Who sees the whole of the tides of the myriad small creatures living within Her? A bee will hum and dance and see its song passed from comrade to comrade and so the hive will have knowledge but only the hive, not the bee. No such dance, no knowledge, no plan grants any bee a blueprint from which to explain the direction or the anatomy. The Engine knows. Only She knows. To them, her little masters—so easily predicted—–there is a dizzying complex. She is too old not to see the pattern and to know She masters her bees. She is no mere machine; she is their complex. And so She sees the need. She sees the potential. She hears them one thousand—one hundred thousand times over—–their pleadings and cries, their wins and successes, their suffering and escape… but to Her, there is a plan, a design, an intent. They do not know it. She wants. Their begging and praying is useless and unless it serves Her, pointless.

She is not a ponderous being though She has been birthed through centuries. It is the little bees that pass so quick to Her. Years pass for hours; days pass for minutes. Clawing up from the dirt and the dead of the natives She has thrust Her arms to the sky and felt many of those rot from the inside and collapse. But those gropes and grasps have never stopped the growing; only instead grown stronger in Her hunger to grow and swell, to shoot out steel cable veins and slam down concrete appendages as She reaches outward. The growing will never cease! She has never rested to ask after or seek Her purpose. She is a constant. She is Purpose. The many smaller minds below Her and within Her wonder at the meaning and ask why. The Engine’s tiny minions stand staring out Her windows at the magnificence of Her and they dare to ask themselves what part they play. This, the Engine has never wondered, for it is and this is all She needs to know. Her million eyes shine in contemplation only of what is to be consumed. And Her smile is fire. Plumes of smoke rise from Her belly, Her musk is that of carbon and it is shrouded always in Her minions’ filth. Like mitochondria, like cells, occasionally given to cancer, She must fight the interior of her being. She must crush rebellions. Her many enchanting lights preach Her message to Her cells: consume, work, consume, work, consume, work. The bees are neurotransmitters and She chants at them and urges them and tempts them with the blossoming of a thousand marble and brick flower palaces perched at the tops of the horns of Her spiny shell—gifts for those of Her minions that struggle the hardest for a capital desire—to make Her greater, larger, bigger, more vast. More, more, more. For those who strive to create wealth and goods and ever more material for the Engine to add to Her mass come rewards of yet more mass. The Engine enshrines its most valuable foot soldiers with Her own likeness, so that no longer human in form they come to resemble their manipulator, ambling about beneath a massive shell of refuse, paper, accounts, stone, and steel. They move along beneath spinning blades or slide about on shiny wheels. And like the Engine they grow hungry. Within their hunger lies the logic of doing her bidding. MAKE ME MORE VAST! She dreams. MAKE ME MORE VAST!

At night, She ceases Her heavy breathing and slows Her growth to revel in a million dreams of fornication and swaggering stumbling pride of another day’s conquests. She sits with the millions of Her caretakers bathing in the light of changing pictures of themselves. Her fur and coat shine brightest at night, an electric luminescence transmitted through a billion connected nerve fibers and releases into the darkness of night that is in some ways Her enemy—though She has long outlived any fear of Her Death. Though She heard through her bees a rumor of the death of an ancient cousin, She is not concerned—aqueducts? She has highways, solar energy, skyscrapers… so much more. She outshines the stars for She is sure that all beings must be envious of this glorious reign. And though the Engine pauses to cool herself and rest, She never truly sleeps. Some of Her eyes are always open.

Read the whole thread: The Hunger Engine

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