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Aliens: Parkry
This story begins with the problem of the unchecked expansion of a race known as the Parkry. The Parkry hive structure is an old one, dating back to around eighty thousand years before the incidence of the NoSanNoOs, and fifty thousand before the rise of human civilisation. The Parkry home-world was a planet almost as large as Neptune, very light gravity, slightly less than Earth normal, two moons; slow rotation with a large habitable surface area. Various forms of hive creatures lived on that planet at the time; what later came to be known as the Parkry Hive was the most successful, allowing the Queens to achieve a degree of sentience. The head of each Hive was a Queen, an animal about the size of a rhinoceros, more intelligent, devious and manipulative than the others; each Queen was attended by three or four Males, non-intelligent creatures kept for purposes of breeding; under the Queen, a Staff of females, potential Queens who managed the Hive under her supervision. Under the Staff was the mass of workers, neuters of various classes such as Builders, Farmers and Warriors. An unusual class of worker was the Scientist; it was a male that had been bred for left-brain thinking, unable to fend for itself but very intelligent in some ways; a small group of three or four of them, left to brain-storm, could solve complex mathematical or engineering problems very quickly. The life of the Hive was such: one member of the Staff would, after she had proved herself a capable manager, be mated with one of the Queen's retinue (which were ordinarily kept well apart from the females); this would begin a series of chemical changes that would cause her to develop into a Queen. This female would be given a Male, a few of the less capable Staff and several dozen workers from each of the nearer Hives that had relations with the current Queen; the new Queen would then set out and find a position for her own hive at a point equidistant from the two nearest hives (forming a triangular grid). Workers would dig a temporary home for the Queen, who would give birth to more workers while they mined the area for materials to build the hive, a six-sided pyramidal structure built from cement made of saliva mixed with sand, or ground-up stone. Once the structure had been raised, the Queen would move in and begin instructing her Staff. The workers would be given detailed instructions on digging the moats around the Hive that would be filled with a kind of nutrient soup, for algae that Farmers would gather and store in the Hive as food for the others. After twelve thousand years, this system spread to cover the entire planet, eradicating all other forms of competing life; Hives were arranged closer together, built from more advanced materials such as a variety of plastic made from the algae. Once the whole surface had been covered to the point that new Hives couldn't be built, the new Queens were forced to expand into orbital space. A series of stations were built in orbit around the equator, linked to the ground by monofilament; these stations became the norm for new Queens, and within another hundred years there was a continuous band of stations all the way around the planet, linked by filaments, the food-moats replaced by spherical ponds filled with nutrient soup. The stations could have continued expanding outwards until they reached the orbit of the moons; at this point, the race was contacted by representatives of the Akhaga... |
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