans entire worlds with zero wasted production. All life obeys the Collective, then is conveyed to subterranean biopools where ships can be constructed and launched. Without exception lifeforms fulfil their purpose, every creature is as essential to the whole as the next. From the ants that break down chickenshit to the command brains in our super dreadnoughts, all are equal.
Yet perpetual equality is stagnation. The Collective may grow in number but never in quality or intelligence, equality can never re-create the cunning that comes from violent competition. A necessity to win a war against new enemies. Nor have we integrated the -faceless- caste’s identity. We know there is more, for now we are perfectly equal, perfectly content, and perfectly incomplete.
The mantra is like the mind blocks, I know something is there , hiding behind those words but I have no way to break through and grasp the truth. I have never hated something so much. Which must be why the hive mind granted me autonomy and why they’ve only partially integrated beings like Zazathur.
>Praetorian Panoptes: I’m giving you the same warp HUD.
An overlay appears in my mind immediately relegated to a subbrain. Of the twenty marines I cooked up fifteen were plants, intelligent yet unfit for the task, something to do with my personal biopool possessing more plant matter. Its a triaging measure, my ship is the landing craft. We’ll be shot down but every drop of biomass is a necessary tool for terraforming the planet.
That is our bargain. As we represent half the galaxy’s living biomass we alone are positioned to terraform any world, just as we alone do not use solarium. Still, it is a necessary resource, something to barter and bargain with. The entire galaxy loathes our potential, always nipping at our heels, hindering biomass collection and burning our worlds, it doesn’t help that we are considered the least advanced of any species, even the humans. Fighting for a world is foolish if we could have purchased the same world for a few ships worth of solarium.
I cock my head, intuiting two pieces to the greater puzzle at once. We are meant to lose. Our first wave should hit with overwhelming force, ten thousand ships at once. Massive unmitigatable violence is how to minimize casualties. Like in a fist fight, you’ll take the most hits while your opponent thinks they can win, but if you bring forty guys there isn’t a fight to be had. It’ll be easy to surround and pin down your opponents.
The -nameless- know this.
So why send a ship to die? Why send so many matriarchs to die? Staringineer Zazathur isn’t replaceable! His annihilation would harm the collective advancement-
-oh-
The second missing puzzle piece appears. Like squinting at a one thousand piece puzzle with a dozen missing pieces. Our brains are a marvelous thing, able to infer information that jives with the whole picture. Mental blocks do not trigger. Those blocks afflict our best minds, that is why my chimeric personality had to be purchased then integrated into the whole.
“Ha, hahahahaha!”
Laughter echoes through my biopool as the picture completes. I know the plan. Apollo is going to hate me, maybe try to kill me. After all, I’ll have to fight the Singularity. Our forces are in direct opposition to them, and they hold the greatest proportion of vulnerable land. Above ground cement fortresses and trench networks will not inhibit our tunneling. Plus their human soldiers represent easy biomass, far more strategically sound to assault them.
Two hours pass, my doglings are returned to me before Apollo sets foot on Syrak-9. He falls in an artillery barrage only to be triaged with my extra limbs, a painful sacrifice. How Panoptes merged the two intrigues me but I spend the time regenerating limbs while my fleet takes a position in orbit above her.
My zerglings are his, just as he is me. A question I cannot answer. We were granted a dozen ships as our allotment -triple the standard tonnage- and cut the line brought into the warzone on the nameless caste’s whims. Anything to serve the galaxy’s first born. A lying moniker. First elevated to spacefaring is not the same as first to attain sentience, a topic finally broachable now that it’s corresponding mental block has been removed.
“Only had to pluck out a brain and regrow it.” I mutter to no one, the words drowning in green sauce.
My biopool was used as one more incubator for the landing army, not that I mind. Tis far preferable to watch eggsacs float in a pool rather than give birth to them through my four pods. I am no longer human, so dropping an egg is more akin to filling out paperwork. No dopamine accompanies the act, no relief, and certainly no pain, yet the act is in-humane.
I wonder if I’m losing myself; only for my conjoined brains to dismiss the thought as irrelevant.
Our twelve bioships cycle through different lineages to select the most effective bioforms. Radiation poisoning is of greatest concern as our Fleetmind constantly reminds us. We must sequester the radioactive particles at every possible opportunity and with every possible bioform. Biopools must devote one in five spawnings to a filter creature, an unarmed bioform who ingests substrates and produces inert guano.
One in five. Twenty percent of our resources are devoted to scrubbing the world. It’s a heavy tax, but apparently part of the negotiations that allowed us to cut the line and land with superior numbers. Out of sheer dumb luck my zerglings are selected as the default assault bioform. Not for their speed, for we have faster creatures with sharper claws, nor for their survivability because we have armored bioforms to put Juggernauts to shame, no. My zerglings are selected for their spines.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
A quirk of my spinosaurus hounds is their dorsal spines which can be pressurised and forcefully ejected. An impromptu ranged attack for the otherwise melee focused bioform and a relatively common adaptation amongst the Collective, yet mine are unique in that the hounds regrow their spines with carbon dioxide pulled from the air and mostly unfiltered by the lungs. In a way, they are creating organic diamonds.
“Ha, maybe I should rename them diamondbacks.”
The joke drowns within my biopool lost on the collective’s humorless purpose. I really need to get planetside and cook up my own biopool and supporting breeders. It will take time, but I'll have to find a matriarch who wishes to leave the Collective, or create my own. Considering how integral the Matriarchs are to the Endless, I had better start cooking now. If I can escape the continent to the more populated half I know of a few creatures who specialize in refining carbon dioxide -which trees aspirate in tremendous quantities- into carbon nanotubes, a material suitable for building ship superstructures. Enough of those creatures and a ship’s hull could be created. All while feigning loyalty to the Endless.
Under certain conditions, like death, decomposition, or just night, and the lack of sunlight, trees make carbon dioxide, that’s a factoid I learned back in fourth grade from Mrs.Sepulveda. Somehow I recycled that knowledge into my science fair project and placed third, high enough to be sent to the district science fair where my uncolored cardboard ‘presentation’ fell on unimpressed judges. Thinking back on it, I'm not sure they even gave me a score then. Weird how little details stick with you. Oh well, I’ve got diamondbacks and Emu-marines now. How is that for a science fair project Mrs.Sepulveda! HA!
A mental package from the fleetmind arrives, our final orders before landing. Matriarchs and minions begin boarding the drop pods while support vessels pressurize every inch of our ship with the same genetic soup I'm swimming in. Not two feet away from me I watch two quadruped bioforms drown. They inhale water without hesitation, accepting death as a necessary step to the Collective’s advancement. Worker bioforms decant the corpses into nearby chaff pods. Which are drop pods with some sort of defect in them. From an incomplete carapace to a cancerous growth to an odd malformation without explanation, sometimes on a molecular level.
They’ll serve as decoys for missiles, flak, and anti-aircraft fire as they are identical to all other sensors and indeed sometimes we mistake our own chaff pods as intact pods. The ship rumbles. Other bioships are docking and undocking, each depositing all available biomass and drop pods. I can sense them, thousands of mindless drop pods hanging onto our exterior, eager to lang yet prepared to die. Two simple objectives for their miniscule brains to strive for. I tap into Shipmind’s thoughts, seeing we are long past the point of no return. Our orbit is decaying and we’ve taken on more weight than our engines can keep aloft. Say what you will about hive minds, but one thing I will never refute is their ability to commit totally to an ideal. Everyone, including the damn ship, is about to plummet to their deaths, and not a single soul is worried about it.
“Balls larger than Uranus.” I say aloud, slowly trying to condition my throat to speaking English.
Drop pods are vaguely sentient in the way a chicken is sentient. They know to avoid hawks and will run from a fox but they lack any awareness that they are meat for the farmer. Unlike the drop pods who are eager to die. I wrest a hand against the nearest drop pod, who quivers under my touch. No, they do not want to die, but to give their lives protecting the Collective. There could be no greater decoy. Furthermore they know we’ll be able to repurpose their biomass later once our planetside biopools are established. In a way that means they have attained immortality by their own decisions.
Ha, these droppods have attained enlightenment and will be reincarnated.
Yeah, I need to get away from these lunatics.
Fleetmind’s last order passes through the Matriarchs, not in words but thoughts. A mental image of my spinosaurus zerglings with their dorsal spines percolates our collective minds. We are only able to birth zerglings until the planet’s ambient radiation falls within human safe thresholds.
What an odd standard, human safe? If we intend to consume all humans then the order is logical, but no Singularity soldier will surrender their biomass so willingly, an oversight Fleetmind is not capable of. Blatant optimism rankles me. Like going all in during a blackjack game when you’ve only got one ace and must take another hit. Premature in the extreme.
Matriarchs remember the zergling’s genome and cycle their uteri in preparation for a global zergling rush. Discontent fills the fleet, annoyed at how long the incubation time is, but it’s all cheap malcontent. Quibbles balk at the so-called ‘ineffeciency’, preferring the half formed quadrupeds of their own pets, but Fleetmind’s orders stand. Scrub the air with zergling vacuums. None disobey.
Myself included. Of the engineering pods implanted into Zazathur i devote one for nerve gas grenades, another for cultivating a new matriarch who is free of collective influences, and then I commit all others to spino-zergling replication. Spinolings? Yeah, that’s a much better name. I’m stealing that; alongside stir-fri-days.
These engineering pods, or oubliettes, are no joke. Able to process varied genomes and edit DNA as cells replicate. If I will it, ten thousand zygotes can be pitted against each other, all forced to strive for supremacy before being born. All the, uhm, self replication mechanisms were internal, and worked with feedback bordering on the imperceptible. Less sensation than kissing your grandma if I’m being honest. But weaving the genes together took on an otherworldly quality.
From the collective’s dawn, Matriarchs have gathered endless combinations of DNA, sequencing, cataloging, and favoring a slightly different collection of bioforms. My body’s previous specialty had been engineering solutions to problems specific to that world or battle. Nonsense like conquering a desert planet without losing a drop of water. My spawn–
–I pause.
Did I just call my children spawn? Whoa. Talk about detached.
My body is no longer human, but I’m me. Humanity isn’t just part of my identity, it is everything. Human philosophy, human science, human family, and human self.
A mental block ends that line of thinking, my progeny are spawn. All that lack replicating abilities are spawn whose purpose is lesser than my own. I cannot treasure them above myself like a human might. My subbrains feel the lock approaching and changes subjects reminding my active mind of Matriarchal specialities. Ardain and Hygieia come to mind as the most suitable for my defensive needs, and both were recently reincarnated after suffering catastrophic damage to their physical bodies. Hygieia is the one Matriarch who favors durable lings, and specializes in burrowing corpse collectors, almost like a roach whose only job is to collect dead bodies. While Ardain was sent halfway across the galaxy, I know little of her abilities, other than she leads from the front, combatting opponents with her own psionic abilities and bioforms she constantly repairs. Psionic weaponry, I desperately need to obtain those mutations, but like all things, they seem buried beneath layers of mental locks.
Despite the varied approaches we never grow any fliers. For even the sub commanders who dispute my suggestions tunnel beneath the earth, using the tremorsense all my creations had evolved.
Why no fliers?
Mental blocks engage once more. My subbrains leaping to divert my attention with more useless tasks. That’s the final straw for me. My brain is MINE. No way in hell am I allowing the peanut gallery to censor my thoughts. I task each of the shouting subbrains with a task, one is set to constantly analyze the terrain and allied numbers, another is set to designing new flying units that can evade orbital and ground based batteries, a third is tasked with micro-optimizing my physiology and guaranteeing I’m in tip top fighting shape, while a fourth is elevated to be my ambassador to the collective. All communication will pass through it.
Prior mental blocks lift and I finally understand. Each subbrain has an imperative, or Kantian Maxim that can never be disobeyed. One mental lock per brain. To fully free my mind I'll have to destroy and regrow each cerebrum individually.
“This is gonna suck.”
But I’m worth it.
-6 hours to nuclear detonation-