The Tyranids are monsters. Wild animals. They are vast, uncountable and united in a single implacable purpose, an eternal apocalyptic swarm of ravening cosmic locusts blotting out the light of an entire galaxy. Their appetite for growth and change is insatiable, constantly driving them forward to seek out new genes to mutate themselves from, new biomass to grow from, to better consume, to better reproduce, to better evolve, to better consume.
And out of all the ecosystems, planets or even galaxies they've devoured, they still haven't figured out photosynthesis.
The world of 40k has plants. We know this, because people farm, on agri-worlds, which are whole planets given over to farming. Plants can survive on sunlight, moisture and nutritious soil, without brutally murdering anyone or anything to survive. And yet, despite all of the planets the bugs have consumed, their powers of subsistence are ignored in favor of whatever can be turned into weapons. On the bacterial level, consumption, evolution, reproduction and even a hive mind are all possible-- all of the driving elements of the Tyranids. By their stated nature, they could be perfectly happy as algae, going about their chosen business at exponentially greater speeds using a microscopic fraction of the energy, without ever harming a sentient organism. Even if it goes against the Warhammer 40,000 creed of "only war", the Tyranids' current behavior is not consistent with their own internal logic-- the same logic intended to justify their warlike nature.
I look at the Tyranid's activity map, and it gives me chills. The way the tendrils reach in from almost all around the eastern fringe suggests a vast external mass. The sheer potential size of that mass is genuinely disturbing, in a way that nothing else in 40k is. The bugs could have eaten the neighboring galaxy and begun to flare out; maybe they've eaten the whole local Group. Maybe they've eaten the entire universe, and the Milky Way is all that remains of non-Tyranid life.
But despite the suggestion that all of creation down to the universal core may eventually be or already has been digested into fleshy grunk, there are a number of reasons why this wouldn't happen. For one, Tyranids are mortal. It takes them years or decades to even get from one star system to another-- to say nothing of the sojourn between galaxies. That trip takes centuries at the least, and there's nothing to eat on the way but each other.
Let's be really, really generous and say maybe one in ten planets actually contains organic life as we know it naturally, not counting all the planets seeded by humans in the ancient past. They find such a planet and eat everything on it, multiplying their initial numbers maybe three or four times.
It's not sustainable. All these new Tyranids need to eat. There's no way they can keep growing like that and still be able to reach new planets in time to keep up positive population growth. Eventually, they will get too big to be able to get to another star system in time, and unless their speed increases, their population will naturally level out. The spread of the Tyranids becomes a wave rather than an ocean, a marching line rather than a spreading and lasting mold, albeit still on a massive scale.
But of course, 40k doesn't play by our rules. It's got its own attitudes on biology, evolution, physics and all the rest of the science textbook, and I love that about it. There's horror in it, most of it by design, and some perhaps some not.
Characters in the race's various codices have a tendency to ramble and posit on and on about how the Tyranids can't be stopped, with passages of fiction of various characters despairing and declaring the facts to state unequivocally that they're all going to die, and soon.
This just does not gel with the Imperium that I know-- they just don't think like that. They see the universe as its great, opulent house, one that it is constantly cleaning and keeping in order, looking for old junk they forgot they had, dusting the shelves, exterminating pests and throwing out unwanted guests. In their view, the Tyranids would be little more than cockroaches-- instead, they're treated as the end of days, and what's worse, according to all known facts, they're absolutely right.
Take a moment to think about all the proud Space Marines with big bolters and ornate power armor; all the devout Battle Sisters with chapels and prayer books and flamers; all the suspicious Inquisitors with cool, swooshy black cloaks and pilgrim's hats; all the fearful but gutsy Imperial Guard in their cheap mass-produced battle gear; all the Chaos forces with their orgies and blood sacrifice and black magic; all the Eldar with their androgyny, all the Tau with their Greater Good, all the Orks with their dakka, all the Necrons with their flensing and all the other cool, fun parts of the setting people like to play with that are going to be crushed, smashed, butchered and metabolized into biocrap if the Tyranids win, and one way or another, they will win. Everyone, everywhere will be dead-- even the Tyranids themselves, who will inevitably deplete the universe of all life, then slowly starve to death. A setting with nothing in it is no setting at all, and that's exactly where the 40k universe is headed with the modern Tyranids.
They have no characters, no personality, no agenda beyond instinctive drives. Above all, they're not fair. If the setting plays by its own rules, the Tyranids are unstoppable and none shall survive, not even them.
In the absolute silence of the end of time, there are only dead bugs.
No comments:
Post a Comment