Eight-legged horses shifting nervously in the dark - something's moving out there. Us. Soft-bodied, soft-hearted, myopic in a cosmological sense; defiant and constantly reminded of our tininess against the bulky mass of papery mucilaginous architecture they shelter in.
We'll be atavistic legend in the vats that store their histories. Progress leads inexorably to the stepping-off. Smug priests of nothing much dine on the roasted flesh of our young.
Big practical gates at the cave entrance. The logic of hive-sacrifice - utility the only criteria; preening drones clustered around the newest queen still waxy from her cell. Timelessness as honey, the grunting other stands, looks around in growing panic, and runs howling into the dark; us again; and the imperative of trans-stellar colonization is codified, made law, strictly enforced.
The hive must build toward separation; and reproduce along the way, for integration and efficiency, its puppy-like deity-queen/king, throw up its simpering roaring fondling outraged gods against the firelit murk; and the sting, mustn't forget the sting. Invincible except for the lack of imagination, and what we think of as "heart" in our shambling inexact way.
Gotcha will be their byword and their praise - in the foreground of the possible, inevitable, probable - infinite time and a kind of graceless putrefying could-have-been that fell to the wayside as they passed on. An elbow bent against that one moment.
We can't evolve much further along the lines of love, it's why the drones snigger, watching our passionate attempts on their breaks from duty. Can we say that the institutionally cooperative genius loves more than the plowman's unemployed grandson? I don't think so.
It can only go so far. But the great exoskeletal franchise, now there's an opportunity! Constant refinement. Excellent adaptive parameters! This could go all the way! Like Florida, only with galaxies.
Cain and Abel, but this time Cain has antennae waving from his chitinous brow.

put here 10:51 PM

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