ERQ

6: Days of Exile

        Time passed.

        Sunshine and moonlight played many a circle dance around the Earth as Jeannie worked.

        Fort Hillford hummed its own rhythm of stop and go, stop and go. The Hive Mind could extend to other animals, but was limited in it's scope. Mostly the animals that she could communicate were other rodents -- mice, gerbils, hamsters and Guinea pigs.

        And Jeannie played her part in this pulse of life when she gave it up for the men and women who worked in the landfill. For most of them this simply meant cooking and cleaning, but for a select few, it meant serving them in the way she knew best. After the first couple of days, Jeannie found that she liked cooking for them, it gave her a sense of purpose outside of her calling as Mother-Goddess of Rat-Kind.

        Time was a human contrivance that she had no need for. So she never kept track of it.

      One day she sent a scouting party of 20 rats back to the Sub-Levels. Another 1000 acted as a living telegraph line, giving her scent images and empathic information. In this way she discovered how to get them to do what she needed without accessing the Hive Mind, which she kept as a backup. Using the Hive Mind for something like that was like using the World Wide Web to make a local phone call to your next door neighbor. This new trick came in handy, though, because the Hive Mind gave her too much information all at once, causing her to work much harder at making sense of it all. In the safety of her own Kingdom that would not be a problem because she could lie down on her bed of trash bags and not worry about anything outside of herself. But here at the landfill she was vulnerable.

        The Down'Ers had already returned to thier homes after having been forcibly removed. Perhaps there was one human within the Eden County Hierarchy who did have a soul after all. Or perhaps they all still lived in fear of public opinion. Either way, if it had become safe for them, it would be safe for her Children.

        She sent a telepathic message through the Hive Mind: 'My Children, we will now return home.'

             'We do. We do.'

              And so she left the landfill and returned to the Sub-Levels.

        Only 500,000 tiny mental voices of her Children followed behind her. Nearly half of them were quiet, which made the Hive Mind's voice inside her head only a dull roar instead of the deafening cacaphony that she'd gotten used to. 

        She didn't hate it, no, but such a vast and powerful thing sometimes made her feel so miniscule that she wondered why she of all people had been offered this position of leader of an entire species. Humans could only multitask so much, but come to think of it, she'd always been pretty good at that sort of thing. Unlike her male cousin Ralphie, who could do up to 7 things at once, so long as he could remain focused on everythig long enough, which was something only 7% of all those with ADD could achieve. During her childhood she could keep up with 3 fully grown adults, talking about complex, abstract things beyond children her own age, and still remember anything that was written or emoted in those conversations. And when it came to being slighted, she had a photographic memory. But being raised as a human had taught her to be forgiving, which always worked against her in the past. Maybe humans from some other place understood the concept of forgiveness better, but not here, not in her reality. Or maybe forgiveness was a conditional thing, to be given out in the same way that one would give a loyal pet a treat when they behaved. That was definitely something to think about.

        She wondered if that was what she'd been when she'd lived as a human -- someone's unwanted pet. No, more like a tool -- a convenient sperm receptacle for armies of losers unable to charm thier way between the legs of those women who would give it up for free. She didn't know anymore. As time went by, she became less and less attached to the past.