The Flying Ship

The Flying Ship

Friday, December 10, 2010

Different Shades of Vermin




I wrote this just now after I crushed a cockroach with my boot.

If someone would like to proof read this and correct it of grammatical errors and spelling mistakes and somehow send it to me I would deeply appreciate it. I just really can't be bothered.

Imagine a single cockroach hatches from its egg and emerges into the world.

What is remarkable about this cockroach (let us call him Adam) is that he has intelligence roughly equal to that of a human being. He breeds highly successfully with the other cockroaches passing on this bizarre mutation to his offspring. These cockroaches, though still as short lived as any insect, multiply and grow, and due to the very great number of members that each generation of cockroaches has, in only a few generations, (that is, five years) the cockroaches have buried deeply into the earth and built for themselves a rudimentary society based on hunting (small mammals and other insects) and gathering (food refuse from humans and such things).

In fifty years and many generations the cockroaches have a culturally advanced society, each individual capable of all the emotions of humans. The cockroaches have no Gods, a completely agnostic community, they believe only in the power of the Roach to ultimately survive all things as a species, be it from daily life to Armageddon. The Roaches, like many insects and unlike mammals, posses a vestigial 'hive mind' or empathetic link to all the other roaches in their community. This means that if only one very few of the specie survives then from this small number can be drawn the total of the communal knowledge.

This simple fact of their biology makes written word, pictographs and other recorded information unnecessary and therefore undeveloped. The roaches, instantly recognise the strongest, smartest and most able members of their hatching and are bread with the most. The weakest and defective members, though cared for by the hive and given tasks, are rarely bred with and quickly perish from the gene pool.

Small technologies are developed. Medicine and tools are manufactured by the roaches, chief among these being a exoskeleton lacquer that improves the roaches resistance to disease and injury, mandible sheathes that allow the insects to dig more easily into the rock of their earthen home without discomfort and the production of farming settlements of maggots and worms for the cockroaches to eat and milk.

The leaders of the roach community after another twenty years and many more generations of the colony at its cultural peak, leaves its vast underground city and moves to contact the humans who they clearly see as being powerful and advanced beings.

Naturally communication with humanity is difficult, but finally a rudimentary language is constructed after the roaches produce a type of Morse code with clicking. After the human scientists decode these messages from the roaches and encode their own messages and send them back to the Roaches.

There are a few relatively brief conflicts between the two species as the humans are difficult for the roaches to harm and the roaches are impossible for the humans to kill more than a few individuals with each attack.

Eventually the two types of creatures meld their resources. The humans benefit from the vast number of roaches in terms of workforce and the relative cheapness the roaches place upon their personal safety and lives. The roaches benefit from the humans' technology and knowledge of science.

Roaches and humans have their own internal civil wars, some roaches and humans fighting on either side, and generally spilling a lot of unnecessary ichor/blood respectively.

Thus the Earth becomes greater than the sum of its parts, it quickly discovers effective ways to colonize alien planets previously impossible, and the universe becomes slowly infected and tarnished by the combined might of these two highly disgusting animals.



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