Ancient Klackon Proverb:
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Nearly-as-Ancient Klackon Proverb:2307-12: Home Sweet Home (And I do mean SWEET!)
Yes, but the more things change, the more they also change!
It's a funny thing: You change when you incorporate 36 million sentient near-strangers into your mind! (Who'd have thought, you know?) Oh, I'd had some experience with it when my numbers swelled in 2303 - part of me had - but that was a small fraction of who I am now, and there was still just the single queen. This ... well, I'm a lot of hive queens now, and a whole, whole lot of Klackons. I'm RBO-11 all right, still am, always will be. I remember my friends, and remember the events that led to my unification, and I'm proud of them as can be. Doesn't mean I'm quite the same now - I'm everybody! And from this point on, this is my galaxy!
Millions of my Klackons continue to swarm from Kholdan to my homeworld of Maalor each year, keeping pace with Kholdan's birth rate so that its population hovers just above one third of what the planet can support. Maalor is building infrastructure like crazy, trying to catch up with all the incoming transports. It's no wonder I've made the place my homeworld; I can't keep my thoughts off all those delicious mineral resources! Well ... except when I'm casting my thoughts and my will across the stars to the lost cities of Artemis! Kholdan continues to put virtually all its efforts into research.
OOC Note: Like Sullla, I believe it's (almost!) always best to max out your homeworld before doing anything else. So I'm doing everything in my power to speed up the maxing of Maalor!I do get a few more Scouters into the skies, getting into position for Deuterium or additional refueling bases to extend their range, and now that I know a little more about the planets in my neighborhood, I begin to consider how to improve them. There are barren worlds around me, but they are neither numerous nor anything like Artemis or Maalor, and I've seen no sign of the "Silicoids" that were hinted at in some of the fragmentary Artemis records - creatures capable of living naked on any planet, no matter how hostile. Thus, I decide to try and devise Improved Terraforming +10 technology to expand the living space on all my worlds. In addition to this possibility, and that of preparing to live on barren worlds, I had idly toyed with the notion of processing factory waste more swiftly, but though this would have been a terrific idea on Kholdan for any number of reasons, I decided to put it aside for a while, as Maalor's resources make terraforming the most valuable technology - as well as the quickest to research - that I can conceive. The more Klackons I can fit on that planet, the better!
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Why are you looking at me that way?
2313-18: Looking Beyond (Really Early!)
As I finish developing Maalor's industrial infrastructure, even before the last few transports arrive from Kholdan (Maalor is fully populated in 2315, with all the factories its Klackons can operate already waiting for the final million arrivals) work begins on a new starship design, named after the most important of the many passengers each will carry: The Hive Queen!
While the first is being finished, I turn my thoughts to the matter of improving our factories. I can't figure any easy way to improve the rate of construction on Kholdan and our many worlds-to-be, so I will instead start work on an improvement to the factories we have, to cut down their emissions drastically.
My scientists feel a little bit uncomfortable with this, the way an individual Klackon's arm feels uncomfortable when it's sitting in the wrong position, but there's some good in it anyway - though far more complicated to develop than terraforming, Reduced Industrial Waste 80% will provide yet another boost to Maalor's productivity. Besides, my other scientists are very comfortable: I could make a breakthrough at any moment in propulsion!
My first Hive Queen ship arrives at Kholdan - I have them heading there from Maalor the moment each one is complete - but it will wait around for a year, briefly delaying our Omicron colony for the chance of speeding the one at Artemis! With another Hive Queen already complete and on its way, Kholdan's will depart for somewhere next year no matter what; I'm just hoping it gets to head for the ocean planet of my dreams!
OOC Note: Believe it or not, I think my opening was too normal for this setup, and therefore slower than it had to be! Everything I spent on factories from 2303 (when I found and colonized Maalor) through 2305 (the last time Kholdan would do anything but research for a while) should have been spent to grow population instead, the faster to feed my "homeworld"! Later, I also went directly from factories to colony ship production instead of keeping a portion of Maalor's anual budget on industry, for enough reserves to keep it fully "fed" each year. The latter course would have sped up overall colony ship production significantly without even delaying the first! I finally corrected this after the construction of my second colony ship ... still a good decade "early," in 2318!2319-24: Stretching the Limits
As the secrets of Deuterium continue to elude us, my first Hive Queen departs for Omicron with its millions of Klackons and their queen, even as I begin to sense a chance for a breakthrough in planetology. Two years later, the second Hive Queen follows the first. Maalor has already finished its third, about to arrive at Kholdan, and is now just mining its incredible resources, both using them to power and maintain its own infrastructure and shipping them out to Kholdan. It will continue to supply Kholdan's mineral and energy needs, and those of our new colonies, for years to come - especially at Artemis, if we can only learn to fuel our Hive Queens with deuterium! The ships, not the lovely ladies. You know what I mean. In the meantime, though ... did I mention new colonies?
Omicron is the first world that my Klackon people settle as a single, united entity - the first of very, very many!
The very next year, I finally figure out how to make Deuterium Fuel Cells work properly! You wouldn't have thought it, but apparently the deuterium stops leaking out into its housing if you use a container without holes in it! This brilliant discovery suggests just countless possibilities, and I ruminate upon them while setting the experimental and theoretical scientists among my Klackons to work on a new project: Our efficient new deuterium cells should make it possible to modify our ships' engines and achieve still greater power! Nuclear Engines in particular are a highly intriguing option, and I believe we'll also someday be able to rig a ring of external engine ports to enhance small-scale maneuverability, effectively stabilizing the ship through even extreme shifts in inertia. Understand, I see no actual purpose in stabilizing my ships this way, nor any need for extra maneuverability ... but you have to admit, the concept is intriguing. Even before I start work on new engine tech however, I reach my Kholdan Hive Queen out for Artemis! My Atlantis shall live and rise again!
Great news! Just as I hoped, my extraordinay concept of "containers without a million holes in them" proves to have utility even outside of Deuterium! Apparently, all the designer chemicals, bioengineered seeds, and heat pump fuel and microcomponents I had devised for terraforming can be safely transported to their intended sites if they are carried in something other than a giant sieve! I can now terraform my planets (and will begin almost immediately) ... and begin to work on new projects in every field of research! I must consider: If our reflector dishes were solid curves instead of mere spiderwebs of metal in empty space, might they become more sensitive instruments, able to detect more at longer range? If so, we'll soon develop superior Deep Space Scanner technology! (The same thing applied to interference transmitters would have helped with ECM1, but there's no need to fear enemy missiles when everyone you know is already a part of your own brain!) If we duplicate the Artemis shield generators a little more exactly, instead of drilling aesthetically-pleasing holes through what seem like they might be "nonessential" components of our own, maybe we could boost them in effectiveness, and use them as Class III Deflector Shields! And if we can build colony domes that actually form complete seals, perhaps the air won't escape, and Controlled Dead Environment will become a possibility! There is something to be said for just improving our terraforming techniques still more, or taking a short detour either to control barren environments or to improve our pollution cleanup technology, but I'll be reducing factory waste by other means anyway, and I do prefer when possible to reach for state-of-the-art knowledge I couldn't have achieved before, and of a type that wouldn't immediately render my latest tech obsolete. This may be the wrong move in this case, but at least I have reasons.
Of course, there's something to be said for Death Spores too, but that something is, "Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeew!" Believe me, I never came up with the toxic things, even in idle speculation - there may have been wars in Klackon history, hive-on-hive, before we were united, but nothing so horrible as these bioweapons was ever conceived. It was in the exploration of Artemis that some of my Klackons uncovered ancient, fragmentary records of some terrible event in another world's past, an event whose nature I could neither understand nor believe until I developed my latest technology: If chemicals, biomass, and heat pumps were devised to perform "anti-terraforming" functions, precisely opposite to those I just invented, then pumped forcefully into a planet's atmosphere and introduced onto its surface, they could have a devastating impact on the planet's population - bringing them slow, painful, and horrible deaths - and even upon its habitability. I shudder to think that anyone could have used such devices even against their bitterest enemies - it is clear from the records that the Artemisians themselves utterly reviled the things - but it seems certain that someone not only built but deployed them; I wonder if they might even be the cause of what I find on Artemis, its inexplicably standing structures and even functioning shields, all alike crumbled by time and disuse as if all its people simultaneously vanished without a trace. Thankfully, there are no signs of any such weapons' residue on the surface, and the continued existence of marine and maritime life of all varieties, together with a peculiar tidiness to the artifacts of the ancient Artemisian civilization, suggests that the passing of their people from their world was neither so sudden nor so painful as might have been the case with death spores, though it was surely as absolute. The cause remains a mystery, and one I must unravel, lest it happen again, to me! Even now, in case some terrible and ancient sea monster should be the cause, arising from the deeps, I begin to consider yet another technological pursuit: The miniaturization of the old hives' most advanced weapons of war to function as Hand Lasers - it seems a much simpler and potentially more useful project than finding a way to mount the things in nests aboard star ships and coordinating their fire in a "gatling" array ... but then, anything seems more useful than "gatlings" to me!
2325-30: Legends Live Again
I have another banner year in 2327, as Primodius joins the fold and my Scouters touch the beautiful worlds of Herculis, Vox, and Gion, while Maalor begins work on Hive Queens once again, so quickly that the first is already on its way to Primodius the following year - a year that will be forever remembered in Klackon history!
At a red star near to Artemis, and nearer still to the center of the galaxy, one of my Scouters encounters a monstrous ship of terrible destructive power. We could detect no life signs aboard, but the ship reacted to our presence immediately and automatically. It is named "Guardian," and if it seeks to guard the secrets of the star system in which it lies, it does so swiftly, efficiently, and without mercy. My Scouter is destroyed almost immediately. I pray this Guardian is set only to guard that system indeed, for if it were to set out along the path whence our Scouter came, it could rampage across all my worlds, and we would have no hope of the slightest resistance. Even Maalor could never build enough defenses to hold out for a single battle against its devastating weaponry. What new mystery is this ancient ship, its form almost Klackon in nature, with vast pincer claws and differentiated abdomen and all the rest, designed for pure destruction even in the absence of any crew, this invincible Guardian? With its automatic and inevitably destructive reactions, we have no hope of ever learning from the ship itself or the system it protects ... but perhaps, if enough records survive and can be unearthed, we may learn something from another world nearby. For 2328 is also the year in which Artemis receives its first Klackon queen! Millions swarm once more through the abandoned cities of Artemis, building new shielded infrastructure on the world's ocean bottoms and coral reefs, leaving the old, no doubt far-superior buildings intact so I might examine them without risk of damage in the course of attempted restoration. My two million Klackons are itching to get their pincers on the beautiful ancient cities and the secrets they contain, but I must prepare the world first, and go about my studies carefully - and in the meantime, they can work and swim and dive and play among enchanting varieties of ocean life in the world's abundant seas! More than 20 million of Kholdan's Klackons meanwhile are permitted to depart at once, much to the pleasure of each and of all of me, to help build up our new Atlantis, and discover its mysteries! And then, in 2330, with Maalor still turning out Hive Queens at an incredible rate, one of my Scouters reaches the yellow star nearest the heart of the galaxy. Where I hoped to find an alien civilization, perhaps with secrets to share about the history of the galaxy, certainly with millions of people to join with me in friendship, I find instead the beautiful garden world of Crius, so lovely that I send a Hive Queen immediately. And still I have seen no sign of any other living species. There is no longer any doubt: I am not merely the most powerful entity and species, nor the one with the greatest potential. With the exception of the Guardian itself, and perhaps what it conceals, I am the only power of any significance in the modern galaxy!
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Next: We're Not Alone
