I don’t think individuals ever really “get” how to interact with hiveminds, at least not tactically. I think it’s something about how they perceive the connection between the bodies. They tend to see them as individuals who are simply able to communicate, still individuals sharing information with all the communication foibles that come with it. They’re always surprised by the perfect, “impossible” timing when a soldier side steps one swarmlings corrosive fire only for a leaping beast to take them in the neck.
Individuals seem to like the word luck for it. They never seems to understand there is no communication between the beasts, do they need to communicate with their own hands to throw a feint and follow up with an uppercut? Maybe it’s simply comforting to them. To think that each creature they kill is a wound, a life taken. I suppose one would need to think of conflict like that, otherwise they’d had to admit they’re already in the belly of the beast.
I imagine that would be unpleasant, realizing all you can do is kill the cells digesting you, barely even able to perceive the thing you’ve been set against, just it’s base components. I suppose one would need to think of those cells as whole beings. It would be rather demoralizing to realize you and your death will be to the single cells of an organism too out of scale for your perception. To you every loss is of a whole person, a whole identity. But all you can do in return is scratch flakes of skin from them. One might simply need to feel those cells were individuals, even if only barely, so their killing holds some meaning.
In truth, I always found it funny. Individuals tend to enjoy combat, the chance to challenge one’s self against another, but so many seemed to abhor killing. We always admired that. But that wasn’t never the truth, well, not the whole truth. They don’t abhor killing, they abhor what is perceived as unreasonable deaths. Their criminals, their soldiers, their enemies, the ones who used their precious “free will” to choose differently from their perceived norm, they may be killed.
I long toyed with the idea of creating a beast or two for colosseums and battle arenas, but it felt… cheapening. My cells wouldn’t be putting anything at risk the way individuals do. Even if the creatures were killed they could be replaced. No identity, or even really time, was lost. We rather admired the individuals who fought, who risked permanent bodily harm or even accidental death to prove their skills. It didn’t seem fair to us, for others to take those risks and for us to desecrate it with competitors that knew no risk.
Of course, that was when we thought we knew you, and you had only the inkling of our nature. We liked playing with you along the edges of your known space. We enjoyed playing with your scientists, your researchers, and the poets, they were the most fun. It was fun, setting up planets of cultivars in the path of your exploration. Seeing the confusion as very smart individuals tried to understand how every plants, microbe, and animal on a planet was genetically identical.
There was one in particular we were quite proud of. A little ocean world where every cell is unique. You found that one and dove right in, cataloging everything, well trying.
We probably would have continued on like that if you hadn’t started burning worlds. Some petty little conflict on a world we shared with you, and you left it a dead, irradiated sphere of glass blow out of it’s orbit. We didn’t understand why, nearly a million individuals between two colonies, gone. We would return, not too quickly, but we would, but those individuals… what had they done to deserve obliteration? Could all of them have done something so heinous this fate was deserved, and how, despite being everywhere on the world, had we missed it?
I made a new beast, no, not a beast or a cell, a child, a true, new individual. She was us without being me. My precious child, with all my memories and understanding, even existing in the same swarm network body, but she was still her own being. She knew I’d made her for a task, and one I feared she wouldn’t survive. But she also knew I would take her place, we were both equally capable of performing either task at hand. But my brave beautiful child craved her own experiences separate from me, from us, and took up the task.
Maybe we truly are to blame for all this. We made a child, we knew they would crave their own experiences their own identity, we’d observed it billions of times watching the individuals and their children. Did we not set our own child on a path of our choosing? We gave her our memories, but knew she would want to be her own being, would want memories the were uniquely her own. We laid out a path to doing exactly that, and while we offered freedom, there was only the one obvious path, any other’s she’d have to carve on her own. The burning was the first move of a game, one only half the players knew was on. So I suppose our child was the first knowing move.
She split from us, taking a small system of cells nearest the human expansion borders with her. She left us a small link, closer to how individuals seem to think our hivemind works, a little sensory feed of our child’s system, we had no ability to control any part of her, just look through her billions of eyes. We watched her grow vessels, some ships to carry herself across the short expanse of stars, and other, smaller vessels to put the individuals at ease. Cells that appeared as beings. Our child was so clever, she learned of the sub-minds complex ai use to manage tasks, tiny copies of the original that operate within more limited parameters to complete single tasks, and simply did the same. They weren’t truly necessary, she could have handled a whole swarm on her own, but the sub-minds, placed in hominid inspired shells, made pleasant faces to introduce herself to your kind.
We’d been happy to stay anonymous, mysterious, seeing when you’d teased out the secret of what you were stumbling into. But our child, she wanted to meet you, on your terms. To ask why you’d glassed an entire world, torn a chunk out of us, and ended millions of existences.
I saw her arrive at your capitol, her ships slipping back into the real close enough for your sensors to pick them up, but not so close your weapons could reach her flotilla. I listened to her hail your leaders, explain who and what she was and the information she sought. I tasted the metallic, polluted grit in the air when she was welcomed planet-side to continue the discussion. I smelled the ozone and ichor when her unarmed vessels were ripped from the sky. I felt every blade, every injection, every experiment, every pathetic attempt at torture you committed against my child. I felt the moment you finally managed to kill our daughter.
I still catch glimpses, her sub-mind vessels will provide compressed recording rather than live feeds every few days. Mostly endless experiments, looking for ways to “sever the connection” as they keep calling it. They seem to think my daughter was another puppet, a cluster of cells, that when cut off from the whole, she would simply cease. I still find it strange they couldn’t perceive her as an individual, but swarmlings, beasts of battle with no will of their own, those they see as individuals.
We suspect it’s because our cells continue to fight if they’re separated from us. The sub-minds my daughter grew continue to complete their assigned tasks when allowed by their captors. They like to see it as the cells enacting some kind of twisted free will, merely warped by conditioning. Does an arrow, once loosed, not maintain the course it was set on? Do your own weapons not have guidance systems? Why would we not do the same once it was clear you could occasionally disrupt the cohesion of our swarm? None are true individuals, but I learned from our daughter. We think we’d like you to know it was her work that kills your soldiers, but we learn.
We understand now those responsible do not care for the deaths of soldiers or even civilians. We regret every life we are forced to take, brave warriors sent against the endless tide as though they alone may blunt the waves. So we shall no longer be an ocean, the cost in blood is too high for your kind. We shall be the knife, the scalpel that cuts out the rot at your heart.
Your leaders glassed an entire planet to kill a single dissonant. Two million lives ended as accepted collateral for a single soul who demanded better for others. They captured, tortured, experimented on, and killed our daughter. She who came before them unarmed, seeking only answers. They have sent your brave defenders to butcher our body, and cameras to record the slaughter we must inflict in defense of ourself. We refuse to play this game anymore.
Your scientists and scholars still study our puzzle worlds. You live in and on us, on worlds that are as much our bones as your homes. Half the human sphere now lives inside us. We harbor no ill will to you, in fact we rather enjoy the experience. We ask that next time, you choose better leaders.
We won’t say it was easy to develop a bioform capable of swimming the space between the stars, but we did that millennia ago. It wasn’t easy to grow a cell able to stalk prey in the real from the space between, but we did that long ago as well. Making one small enough to slip by those sensors that can peer into the space between, large enough to kill a human, but easy enough to grow in plentitude? Now there was a challenge. Or it would be, if you assume we ever want the cells back, or that we wished to remain anonymous, or maybe that we actually enjoyed the pointless slaughters. But we don’t need them back, do you collect every shed skin cell? On the second point, here we are, signing our bloody work, and for the third, we simply do not, most of you live in and on us in peaceful ignorance.
Your leaders, the people of power in the governments and conglomerates that had a hand in the murder of my daughter and 2 million human beings inside me, are dead, we have executed them humanely and as painlessly as possible. When you perform the autopsies you will find a single chitinous spike in each of their brains. You can sequence their genomes for a list of crimes and evidence against each of those we executed.
We will no longer hide. We are here, we were here, and we will protect our own and ourselves.
