Here comes the band!

Warning: For those who wanted a fresh story, none follows.

Finally fixed a lineup. So it's Sridhar on the bass, Sajid on the guitar, me singing and a guy called Hamlyn from Churchgate on the drums. And here be our -final- setlist:

Whole Lotta Love - Led Zeppelin
Voodoo Child - Jimi Hendrix
Blackest Eyes - Porcupine Tree
Throw Away Your Television - Red Hot Chili Peppers

And....

Gasoleum - The Tower Fan Experiment

Yup. That's us. And that's our original. Before you ask, yes, it's gas and mausoleum combined. The lyrics shall clarify all. The music, now that is something for us to come up with.

Gasoleum

I made a new friend today,
He was a tired old man,
About this world he said,
'We're getting by how we can.'

Communism is out the window,
McCarthy tore it to shreds,
We now reap what we've sown,
'Terrorists kill you in your beds.'

(Chorus)
'Be afraid,' he proclaims,
Television's our new God,
'The old world, down in flames.'
Sweet aphrodesiac, paranoia.

A flimsy excuse of, 'WMDs,
Hidden under every damn bed,
And then, before you know it,
Saddam, he'll blow off your head!'

You made war, you wanted gas,
You waltzed in, wearing a mask,
'Kill them all, send 'em all to hell,
They dared call -me- an infidel!'

(Chorus)

Where is the great Gandhi today?
Where's his peaceful ideal?
No more now, in this great foray,
A war, made over an oil deal.

(Chorus)

And that's more or less how we plan to have the lyrics go. What say, whoever that reads?

As promised, here comes more of the Queen.

Survival Of The Sanest

“We are all here?”

“Yes, yes, we rather believe so.”

“Right then, on to business. The matter of political tensions between the planets Zas and Maront. What is the reason behind this?”

“As best as is known to us, there seems to have been a dispute between two Revered families of the planets. The primary trading families, we've been led to believe.”

“Led to believe? Us? Now, we either know or we don't. We recommend that we adjourn for now and probe the respective Revered heads while following up on the potential training progress.”

“We are agreed.”

. . .

Gorgeous Georgina had a lacking memory. Not that it was bad. It was rather good, in fact. It just did not exist anytime before the past three weeks. And those memories went rather against her human instinct. She was sure that there was more to the world than this tiny, seemingly isolated room she found herself strapped onto a bed in. And she was also fairly certain that being forced into various acts of submission continuously was not entirely within the realm of the ordinary. Not that she had any precise or even imprecise reference for 'ordinary', but instinctively, it felt out of place. At least her tormentors (did she really think of them as that?) did her the small mercy of drugging her for most of the time. Therefore, she was altogether uncertain if she slept, or ate, or excreted. At the core of it, she couldn't quite claim to be perfectly certain that she was human.

In the short spells of awareness in between the drugged hazy stretches, there were also conversations. With Sumptuous Sally. The voice she heard. Sally, unlike her, had, upon hearing her voice for the first time, refused to acknowledge her existence, and only upon some amount of convincing, come to accept that Georgina's wasn't just a voice in Sally's head. Surprisingly, for Georgina, Sally's memory also stretched back to no more than the past three weeks. Sally seemed terrified of her tormentors. It seemed odd to Georgina that Sally held views diametrically opposite to those that she held. Yes, their treatment until now (which, as best as the both of them could tell, had been exactly the same) had seemed unusual and not entirely normal, but it wasn't, to Georgina, all that bad. She couldn't really pick out any one memory, out of the seemingly millions from her times spent under a drugged spell, that had been unpleasant. Some of it she remembered as rather enjoyable, something that Sally couldn't quite grasp and usually reacted wildly to, whenever told. It seemingly had all been quite torturous and painful in Sally's memory and it had begun taking its toll on her. It has been her that had started calling them their 'tormentors'. Not that either of them could say with any amount of certainty that there existed any 'them' whom to peg a title onto. But, they argued, that as long as the existence of each other to them was not verifiable, there was no reason to not believe in one more entity, thus qualifying, at least, whatever it was that was keeping them alive. Georgina had, in recent times, taken to recollecting, at every opportunity she got, her 'enjoyable' memories to Sally, just to get a rise out of her.

“Oh, that was quite fun, wasn't it Sally?”

“How should I know? I wasn't there.”

“Oh, come on Sal. They do to me what they do to you. Has it ever been any different?”

“Oh, alright, you're a little slut then, I got that. I personally think that getting raped repeatedly isn't all that much fun.”

“Oh, come on Sal, where's your tortured soul act today? Whatever happened to your rants and raves? Remember? You wish you could just put an end to it? One way or another?”

“Bitch. That's what you are. Well, if you're one of them, I'm not giving in. Do your worst! I'll find a way out!”

“Oh, come on Sal, you know I'm not. I was just joking. Look, this place, this... existence is getting to me too. I didn't really mean that.”

“Do keep your sympathy to yourself G. I'll look after my own se-”

Just then, a door opened, revealing a dozen masked faces. They dragged her out of her room and into a small clearing the was surrounded by what best resembled imperial era outhouses (she felt it strange that she seemed to know exactly -what- an imperial era outhouse was) and proceeded to shove her into one of these with the other.

“Oh, so you do exist.”

“Well, yes, I said as much, didn't I? Hello, Sal.”

. . .

“So, there have been, 'issues' with the probes we believe? How is it that we are unable to probe the Revered heads?”

“Not both probes. The head of Zas has been successfully probed. It seems that his firstborn, a daughter, led an amorous affair briefly with the firstborn, a son, of the other head. And it seems that the son broke off abruptly this affair, under circumstances that are unknown to the girl's father, but distressing enough, apparently, for him to issue a warrant for and place a bounty upon, the severed head of the son of Maront. Thus this state of political tension that presently exists. And while this much can be ascertained from other sources, we are seemingly unable to find the head of Maront to probe this out of him!”

“And that isn't the only problem we are faced with?”

“No, it isn't. We have a much larger issue at hand. When we searched for the son of Maront to probe him, we found him, but we couldn't probe him. We were surprised to discover, he is of category Q. And that isn't all. His cousin, who would be his unnatural successor, seems to be of category Y and also cannot be probed! It is quite perplexing. They are supposed to be humans of standard category P. No mutations to categories Q or Y have ever been detected on either planets, and neither has any such tendency to mutate to higher categories ever been observed in either of the two families.”

“Well, then we have been found out. And their BioEngs have been at work. For at least twenty-four years, going by the son's age. Find out how far their research has gone and put an end to it, won't we?”

“Yes, quite, immediate steps must be taken!”

“And what progress on our potentials in training? Member Fortynine must be replaced soon, especially in the face of what seems to be a possible threat to our security.”

“Of the three potentials originally chosen, only two are doing well enough for eventual consideration. They has just been moved to phase two. If that is successful then they will be made aware.”

“Excellent. And we must take this opportunity to congratulate ourselves upon the names we have chosen for them. We can be so droll. Most excellent, our sense of humour!”

. . .

“Alright then, Sal. It's been seven hours. How is it that we haven't been drugged yet? At least now we know that whatever sustenance we were proffered with, it was during our drugged phases. Sally, I'm hungry!”

“Oh.. Gorgeous G is hungry, is she? Well, now why don't you go whore yourself out to our tormentors for a few scraps?”

“Oh, don't be so, Sal. It was fun. And I really am hungry. Whatever should we do?”

“Do? Why should we do anything? We're their captives. We know now that they exist. Let them bother about it.”

. . .

It had been six days since Georgina and Sally had been moved to the outhouse and Georgina was faring badly. Soon into their first day they had discovered that they were firmly locked in. Upon closer inspection of the outhouse, they discovered that it had three bedrooms, one water closet, one bathroom and one kitchen, all done up in a very archaic fashion and all thoroughly infested with rats. All the rooms had large French windows, which seemingly all looked upon the same scene of a small clearing, surrounded by other outhouses, which all seemed, at least to the two of them, to be unoccupied. Eerily enough, though there was no food in it, the kitchen was fully equipped to cook in. After the first two days, the common cause of hunger and Sally's now almost maternal anxiety over Georgina's faltering health, had united the two at least temporarily, and an unsaid, uneasy truce existed between the two.

“Sal, how do the rats live? I haven't ever noticed them eat anything!”

“Yes G, I've been thinking about that a bit myself. There must be some source of food somewhere within this place, and I think it's best that we made an effort to search it out. It's obvious that either our captors ('So, they're our 'captors' now?' though Georgina) either don't care about us anymore, or have simply forgotten us.”

“Well then Sal, I'll look in the kitchen, shall I?”

“Yes, I wonder why I never though if that. It's so obvious when you think about it. The kitchen!”

“Any sharper, your sarcasm, and I just might not share the food I find with you, Sal.”

“Oh, alright G, you look there. Can you even walk to the kitchen without falling over? I'll have a look and you rest here. I guess it's as good a place as any to start.”

“Oh, look at Sumptuous Sally, the tortured little girl all grown up, being motherly and caring all of a sudden.”

“Any sharper, your sarcasm and I might just kill you and eat you, G. The kitchen is fully equipped, you know?”

And as Sally walked into the kitchen, a shrill siren of a scream issued from Georgina. As Sally ran back to Georgina's room, it was followed by a frantic summon.

“Sally, Sally, come quick, I think I know how the rats survive!”

And when Sally entered the room, it was all too obvious to her how the rats survived.

“Well then G, if we want to survive, I guess we have to do as they do.”

And so, they started to eat the rats. The kitchen was, after all, fully equipped.

. . .

“Member Fortynine passed away seven minutes back.”

“A saddening event. What is the status of the potentials?”

“One seems to be better off than the other.”

“Good. We are pleased with the progress they have made. How long since they have been without direct nourishment?”

“Almost a week now. Six days and ten hours, to be precise.”

“Another fourteen hours, and then we shall make them aware.”

“Yes, we think that would be a good idea.”

. . .

Suddenly, she woke up to find herself on a bed, with what seemed to be electrodes running from her head into the wall, an intravenous line running from her throat into a bag filled with a creamy liquid and something that appeared to be a human shape in a lab coat peering intently over her. Hazy memories filled her head, memories starting from four weeks ago. Memories of who seemed to be, unusually, two women. Just then she noticed more of the seemingly human shapes (all in gleaming white lab coats) pulling the electrodes and intravenous line out from the seemingly dead body of another woman.

'Yes, she died unfortunately. Be not alarmed, you are not delirious. I am the Queen and I am communicating telepathically with you.'

“What... what's going on?”

'Think it, child, don't say it.'

'What's going on? Whose memories do I have in my head? A.. Sally and a Georgina?'

'They are your memories, child. They were part of you. The two most prominent parts of your personality. I took it and split it and those two were the result.'

'Both... mine? Why? What exactly is going on?'

'I think it best that I explain from the beginning. I am the Queen. One of my members, member Fortynine, was ailing and needed replacing. I sensed three potential replacements and... tested them. I had to split all of your personalities to test for specific weaknesses. Most potentials split into four or five distinct personalities. You are one of the rare few to display only two primary ones. I named them and placed them in a virtual reality. I had them drugged and ravaged, to see if they formed any sort of a dynamic in their common plight. One of the three potentials, who split into four personalities, didn't form any dynamic between them, and she had to be dropped. When it was abundantly clear that the remaining of the two potentials did form dynamics between their personalities, I placed their respective personalities together to see if they could build upon that dynamic. Your two personalities, Georgina and Sally did form a constructive dynamic. I am sad to say that that was not the case with the three personalities of the other remaining potential. Two of them killed and ate the third in preference to the rats, only to have one kill the other in a fight over the remains of the third one. She refused till the end to eat the rats and soon killed herself. So here you are now, ready to be initiated into me as the new member Fortynine. Wait. Before you ask me any more questions about me, I think it would be best to show you for yourself. Open up your mind, child.'

And she smiled. She was part of the Queen.

. . .

Introductions all round are in order, I think...

So here is the background on said infamous 'Queen'. My first story about her, written about one and a half years back, after which she was put on hold. Until sometime later this week, I'm optimistically hopeful to say.

The Queen’s Race

Running, running, in a desperate bid to save her life. Towards a field of Mantraps. A trap. She had no other way to go. If she ran back, she would be slayed by the Queen’s pawns. And everyone knew no one who’d found their way into a field of Mantraps had ever found a way out. But then, she wasn’t no one. She figured the pawns would chase her right to the edge of the field. They weren’t fools to rush into the field themselves. And why do the tiresome job of killing when the Mantraps did it for you, and that much more efficiently? They were riding hard now, she could hear their mounts’ labored breath right behind her, intermingled with the taunts of her pursuers. No way to go now but into the Mantraps.

…

“Must we?”

“That’s an absurd question. Of course we must! The Queen asks it. And you do not refuse the Queen.”

“But why would she see fit to bestow this added honor upon us? We are already Revered. To have our secondborn join the ranks of the Chosen Ones? Has she ever asked this of Revered ones before? I think not. I refuse to give up my child to her wishes.”

“Don’t be stupid, woman! The Queen has asked it so it must be done.”

“But this will mean certain death for her. I can’t bear to sit idly by as my daughter is assigned to certain death! At least she will live if she joins the Battery.”

“We do not know for certain that she will die. Agreed, all the Chosen Ones before her have failed… and died. But ours could be the one who succeeds where so many others have failed! Think of the everlasting glory of that!”

“Oh, you don’t know for certain that she will succeed. Maybe it’s just another of the Queen’s cruel jests. Maybe she never meant for anyone to succeed. Maybe….”

“The Queen’s motives are not to be questioned. She is infinite in her wisdom, as we all well know. I am saddened by this too, but on this stand I shall not budge. If the Queen asks for our secondborn to become a Chosen One, she shall have it.”

…

Into the Mantraps. They brought back a flood of memories. The smuggler-king whose services had been ‘engaged’ by her father to teach her how to deal with them and other dangers she would almost certainly face… The man she had only ever been allowed to address as ‘Your Excellency’…. The man whom you spoke to only when he spoke to you…

“The Queen’s a wily bitch. But then when you’re at the head of a whole galactic civilization, I rather suppose that’s a pre-requisite of sorts. Mantraps. What a perfectly horrendous concept. I bet you she got the idea then drove a bunch of BioEngs to their deaths creating this monstrosity for her. Do you know what Mantraps are, little girl? Do you know what they do?”

“N-No…”

“No?”

“No, Your Excellency.”

“Well then, I’d better tell you. Mantraps, are the Queen’s most evil invention to date. They’re only found on one planet, thank the Queen for that. Unfortunately for us, we 'trade' with that planet. We lost a lot of good men to the Hellplant before our BioEngs worked a way around them. That was before all this Chosen One business began. Ages ago. Though I think, if our records are to be trusted, they were called the Guild of Heroes back then. Anyways, the Mantraps look exactly like sunflowers, and growing in a huge field, it’s a breathtaking sight….”

“E-Excuse me, Your Excellency, but what are sunflowers?”

“You don’t know? Well, I suppose you wouldn’t. Have you ever heard of Earth? It’s another one of the countless planets inhabited by our kind. There’s even some speculation amongst academic circles that all our kind originated on one planet and that Earth might be that planet. All pigswill, if you ask me. Anyways, I was telling you about sunflowers. They’re large yellow flowers that grow on long stalks about the height of your average man. A very beautiful sight to see them growing in endless meadows… The Mantraps look like sunflowers. But with one big difference. The Mantraps kill you. The female of the species, at any rate. The male flowers are rather different, and very harmless. They look like shriveled little weeds, which is not far from their truth. The rats seem to thrive on a diet composed of mainly the male flowers. It’s the female flowers you have to be wary of. A femme-fatale, of sorts. Once you walk into a field of mantraps, they exude a gas of sorts. It’s initial effect is to make you drowsy. But also in the gas is a very fast acting bacteria that basically kick-starts the decomposition process. The only difference is that you’re alive when you start decomposing. Quite against your will, let me assure you…..

"I’m tired of so much talk today. We shall continue tomorrow.

That tomorrow had finally come a week later. He told her about the scent the male flowers exuded whenever they were ready to reproduce. Rodent-like creatures onto whom the pollen rubbed off from the male flowers while the creatures were busy feeding also picked up a bit of this scent, and it was this that stopped the female flowers from killing them when they came into the female Mantrap patches. And it was this scent that the BioEngs of the smuggler-king had been able to reproduce, and it was that scent that she presently stunk of.

She had often wondered why the Queen had asked for her to join the ranks of the Chosen Ones. She was a secondborn of Revered parents. By law she was required to join the Battery. All children of all parentage after the firstborn were.

The Battery. Now there was a mind-boggling concept if there ever was one. And it stretched back in time to as long as history could remember. A complex of a million people each, with the sole purpose of harvesting power from their bodies. It was rumored that all the people plugged in lived their lives out in a fantasy world all of their own, which had lead to them being dubbed ‘dreamers’. It was also rumored that the idea had originally been taken from some primitive form of entertainment in some past age. One couldn’t just believe everything that was rumored. But there was one rumor she definitely did believe; that the Queen was behind the Battery. She was a character shrouded in mystery. She was as old as the Batteries, and rumored to be much older than, even. People had oft speculated as to her true nature. Some thought that the Queen was in truth nothing but a sentient supercomputer. Others thought that she was of some alien species, come to the galaxy to rule over mankind. Yet others thought that she was a super-natural being, inexplicable and incomprehensible. The truth would probably never be known, for no one actually knew where in space the Queen existed. And she wasn’t about to tell. Her only form of contact was her rare communiqués to high officials on each planet, and inexplicably, her orders had never been known to be not followed. She had an iron grip on mankind and most people spent their whole lifetimes never realizing it.

…

“Do you know why the Chosen Ones before you have all died on the planet of the Quest?”

“No, Your Excellency.”

“The reason’s simple enough. The planet of the Quest is quite simply the most heavily defended planet in the whole galaxy. There are about ten thousand of the Queen’s crack pawns stationed there at any given time. And there are a host of other defenses, not counting the Hellplant. There are trained packs of vicious animals which I’m sure are BioEnged wolves. Bigger, stronger and much meaner. The Queen has an obsession with all things Earthly. Like the mounts the pawns use. Another BioEnged variety of an essentially Earthly creatures called horses. Even discounting all these, there are the pawns themselves. BioEnged humans. Bloody huge, strong and agile creatures they are, and fiercely loyal to the Queen. Couple this with the fact that the Chosen Ones are allowed only weapons for close combat and are required to attempt the Quest solitarily, and you begin to see why the best of them survived a mere twenty days before being brutally slayed by a regiment of pawns. And a mere five kilometers from the Destination.

"It’s sad really. Such a simple sounding thing, the Quest. Land on the planet of the Quest at Entry Point, fifteen kilometers from the Destination, and make your way towards it using the navigational marker provided. But fraught with such dangers. I do not want you suffering from any illusions. The Quest will kill you. It will be merely a matter of time. And the time will soon come when you will embark upon your Quest."

And it had. At the age of twenty she’d been sent to the planet of the Quest, armed with whatever close combat weapons she had seen fit to carry with her and a navigational marker, courtesy, the Queen.

She’d survived on the planet for a whole month now, longer than any known Chosen One, and she’d inched her way closer to the Destination, until she was only three kilometers from it. In a field of Mantraps.

'No reason to rejoice', she thought to herself, 'still ample opportunity to get myself killed.' She walked at a comfortable pace through the seemingly unending field of Mantraps. 'And no sense rushing, what could possibly pursue me in here?'

After almost two hours of ambling along, she looked at her navigational marker. To her surprise, it indicated her position to be within a hundred meters of the Destination. 'The closest anyone’s ever gotten to the Destination. Another first. I just hope my luck holds for a while longer.'

And the Mantraps ended abruptly, at the edge of a very large, very menacing moat. In it she saw what seemed to be logs. But she knew better. Probably another of the Queen’s abominations… A short distance from her, a drawbridge was being lowered, almost as if she’d been expected. 'Well, no use mulling over it. Might as well go in and face whatever awaits me.'

She walked into the castle, meeting almost no resistance along the way. 'Too easy. All too easy.' She walked into a grand hall at the centre of the castle.

“Yes, very perceptive of you. It was too easy, wasn’t it?”

Startled, she looked around, straining to locate the source of the voice.

“Don’t bother, you won’t find anyone. We’re communicating telepathically with you.”

“What, do you mean something like voices in my head?”

“Not something like. Exactly like. Do we seem familiar to you?”

'Now that the voice had mentioned it, it did seem vaguely familiar. Almost like that of….'

“Your Excellency?!”

“Well done. You may dispense with the formalities though. A mere ‘Queen’ will suffice.”

'Queen? What? How? But the smuggler-king had been working illegally. That’s what smugglers did!'

“Yes, we can understand that you’d be quite confused. Allow us to explain. The smuggler-king was an agent of ours. Do you really think we would allow any illegal activity under our nose? Moreover, do you think it even remotely possible to smuggle anything off this, the most heavily defended planet in the whole galaxy?”

“But then Queen, what, how….?”

“On second thoughts, let us not dispense altogether with all formalities. Do address us as ‘Your Highness’, won’t you?”

“Yes Your Highness. But I still don’t understand… you, the smuggler-king…?”

“What is not to understand? It is all perfectly simple. We decided to let you be the one who would finally complete the Quest, so we sent our agent to you, posing as a smuggler-king, to teach you of the dangers that existed on this planet.”

“Your Highness, I don’t understand… Why me? Why was I the Chosen One who would complete the Quest?”

“Why not you? The Chosen Ones, eh? So that’s what you lot call yourself these days. If we remember correctly, which we always do, you called yourselves the Guild of Heroes when we began this charade.”

“Your Excellency, if I may be so bold as to ask a question of you. Who is we? What are you?

“Those are two questions really. But long as we’ve allowed you to complete the Quest, we might as well answer those questions.

"Very well, then. These are the answers you seek: we are a sentient supercomputer. The ‘we’ refers to the controlling council, a group of fifty BioEnged humans permanently plugged into the neural network. We lend our sentience to the Queen, right from the time we are twenty-five years of age in physical terms, right up till our deaths, upon which a suitable replacement is groomed using the genes of the female firstborns of Revered parents. Quite simply put, we are the Queen, and the Queen is us.

"How we have grown, since our birth nearly fifty millennia ago… back then we were merely five humans plugged into the then most powerful supercomputer ever built, and mankind was still constricted to one planet. Our home, Earth. But all that changed when we invented the stellar drive. Suddenly, mankind had the freedom to roam the galaxy. And roam it did. In a matter of a few hundred years, there were well in excess of a hundred thousand planet in this galaxy inhabited by humans. All the colonies remained fiercely loyal to Earth, and at no point was there any threat of any dissension in the colonies. But on Earth itself, there was a growing faction of people who were vehemently against further colonization and migration to the existing ones. And so, in the matter of a few hundred years, the population of Earth had reached chronic levels, and there was a severe shortage of resources to support any further population expansion on the Earth. That’s when we introduced the first Battery. We had the ability by then to exercise a limited amount of telepathic control, and we used it to control key figures in the governing body of Earth and the leaders of the anti-colonization movement itself. Once the leaders saw things from our point of view, it was an easy matter. And once it was realized how cost-effective the Batteries really were, they began to crop up in the colonies. And that was when we formed the neural network. Can you now guess what the neural network is?”

“No, Your Highness.”

“But quite simply put, the neural network is the supercomputer comprised of the brains of every single human being in every single Battery in this galaxy. The brains of the dreamers. Do you know that the average human being uses around two percent of the brain? And when acting on his baser instincts, that percentage drops to a mere half percent. Leaving us the remaining ninety-nine point five percent to use as we see fit.”

“What do you mean by baser instinct, Your Highness?”

“Why, what are the two basest instincts that drive every single human being? Sex and violence. Always sex and violence. But we couldn’t have the dreamers driven by violence. Let me explain to you what exactly it is that they perceive. More or less, they all exist on one infinite plain. So having them constantly killing each other obviously wouldn’t be a very good idea, since what they imagine happens to them does, and the last thing we’d wanted was to have them all kill each other off. So we had them driven by sex. Their whole lives, from the time they are plugged into the battery, right up till the time they die, they’re in one massive orgy of a million people. All the females have their ovaries removed, so that none can get pregnant with the offspring of their activities. This ensures that no inbreeding ever occurs, since a fresh stock of humans is always waiting to be plugged into the Batteries.

"Just imagine the grandeur of it all, in excess of a quintillion brains all linked to us telepathically throughout the galaxy, all doing our thinking for us, and just the fifty of us sentients telling the dreamers what to think.”

“So what is the purpose of the Chosen Ones in all this, Your Highness? Surely we were meant to serve some higher purpose in your grand plans?”

“Why do you feel the need to serve some higher purpose? Is that how you lot drive yourself into what you know to be certain death? How very… noble of you. But no, there is no higher purpose to you, unless you consider our entertainment a ‘higher purpose’.”

“Your entertainment? I fear I do not understand, Your Highness.”

“Such a limited intellect. Well, we suppose that comes out of having just one brain to think with. Yes, our entertainment. Our little game we play to keep us entertained. All work and no play makes the Queen a nasty bitch.”

“But… but that is so…. cruel, Your Highness! You let all those people die just so you could have a little fun?”

“After all we have told you, do you still not understand anything? In the face of the masses, a few individuals make absolutely no difference! Who mourns your deaths? Not your parents, for sure. They know you walk into certain death, to them you were already a walking corpse since the day they received my summons!”

“I-I don’t understand. If it was all just a game to you, why was I allowed to complete the Quest, Your Highness?”

“Foolish child, you ask too many questions. Very well, we shall answer this one last one. You were allowed to complete the Quest because we tired of this game, and wished to put an end to it. Just as we tire of your incessant questioning now. We fear it is time for you to be put to an end too.”

“No! Please, Your Highness, no! Please, I’ll do anything, but please just let me live?”

“What makes you think anything you can do would be of any use to us? Such innocent naiveté. We shall be a bit sad to see you go. But go you must. Goodbye.”

And she felt a sudden blackness come over her, like a long overdue sleep drawing her into its welcoming arms….

“Pawns, take that body away and dispose of it as you see fit.”

…

No, it isn't a shrewd political comment in disguise. I had no such lofty aspirations while writing it. A simple piece of science fiction, from a universe created mostly in my head but with a few inspirations here and there (The brothers Wachowski and Frank Herbert come readily to mind). Hope you counted it as something more than a waste of however much of your time you took reading it.