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The Integrated - Castes — Description
The Integrated are an electronic species with the capability to take adult sapients and convert ("integrate") them into more of their kind, covering their bodies in circuitry and irreversibly morphing their form into variations on "highly stylised female human". Several planets have already been fully integrated in this way - and now it is the turn of the Earth.

Egg - Perhaps not a perfect analogy, in that a new Integrated does not hatch from it, but it contains all the information needed to integrate a local sapient life form, and indeed they can be used to do this repeatedly. Eggs come in a few varieties: a queen egg is first sent to a planet, and lies dormant until coming into contact with a suitable being to become a new queen. After integrating the queen, the queen egg can be used integrate further beings into workers. The queen can also produce new eggs - different types of egg will integrate new beings into workers, soldiers or hives. It is unknown how she produces these eggs, but she can then give them to her workers and soldiers to spread out and speed up the integration process.

Queen - Queens are the highly centralised controlling intelligences behind the Integrated, capable of taking direct control of the various drones under their command. There is typically only one queen per planet - one is necessary, as the Integrated communicate via radio and the speed of light puts a limit on how effectively a queen could control her drones from off-planet - but one should ultimately be sufficient to integrate an entire planet on its own. New queens mostly retain their old personality, but their new powers quickly corrupt them: indeed, the queen tasked with Integrating the Earth seems to be relishing her destiny. Once the adult population of Earth has been fully integrated, she will produce new queen eggs, which will be sent into space to integrate more planets.

Worker - A basic drone capable of simple automated tasks, as well as being controllable remotely by their queen. If a worker retains any of her old personality, it is heavily suppressed. Duties include construction, logistics, scouting, skirmishing and acting as "cannon fodder" in larger engagements (though a worker is nonetheless considerably tougher than a typical human, requiring sustained small arms fire to destroy). Workers operate unarmed, but are typically supplied with eggs by the queen that they can throw at hostiles to integrate them.

Soldier - An advanced drone specialised in combat tasks, also controllable remotely by their queen. Of considerably more robust construction than the queen, workers or hives, soldiers are nonetheless considerably less stealthy due to they larger size. Typically a queen will only start integrating soldiers once she has integrated enough workers to be able to safely move from covert operations to overt ones. Soldiers are tough enough to withstand small arms fire without a scratch, though sustained high explosives will eventually destroy one. Soldiers can acquire discarded weaponry and show an intuitive understanding of how to use it, but their preferred weapon - as with workers - are eggs. Soldiers' old personalities are also heavily suppressed, though perhaps not quite as heavily.

Hive - An advanced drone specialised in the storage, processing and relaying of data, hives are frail (about as frail as a typical human) but essential to the later stages of integrating a planet. The queen can use the minds of the hives to boost her mental capacity, allowing her to address the increasingly complex tasks she is presented with - they also act as relay stations for the queen's commands over longer distances. Hives have a reasonable amount of autonomy when not being directly controlled by their queen, and their old personalities are less subdued. Indeed they can remotely control workers and soldiers to accomplish tasks without the queen's direct oversight. However, they are reliant on those workers and soldiers for sensory input: most of their sensory organs have atrophied. The exception is their eyes, which are large and presumably highly developed, but kept tightly shut for reasons unknown.