STORY WRITING - RAVENOUS

Hello guys! This month  I’d like to share with you a story I’ve had some fun writing. Let me know what you think!

Yuri

I’ve always wondered if there’s a God, if there’s someone out there who watches us, who guards us. Even now, I haven’t found an answer yet. The universe is huge, enormous, full of different planets and populations, too big for a human-being with a limited mind like me to comprehend. Yeah. Far too big. But if there’s something that I can comprehend is that my people, my species, we, are different. Different from each other. Or, at least, from the majority of them.

Hamaki, we call ourselves. Swarm, they call us. They classify us as an insectoid species; insectoids born on the barren surface of a gelid planet, on the limit of the inhabitable zone of our solar system. A planet with ammonia oceans and clouds, barely lit by its dwarf star. A grim and desolate planet.

Our society is divided in an extremely rigid cast system: Tyorlan and Soturi. They are our labourers and soldiers. Asexual. Their unique purpose is to work and keep our society alive or to protect it from external threats. They are on the bottom, where I am too. You can guess why.

Ruthar. You can call them princes. Fertile males. They mate and protect the females. They are their bodyguards. Ruthe, the princesses. Fertile females. They give birth to the new Hamaki and act  as the queen’s emissaries. Naisha, the queen, the only female who doesn’t have to reproduce. She’s our guide, our reference point, our Goddess.

Differently from many other species we can only nourish with minerals which contain silicon. Our bodies aren’t able to assimilate anything else. But what really makes us so differenti is something that dwells inside us, inside our essence, in our costantly hungry  being. No matter how much we eat, how much we fatten, how much we consume: we are never full.  And it’s not a physiological matter, no, it’s something deeper, it’s an…illness. A mental illness. I think this is the best way to describe it.

We are all ill, we are a population made of mad creatures. A population which always ends up, no matter how much they try, consuming all the available resources. A population which is forced to constantly move, looking for new worlds to consume. A ravenous population. Probably this is the reason behind the hate of many of the other species harbor against us. How can we blame them, after all.

If there’s truly a God above us, over the queen’s throne, then when they created us they didn’t have in their mind good plans for us. If they exist, then they probably hate us. I’m that kind of person who thinks a lot, maybe even too much. One of the many things I often think about is what truly was our limit. And I’m not talking about the single individuals, but about the entire species.

None of the technology we tried was able to block this instinct of ours. They can only lighten it. None of the laws we had frightened us enough to discourage us from eating. They could only send us to jail. None of the genocides we have gone through stopped us consuming. They only slowed us down. And the recent queens’ behavior hasn’t helped at all. They have made our numbers increase; they have removed many of the laws and the limits on food we  previously had; they have made everything they could do in order to make us consume even more. And I don’t understand why.

It’s absurd. The universe is enormous, that’s true, but it’s not infinite. Even the universe has its limit. Now the other races, the other world, the various oddities of the space are containing us, but…if, for some reason, we’ll manage to overcome all of these obstacles? What will happen then? What will happen to the universe? And what if we end up consuming everything in the universe, if we wrack it so much that it won’t be able to provide any new resources? If that happens, what will we do? Will we die out? No, no, no. We will never perish. We won’t be able to. No, we will continue to eat, and eat and eat, again and again, without stopping. And this universe will finally end, we will find a way to go out and escape. We will pass to the next universe.  And then to the next one and so on. Without. Stopping.

We are a reavenous swarm after all, aren’t we? Why don’t you answer me? I’ve been talking for something like ten minutes, and you haven’t said anything yet. What’s up, are you mute now? Are you like that because I have a rifle in my hands? Because I shot you? Because there’s a hell of fire and bullets behind me? Come on, answer me! Come on! Say something! You know? I’m pretty tired, I have been fighting for days. I wish I could rest somewhere. I wish I could put something into my stomach…yeah…something… Wait a minute, you and your people are lithoids, right? Yeah…you are, of course, you are. You are made of quartz. Tell me, is it me or quartz that contains silicon? You know, if that’s the case, then you wouldn’t mind if I bite you, would you? No,of course,  you wouldn’t.

YURI