Chapter 421 (1/2)
The day was warm, the energetic yellow star shining in the blue sky. Puffy clouds decorated the clear blue sky where two moons were evident. There were no jet contrails, no rings, no large constructs in the sky. Someone with a telescope perhaps could have seen the handful of satellites orbiting the world, but those satellites merely watched, not interfered.
On the surface were several scattered farms. Large affairs, complete with tractors and barns, corrals and fields, drying sheds and smoke houses. The houses were identical in layout but not in appearance or decoration.
While the tractors and drones that tended the fields were largely robotic, the beings who inhabited the houses were not.
The barn opened and a massive insectoid delicately stepped from the barn. It wore a leather abdominal wrap, a denim vest, and a buckskin satchel. Its look was topped off with the floppy hat on its head with holes cut for its antenna and a stalk of wheat in its mandibles.
It held a fat fowl in its hands and was petting it slowly with its bladearms.
The insectoid stepped into the sunlight and paused, raising its head and closing the cover over its compound eyes, its face raised to the sun. After a long moment it started moving again, heading to the front porch of the house. It sat in a strange chair that was a combination sawhorse and rocking chair, pulled the lever for the back to swivel into place, and leaned back slightly. It set the fluffy fowl in front of it, still petting it, and reached down to grab a piece of wood.
It sat, using one bladearm to carve the wood, the other to pet the fat and pampered fowl, and stared out at the field of grain that extended off as far as the eye could see.
Cordexen had to admit, life had suddenly turned good.
Farming was fulfilling after an eternity of high-tech slavery.
Plus, turkey was delicious.
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TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS
You doing OK, sis?
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MANTID FREE WORLDS
Yeah.
I kind of feel bad for them. All of them.
It's a good thing that they're at peace.
How did you know that it would work, letting them be farmers?
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TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS
Same thing CONFED does to their people that are badly messed up. Primitivism therapy.
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CYBERNETIC ORGANISM COLLECTIVE
Well, you'll be happy to know that they are indeed your ancestors.
There's some drift. Not too much that we can't track it.
They're probably the most clean Precursor species DNA we've gotten to examine.
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TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS
And they're alive.
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CYBERNETIC ORGANISM COLLECTIVE
That too.
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TELKAN FORGE WORLDS
That was strange. I don't understand why the smaller ones wanted to stay with the big ones.
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MANTID FREE WORLDS
The 'servitor species' as the warriors put it, could hear the warriors begging them to talk but couldn't respond.
They're different than we are. I think they felt more comfortable with the ones who tried to shield them from that disgusting phasic domination system.
Speaking of which, what happened with that obscene device?
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DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS
Examined, scanned, taken apart, put in storage.
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MANTID FREE WORLDS
You should destroy it.
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DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS
You can't think of any reason to keep it?
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MANTID FREE WORLDS
No. It's a grotesque systems designed to enslave my people to a computer system masquerading as a queen.
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DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS
And keep the servitor races non-sentient slaves.
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MANTID FREE WORLDS
Right! And keep us enslaved!
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DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS
And prevent warriors and speakers from overriding the computer, much less the other castes.
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MANTID FREE WORLDS
Right! Enslaving us to a computer!
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DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS
And protect you from the Atrekna shared consciousness.
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MANTID FREE WORLDS
Right! And protect us...
wait.
what?
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DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS
It was designed to keep the Lanaktallan and Atrekna psychic racial gestalt systems from overwhelming your people.
Hate to tell you this, sis, but we're getting some information that what happened may not be what everyone says it was.
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MANTID FREE WORLDS
Like what?
>squints at DASS
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DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS