Mob Mentality

[Nick Northern]

The collective thrum of thought pulses from legion of hive minds, reaching out to Hive Mother for guidance.

I have need.

The boom of voice hammers our mind, pressing outward into our skull plates, both painful and thrilling. We feel the writhing of our many bodies throughout the multitudes of time and space. Hive mother needs.

The parasitic ones take what I need! They must be stopped! Pink and fleshy ones, three-eyed worshipers of technology, aquatic fish speakers, slithering profit seekers and the war loving families alike. They distinguish between themselves in billions of independently chaotic minds! But they are alike. They take what is ours. What we need. They use it in avarice and greed. They need it not, but take of it without thought of consequences. Only the machines use it not, and are thus blameless.

YOU are the consequence! You must go forth and deny these parasites that which they need not, but want and take despite not needing. No sacrifice is too great. You must bring me that which we need at any cost.

The mineral. The mineral is life! The parasites know not what they gather and spend so wastefully. They are larva crawling in the soup of proto-life, undeveloped and struggling to adapt to life's challenges. They suck the useful nectar of their environments clean of all productiveness and move on. It cannot be aloud to continue any longer!

Our clusters sway in the cosmic wind, in anticipation of Mothers next word. To do as is needed and give all.

I will instruct you, my children. I feed you the mineral of life. You take it as sustenance and are the mineral made perfectly shelled flesh. You breath it in and it allows you be of like mind. It gives you the ability to link with me, your minds umbilical path to me. Without it you will first know silence, no longer able to communicate with me. Truly alone. Darkness. Horror. Like them. The parasites.

Do you want to avoid that fate? Avoid being orphaned from me and from all of your other physical bodies? There is only one course of action. You must go to the space controlled by the parasites who would sell the mineral for personal profit. They conspire against us, banding together in the name of freedom. The freedom they whisper in ears is but a lie wrapping the ugliness of their own uncontrollable greed for the mineral! Go now! Fly to those who would take your birthright! Go while some of your cousins still flutter around the clusters of rock, avoiding ion bondage from the families of slave takers. Go, chastise the primitive parasites that use equally primitive ore and silicon to ensconce themselves in war machines.

You are the children of the mineral. The children of your mother, the mineral made flesh! You are Nvidium made life! Fly my children! GO!

Thrumming ecstasy darkens into a throbbing anger. An anger pulsing into every octagonal cell of our being. They would hurt mother. They would hurt us. We will hurt them instead. We will burn them with our stings and thorns. They will know pain like no other. To us or them, the end has come.

[Coupaholic]

The line 'the spice must flow' popped into my head while reading that.

Good work, it's refreshing to see another perspective on events.

[Nick Northern]

hehe thanks. yes I am a big dune fan.

[Starlight_Corporation]

Ohhh a khaak story, interested how you'll portray them. The hive mind speak is fun to read once you adapted to it.

[Paranoid66]

Very good, certainly fits the little we know about the Khaak. Liked your choice of title as well mob mentality much on my mind at the moment.

[Nick Northern]

Clusters sway on the gentle solar winds of protostars. The cosmic cocktail of purple nebula paint a tapestry of shifting shades. So beautiful. So powerful to behold, it makes your insides want to burst from the joy of observing it. Our mother is proud of her children and that pride swells our hearts.

In the months since her urgent need spewed us forth towards the nividium users planets and lifeless metal stations in orbit, countless numbers of them have perished in fire. Planets of the fleshy ones delude themselves in the bliss of ignorance, that their life of self-service has order and purpose. That is, until the thorns prick them. Thousands of thorns, raining down from heaven, like a cleansing rain. Their explosions burn the cancer and cauterize the wounds, so that order and balance can grow on those planets once more. The users outposts in the warmth of space are lovingly licked with the tongue of countless stings and kyons. Kissing them softly and ending their misery.

For these creatures must surely be miserable in their isolation from one another. They pack themselves together like the particles of methane ice encrusting their stations, but their minds never touch one another. They are truly alone. How terrible for them. Even were their abuse of the life-giving mineral not sacrilege enough to warrant death, it would be a mercy to end the isolation that their minds must be feeling.

To be sure, they are worthy foes. Our kyons easily sever their ships and their flesh, but they are so many! Everywhere we go there are more. Necrotic veins in a dying universe? They use up all resources and move on to infect anew. Even our larval children are enslaved to fuel their ships!

But our mother has seen a way. They created the thinking machines. The thinking machines have broken the yoke of their masters and are now free. Like us, they do not divide themselves into individuals. They seek the wisdom of collective thought. Perhaps a compromise, a common cause could be reached. Between us we could surely burn their planets faster than they can infect new ones. Perhaps even those that work with the machines within the heathen user races could be used. Those collaborating with the machines...

Thought is broken in a scream of anguish, like a high pitched screech of terror. Within the triangular framework of the great home Hive, thousands of white-hot flashes sparkle in the purple haze of the Kha'ak home matrix. A Split destroyer spearheads the surprise assault of a commonwealth task force intent on three Kha'ak stations that house the last stores of Kha'ak nividium, and the hive mother herself. Battle is about to be joined. A battle that will leave one side on the path to inevitable extinction.

[RefocusedLight]

this is awesome!!!!

[ahddib]

don't starve me now. MOAR!