This is a small story opening that I wrote the other day, and I'm still not sure what to do with it next. But first I'd like to iron out any little flaws it may have.
EDIT: Updated 27/12/07 20:04
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Consider an ant.
There is no such thing as a single ant. Oh there are ant bodies, yes, but they are not ants, in the same way that your cells are not tiny versions of yourself. Rather, each ant is an aspect of a whole, a tiny fragment of that mighty beast that is the hive mind. Each ant is merely a highly mobile cell, an idea that would be incredibly messy for, say, a giraffe to try.
And humans with lots of little letters after their names come along and hum and hah, and write great long papers on the peculiarity of this. They drone on and on about how well-suited this is to the ants, and another fine example of evolution at work for everyone who doesn't live in certain areas of America. And they then go on to say, well this is obviously not a tactic suited to higher lifeforms, is it? A single mind on its own cannot reach the level of ingenuity required for fire or the wheel. That requires the constant interaction of a million minds to work, constantly bouncing new and exciting ideas off of each other.
But these humans are, as it turns out, wrong. Not necessarily dead wrong, as there is every chance that they may survive the coming weeks and months. Of course, there is also every chance that they may not.
For you see, humans didn't avoid the hive mind route. Quite the opposite in fact. They actually reached the next stage up from ants and bees, which is to evolve into a state where each creature has both a link to the hive mind and a mind of its own. Even if they were to realise this, they wouldn't realise the implications that this has. At least, not until it is too late.
For much in the same way that large objects bend time and space like a cheap trampoline, so too does imagination. Whilst a single creature with imagination, which is a rare creature indeed in the vastness of the cosmos, would have an almost unnoticeable effect, a creature who had both imagination and a million or more other creatures to amplify that imagination with could harness almost limitless power.
The only reason that humanity doesn't reach this stage and severely castrate its chances of survival is that it needs a queen. Oh, not a monarch, not a simple ruler. They are but cheap imitations of the true queen. Think of a queen bee, with the command of a swarm, and then think of a queen human with the command of a planet. This missing command is all that prevents the final linking of the hive mind, and all that prevents the surfacing of the true power of imagination.
Every culture has a form of magic in the darkest recesses of it's identity. Call it magic, call it God, call it alien interference. There remains a suicidal longing for greater power in humanity, and very soon it will be fulfilled. For imagination is magic, locked inside of a human mind. A queen would merely free it from those dusty confines, let it loose upon the material world. It certainly is a good thing that there is no queen.
Well, not for another few hours anyway.
