This is probably my best Sci-fi novel.
This, on the other hand, is a Sci-fi story that has been buzzing round my head fore a year or two. I was actually looking to create a novel out of the idea. I might find a way of doing that in the future. It was a fun biological idea.
I would be very grateful for any comments on this rough draft!
The Supreme Leader.
The Supreme Leader relaxed within the luxury of his command centre. The weight of responsibility for the welfare of trillions of his fellow citizens sat easily on his shoulders. Everything had proceeded extremely well, with only a few major blips that no amount of planning could have done anything about, for over three billion years. There was really no reason why it should go wrong now, not under his watch. The Supreme Leader had long ago realised that he was largely superfluopus. All the major decisions had been made long ago. All he was required to do was oversee, keep a relatively high profile, and change as little as possible.
He was confident that they, as a species, had the diversity to ride out most storms. Even, in the long run, the major catastrophes were minor hiccups in the big scheme of things. What did they matter? A few trillion here – a few trillion there. It didn’t amount to a hill of beans. The numbers were soon made up. All that was required from the management team was a little nudge here and there. The art was not to panic; to keep things in proportion, and to maintain a light touch on the controls. That was his philosophy.
This move to the new planet had been the best idea yet. They had food a plenty. It made their previous, water deficient world, resemble a desert. It must have seemed like paradise to those first pioneers. At first they had roamed freely gleefully funnelling in the huge amount of resources and reproducing like there was no tomorrow.
Of course, there always was a tomorrow. They had soon discovered that. That is when they had gone into farming. Why scavenge for food when you can grow it on your doorstep?
Once they’d started down the route of farming they had never looked back. They had produced bigger and better stock. For millions of years they had bred, modified and selected the organisms to engineer ever larger and more bizarre models. It had been fun to guide the evolution down the multitude of pathways. And they themselves had adapted and diversified to maximise the opportunities. Life was bountiful.
Never had a species proved more successful.
They had altered the whole surface of the planet beyond any possible recognition. They had even engineered the composition of the atmosphere in order to be more conducive to their own needs.
The result of all these efforts was there for everyone to see; the whole planet was under intensive farming. It supported trillions of lives. They all lived in luxury and had their every need catered for. There was a huge variety of edible plants and a gigantic number of great lumbering beasts that they maintained for food. It was in balance and worked superbly. They lived off the hog of the land.
They had also had great fun developing the multitudes of varieties. Each had it’s own distinctive flavour. Variety was the spice of life.
There were a few snags. There always were. One of their creations was causing a great deal of stress and was proving very hard to control. Somewhere in the past some bright spark had thought it would be a good idea to produce a model that could show some initiative for itself. They had thought that it would alleviate a lot of the hard work. It was a pain having to control the beasts and keep them in order.
It was a mistake.
The beast did show initiative. It displayed far too much.
It started off well. The beasts’ initiative worked well. The ‘intelligent’ creatures helped keep things fertile and had provided numerous offspring and thus produced more quality nutrition than ever before. They were succulent and highly sought after. All was looking good.
But that’s when things became out of hand. The beasts were exceedingly hard to control. They believed they had a mind of their own. Not only that but they insisted on inventing things and changing the environment around them to suit themselves. Admittedly some of the ideas they came up with were useful and their teeming numbers provided great resources to be exploited. In the early days farming had never been so much fun or so profitable. That’s when it had sailed off the rails. The creatures started fighting. That wasn’t too bad. At least the dead bodies were useful and salvageable as food. It was when they began destroying all the other creatures that it became a major nuisance. It soon became quite clear that their rampaging was actually reducing the overall amount of available food. That wasn’t in the original brief. There were debates about whether it was actually worth maintaining these beasts; whether they simply weren’t too much damn trouble.
The voices grew louder when the beasts began manufacturing weapons to use against their farmers. Of course, we found ways of circumventing their attacks but the clamour for their extermination grew. Most of the time the stupid creatures seemed intent on destroying themselves and that was merely amusing. But the clamour for their extermination reached a peak when the idiotic creatures actually created weapons that could feasibly destroy the whole planet. It was getting beyond a joke.
It was taking all the resources at hand to control the beasts. They were more trouble than they were worth.
The Supreme Leader knew that the writing was on the wall. Sooner or later they were going to have to bite the bullet and do something about it; they were going to have to wipe the psychotic beasts out. There was no alternative. They were too destructive and dangerous. It was a shame because they made such brilliant food. Nothing tasted better. Besides, they brought a dash of colour. They made life exciting. All the Supreme Being hoped for was that it didn’t come to the crunch on his watch. That would be far too much of an upheaval. He wanted the easy life and was far too content living in the frontal lobe of the beast that called itself David Cameron, controlling his mind and peering through his eyes at the world outside.
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