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.

Initial consumption of Earth (August - December 1985)

The Horde's actions

The Beast descended upon Earth with great hunger. Planets like this one were rare, which meant a much greater feast of genetic information. By this point, the Horde functions as a mutant virus when it comes to a new planet as complex as Earth. It analyzes the ecosphere, picking and choosing different genomic strands it deems "worthy" for assimilation. Then, it drops spore pods onto the planet of a rapidly-reproducing mega-fungi that immediately begins its growth and consumption. The Beast, upon making this decision, has also intentionally programmed this mega-fungi to attack and kill all those deemed unworthy to its project or that pose a threat to its own growth.

During the invasion, the Horde created a habit of making "kill zones" in its life consumption, where it would collect millions of animal bodies in one spot and have it consumed by a mega-fungi into a large genetic soup. The genetic soup all is piled into a main digestive node which distends upward over 50 feet. A fleet convoy swings in nearby, first dropping a large bony pillar through the middle of the distended mass. Large tubular structures emerge from the distention to connect to the pillar, which allows for proper digestion of the genetic soup. Using enzymes and proteins found in the genetic material, this allows the mass to grow musculature around the pillar, protecting it from the elements. With the dispatching of aero-semen from the fleet, they spray their seed into the musculature's newly-formed orifices to then generate further cellular growth, finally completing the transformation of the kill zone into an amalgamated "birthing facility." The original kill zone was inside a body of freshwater, which is now being used by the birthing facility as its water consumption. Its input is aero-semen seed and freshwater in the production process, which then pumps out new copies of both recently-made creatures from the Earth invasion or older creatures from previous conquests stored as genomic data. As a byproduct of its output, the cloacal orifices of the facility release large amounts of methane gas into the atmosphere.

In the end, the Horde's victory over Earth in its invasion was simply inevitable. The Horde turned Earth's life against itself. The invasion of Earth took a little more time than expected by the Horde, only due to the fact that human presence complicated the delicate process. Rather than just taking around two months to consume the entire planet, it took a little over four instead. The Horde never directly "invaded" Earth, only ever using its fleet of ships to occasionally bombard what it deemed to be enemy targets hampering the expansion of the mega-fungi. Who were these enemy targets? More often than not, they were human beings. It determines that there’s roughly 150 groupings of them all carrying out similar actions in trying to stop its consumption and total transformation of life on the planet. These fascinating little things have created incredibly complicated colonies, being able to communicate via some sort of information net that remains unknown to the Beast.

The process of totally wiping out humanity was instead slowly replaced with curiosity. It still couldn’t quite figure out how these beings worked. I’ll kill the majority to eliminate any potential threats, since their power seems to be in numbers, it thought. Just hold onto a few million just to see how they work, it thought. Poke and prod at them, see if there’s something it can learn about this special network. Might be a breakthrough that proves necessary to aid in the Beast's pursuit of immortality. These thoughts rushed through its mind. It’ll stick around with this planet for a while, and see what can be done.

The last humans were rounded up, and placed in small towns with organic barriers grown by the Beast blocking them in. Good places for observation, and it can keep them out of the way as it continued to eat away at the countryside. At first, little action was taken. Eyes and ears were grown across the towns to observe their behavior, and drones patrolled the walls to prevent escape. New drones, too, made up of DNA from king crabs, water buffalo, brown bears, cougars, tardigrades, chimpanzees, a little bit of human, starfish, dolphins, wolves, dogs, gibbons, housecats, donkeys, gnats, fire ants, and redwood trees. Thirty-eight other insect species also had DNA the Beast was thought was useful as well.

Timeline of the invasion from a human perspective

• August 8, 1985: Meteorologists report several bouts of seismic activity likely caused by unknown objects from space striking the surface of the planet. The largest seismological readings come from these particular places:
  • Sioma Ngwezi National Park, Zambia
  • Nwetwe Pan, Botswana
  • Near Polokwane, South Africa
  • Lake Malawi, Malawi
  • Near Taif, Saudi Arabia
  • Dashte Nawur, Afghanistan
  • Manchar Lake, Pakistan
  • Narmada River Reservoir, Madhya Pradesh, India
  • Near Yangon, Myanmar
  • Near Semarang, Central Java, Indonesia
  • Issyk Kul, Kyrgyz SSR, Soviet Union
  • Tunguska Zapovednik, RSFSR, Soviet Union
• August 16, 1985: The biology department in Moscow State University makes an alarming claim, noting it thinks it has found an "alien organism." News is suppressed about it, but official discussions begin behind closed doors in the Kremlin.
• August 19, 1985: The biology department at Harvard discovers something extremely similar, which leads to it leaking to the general student population. It is initially reported on in the local media as a hoax.
• August 21, 1985: First verified claim made in Indonesia that farm animals were "swallowed" by something growing in the jungles.
• August 22, 1985: The USSR's government gets into contact with the United States, asking for a meeting on the unknown spreading infection that the general population is slowly growing aware of, especially in rural places nearly everywhere around the world. Immediate concerns are being raised since this is threatening harvest season worldwide. CIA analysts have already concluded that the possibility of famine in southern Africa is likely.
• August 25, 1985: An emergency meeting is held, and scientists pool their data together. The fungal infection is everywhere now, found to be present in nearly every possible climate and ecosystem. It's killing and consuming wildlife at an alarming rate. The chaos is spreading in the background, and most communications are limited due to nobody understanding the full scale of the attack.
• September 1, 1985: A mutual agreement is made by the USA and USSR to release the information to the world on the "alien infestation" in order to put together the effort in eliminating it.
• September 2, 1985: The Sudanese army is forced to retreat from a village, leading to the infestation to consume the settlement entirely. Professional military forces in the poorest countries are beginning to weaken against staving off infestations into human settlements.
• September 4, 1985: NASA and ESA privately confirm the transit of a building-sized object in space that is now in stable orbit around Earth. It is highly likely that this is what disbursed the fungal infection.
• September 14, 1985: A global research effort is set up in Milan in order to figure out a way to kill the global infection. Workers in industrialized countries are conscripted into anti-infection labor battalions to build defensive structures protecting major cities. Concrete walls and medical tents are hastily thrown together.
• September 19, 1985: Society begins to break down. Riots break out across cities in most of the world. Airports are shut down. All of Eastern Europe, India, and the UK declare martial law.
• September 28, 1985: Nearly every military on Earth has been fully mobilized as if this was now a Third World War.
• October 18, 1985: Governments are losing control over their own countries, with most lines of communication being broken down combined with general chaos and riots. The United States launches a thermonuclear missile for a specific attack for the first time in history, attempting to strike at what are now defined as "hive centers" in Mexico.
• November 1, 1985: Deaths have reached over a billion people.
• November 2, 1985: The infection suddenly changes tactics, which takes the entire world by surprise. Rather than mindless spreading, chimeric animals begin to "invade" the cities and towns, striking specifically at the armies, and focusing on capturing instead of killing unarmed people.
• November 3, 1985: Key cities still standing, such as Moscow and Cairo, have been taken by invading forces now operating like a fighting force rather than an infection. Armies are still taken by surprise.
• November 4-25, 1985: Acting in desperation, nuclear-armed countries begin to fire missiles onto enemy occupied territory intermittently to delay the invasion forces. Global temperatures drop, and populations rapidly decline.
• November 27, 1985: All state societies on Earth have collapsed by this date. The last surviving populations on Earth mostly remain in the small towns under direct occupation by the hostile animals.