Excerpt from Professor Whittingbone’s “On the creation and enhancement of life”
The weevil is, despite their earned reputation as a dangerous pest, one of the greater success stories for the Ascension College and the Department of Life Enhancement. They represent a major step in our understanding of altering life and creating new, stable forms of life. Their creation shows how far we in the department have come in our abilities, even if their containment was lacking.
Weevils were created to match the mysterious nulls of Xrantha, a tireless servant to perform any task, allowing for industry and production unheard of. The original form persists, the base “worker” caste that to this day remains the most numerous example of the weevil species. Their small forms are dextrous enough for most tasks that would be required of them, and require little nourishment relative to their size, with their systems being able to digest most anything making them, in theory at least, a perfect servant and disposal in one. These were created using the insectile creatures colloquially known as “rock beetles”, taken from the caverns surrounding the Maanzirinth Colony as part of the colleges trade agreement. Several of the original queens used in the original production persisted in their unaltered forms, still capable of bearing unbound workers that were quite useful for testing up until the night of the escape.
The base workers were near ideal, the Words added to or removed from their template giving them a bipedal form and stripping away natural defences and extraneous limbs that were unneeded and would have simply been a drain on resources to birth. Their intelligence had been boosted greatly without giving true independence and sapience, they would readily learn tasks and replicate what they were shown. The issue, as we all know, was their lack of true intelligence meant they could not contextualise the actions they were taught and memorized. They could flawlessly mimic the act of repairing and sharpening a chipped and dull sword blade, but only for that exact blade, they could not as much as take the actions of repairing a blade chipped at the base and translate it to repair a chip at the top, they could only “repair” a non-existent chip at the base. So the next step, of course, was to add an intelligence that could.
The queens had already been modified at this point of the work, their reproductive processes rewritten to churn out the obedient bipedal workers rather than their bestial kin. Giving each worker true intelligence was considered unthinkable, their numbers meant the likelihood of some unknown mutation causing issues was a near certainty. The queens were already the de facto mind of the colony, controlling and directing the movement and actions via pheromones, so the work began there. The pheromones were left intact, while a psychic link was established {See Professor Whitestone’s treatise “Minds connected – The Reefs of Detun”} to allow the queen to gather, catalogue and dispense the information and properly adjust the actions. It took many iterations and attempts, but eventually we saw success not from the modified queens but from an unexpected birth, that of the first of the second generation queens.
The second generation queens were not the bloated aberrations their mothers were (at least not until late in their life cycle), being instead tall bipedal forms, standing above most of the researchers present for their birth. Their forms betrayed their origins more than the workers, bearing horns matching those of the original queens and an additional set of limbs. Their skin was unusual, being akin to human skin but of colours not seen in the wild origins, with the traditional carapace of their kin laying underneath the skin layer, protecting the organs and skeletal structure, leaving them far sturdier than their thin frames suggest. They were quite docile, and as such despite objections the work continued, their unexpected and unplanned birth being documented as a happy accident.
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The new queen’s birth cycle was just as rapid as their feral mothers, bloating and laying eggs each day in a cycle that matched our previous production records. Of course we know now that an immature queen is relatively slow to produce children, it is not until they form a proper colony that their population growth truly explodes and they begin producing the truly fearsome praetorians and myrmidons. But we were content, and could not be blamed for not expecting the most bizarre circumstances of their new life cycle, nor for their fiendish intelligence that they kept hidden, as deep into unknown territory as we were.
With the new queens came a new caste, the “soldier” class, though at the time we deemed them no more than an improved iteration of the workers. Greater in size while still being shorter than any People, with improved strength and intelligence that allowed for easier completion of the tasks assigned in testing. They are marked for their pale skin and striking blue eyes, and a single horn jutting from their skulls betraying the origin of their species. They were of great interest as an example of an emergent species, one of the first documented cases of an altered lifeform producing a new lifeform itself.
Of course, when the queen’s rebellion came we were woefully unprepared, believing them to be the same dull servile beings that had obeyed and followed testing and orders for a full two years and more. There is still much debate on whether it was a new mutation that caused their violent escape, or a long term plan finally come to fruition. I confess, reader, that here we move from documented fact into simply own belief and theory. I was part of the team that created the weevils, I worked on the original unaltered queens and was active up until the night of the rebellion. I saw them daily, and I saw them that night. I saw the forces of the queen’s rise up as one, some invisible signal causing workers to dash themselves against the walls of their pens until they shattered outward, the entire complex breached from within in moments. I saw the butchery and heard the screams that night, and every night since. I say this as a warning to all those that wish to continue the great work of the Department of Life Enhancement. If you take nothing else from this document, take only this note, and read carefully what I write next.
I saw the queen’s that night, cowering under a piece of rubble that had crushed my legs but left me hidden from sight. I watched all four of them assemble, and I saw their actions. As many faculty and students as the workers and soldiers could catch were brought to them that night, and the queens personally murdered all brought to them. I say murdered, not slain, nor killed, as it is the appropriate word. They did not dispatch their victims as an animal would. They tore away limbs and allowed the victim’s lives to leech away slowly. They reached into bellies and slowly tore out handfuls, their victims persisting in agony for some time. They dripped their acidic discharge into mouths, melting their victims slowly and agonisingly from within. Their minds were not only bent on escape that night. Truly I do not know if it is revenge, acting against us in particular as the architects of every agonising modification inflicted on their mothers (who had been given gentle deaths by their daughters, held and caressed as a single blow ended their lives in a painless instant) or simple sadism we had accidentally added to them as an unseen and unexpected mutation. I watched them flee only when no more victims were available, and the forces of the college guards began to slowly whittle away their colonies.
But the lesson is clear. When modifying life, we are never truly in control. We look at the examples of the weevils, the fleshmares, the eye-spiders, all created and birthed in our halls and all escaped to plague the continent. We have a responsibility to the people, but also to our creations. It was our foolish pride that allowed them to escape and reproduce and become the problem they are. Containment protocols are in place for a reason, and must be followed, lest we add to the infinite horrors of the wilds.
