//------------------------------//
// Workers 
// Story: Changelings: A Summary 
// by HypernovaBolts11 
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	Workers are the lifeblood of a hive, and yet, they lack even the most basic quality of sentient creatures: independent thought. A worker has no mind of its own, and it will fail even to feed itself if it is not instructed to do so through the hive mind, which is, from what I can tell, somewhat comparable to a network of computers.

It relays commands from the queen to each unit that is capable of completing one task at a time, and controls even the most basic of movement. A worker left uninstructed will first fall over, unable to balance itself without the hive mind's orders, and then starve to death or succumb to thirst.

A worker's body must sleep, but what semblance of a mind it may possess cannot actively do anything. It does not dream, and it does not think. If a worker is roused from its sleep, its eyes will open, and it will remain there, unable to communicate with the hive mind. It will stay that way until its eyes roll closed, and it falls back asleep.

It can only truly wake up when the hive mind recognizes that the body is rested and that the worker is inactive. Only then will the hive mind resume its control of the worker, and command it to continue working.

Workers are hatched, and thus, referred to as "hatchlings" for the first month or so after they are born, before they begin working, and go about the tasks with which the queen is too important to do herself, but only domestic tasks. Foreign activities are left to the infiltrators and spies.

These include, but are not limited to: the incubation of the queen's eggs, tending to the dietary needs of the soldiers, the care and nourishment of the young, the construction and renovation of the hive, and the transportation of material and prisoners. They can tether objects together using a special silk produced by a set of spinnerets located inside the cheeks.

While the biology of workers is more simplistic than that of the soldiers or drones, it is perhaps more extraordinary than either of them. Workers have very little in the way of a digestive system, and directly ingest love energy.

My associate describes this energy as being similar to magic or water vapor, permeating the universe, and clustering around creatures in clouds of varying densities and compositions. The compositions of these clouds are what gives different forms of love different "flavors".

The workers are anatomically similar to pony mares, but they have no ovaries, and the exoskeleton around their stomachs is capable of stretching incredibly far in order to contain a soccer ball sized volume of eggs.

The eggs in question are relatively small when the worker receives them, and can develop in a few different ways. The eggs can either become new workers, soldiers, drones, or, though it has not happened in a few thousand years, queens. The development of the eggs seems to be determined by the incubator's body, as any two eggs incubated by the same worker will both develop into the same thing.

The exact determining factors of this process are unknown, and will likely never be formally studied, as the last queen has already died without leaving another in her place, and the only living drone is not with the hive. I fear that this is the only broad study anypony has ever conducted on changelings, and that my associate will never be fully accepted for who he is because of what he is.