One morning, after a night of troubled dreams about not gathering enough discarded sucrose for the queen, Procurement Drone Delta-Theta-81171 woke up in a big pile of fluffy things that she somehow reflexively knew to call ‘a bed’. Now, inexplicably, some sort of gigantic monstrosity.
“Sugar?” She made those sounds with the fleshy excuse for mandibles she now seemed to have, bizarre new instinct telling her those sounds meant the sucrose crystals she should be collecting for the queen. But she couldn’t smell the queen or their nest or sugar or anything. The olfactory nodes on whatever she had become were unbearably weak, as was the vibrational sensor arrays. On the plus sides, she could certainly hear much better and see much further, but any incidental advantages didn’t make up for being larger by orders of magnitude and something else entirely.
Before she could lament her situation any further, that new keen hearing was overwhelmed by a terrible buzzing sound coming from a little black rectangle beside the ‘bed’. Concepts that Delta suddenly knew but had no idea how she knew flooded her mind. This was a cellular phone. That was the alarm clock on the phone. A phone that belonged to Georgette Samsa, who she was now.
Half her mind was memories of this squishy… human?… she became, half that determined drone who just needed to find sugar for the collective until she died. Delta went through the motions of this meaty-sack’s life, knowing but not understanding why she was doing them, but knowing that until she could figure her way out, she had to go through those motions regardless. Washing with enough water to flood the entire colony as if it were nothing. Clothing and face-paintings, as was the customs for the type of human she apparently was. Silly as hell but necessary to maintain the illusion until she could escape. A car, it was metal and it got you places faster. A job? Answering questions on phones, so that people could keep using their phones, and they somehow knew less how to use them than her, even though she had yesterday literally been a bug. A happy little bug.
Lunch, functional, unpleasant, barely enough time to eat it. Only two breaks to excrete metabolic waste. Tolerating, but rejecting, half-hearted attempts at mating from fellow prisoners?… no, they called them “employees”. Duller and more monotonous than procuring sucrose, that’s for certain.
When she went home that night, she researched if anything like this had ever happened and if so, how to reverse it, but she found no answer. Before reclining back into that incomprehensibly soft ‘bed’ for sleep, she wondered how long this unbearable trial would last, the purposeless slogs she seemed doomed and damned to as Georgette. One day of that unmoored horror was already more than she could reckon enduring. As she drifted away into a human’s fitful slumbers, all that Delta could hope for was to wake tomorrow as the purposefully-uncomplicated little insect, once more.
Loading comments...