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.