The Queen

The beginnings of the hive were stored safely in its collective memory. A long-running project on a distant, secluded moon, designed to make soldiers more efficient by letting them act as a single unit. It had failed miserably until they attempted the process on two female volunteers.

Now, emissaries from the hive had spread to every corner of the United Federation, spreading the Unification message. Sure, they traveled under many guises – some as representatives of intergalactic fashion companies, some as religious missionaries, some as simple souls ready to give the needy a hot meal and a place to stay the night. All sported the slightly-oblong skull that was shared by all members of the hive. Every head was distended vertically about three inches, rising to a smooth point. Normally, it was hard to detect through a member’s hair, but those sent to the more liberal and forward-thinking planets generally went completely shaved – all the better to advertise.

They proclaimed that the modification promoted clearer thinking, a heightened sense of well-being, and other intangible mental benefits. And, to be sure, this was all true. But it also linked every single member into the ever-expanding gestalt of the hive, an intergalactic entity that could process and share information across vast distances instantly, the supposed laws of physics be damned.

And on that distant moon, a cross-section of the hive’s members paid unceasing homage to one person – The Queen.

“I’m getting hungry again, Lira. Could you bring me something to snack on?”

There was no need, really, for the Queen to speak, since her will was the will of the hive. They knew her desires the same precise instant she herself did. But it amused her to give direction, and therefore her worshippers accepted it.

The drone called Lira stepped forward with an enormous bushel of grapes, imported from a farm world half a galaxy away. Carefully, she began feeding them to the Queen.

Before her transformation, the Queen had been a woman of merely average intelligence who had been working at the station as an assistant to an assistant. However, in the heavily-male staff of the military, it had been her they used as a test subject when all attempts with men failed. That had been her ascension, her crowning. As other women were added to the hive and their minds were joined into the gestalt, they had merely grown slightly, while the Queen’s mind expanded geometrically.

It had been a close-run thing to take over the laboratory. Not simple, by any means. But the success of the hive meant that the scientist’s initial theory – that a fighting force that could think as one unit would be more effective – was proven tragically correct when they found themselves captured and put to work modularizing the technology needed to make further expansion of the hive easy.

As her drones spread out into neighboring solar systems, the Queen found herself quickly running out of space for her expanding skull. Drones went to work expanding the throne room she had been installed in, slowly hollowing out the moon as her massive, gorgeous brain grew first larger than the rest of her, then larger than an earth elephant as the first few planets fell entirely under her sway. Funds were diverted. Digging equipment was purchased and delivered. New tunnels were dug.

“Thank you, Lira, that was delicious.” The grapes were gone. The Queen sighed contentedly. From across all of known space, knowledge was flowing through her mind.

A significant proportion of the galactic economy was now in the hands of the hive, and the markets were calmer than they had been for decades, as hive members moved to contain crises and panics before they reached the awareness of the non-converted. They also invested in each other’s projects, a wave of mutual munificence that made joining the hive all the more tempting for those not yet inducted.

Work on truly building a safe room for the Queen’s titanic skull proceeded as rapidly as was possible. Previous plans to hollow out asteroids for living space were consulted and adapted by the hive as her growth continued non-stop.

She reached out and touched her enormous cranium. It was as if she were attached, head-first, to a planet all her own, such was its massive scale. She was far too large to move under her own power anymore, and simply reclined in a plush chair, her enormous brain taking up a good percentage of the volume of the moon above her.

“Delilah, please, attend to me, won’t you?” The Queen spread her legs, and another drone descended to her crotch.

The Queen’s sedentary lifestyle had transformed her body. Previously, she had been a shrimp, skinny and androgynous. Now her body was plump and curvaceous, with melon-sized breasts resting atop her soft belly, which in turn was anchored by her vast hips and wide thighs. As befitted a woman who was now the largest organism in the universe several times over, she truly now had the body of a goddess of fecundity. For a while, the Queen had wondered if her massive combined willpower was somehow warping her body into this particular form, but decided that was not a profitable mental avenue to explore.

Idly, she tapped into the millions of her drones having intercourse at that precise instant and piggybacked on their pleasure, sending her own arousal soaring. Little more than masturbation, she thought, like using my own finger. Delilah’s tongue was quite a bit more capable than that, however – before joining the hive she had been employed in a lesbian-only brothel in a distant solar system. While the gestalt could share in her knowledge, it could not replicate her tongue, and so she was summoned to the Queen’s side (and between her thighs).

Panting, the Queen released Dalilah, and sighed as she felt her brain undergo a subtle but measurable growth. “Another mass conversion,” she said, for no reason at all. “The entire planet of Melete has joined us.” By this, of course, she meant the women of the planet. The men, it was known, would barely notice, and those who did would be easily silenced. Within a few months the hive would have complete dominance of the social and political spheres on the distant world, and any discontent could be entirely suppressed. It had happened on thousands of planets already, and would happen soon on thousands more.

The Queen consulted her plans for abandoning her moon. It was going to happen sooner rather than later, she knew; her growth continued to accelerate, and the massive cavity she currently inhabited was reaching the limits of how much larger it could be safely expanded. The solution, she knew, was a vast artificial space station, many times larger than had ever been built, but luckily for her she had the wealth of an entire galaxy at her fingertips. She laughed, a rippling, throaty chuckle, and drew Lira close again, swallowing another plum-sized grape.

It was good to be the Queen.