Splitting and Reforming

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   It is said that multiple queens can wear the same crown. History on every planet in every solar system has told us this. I can't think of too many planets, however, that bears the weight of the crowns that our queen wears. 

  Yes, crowns. You heard that correctly. 

  It was only something we discovered recently as we watched another planet boil and burn against its parasitic lifeforms. We noticed a lifeform in the menagerie that looked very similar to our queen. Nearly identical if we thought with any fewer cells in our bodies. We brought our queen to see this and she paled at the thought. She asked us to keep tabs on them. To look for others. A rather strange request, considering our queen never spoke directly to us or cared about our work. She was usually too busy keeping the government running to her liking. But now we felt off-put by her requests.

  Nevertheless, we did as we were requested. And we found more. Many more. Almost half of the planets we were studying or passively recording had a lifeform that looked like her, behaved like her, and -most importantly for us- felt like her. We pride ourselves on our connection to the universal conscious, and through that we came to an awe and wonder about what that must have meant for the queen. To have all of these pieces of her being, scattered on different planets, either totally unaware or very aware of her existence. We celebrated the knowledge that we may be able to keep our personal queen's reign eternal simply by plucking one of these other lifeforms off their planet and giving them a quick tutorial about our planet. 

  We were wrong. The battleships told us the truth. And it seemed our queen knew it long before we did. 

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