by Reinhardt » September 7th, 2014, 9:54 pm
Thanks for the explanations. If an epilogue takes too much time, the pin-ups sounds like a good idea if you get the chance to do them. And about the rows of drones being converted; what about some "cheating", like most of the row being hidden behind a corner or something, with only the few first ones visible? But I guess that's one of the solutions to the problem you have in mind.
And thinking about it. In addition of being able to make human clones if required, the queen and the collective also seems to have become good at using the nannites to enter a human brain without actually infecting it, do some rewiring to change their personality or turning them into sleeper agents waiting to be activated, and then leave the body without a trace, making any infections impossible to detect.
Anyway, with the storyline pretty much complete with or without pin-ups, I thought about the origin again. Not meant as any suggestions, guessing or a theory, just an attempt to use the imagination of what could have happened in the absense of any existing backstory. Maybe others have an idea or two as well?
The collective was originally created by an unknown race as a tool against the parasite enemy that almost made them extinct (where the parasites came from or how they were created, could itself be turned into a story I guess). A small hidden colony of survivors were able to use a part of their civilization's tehcnology to invent the nannites they needed to beat the enemy, using their own tactic against them (perhaps similar nannites used to be the building blocks of synthetic organism they used as servants, and the technology behind was reinvented and given a new purpose). It was an attempt born out of desperation as they couldn't come up with any better solution fast enough, despite the potential danger. With limited time and ressources, perhaps even the enemy was banging on their door at the moment, there was no guarantee it was foolproof or couldn't get out of control. The programming may had a few minor errors and imperfections, but it was good enough for its purpose and the only chance they had. Also, some fail-safe devices had been built into the core programming. Once a planet/colony had been infected, the nannites would be released, assimilating both host and parasite, as the hosts couldn't be saved anyway at this point because of the desperate situation.
They could not allow the drones to be independent so they put a queen in charge they would all be submissive too. A queen would always be in mental contact the the collective, maybe throught an unknown phenomena related to quantum entanglement, and she in turn would be submissve to her programming and the race that invented her. She controlled her drones and knew all about their whereabouts. They had given her a personality that had no bigger priorities in life than destroying the parasites, assimilate new individuals into her collective and to dominate.
It was a success. The original inventors of the nannites were gone and it would take time for the remaining survivors to learn the skills, but in the meantime they put what they had to good use, not daring to give their enemy enough time to breath or recover. Planet after planet was infected by the nannintes, the surface became covered by drones while the queen was floating over them in a ship in orbit. In a safer distance, a ship or two of the race the created her would be in direct contact with the queen. Once she informed them the planet had been "cleansed", they would send out a self-destruct signal to the queen, which in turn would spread it to the rest of the collective, killing the drones and the nannintes they were made of one by one (this also prevented any parasite hosts that found their way to a lost planet to find any nannite remains they could study and use against them). When all of them were gone, the queen herself would self-destruct if required and a new one created later when needed. But since that required either capturing a parasite infected individuel or that someone not infected volunteered to be the new queen, they would normally keep both her and a manageable sized army of drones alive to be used again on a new planet if possible.
Realizing what was happening, the parasites decided to fight back at all costs, and there was one final big fight, killing everybody, including the ships with the creators of the nannites and all the drones and parasites. Only one ship got away; the one with a parasite queen and a couple of hosts, but not before it had been entered by a surviving drone. With the old queen gone, it turned into a new queen, now only following her basic programming in the absense of anyone to give her orders. (Alternatively, one of the parasite hosts could be infected with a few nannintes, but they would be inactive, waiting to be activated so that it could be turned into a drone when the best opportunity to take out a parasite queen showed up. And again, once the old queen and the collective died, they were activated and turned her into a new queen.)
When the queen finally succeeded in taking control of the ship, the parasite queen used an escape pod to take a chance at the nearby singularity, which had been the destination all along as a final attempt to get away. The nannite queen was able to grab the pod in the last moment, clinging to it as it went through the hole in space. Before killing them, one or two of the last remaning parasite hosts had wounded her, even if it was nothing serious. A few drops of nannite blood ended up on the floor inside the ship.
(Another possible scenario; the ship with the parasite queen was being followed by a ship with a black queen and some drones. A few drones succeeded in boarding the parasite ship and once of the drones were injured while another one grabbed the escape pod and followed it through the singularity. Without thinking, the queen ordered the drones and the assimilated hosts back to her own ship and they followed the escape pod, and they were all killed when they came in contact with the singularity.)
The nannites shut themselves off, just laying there dormant for a long period of time. Time itself would gradually start to wither some of their secondary programming away, and eventually reach the core programming. But before it got that far, the ship got a visit from human exploreres. Woken up by the vibrations and contact with a boot that unknowingly stepped on them, they started to eat through the syntethic tissue before anyone could stop them, finally coming in contact with human tissue where they would start their work.
Once a new queen had been made, a human queen this time, the only information available was what was stored inside the tiny amount of nannites themselves (and inside the alien ship's computers). There were no creators nearby that could feed her with information or orders, there was no collective around that also functioned as a databank she could connect with. With some holes in the nannites' programming due to the software rot that had occured over time, but still intact enough to do their job, and because humans were a new race that required trials and errors to assimilate, plus the fact that it was assumed all the parasites were gone and therefore given less priority during her transformation, she had become a queen independent enough to follow her own plans and ambitions. Including feeding information to a human scientist intelligent enough to crack the code of the nannites and do what the programming prevented herself from doing.
The new code had none of the errors and weaknesses of the old one, the "holes" were repaired, the self-destruction mechanism and fail-switches were removed, the original strenghts were improved and new abilities added, the programming made more efficient, it was no longer possible to take control of the queen as the original creators had done, so the queen had no other purposes in her existence but those she decided to follow by her own free will. While having a dominant individual that controlled the collective had originally been meant as a way to prevent the infection from spreading, it was now turned into her own advantage.
The old queen still has the need to assimilate others and dominate, but that could just be a leftover from the personality given to her from the original nannites that first transformed her. The Angela queen on the other hand started out as a human and appears to have more of her humanity intact. But being a queen still requires a desire to control the collective, the doctor himself had planned to dominate the galaxy when making the new nannites, and Angela's personality had already been partly altered by the old queen, so even if she is different from her predecessor, she is still a queen.