[General Battuta]

Are we alone?

The crew of the starship Unity is all that remains of the human race. Earth, wracked by war and systemic collapse, has fallen silent behind us. Division and strife claimed her.

And we carry that strife with us. The captain of our expedition has been assassinated. The crew has splintered into rival factions. Miriam Godwinson rallies her faithful beneath the banners of radical faith. Corazon Santiago prepares her troops for harsh, militant survivalism. Academician Zakharov withdraws his scientists into their laboratories, driven by the pursuit of knowledge alone. Pravin Lal tries to rally the crew behind the banner of the UN and the mission. CEO Morgan's black market keeps the ship running, even as his oligarchs plan the exploitation of the future. Lady Deirdre Skye walks among her Gaian cultists and prepares them for a new life on the world ahead.

The world ahead. Alpha Centauri. Our ship crippled, our people divided, we each prepare to shuttle to the surface and begin our separate colonies. Divided again.

But I know the truth. I am Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang. And in my Human Hive, no one is ever alone.

ALPHA CENTAURI

The Land

Planet! A red world. A poison sky. Vast shelves and towers of fungus across the northern waste we inhabit. Vast islands of growth adrift in the northern sea.

We dig the warrens of the Hive into the rock and we set around us our breeding chambers and our factories and we send out our rovers and our terraformers to plant forests and build solar collectors and weave roads to new settlements and make this land ours.

We stand at the north of a vast continent, the Hive's Continent. To our west is a little island and then, past thundering shoals and rocky straits, two twinned continents, the Geminis. We have heard no signals from the other factions. But we have seen life on Planet - alien life.

The mind worm crawls among the fungus and when it looks upon a human that man or woman is overcome by fear, incredible fear, beyond any reason. And there is much reason for fear. The mind worm enters the skull of its victim and plants its young and they grow fat on the nerve flesh of the victim. It will penetrate the suit or the rover or, in the most disastrous case, the warrens of a settlement.

In such harsh land, beneath such alien skies, we must work hard. Work together. Cultivate. Expand our territory. Fill it with the forest and the solar collector and the mine. Arm the Hive with the rifle and the rover and set pickets to watch the waste. Above all we must be united.

The human being does not naturally cooperate, especially with little food but fungal paste, little water but their own recycled urine, little space beyond the work and the creche and the sleep pod. Where the human being fails, we must succeed. We must be more than human, when it suits us, and less, as the need arises.

Thus it is that we quiet unrest with the nerve staple.

Soon the great engines of our factory stamp and seal together rovers to race out along the web of our roads and explore Planet, down from the north of the Hive's Continent, into the long peninsular south. Behind them stamp the formations of our infantry, heads bent to the road, legs weary with the march. But on they march! Onward marches the Hive!

One by one we find our neighbors on the Hive's Continent. One by one I gather around me the writings I have saved, the pictures I have retained, the mementos that let me understand them. One by one I pass the order to the Field Marshals of the Hive and they pass the order to the Generals of the Divisions and the orders pass on down through the ranks among the boots of the soldiers and the wheels of the artillery and out to the racing rovers.

Who is Academician Zakharov before the Hive? He believes that mankind must understand the world. I believe the world must be made to understand mankind. Together we choose what is real.

Academician Zakharov has made many ingenious discoveries, discoveries that promise great might and power to reshape the world. But they do not reshape it as well as tens of thousands of men with rifles.

Academician Zakharov is quickly made to understand us.

Who is Miriam Godwinson before the Hive? She believes that mankind must praise and obey God. To praise God is to insult mankind. Would you insult your neighbor? In the Hive, we are all neighbors.

Miriam Godwinson has raised a powerful army fueled by singular fanaticism. It is devoted and fierce and it raises up in its own defense like a lion with claws. But what are claws against the cloud? What use strength against the spiderweb? You cannot cut the water of our thousand thousand rovers, Miriam. You cannot bite the earth of our unending creche-born.

Miriam Godwinson soon learns to be a neighbor. She learns to share her worship.

Who is Pravin Lal before the Hive? He believes that humanity must gather under the banner of the United Nations. I believe in one Nation, United. In the Hive there are no Nations.

Pravin Lal has made a small and civil camp with many laws, laws that speak of inalienable rights. They are good laws and I respect them, but they hold no dominion over the law of the impact rifle. They make no protest against the sovereignty of the shard artillery.

Pravin Lal is relieved to shed the burden of so many flags.

[General Battuta]

The Sea

We have filled our continent. The Hive's continent was truly well named. The Hive webs with it roads and blesses it with factories to make use of the groaning mineral riches that have so long awaited a purpose. The Hive finds the Planet unruly, for the Mind Worm still crawls among the Fungus, and the Fungus still grows. Hundreds of thousands die. But the flame holds the Mind Worm at bay.

The Hive must grow. The Hive is a great engine and an engine works best and hardest when it moves. And so the Hive looks west to the little island and beyond it the great twin continent, the Geminis.

The purpose of the Hive is to unite all mankind in glorious effort. To render man unto his necessities. What use the burden of happiness, when the nerve staple can make a man happy wherever he works? What use the burden of will, when the datalinks can choose the wisest course? What use the burden of consciousness, when all life may be set in its proper place, and know that it greatens the whole?

Do not mistake the Hive's singular industry for singular ignorance. I understand that the mind and body work in harmony. But now we must cross the ocean to the island west of us, where dwells CEO Morgan, who believes that wealth must be grown and gathered. I believe that wealth comes from generosity. I believe that wealth multiplies when shared.

And behind CEO Morgan, in the green shadows of the newborn forests, walks Deirdre Skye, who communes with Planet. She who believes that mankind stands student before the teacher of the world. I believe that the world learns from mankind, in the furnace, in the mine.

But they are mighty together. Sharp where the Hive is vast. Together they have overmatched and conquered the Spartans, who loved only strength.

And we have no ships. We have no aircraft. The lion cannot claw the earth, but the earth cannot swim.

Already in the west move the needlejets of CEO Morgan, glistening like the glass of his towers. And behind them come swiftly the hydrofoils of the Lady Deirdre, dancing effortlessly among the fungal isles, pregnant with weapons beyond our ken.

Truly the Hive has become encumbered by its own vast reach, by the geological patience of its armies, by the deliberate care of its researchers. Our armies gather on the western shore of our land, ready to make the crossing, but we have no ships to carry them. We build ships and send them and -

Deirdre torpedoes them and sends them to the sea floor, her weapons brighter than the dawn. Morgan's needlejets strafe our transports and set them burning upon the shore mingled with the burning hulks of so many tanks and the scattered waste of the dead.

No matter. If we cannot cross the sea, we will raise the sea floor.

I bring up armored terraforming units. I give the order to my Field Marshals and they pass it to the Generals of the Divisions. You will hold upon the shore. You will weather the storm. You will walk to Morgan's island.

Again and again Deirdre's ships bombard us. Again and again the needlejets swoop in to strafe and bomb. Days become months. Months become years. Again and again our terraformers are destroyed. But the Hive's factories churn on. Down from the north and from the east march thousands of fresh soldiers, hundreds of fresh terraforming engineers. The logistical tail is so vast and slow that the units fresh from the factories are two full generations of technology more advanced than those at the front.

We raise the seafloor into a spit of land and we advance out upon it, our artillery and anti-air units fighting and dying in an endless decade to guard the terraformers, the terraformers bending the world to our will. The machines of our enemy fill the sea and sky. But the Hive is not the ship or the needlejet. The Hive is the woman with the rifle in the slit trench. The Hive is the man who drives the armored terraformer.

The hive bridges the sea. The great army rushes across to conquer Morgan.

And Deirdre, wise in the ways of Planet, launches a great mirror into orbit to melt the ice caps. Sea levels rise. The ocean rushes in to drown our bridge.

No matter. The Hive is resilient.

In another decade we have done it again. We have opened the way to Morgan and we fall upon him and his mag tubes and his glistening pleasure domes like the flood we overcame.

The Sky

How many ways can a man die? Morgan and Deirdre Skye have found new ways. The Hive must never languish. My Hive must understand the world in order to master it.

This war has broken my serenity. For decades now the flood has found itself dammed. We rush through Morgan's cities and then new and terrible weapons carried by new and terrible machines push us back. Deirdre Skye has rallied the planet's life itself. Trained Mind Worms answer to her command. Locusts of Chiron devour our pilots or send them crashing, panic-stricken, into the sea.

The Hive must always strive to envelop the enemy. This is our strength.

We reach Planet's orbit and we fill it with our factories and farms and weapons. Yet we find this space crowded. The sky belongs to Skye. The Gaians, too, have conquered space. Their stations watch ours across distant kilometers and the silent song of radar warns me that this, too, will soon be a battleground.

New troops reach our front, carrying new weapons. By weight and weight and weight redoubled we force Morgan back to his last island strongholds. By fire and the sacrifice of millions we force Deirdre's creatures and their chanting acolytes to withdraw. And then they return with hovering fortresses and weapons built of the very fabric of space and we die and burn in turn.

My space program - my space program? - has yielded...expected dividends. We have missiles now. Fusion warheads. In hushed places where proper openness is not always observed my scientists call them the first planet-busters. Capable of blasting hundreds of kilometers down to the bedrock.

And when Deirdre Skye's creatures burst through a salient and into our supply chains and then suddenly come racing down the very road of rock we raised to make our invasion so long ago, I find a serene place and weigh the options and then without hesitation I launch them. I fire a planet-buster among my own armies. In an instant it blasts the spit of land we labored so long to build down to the bottom of the ocean. I break the umbilical connecting our continents and set the sea between us again.

The Hive has been turned back. I don't understand.

And then, as if to speak the truth of how little truth I know, I find that Planet itself has risen up against me.

[General Battuta]

The Fungus

The Hive is a sea of light that covers a continent. The Hive is a patina of solar collectors that clings to all mountains. The Hive is the hydrocarbons and soot that fill our every breath.

And in the wake of my self-inflicted planetbuster strike, the Hive has been torn asunder. Not by the blast itself. Not by any retaliation from the now-distant armies of Morgan and Deirdre. But by Planet.

The mind worms were never animals. That much is clear. Perhaps they are a planetary immune system. Perhaps they live in symbiosis with the fungus that births them and the fungus in turn has felt the blow of the vast devastation I unleashed.

The mind worms hurl themselves against the perimeters of the Hive. They fill the warrens and the screaming skulls of the billion billion workers packed within and birth so many teeming billions more.

Of course there are contingencies. Entire habitats explosively self-seal. Refugee columns are bombed. Firebreaks are established. The outbreak is...contained. The vast industrial North escapes consumption. The tattered remnants of the south feed the dead into the recycling tanks and begin to grow new generations. Terraformers purge the fungal growth with gas.

And I understand that this was good. This was right. The Hive has failed. The Hive must be deconstructed and rebuilt.

Of course there is dissent among my Field Marshals and my Generals and my Chief Scientists and my Committemen for Proper Thought. The nerve staple calms all dissent. The human answers to the needs of the Hive. Just as the world must.

Like the water, we must carve a new path.

We cannot overcome Morgan and Deirdre in the field. We cannot unify the world because to unify the world is to unify only a part of the whole and unity must of course encompass the whole. I have neglected to examine the fundamental article of the Hive: there is no I. There is only the Hive.

That means I am the Hive. I am the Hive. And all I must do to succeed is to unify myself.

My scientists bring me the secrets of Planet. They teach me the truth of the mind worms and the fungus: a single, vast neural network, slumbering. Awakened by our wars. Soon to flower and devour all human life. To end everything.

Unless a human mind could somehow enter the network, and become one with it, and make the world understand. Ascend to transcendence. My scientists tell me it is possible. A sufficiently powerful computer system, the appropriate transmitters - Godhead within reach, for the first to attain it.

My scientists tell me that Deirdre Skye has already set the ground work. She has learned to speak the tongue of Planet. In Gaia's High Garden she has already begun to build the transmitter.

And with every last fabricator in every last colony of the besieged Hive I cannot find the industry I need to beat her.

To the west our ships begin to go silent. Morgan's invasion force is coming.

[General Battuta]

Planet

I do not despair. I cannot despair. I am Sheng-Ji Yang and I will be the world. I will be the Hive and the Hive will be all.

Deirdre will not be God. I will not permit it.

The only chance is a decisive strike upon Gaia's High Garden, to destroy her project and set her back irreparably. To let me win the race. But my planetbuster missiles have no range to reach her home continent, an invasion is hopeless, and the Gaians have control of the air.

I gather my troops in a defensive cordon around my capital, where we have begun to build our own Ascent to Transcendence project. We abandon the coasts and all who live upon them. We let the mind worms breed freely, just to slow the invader. Morgan is coming, his master's whip upon his back.

Yet in the North and South the citizens still work day and night, to their last meal and last breath and last drop of water, to build; and when they fall they are sent to the tanks so their bodies may aid the labor.

They build unarmed hydrofoils with carrier decks. Not that we have ships left to escort them. Not that we have needlejets remaining to land on them. Morgan's troops wield power beyond imagination.

I admit to horror at the speed with which they advance. And yet -

Like dandelion seeds the hydrofoil carriers scatter into the ocean. Dozens die, torpedoed or bombed or eaten by the fungus. Dozens more make it to the open sea and race in every direction, scattering, a diaspora of little ships. We are not the knife like Morgan. We are as the Hive has always been. Vast. Distributed. Ineffable.

I strike first in orbit. My defense pods launch kinetic kill weapons at Deirdre's orbiting foundries. She strikes back at my foundries in turn - an overwhelming retaliation. But now the real blow falls: a second, larger salvo, targeted not at her foundries but her defense pods. The sky above Planet fills with light and in the evening the comets of the re-entering debris outshine all the stars.

Morgan's noose closes around my capital.

In the southern sea a Gaian warship chases a triplet of scattering hydrofoil carriers. It closes.

I fire a single planetbuster missile, fusion-tipped. It has nowhere near the range to strike any vital enemy target. It is aimed at my own southern cities.

I am Sheng-Ji Yang. I am the hive.

The multi-ton missile crosses the coastline with the desperate last breaths of its engine. Coasts down towards sea level. Lands, with perfect grace, on the deck of a hydrofoil carrier. Crews aboard refuel the planetbuster and it lifts off again.

Another carrier. Another refueling. On and on, leaping from ship to ship, around the globe -

To the single desperate hydrofoil that has made it through Deirdre's blockade to the very edge of her continent. To the last screeching touchdown on a carrier deck. To the last fueling and the last ignition as a Gaian ship closes in to finish this straggler.

Onward through the gap left by the destruction of so many Gaian orbital defense pods.

And then to the fusion dawn over Gaia's High Garden, and the sea rushing in to fill the steaming crater where Deirdre Skye and her transcendence project stood.

I am Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang. I stand in the solitary final bastion of the Hive, Morgan's troops nearby. But I have enough planetbusters stockpiled to hold my ground. The scientists and the technicians do not need to assure me that the transmitter will be ready to carry my mind into the neural network of Planet itself. To seize immortality and eternity. I know they will succeed because I have made them as they must be. I have gardened them and now that garden will flower.

I am the Hive. And the Hive will be all.

[General Battuta]

Coming soon: Battuta learns to love nerve gas and accidentally causes Mad Max vs. Water World as the Manifold Usurpers in Alpha Centauri III: Genocide the Humans!

[Scotty]

Battuta - 2, Planet - 0.

[IronBeer]

Hive is SMAC on hard mode. Was your playthrough really that tense?

[redsniper]

When the missile landed, I knew what would happen. You magnificent bastard...

[Colonol Dekker]

I like what I'm seeing and would like to subscribe to the Hive weekly newsletter.

[Aesaar]

Glorious.

[MP-Ryan]

Every time Batts posts a playthrough, I want to play this game.  And then I remember how last time I tried I could not get into it at all.

Nevertheless, enjoying the write-ups.

[Mongoose]

This scares me.  In a good way.