00004.00

From: Alien Spy, codename: “null value/null value/heptad”

To:  Orbital Intelligence Communications Node Guiding Intelligence codename: “Mu”.

Swarm Date: TotalSubmissionDay; 20^th rotation of Swarm Unblemished Unity; Year of the Screaming Traitor.

My Host’s rudimentary intelligence is torn between two poles of emotion during this cycle.

The problem is this:

The fourth most dominant species of this planet -men - (ranked Number Four on the Rock by our beloved nest-mates, the geniuses at Central Intelligence; after cockroaches cats and women) has a bicameral brain.

This is to say that the male species possesses two distinct, separate and specialised brain centres or hemispheres - denominated “chambers” - of sense and sensation, cognition, action and will.

The first (“left”) chamber is concerned with linear reasoning and language, including grammar and vocabulary, and thus is employed making rational judgements about football and stating them verbally. The second (“right”) chamber is concerned with the processing of visual and audiological stimuli, spatial manipulation, facial perception, and artistic ability and thus is utilised to observe, participate in and to express feelings about football.

Please note that a man can consider and respond to one particular subject (and one subject only), at any given time; but in the above two different ways.

This gross physiological fact about our Number Four enemy here on Planet Trash should be compared with the unicameral nature of the brains of women which lack this distinctive and useful intellectual polarisation. This is probably a weakness on the women’s’ part and can be exemplified by their muddled attitudes to, for example, overtaking slower-moving vehicles when they are piloting one of them along Trash’s mass-transit system.   

Men’s consciousnesses will usually be concentrated on the goal and the activity of overtaking and overtaking alone: the bicameral intelligence both observing the need to be in front of the tardy vehicle ahead and generating the willpower and physical manipulations that are directed to the pursuit of that goal.

Admirable.

The mind of a typical female biped in the same situation will be much less focused and task-oriented, and will be typified by a loss of concentration and a weakening of willpower towards goal-seeking because random and distracting thoughts, images and words enter her more stream-like consciousness: irrelevant and redundant phrases such as “twisted wreckage” and “mangled corpses” often frustrating the mission altogether.

During this light cycle, therefore, the Host is obliged to take turns thinking about and emotionally responding to:

# the Warrior Caste of this archipelago henceforth being obliged by the local Military Decision-making Caste to resurrect as the chief stratagem of their Hive-defending capabilities that ancient and long-neglected technology called the “moat,” (feelings which are summarised here), 

and

# what the Host considers to be the most sublime and yet paradoxically brilliant strategy of using the perceptions and judgement of an immature adult biped to assess the likely result of the Western Continental Hive’s ongoing ritual civil war; an assessment that the Host regards with an untranslatable and frankly redundant Trashly emotion denominated “LOL.”

00003.00

From: Alien Spy Threttubray, codename: “null value/null value/heptad”

To:  Orbital Intelligence Communications Node Guiding Intelligence Prymaesst codename: “Mu”.

Swarm Date: Painday; 18^th rotation of Swarm Unblemished Unity; Year of the Screaming Traitor.

“Humans” think of themselves as food.

Well, so do we; but even prior to our invasion and years-long victory feast, the two lesser dominant species on this world are accustomed to treating themselves in exactly the same ways as they preserve surplus food.

Every method of preserving excess livestock and produce is also applied by men and women to themselves with a thoroughness and diligence that would be praiseworthy in Worker Drones back at home, though both the species called women and men use specialist technical vocabulary to denominate food preservation strategies that they apply to themselves.

These techniques for their fodder (and for themselves) include, respectively: wind-drying or jerking (hiking); freezing (golf and queuing for the New Year sales); vacuum packing (International Space Station); soaking in salt and fats (hamburgers); coating in sugar (musicals); pickling in acid and alcohol (the 1960s and Ibiza); smoking (tobacco); irradiation (sunbathing) and jellying (bumper-hugging.)

Though neither of “Earth’s” supreme species (cockroaches and cats) employs any of these (or any other) forms of food preservation themselves, both of the races at the Number One and Number Two spots on planet Trash’s food chain benefit immeasurably from women’s and men’s husbandry, agriculture and cuisine without in any way taking part in production themselves.

It seems likely, therefore, that in some way cockroaches and cats farm or otherwise knowingly oversee bipedal food production to their own benefit in much the same was as our beloved Hive Queen (may She conquer the universe, enslave all sentient life, breed many warriors and live forever) benefits almost exclusively from almost 144/144 parts of the efforts of every other member of The Swarm.

[Strategic briefing # 4: please be aware that the hamburger is by far the most widespread method of meat preservation in the areas of the highest technological and military organisation here on Planet Trash.

In conjunction with a future strategic alliance between the men and the women, this ubiquitous foodstuff might present our incoming Warrior Caste with a formidable combination of high-calorie; protein-rich combat rations and two feisty and aggressive species fully tooled up and armed for segmented egg-stealing tunnel-raiders.  

Please redouble, therefore, your efforts through our networks of bipedal agents of influence to portray hamburgers to the uncommitted “humans” as somehow malign or harmful to bipedal life, along with your campaign of cultural sabotage to render both “human” species unwilling to consume either fat or salt in any useful quantities.

Mu, I really mean this: hamburgers truly are that dangerous to our plans.]

(As an aside, I can find no sign anywhere of that either the cats or the cockroaches are aware of just how large the evolutionary advantage hamburgers would provide to a species which monopolised their consumption.

The cats, in particular, would gain an almost insurmountable advantage even over the cockroaches if they ever controlled access to the hamburger. Fortunately, I have been able to find no evidence - even on the Internet - that this is ever likely to happen, and the very thought of cats actively undertaking a campaign to secure a monopoly of the hamburger or any of its variants is, frankly, laughable.

Curiously, in previous inter-continental conflicts, the “humans” have used food preservation methods on their fellow biped enemies (either real or imagined). 
 

Though their information services instruct the bipeds of “The West” that such methods are reprehensible (I cannot tell why) our helpers on the planet who preach “peace” (which means the military surrender of the most advanced nests of Planet Trash to the mercy of its lower refuse-tunnel rejects) seem to remember the writers of the old recipe book with relish and hope for it to return.

The Host body stirs.

Threttubray out.

00002.00

From:

Alien Spy Threttubray, codename: “null value/null value/heptad”

To:  

Orbital Intelligence Communications Node Guiding Intelligence Prymaesst codename: “Mu”.

Swarm Date: Retributionday; 17^th rotation of Swarm Unblemished Unity; Year of the Screaming Traitor.

Mu, we must encourage The Taliban and hairdressing!

This Host’s body has begun to smell of pineapple and mackerel during the dark part of the planetary cycle.

These smells are only marginally noticeable to the curiously inefficient sensory apparatus of the biped species and the presence of deodorising fluids and fermented apples tend to mask the scent from the Host’s neighbours and genome-sept group.

Unfortunately however both of the planet Trash’s evolutionary supreme overlord species (the cockroaches and cats) have reacted more emphatically to whatever pheromones my transformation of the Host’s nervous system are emitting. Cockroaches by greater avoidance and cats by more eager attraction.

This might prove awkward as the Host has a reputation for disliking cats, and as they are now more willing than ever to be near him.

Even so, it is likely that as other agents of the Swarm invest biped bodies here on Trash prior to Operation Swarmfall, some alert creature or other might notice our unusual nocturnal behaviour and connect it to the smell, count the legs, add two and ten together and thus expose our Intelligence Echelon to capture and autopsy, and thus instigate global searches for other spies of the Queen.

Fortunately, help is within our manipulation-appendages’ reach in the form of Planet Trash’s sub-colonies called Taliban and hairdressing.

This of the Taliban:

When Aisha was 12, her father promised her in marriage to a Taliban fighter to pay a debt. She was handed over to his family who abused her and forced her to sleep in the stable with the animals.

When she attempted to flee, she was caught and her nose and ears were hacked off by her husband as punishment.

This of hairdressing:

A hairdresser was horrified when her nose collapsed after decades of breathing in minute hair clippings.

The bipeds’ remote olfactory organs are hardly miracles of Nature but if men and women can be encouraged to persevere in behaviours that destroy them altogether then our Infiltration Corps might go on unrecognised until The Day itself – after which it will be a matter of no interest what we smell of as there will be no other species but The Swarm on Planet Trash to care.

[Strategic briefing #3: please take care to evaluate whether or not another invading swarm or its equivalent is behind the spread of Taliban and hairdressing across Planet Trash – perhaps to disguise its own infiltration operatives’ chemical spoor. Can it be those digestive waste Pod People again?]

[Strategic briefing #4: please arrange for the destruction of the wheat field in Swizerland at reference 17/132/101 by 66/91/140, where cereal curlers have inscribed the treasonous warning:

Like, sniff out your neighbours, Earth-losers; and if it smells like Del Monte or Bird’s Eye, then terminate with extreme vitamins.] 

Host’s Sunday nap is now ending.

Threttubray out.

00001.10

Initial communication: Supplemental.

From:

Alien Spy Threttubray, codename: “null value/null value/heptad”

To:  

Orbital Intelligence Communications Node Guiding Intelligence Prymaesst codename: “Mu”.

Swarm Date: DoubleWorkshiftsday; 16^th rotation of Swarm Unblemished Unity; Year of the Screaming Traitor.

Prymaesst: the particular section of your interrogative that requests data concerning my genetic and cellular wellbeing and my gross-anatomical integrity after the missile attack does not seem to have been received.

Please rebroadcast.

In reply to your first (and no doubt commendably prompt) interrogative, I am sending these reports through the primitive medium of blogging because the receptor axon cluster of my communications node was destroyed in the missile attack that forced me to ditch my landing pod in the body of water locally denominated “Lake Windermere.”

This particular Host body’s technical skills are limited to the operation of simple networking devices and the occasional replacement of malfunctioning visible light spectrum illuminators. This is much to the satisfaction of the dominant parasite/commander which occupies his nest; a satisfaction that she shares with all their familiar drones and working-party companions on numerous occasions.

As instructed, I have infested a Host in the central region of the larger island of the target sub-arctic archipelago locally denominated by the bipeds as “Great Britain”, or as “food place/big toilet” by the ruling cockroach and cat superspecies.

As theorised by my predecessor, this island is the source of the biped language used first to broadcast messages into space in volume and later was the language spoken by the only over-nest to use nuclear weaponry against their competitor bipeds, and later still by the explorers who first stood on Trash’s large natural satellite.

The wisest several hundred of the bipeds’ intelligence-bearers all agree that the colonist-warriors of the only over-nest that has so far deployed nuclear weapons (and visited the moon) are by far the most thoroughgoing and remorseless killers and conquerors that Trash has ever originated.

Quite why that particular over-nest’s equivalent of the Hive Queen and her Supreme War Council decided not to exterminate all their competitors on Trash by exploiting their brief monopoly of nuclear weaponry is not known. There must be some better weapon available to them.

It must remain a priority of our remote intelligence-gathering AIs to discover what super-weapon it is that the Murcans possess to convince them that global nuclear extermination was an unnecessary tool for realigning Trash’s power structures in their favour. 
Conversely, perhaps the cockroaches or cats influenced them to abandon their unique and enviable position of untouchable power. 
Worse; perhaps some other invading intelligence obliged the Murcans to desist from the perfectly logical course of genocide.

[Tactical briefing:

My predecessor was wrong to scale down our remote-controlled AI campaign of capture and biopsy of Murcans in pursuit of this vital enemy data. I recommend that you revive the robot probes from orbit and start gathering Murcans again for interrogation and testing. The Hive Queen has invested considerable resources in the remote robot fleet for this purpose, and I do not understand, Mu, why you should have agreed to my predecessor’s advice to power the robots down and render those useful little grey homunculi dormant.]

[Strategic briefing #1:

English is not used as a means of interspecies communication between the men and women of the two biped races.

The vocabulary and syntax of English are used in common by each species, but the meanings which are conveyed to each by the shared sounds frequently contrast and are often diametrically opposed to each other.

For example, the sentence made by a man says to the woman with whom he struggles for dominance in their shared fortress/nest: ‘Do you want to have a bath soon?’ has two different meanings.

For the man the sense is ‘Should I speedily shave whilst I’m filling your bath so I’m out of the way when you need the room to yourself?’

Yet to the woman, these self-same syllables mean; ‘Your cranial hair is oily and unkempt and you legs probably need depilating – how can you not have noticed your present state of unhygienic disarray?’

As I noted above, I expect the joint forces of the men and women to pose little if any threat to the Warrior Caste.

The biped races should be a pushover.]

[Strategic briefing #2:

We are not along on and around Trash.

As my pod recovered from the missile attack over North Korea, evaded the local aviation constabulary denominated “the RAF” and approached its eventual splashdown in Northern England, I passed over the fodder-seed agricultural complex denominated “Wiltshire”. I regret to inform you that those irresponsible and unlicensed interstellar information dilettantes The Cereal Curlers are present on Trash.

The first example of their campaign of unauthorized information about the Swarm’s galactic ambitions was pure obscenity, consisting of three equilateral triangles along a central spine imparting the blasphemous slogan “The Hive Queen Eats Everyone!”

Whilst ultimately this is strictly true, I see no reason why such an offensive and inflammatory message should be visible from orbit, and I insist you send an incendiary micrometeorite to ignite the cornfield concerned.

The second example took the form of six interlocking spirals of plain discs importing the equally dangerous:

“Hey Earth dudes, wake up and smell the Kryptonite! Watch the skies for Fabricius’ sake! S.E.T.I. epic fail!”

Time to send the cleanup crew for that one, too, if you still have your biped quislings on the payroll.]

This second, post-breakfast rest-period spell of dormancy seems to be ending.

Threttubray out.

00001.00

Initial communication

From:

Alien Spy Threttubray, codename: “null value/null value/heptad”

To:  

Orbital Intelligence Communications Node Guiding Intelligence Prymaesst codename: “Mu”.

Swarm Date: Retributionday; 16^th rotation of Swarm Unblemished Unity; Year of the Screaming Traitor.

I have landed and successfully invested this host body’s nervous system, which is that of one of the lowest-ranked of the four ostensibly native dominant species on this planet.

It is called a “man.”

The other three ubiquitous life forms here are called, in decreasing order of intelligence: “cockroaches,” “cats”  and women.

I estimate that cockroaches are the supreme species on this planet (which they denominate as “Trash”) primarily because, unlike cats, they are not obliged to emit sonic triggers or to deform their bodies to induce women and men to give them nourishment. Women and men alike are entirely unaware of their subservice to cockroaches and cats and thus fill the positions in Trash’s hierarchy of domination as the third and fourth within the tetrad of dominant superspecies. This second-tier pairing is denominated in my Host’s primitive consciousness with the untranslatable phrase “Liverpool and Arsenal”.

Cockroaches - though individually fragile - are genetically predisposed to overcoming almost all environmental and physical threats and have so far survived every evolutionary change and mass extinction event in the three hundred million rotations or so that Trash has made around its star since they appeared, including numerous periods of climactic warming and cooling, such as the small Ice Age that Trash appears to be approaching at the moment.

[Note for Colonial Swarm sub-leaders in the Invasion Fleet:

Cold climate planning for the genetic modification of Combat Drones and technological re-equipment for Ice Age conditions should begin now, with the proviso that the Ice Age is not wholly inevitable and might be prevented by wide- scale technological activity here on Trash. My tactical AI calculates that there is a 7.468 parts per gross probability that mean temperatures might actually rise sharply in and around many of the larger global biped settlements for a brief period within the next two years if the proposed Google/Cyberdyne Systems merger goes ahead in 2012.]

 

Back to cockroaches. These armoured and racially indestructible creatures exist on every continent and in every environment where the other three species dwell and they travel throughout them almost unconstrained by any and all competing life forms. They think and behave with a single-mindedness and dedication to survival similar to ours (though they smell and taste slightly nicer than we do), and are armoured arthropods and omnivorous and as such they are the most similar local species to the Swarm.

Extermination of the cockroaches must therefore be our Prime Directive here on Trash.

I will review my predecessor’s notes on the matter once I can reach his downed observation pod and can scrape his fluids from the pod’s data node.

Successful retrieval of data from Trash’s Syrian region might be difficult for this body to achieve for a number of reasons; not least of which is the possibility of further bombardment of the area where agent null value/null value/hexad met his fate.

Until then, we must invest our second most substantial efforts at intelligence gathering on the creatures denominated “cats,” though I should warn you and the Invasion Fleet commanders that the Tactical AI indicates a 133/144 probability that cats are either the descendants of an already successful invasion from beyond Trash’s solar system itself, or are native Trash animals invested with the guiding intelligence of extrasolar colonists in a similar way as I nestle within this body. As such, cats represent almost as deadly a direct competitor for this world’s resources as the cockroaches do.

Further intelligence will follow regarding the defensive plans and force dispositions of these enemy Quadrupeds once I have located such.

Evidence concerning the two biped species “men” and “women” is much more abundant and therefore their elimination is likely to be much less problematic. I anticipate learning the keys necessary to their extinction very soon…

This time in control of the body is growing short. Its rudimentary brain indicates that it will soon end the current stretch of dormancy and I must retreat from its awareness, but I can send out my initial impressions before the meat-suit recommences independent activity.

Men and women live in an apparently ritualised state of mutual conflict and parasitism based upon their markedly contrasting physiologies and still more egregiously opposed mentalities.

The Host’s instinct is leading it to seek an unbelievable combination of animal, vegetable and mineral matter in order to generate energy for the next light cycle’s activities.

Before I am obliged to skulk behind its temporal lobe until the next dark cycle, I have only time to send you this urgent intelligence:

Initial observations indicate that women possess very powerful psychic and telepathic powers as well as eidetic memory; both of which weapons systems the Swarm’s Warrior Caste must one day confront on the battlefield. 

This is most easily observed in contrast to the behaviour of their fellow Trash-dwellers and parasite/symbiotes the men.

I have two examples before I end this report:

# Men and women alike each receive much of their data and daily instructions through audiovisual data streaming broadcast via direct electromagnetic radiation or rebroadcast from satellites or along hardware conduits denominated “cable TV.”

Whereas men require mechanical contrivances to alter the sector of the data stream that is broadcast into their nests for much of each cycle, the women expect (and are thus expected by the men in turn) to alter the stream or channel by thought alone and thus do not require access to physical remote technology.

# Women are the record-keepers and historians of all the events on the planet known to the two biped races.

Curiously, and despite millennia of their connection with men, women remain unaware that men do not share their total recall and thus can often be observed in states of confusion and randomized conflict when the men do not possess the data which women clearly have available. Thus, men can not access vital data instantaneously (such as the annual commemorations of the hatchings of those of related genome-group sept or clan members or the location, utility ease of installation and availability of various technologies for securing the integrity and functionality of their joint fortress/nests).

Men remain especially ignorant of all data provided for them by women during broadcast datastreams: especially those broadcasts involving small ritual wars that are waged by poorly-camouflaged Special Forces platoons and waged at the regular intervals of seven axial rotations of Trash. The ability to absorb and use nest security information simultaneously with observing infantry combat is an essential military tactic and the men seem to lack any notion of it.

Given this inability to share data and to co-operate under combat conditions, I expect the joint forces of the men and women to pose little if any threat to the Warrior Caste.

The biped races should be a pushover.

Here comes breakfast; male cerebration levels are expected to reach their daily cyclical peak within 20 ichor-circulation pump-beats.

Threttubray out.