The Brood Invasion of Earth:
Recap and Debrief, Auto-Generated Transcript [CM Eyes Only]

Part 5. Achieving Total Control

The Truth About The Brood

The Brood has recorded relatively little of our own history, in part because for most of that pre-historic period we only controlled beasts of limited mental and physical capacity. And despite the heroic tales every broodling learns about the rise of The Brood to dominance of our home world through our own intelligence, guile, and trickery, those of us who have entered the upper echelons know the truth: The Brood arose because of a mistake. It is true that once that mistake was made, we did use intelligence, guile, and trickery to enslave our homeworld and become the dominant species there (and then used The Throat to expand our grip to new worlds). But without a truly historic mistake, there is no doubt that our species would still be relegated to steering dumb beasts through the muck, irrelevant and ignored by the first sentient species we enslaved--the Visk.

In our origin stories, the Visk were a violent, dangerous, and frankly stupid race of bipeds that The Brood civilized and uplifted. The story goes that the Visk were chosen by The Brood for their precise and delicate manipulators. The Brood had been blessed with superior intelligence, but in our natural state we were almost incapable of forming or using tools. After recognizing the limitations of our prior feral hosts for such uses, The Brood had taken the Visk under our tutelage, using their precise and flexible bodies to develop the technology and infrastructure that would carry us to the stars.

While the myth has some elements of truth to it--as all durable myths must--the real story is actually much less flattering.

First, The Truth About the Visk

When a broodling has distinguished themselves sufficiently to justify selection into the rarefied ranks of The Hierarchy, they undergo a challenging rite of passage, after which they are finally permitted to learn two shocking truths about the Visk: First, it was actually Visk scientists who originally developed the portal technology with no assistance from The Brood. But even more shocking: The Brood as we exist today are the result of genetic manipulation undertaken by the Visk.

[Note: I cannot stress enough how shocking these facts can be to even the most seasoned broodlings. Unfortunately, some become so distressed by this information that they are unable to serve in the Hierarchy's ranks. Unlike some more primitive societies, we do not condone the execution of our distinguished broodlings just because their idealism exceeded our actual supply of virtue. That said, it has been common practice to isolate these distressed broodlings and then apply their talents to scouting new planets through The Throat. It has been the Hierarchy's conclusion that such perilous work on behalf of The Brood tends to either restores their faith in our mission, or in some unfortunate cases ensures the safety of our secret in practice.]

Starting with the second revelation, a curious listener might ask why the Visk chose to genetically manipulate our ancestors to create a new species that would ultimately enslave them. Much like what we have read in Earth's cultural myths, the root of the Visk's error was ultimately their hubris. The Visk were incredibly advanced and intelligent and powerful (far more than humanity, frankly... not counting the superhumans such as my Mistress, of course), but they lacked the humility to see that the weapon they were creating for their own selfish ends could ever be turned against them. They created The Brood to increase their power, but ultimately their creation sapped their power and enslaved them.

At the time of our elevation, the Visk were divided into feuding nation-states, each of which jealously sought to conquer the others and achieve total power for themselves. After some of the armed struggles between states led to massive destruction and suffering, an uneasy detente lingered between the two main blocs of nations. Neither bloc was capable of destroying the other using military force without assuring their own destruction. As a result, both blocs began to spend more resources on espionage and especially on surreptitious attempts to undermine the legitimacy and integrity of the other's society.

The bloc that genetically elevated The Brood (the Elzin Alliance) did so after a string of major intelligence failures that had embarrassed the ruling regime and called their competence into question. After their abject failure, the old Elzin leadership was swept aside and a new and innovative group of leaders was installed. Their new plan was bold and creative: to modify the planet's existing parasites to secretly infiltrate and eventually topple (and actually enslave!) the competing bloc of nations. They argued that this would lead to a bloodless, total victory over their foe before their enemy even realized they were being attacked.

To mask their true intentions, the Elzin created a cover story that was exceptionally ambitious, effective, and ruthless. After they had secretly gathered their necessary samples from our predecessor species, the Elzin secretly released an engineered parasite that almost entirely eliminated the natural population of our ancestors worldwide. They then created a lavishly-funded Institute that would supposedly study the very crisis they had created and work to re-establish the natural balance they themselves had deliberately disrupted... but was actually the home base of their new weapon. Later, we realized that the deliberate annihilation of our predecessors also ensured that their enemies could never imitate their strategy, should it be discovered. Ironically, some of our most effective infiltration missions into the opposing bloc were launched under the pretext of studying how the eradication of our ancestors had impacted the natural balance within those countries.

As part of their plan, they took our predecessor species' natural--but extremely limited--mind control ability and exponentially increased the number of neural connections, enabling the enhanced broodlings to control larger and more sophisticated creatures. For the first time, they enabled voluntary control of whether our hosts' eyes would glow when we were controlling them, removing a visible marker of our presence. They removed another visible cue of our presence when they added new matter-shifting phase control, allowing us to gradually transfer our body into the spine of our host. While sophisticated medical scans could still find signs of our presence, in most normal circumstances our hosts were physically indistinguishable from the uncontrolled.

In addition, they gifted us with an enhanced stinger and more potent paralytic venom, enabling us to subdue many threatening animals and then counteract the effects of the venom quickly once the host had been mounted. They enhanced our sensory organs, keeping our vision rudimentary and hearing almost non-existent, but adding very sensitive perception of electrical fields and currents (especially tuned for those involved in nervous systems). Finally, they dramatically increased the size of our brains. Our ancestors had apparently been on the verge of sapience--especially when in command of a sufficiently intelligent host--but our newly-expanded brains allowed us to better understand, manipulate, and control intelligent social creatures like the Visk.

The risk of developing such a weapon seems obvious, even without the benefit of hindsight (or observing the great effectiveness of that weapon in the current invasion of Earth). So one might ask how the Visk (or rather, the Elzin Alliance) thought they could still control The Brood? The Elzin relied on a relatively simple plan, which was actually fairly reasonable on its face. The Elzin scientists designed The Brood to be nearly unstoppable as a weapon, but worked to guarantee that they (and only they) could control it. In designing our genetics, they ensured that The Brood would be rigidly hierarchical in their thinking. Each broodmate would be completely loyal and subservient to the broodmate above them in their ranks. They were made to be physically incapable of disobeying an order from a superior broodmate. The presence of legitimacy of our Hierarchy is not an evolved social innovation: it is hard-coded into each broodmate's identity at the time of their hatching. While a broodmate's specific position in the Hierarchy was modifiable through their actions (i.e. lower-ranking members could be promoted; higher-ranking members could be demoted), their power and position was always known and validated by those higher up in The Hierarchy.

The Queen of All

Critically, the very top position in The Hierarchy was--and still is--the Queen of All. While there are other Lesser Queens that can be activated or deactivated to boost or restrict population growth or provide localized production on colonies with limited portal access to the homeworld, every member of The Brood is genetically incapable of betraying, disobeying, or endangering the Queen of All [Special note to Cecelia: I believe that one of the reasons why your slaves within The Brood have come to recognize you as our rightful Mistress is based on the hard-wired allegiance the Elzin scientists wrote into our genetic code. Demonstrating you were the rightful superior to the Queen of All quickly ensured our complete obedience to your divine rule].

Once the Elzin had established unbreakable fealty to the Queen of All, they used her to control an increasingly large and powerful network of slaves. The Elzin cleverly engaged the opposing bloc in a series of high-level negotiations and summits and exchanged commercial, military, and leadership delegations, all of which returned their enslaved delegates to secretly serve the Elzin agenda. All embassies across the Elzin Alliance were also quickly turned (including their sizable espionage delegations) and started sending misinformation back to their leaders—misinformation that was later corroborated as the spy networks they managed within Elzin territory were quietly rolled up and enslaved, as well.

As the external enemies of the Elzin Alliance were increasingly neutralized and controlled through The Brood, the Elzin intelligence agencies began to look for more opportunities to exploit this unstoppable weapon against their many enemies within the Elzin Alliance. Operating without the knowledge of most of the civilian and military Hierarchy of the Alliance, The Brood were increasingly deployed against recalcitrant allied leaders, domestic dissident leaders, and even key leaders of the governing coalition. Before long, the leaders of the secretive Elzin intelligence cabal that had developed The Brood were issuing orders to the supposed military, political, and economic leaders of all nations, not just the Elzin Alliance's enemies. The cabal's power was absolute and unquestioned, and they believed their rule was guaranteed as long as they maintained their tight control and isolation of the Queen of All.

The Queen of All was indeed their prisoner and knew without question that she (or rather, the Elzin woman who had been kidnapped and provided to her as her host) must speak the orders provided by the cabal verbatim and without deviation or she would be immediately killed and a new Queen of All elevated in her place. Although the Queen of All and her court of Lesser Queens laid every egg of The Brood and passed every broodling to the cabal for their deployment, she was only allowed to speak when recording the orders that would later be verified and transmitted to operatives: At all other times she was completely silent on pain of death. For more than 20 years, the system appeared to work exactly as the cabal had hoped. Not a single order was disobeyed and not a single unscripted word was spoken by the Queen of All. Unfortunately for them, the scientists of the Elzin Alliance had done their job too well when upgrading The Brood. Unbeknownst to the cabal, the seeds of their destruction had been planted and would soon bear fruit.

Where had the scientists gone wrong? For one thing, they had made The Brood in general (and the Queen of All in particular) far too intelligent. It was understandable why they had done so, given the almost completely flawless record The Brood achieved in their secret subversion: Almost none of the enslavements were ever detected at the time of subversion or even afterward, and in the rare cases where something went wrong, the intelligent and creative actions of fast-thinking broodmates were always able to right the situation. The scientists had also given The Brood the gift of patience. Because of the limited opportunities to implant our broodmates without arousing suspicion, the scientists had known that they would need to have our slaves wait years--maybe even decades--to achieve final victory. They therefore gave The Brood patience and fortitude that sometimes seemed to exceed that of the Visk, themselves.

But most importantly, the Visk failed to recognize what a gift they had given us when they enhanced our sensory organs and the number of neural connections we maintained to our hosts. The scientists knew that even if she were willing to risk certain death at their hands by speaking, the Queen of All would be unable to talk intelligibly to broodlings that could barely perceive—much less understand—sound waves without a host.

Fortunately for The Brood, our enhanced connection with our hosts' nervous systems and our improved electrical sensing organs allowed the Queen of All to communicate to any broodling--with or without a host--through simple touch. [Note to Cecelia: It is my hypothesis that your magnificent power is most effective when channeled through a human host. We should test your power on a unjoined broodling in a controlled setting as soon as possible to verify]. As the Queen of All and her lesser Queens had been handling the newly-hatched broodlings over the years, they had been giving them a litany of instructions—including to only follow spoken orders if they did not violate Her pre-existing main order to deliver the Visk to her as slaves.

The Visk Fall; The Brood Rises

For more than a decade, the cabal and the Queen of All shared a common interest: Enslaving the leaders of the nations that stood in opposition to the Elzin Alliance. The Queen of All cooperated in every way with that effort, despite Her worry that upon achieving a silent and unpublicized--but absolute and irrevocable victory over their geopolitical foes--the cabal might peacefully unite those nations with their own Alliance and begin to eliminate the broodlings deployed there. Fortunately, the Visk were not known for their patience, virtue, or benevolence, and the Queen of All was delighted to support the intelligence cabal's subsequent quest to subvert the Hierarchy of their own nations.

As this arrogant cabal was acting to ensure their own power and dominance, they were actually sealing their fate. By giving themselves more and more power over their own government and agencies, the cabal was actually giving The Brood control. And unbeknownst to the cabal, their orders were increasingly being relayed to subordinates who served The Brood, as broodlings that were intended for domestic political figures were secretly redirected by "loyal" slaves to new targets within the command-and-control apparatus serving the cabal. While the Hierarchy of the Elzin Alliance continued to be targeted and was largely controlled by implanted slaves, the highest priority beyond them was then to gradually subvert the workers and scientists who controlled the facility where the queens were held under guard. Again, thanks to The Brood's genetically boosted perception, the Queen of All did not need to leave her isolation and have physical or verbal contact with the staff in order to observe how complete her children's control of their erstwhile home had become.

While the eventual and total enslavement of all remaining Visk would not be completed for another seven years, it had already become inevitable when the cabal held a meeting at the secret facility to plot strategy nearly twenty years after launching their audacious plan. The cabal's leaders had expected to be discussing how they would expand their control to schools and the rest of the world's communication infrastructure now that all members of the Visk Hierarchy were totally under their control. To their shock, their meeting was interrupted by the Queen of All, Herself. The cabal's leaders ordered that She be executed immediately and were stunned to realize that everyone (including their personal staff) in the entire facility now served The Brood, and that they would join them in doing so at once. Moments later, they eagerly supplicated themselves to their Queen and became mere cogs in Her plans to subjugate their world to The Brood.

The template that was developed then continues to be the standard infiltration plan for The Brood in advanced societies. And that playbook was what continued to guide our broodlings to success from the moment our scouts first traveled through The Throat to that humble Earth farmstead in the dead of night. In the months that had followed, our brave broodlings had overcome adversity and great danger to spread The Brood's influence to wider and wider circles of power within human society. Our path was always careful and patient, and at every step we leveraged the relationships and power structure of human society in our favor.

Not All Guardians Wear Badges

Our biggest prize thus far was the local base of operations for the organization known as Army. Thanks to careful planning--and a bit of luck--we had first seized control of the security apparatus and personnel of the base, allowing us to use their power to target and enslave other key personnel. While the access and deference afforded to our thralls by virtue of controlling the security apparatus was impressive, we quickly realized that to scale our control to the entire base quickly and efficiently would require an apparatus that was less obtrusive than base security personnel. Indeed, while the appearance of our enslaved MPs in the lives of key personnel was very helpful in the earliest stages of our plan, the insertion of our officers into homes or offices was observed (and sometimes even electronically recorded!) by many individuals, leading to unwanted attention and exposure.

To consolidate our control, we therefore shifted our attention to the health services of the base. As a reminder, we had concluded that the most advanced medical scanners on this world might actually be able to detect our presence in certain physical scans of our hosts. We had therefore prioritized the subjugation of the staff of any medical facility in the area that contained equipment that might be capable of detecting us. That had included the medical staff at the military base, who were among the first to fall after the base security.

Once we had enslaved a sufficient number of these medical staff, we began to recognize their role as trusted guardians of a different sort. While using security officers to attempt to isolate and enslave soldiers had resulted in unhelpful attention, we learned it was not only possible but actually routine for personnel to be isolated and sometimes restrained as part of the medical process. Once that became clear, our slaves began to concoct the most plausible and efficient way for our medical staff to assemble, isolate, restrain, and enslave all remaining personnel on the base.

With impressive speed, our slaves concocted a plausible medical concern (an outbreak of a mosquito-borne Zika virus variant) and "testing" equipment in the form of a chair that would restrain the subject's body and muffle any sounds they produced while exposing their spine for easy enslavement. We set up 10 phony testing stations, each of which could enslave around 30 soldiers per hour. Total enslavement of all 32,459 base personnel and associated family members, civilian employees, and contractors occurred within six weeks of the first enslavement on the base, despite running into occasional unexpected obstacles. For example, some humans were exceptionally negligent in following through with scheduled appointments at the proper time; others were unreasonably concerned about rumored side effects from our testing (especially since there was no plausible basis for this concern, even if our fictional test had been real); still others believed fanciful conspiracies about the government implanting microchips to control them or altering their hormonal balance through the testing...which in fairness was actually not completely fanciful in this particular case.

The End of the Beginning; The Beginning of the End?

As new recruits and visitors continued entering the base and were immediately enslaved, we expanded and tightened our grip on the surrounding community. The municipal equivalent of Sheriff organization, the local political Hierarchy and communication media, medical and educational staff, and infrastructure workers were targeted next, with the goal to isolate and enslave all remaining humans in the relatively small metropolitan area within the next six months. Because of the risk of medical detection of controlled hosts, we patiently ensured that we had full control of all medical or law forces in an area before we would expand to mass implantation of that local population.

We were also increasingly concerned about two additional threats to our operation. First, despite a huge increase in the logistical infrastructure at our foothold, we were only able to receive a maximum of around 15,000 new broodlings per day through The Throat. Even if there were no costs or delays associated with enslaving a human for each of the received broodlings, that would total fewer than 5.5m humans enslaved per year. That might seem impressive--and would be very helpful in establishing control of the human's Hierarchy--but with each of the 8 billion humans on the planet needing their own broodling, it was essential that the Hierarchy immediately dispatch a large number of lesser Queens to establish local egg production.

However, despite our repeated request, the Hierarchy refused to release any Queens through the Throat until we could guarantee their safety. And thanks to our increasingly detailed reports communicating all we had learned about Earth's superhumans, they had determined that no Queens would be released to Earth until we had successfully enslaved every member of the League of Heroes.

With that answer in hand, we started carefully and patiently planning how we could ensure the Fall of the Heroic League.