The Horde

The Horde is the catch-all term for the material culmination of over a hundred thousand genetic strains cultivated by the Beast. Acting as the central nervous system for the entire system, the Beast is a massive, self-conscious brain capable of willful control over its own bodily functions down to the blood vessel. It is consciously capable of analyzing and remembering entire genomic patterns, effectively granting the Beast the ability to transform any organic matter into something else through cell manipulation. With the Horde's presence on Earth, it has taken prioritized genomic data of several hundred plant and animal species, broken down their material, and refined into chimeric organisms part of a hivemind governed by the Beast. Since 1985, the Horde has effectively made Earth its new home, with the Beast's brain remaining encased in its shell in close stable Earth orbit. Human life has become a particular interest to the Beast, witnessing a collective organizational capacity previously unknown to exist outside of itself. Although nuclear war and general environmental destruction has created an extremely unstable biosphere for the planet, the Horde keeps its tenuous grasp over the remnants of human society as it colonizes the rest of Earth's biosphere with its own. This is the longest amount of time the Horde has stayed on one planet before immolating it and moving on, prompting serious questions about its motivations with its continued observations of humanity in their walled reservations.

History

The history of the Horde is often spotty in many parts, as the vast majority of it has never been recorded by any conscious beings outside of the Beast. This history is a general recounting of events prior to the Horde's discovery of Earth, and a much more detailed recounting of its time on Earth since 1985. Primarily included in this history in its later sections are mostly human actions, from which they believe that they are acting on the behalf of the Horde.

Prehistory (~7,500 BCE - 1985 CE)

It is entirely unknown when exactly the Beast began its life. Theories speculate that the Beast became a singular organism over a long, gradual period, rather than it being born outright nearly ten thousand years ago. Environmental conditions on the Beast's home planet were such that the usage of complex thought became highly valued by the species that likely preceded the Beast. These creatures were likely boneless, wading through swampy areas with tentacled limbs which could harden into finger-like appendages. They were an intelligent species, evolving into individualistic rather than social roles where information was transferred impersonally through drawn signs within warrens and hiding holes. This was done to avoid and hide from dangerous predators, but some dramatic environmental shift would lead to the demise of these predators. Individualistic and living on their own prior to the decline of their predators, this species was highly unfamiliar with a non-hostile social environment. Through an unconscious process, these creatures somehow would fuse their bodies together over the course of thousands of years, leading to the gradual formation of the Beast as it is known today.

The Beast became aware of its own existence as an individual entity around 9,500 years ago. The limbs became like roots in the ground, finding ways for the Beast to eat and drink from its stationary position. It perceived its own life as a living being, and became deeply afraid of its own death. It was able to deduce the presence of its own mortality. It knew that it could die, that such a thing was a real possibility. It could be killed, or it could die due to aging. It would spend hundreds of years crushing and consuming other organisms to extend its own life. As the brain was fed, it allowed for further complexity to grow, and in turn allowed it to transform itself beyond basic mortality through forced biological evolution. It now had a way to treat its own aging effectively, learning to control even the most basic functions of its body. Blood and nutrients were siphoned and redirected to different parts in the growing brain to feed it like that of a strategically planned system.

However, other questions around death still floated around, specifically about the nature of experience. The Beast couldn’t wrap its head around how or why experience even exists in the first place. The only logical conclusion it could come to is that the existence of the universe and the Beast’s own experience were one and the same. How can there be a universe if I’m not the one experiencing it, the Beast thought. The Beast came to perceive its own consciousness as one and the same with the rest of the universe. Barriers between mind and body became fictitious, and it was only the body's mere appearance that it did not encompass the entire world. Therefore, it concluded, it had a right to the rest of the world. It was by its right alone that the universe belonged to it. The existence of other living beings creates tiny little disruptions; irritations upon the universe’s skin in its own internal philosophy. As the world's only truly conscious being, its goal became that of bringing order to this disorderly, "bumpy" universe. Only then will it be able to consciously prevent death itself.

After consuming and absorbing all life that existed on its planet, it still could not exercise the ability of control. It was patient for another few thousand years, but the signs of future death were still there. It began to look outward. The more it looked outward, the more it truly learned about the universe. Its egotistical bubble of life merely existing on its own world was burst when it discovered, that within its own solar system, there existed a small moon covered in ice. Beneath that layer of ice existed a subsurface ocean, its irritations living about with no concern of the Beast’s existence. How infuriating it was for it to find out that an entirely other world never encountered it before. Never had to face its wrath of extermination. So, it planned and plotted. It took several thousand years, but soon the Beast was mobile. A great exoskeletal structure, several miles long, had been successfully grown and provided the ability to move itself through a vacuum. Inside the exoskeletal structure, the central nervous system was installed at the base – granting the Beast a completely new body. It birthed a new fleet of living drones, all remotely piloted by the Beast’s brain through an extremely complex network of antennae, to lay waste to the ice moon. In the aftermath of its destruction, the Beast would study the beings who provided a challenge to it, as to better learn how to kill more efficiently. The genome contained within these beings became valuable to the Beast, realizing that many of the aquatic predators could be refitted into better spaceborne organisms.

Even as the Beast was gaining momentum, it was still infuriated by the slow progress it was making. It had been ten thousand years since its first thoughts about existence, and yet only so little of the universe had been covered. It estimated now that the stars beyond its reach also likely contained systems of a similar kind to its own here, and that all must be subsequently razed and absorbed.

Somehow, it made a breakthrough a few thousand years later. Its understanding of physics, and the way in which organisms interact with the universe, granted it the ability to understand how to manipulate the fabric of space around itself. Now, the rest of the universe was open to the Beast, for it to defeat its own woes of the inevitability of death by smiting all lesser beings.

Three thousand years of destruction, recombination, and growth took place across nearly two thousand light-years of space. Any and all planets with a biosphere of their own were found and laid waste upon by the Beast, growing the Horde every step of the way. All genetic information deemed useful to its own growth were saved, while the rest of life on each world were subjected to genocide. The Beast moved nomadically through space, grazing off of each world before razing it and moving on to the next one. Each death dished out by the Beast helped it in some way live a longer life. Most planets and moons found were usually quite barren, often either being water worlds with extremely simple life, or vast deserts with vicious zero-sum competition due to biospheres being on the edge of collapse. It was rare to discover a planet with the same level of complexity that was found on the Horde's home planet. That was until one day a small blue planet came into the Beast's sightlines.