Colony Life

Two rat-like creatures whose hair was so thin that their pale and wrinkled skin formed several folds over themselves. Their skin, which lacked color entirely would be entirely transparent if not for the faint scratches on the surface from the rocks which were occasionally shot back due to the frantic rate that they dug at. What would be seen if not for those scratches and blemishes would be a layer of muscles which contracted rapidly and pulsed outwards with each beat of its heart as the blood forced its way through the veins.

"Dig, dig, dig, dig, dig. Henry, do you think this will ever end?"

"End? Yeah of course! When we die!"

"But look! The caretakers said we would have a vacation!"

"Haven't you kept up with the news? Humans came down and captured half of us!"

"What! How did they do that! Where were the guards!"

"Guards? Hah! The Queen's drained so much from their energy budget! You think the guards are in any position?"

"Well where was the Queen then? Couldn't she have protected us?"

"Hah! As if the Queen cared about the rest of us! Even the scavengers have to skim a bit off the top to stay alive! You'd think the Queen would give enough to keep those old fools alive!"

"Does the Queen not care that they're skimming a bit off?"

"She's too lazy! She barely births new young to keep our population the same! It's even questionable if she'll ever increase the number born after this!"

"This couldn't be! How do you even know any of this! You must be lying!"

"This is common news! Young one, this is just how life is. Ask anyone else!"

"Shouldn't we revolt? Why are we just standing around!"

"Revolt? Hah! As if! That could never happen! She has more energy than the rest of us combined! You know how important energy is? She could let us attack her for years and be able to regenerate it all!"

"Can we run away? I'm sure she couldn't stop us from running away!"

"As if! Where would we go! No tunnels anywhere else! Just give up. Nothing's going to happen, just keep digging."

--Inner Nest--

Deep below the surface, where the dirt had started to be filled with so many rocks that were it was impossible to expand any deeper, a large blob that was five times as wide, ten times as wide, and thirty times longer lay flat on the floor. Running down the body were rings of fat that sagged and jiggled around was the monster occasionally pulsated. The waves formed slowly traveled down, almost dissipating entirely before ending up at a curious hole with crease marks traveling outwards from the center. It seemed to lead ever more so in, but there was no gap to go further.

But as you rotated around the large body, a relatively smaller form appeared. This smaller attached blob resembled a mole. The part where they joined made it seem dubious that these two bags of flesh were even one creature to begin with.

The smaller form continually stretched an appendage around each pile of trash before it funneled the trash into an opening which faded away into a dark hole.

Moles funneled in, carrying large quantities of material in their mouths. They deposited them into a hole that led down to the Queen. Along the scraps of material came rolling down balls of dusty white, composed of sludge mixed densely with the dust that was so common around the deeper parts of the sea of trash.

In the natural course life, there would, of course, be dissenters. Dissenters and dead bodies would be carried alike down the hole and dumped. As the Queen constantly funneled and digest more materials in, a powdery substance came puffing out from under the folds of the Queen's sides.

The fine powder did not vent out in any such way however but fell back down onto the pale, pulsating body which showed various organs dissolving each piece of matter. Through the myriad forms of which the sheets of plastic took and the boxes of silicon were melted in, the melting of each object seemed to send waves down its surface until they formed folds. These folds kept on drooping until a face was faintly discernible but quickly faded away after.

This cycle continued on as the numerous scavengers sought out more reservoirs of sludge.

--Inside--

Within the cage of the cockroach and phallic creature, a cover was twitched open and a medium sized black tube with walls as thick as the hole, was stuck partially through the hole before it started vibrating. The vibrating was slowly dampened out as a liquid was slowly pushed through, slowly coming out in short bursts.

"The sludge is coming! They're finally feeding us!"

"The question is though, how do we get more?"

--Outside--

"Hey John, they sure are scrambling for the energy waste, aren't they! I reckon we could set up a site and just let the moles live there while we pour more and more sludge down! We could use them as waste disposal! We'd earn so much in subsidies! We'd have enough to do just about anything!"

"Leonard! We need to study them first!"

"Well, we can pitch this idea to them first! I'm sure they'd send tons of resources here! More robots! We can conduct experiments on a larger level! Think about it! We could command hundreds of bots to conduct research! Think about it! All we'd have to do would be to load up commands and watch! We could get the good models! The ones where it can control everything precisely! Just imagine! We wouldn't be prone to minor errors anymore! We could get near pure compounds! We could do anything!"

"Yeah go write up that paper, remember to include the necessities of the moles too, and the studies on their anatomy that you haven't done yet. Remember to include how that mole became frenzied too!"

"What if we just advertised ourselves as just another company that stuffs that waste into the ground! We'd get that stuff transported to us for free! We could even earn money from it!"

"Yeah, you wanna pitch that to the boss? Why one of his research groups has suddenly decided to go into the waste storage business?"

"I'm sure he'd be all for it! He lost so many nanobots trying to capture them all! He'd see them as a return on his investment surely!"

"Yeah you go talk to him about it, I'll try to gather some information about how the moles react to this amount of food."

"How's the cockroach doing?"

"It's doing fine, kinda lazy, seems to have gotten out of its initial panic quite quickly."

"Is this normal?"

"Too soon to tell, it's only been here for a couple of hours so far!"

"Well hows that mole? Is it secure?"

"I haven't checked yet, the electric fence makes it hard to see inside and hard to place anything inside because it's hard to insulate against. I'll check on it later."