Editing Hive World (section)

== A Short Piece of Writefaggotry about Hives ==

The crowd. It never, ever goes away.

You share your pitiful, filthy dwelling with three other citizens. It is sweltering; if the energy is taken away for whatever arcane reasons, it can become a death trap where you will choke or desiccate.

You eat vat-grown algae at best, recycled human beings at worst. The air is polluted beyond reason, and has been through many lungs by the time it reaches you. All light is artificial, as are all surfaces; you will live your entire life many miles above a ground you will never know.

There are heretics, worshiping pure evil, who would kidnap you and tear your guts open for a daemon to lay waste to your land; alien hybrids preparing the terrain for a horde of hungry space locusts; crazy cults who adore the Emperor by killing in his name, the brutal thugs that pass as law enforcement, the warring gangs and their ever-escalating turf wars, the Arbites and their crushing book of Law. Perhaps you will be murdered by young, sadistic nobles with technology that seems like magic, or enslaved for arcane reasons; a fate better than that of the servitor, which will see you partially lobotomized and made into a mechanical servant of the Hive.

Your little world is liable to be invaded by bloodlust-driven hordes of green beasts, by the aforementioned space locusts, by legions of heretics – some of them twisted brothers of the warriors you have been taught are the Emperor’s angels - who will murder, sacrifice and rape their way until your planet gets dragged into Hell itself… and that's if a zombie plague doesn't get you first.

Ancient, powerful beings may engineer disasters for their own purposes, and you will never know it; similar, darker creatures may raid your city on their silent engines, eliminating all resistance as they laugh, taking away your loved ones for infernal purposes, taking you away, too, if you are not fast enough in ending your life.

The ground might collapse and your entire block fall into the utterly dark under-hive and its mutants, its lethal secrets; or it might rip open and let forth armies of cold, alien machines from eons ago who will murder everyone for no apparent reason. It could be that an empire obliterates your rulers and demand you submit to its Greater Good, lest you be herded to your death or pounded to dust from orbit.

ALL OF THIS will only be possible if the Inquisition does not one day decide to obliterate all life on the planet because they sincerely believe they have no right to let its population live, the risk of some threat spreading from it too great; you will not even see the cyclonic torpedo enter the atmosphere, as you have never seen the sky, but you and all the hundreds of billions will die just the same as the planet burns and is torn apart.


All this pain, all this danger, to one end; to allow you to work 16-hours days in a manufactorium so vast, no one knows its whole extent; you work endlessly to create implements of war, for the Imperium knows no peace, from the humble laser rifle a soldier will die clutching to a massive battle tank that will crush the Emperor's foes thousand of light years away. Odds are you will one day meet your end in this unfeeling factory, torn apart by a machine, dropping dead from exhaustion - or one day, you might be taken away, too, to become a Guardsman and perish standing, fighting an enemy beyond comprehension on a world you do not know.

You are not a person, subject of the Emperor. For that is the life of an Imperial citizen; it is better to die for something than to live for oneself.