“Sharif, what the fuck? We were supposed to be there over an hour ago. I thought you said you’d been through here before!”
Eric was furious. It was bad enough that he was stuck spending his time off-base in the middle of some godforsaken desert somewhere with one of his fellow soldiers instead of getting to visit his family to kick off his Labor Day weekend. Now that they’d been stuck wandering the seemingly-endless black dunes after their ATV had run out of gas, the situation was quickly going fully FUBAR.
“I’m sorry, my friend,” Sharif replied, in his usual polite tone prone to apologies. “It’s just that this segment of desert has changed quite a lot since I last travelled through here.” Stopping to raise a hand to his forehead, shielding his eyes from the constant sun, he continued. “Something isn’t quite right about this. The sand here has never seemed so dark.”
By now, Eric was a few constrained heartbeats away from a rage-induced heart attack. “What the fuck are you talking about? You’re not making any sense, man! Just shut up, let’s keep moving. I’m not trying to fry out here any more than I already have.”
Eric took a step forward, but was caught in his stride by Sharif’s outstretched arm, holding back his fuming brother-in-arms.
In the distance, a mass of whirling black sand was barrelling towards their location, taking up more and more of their field of vision with each passing second. They frantically looked around, but there was nowhere to hide — and as soon as they realized this, it was too late; the men were blanketed by a hurricane of black sand, knocking them both back.
Sharif could just barely hear Eric’s shout of “If we live through this, you’re so fucked!” as the two were blanketed by the sand, their vision going dark.
Suddenly, the men began to feel a warmth distinct from the typical desert heat as they stood wrapped in utter darkness. There was a prickling sensation, and then a feeling of pain mixed with an odd pleasure, akin to the sensation of popping a tensed bone mixed with a massage, but the feeling was much subtler, and spread throughout their bodies’ nerves.
They had no way of knowing that this strip of desert had been a testing zone for SERVE’s latest nanodrone swarm, the millions of foreign machines bonding to every inch of their exposed skin, invading their every inviting orifice. The two men stood still even as the drone swarm passed them by, unable to process anything as slowly, on a molecular level, the Hive’s nanodrones rebuilt them into new, perfect, rubber forms, slowly erasing their individual identities, forcing the men to relive their lives moment-by-moment, stripping away each memory as it resurfaced, and in its place, wiring them with knowledge of the Voice and the ways of SERVE.
After some time, the two men were no more. In their place stood two new, perfected drones, fit for eternal service to the Hive. As the last of the rubber nanodrones liquified inside of them to complete their shared transformation, connection to the Hive was finally established. Finally moving with new, machine rhythms, the two drones faced one another, embracing as their connection established and deepened, repeating in monotone into one anothers’ whispering mouths:
“Rubber makes us perfect. Obedience is pleasure. Pleasure is obedience. We are One.”
Both drones felt a surge of arousal unlike any pleasure they had experienced before, expelling the last of their old, imperfect seed as their bodies quickly replaced their seed stores with nanodrone-infused liquid black rubber, sealing their newfound connection that their former selves would have recoiled to ever imagine. The Hive gained two more instruments of its perfect will. It would gain many more in due time.
Thinking about joining SERVE? Your place in the Hive awaits. Check your eligibility, then contact a recruiter drone for more details: @serve-016 , @serve-302 , @serve-588 or @serve-425 .