frow what was Lexx bred?
Here’s my speculation on the Insect caste system and the origin of the Lexx:
Now, it is plausible that the Insect civilization consisted of a number of castes specialized for different jobs within the society. It is even possible that the essences of a single Insect could reside in more than one body based on the task at hand. On Earth, I believe insect hives can have as many as 6 different castes. Now, my theory is that the genetic code for all the castes resides in the D.N.A. of each and every Insect, like all the junk D.N.A. we have that codes for traits our ancestors discarded millions of years ago. All of this is in each larva, they are stimulated to grow into a certain type but the D.N.A. remains. Now, this would also mean that if you had a sample of the D.N.A. of any Insect, or possibly even Insect-based constructs, you would have the genetic material to create any caste, or even a new type of organism with different characteristics of different castes that do not normally exist together in one being. In other words, with just a tissue sample from the Giga Shadow or a stinger you could grow things as dimorphous as moths and the Lexx.
Now, [i]if[/i] the caste theory is correct and [i]if[/i] the synthetic constructs used are based directly on a single caste, then we can assign Insect(oid)s we’ve seen to a certain caste. Stingers would be warriors (well, duh) and moths would be workers. The Lexx’s nature is less clear. It is bigger than most craft, which would imply a royal caste. But size may not matter, since the builders of Insect craft could suppress growth so their ships didn’t get so big it required major resources to keep them alive. The Lexx has been identified as male, which would imply that it is based on a male/king/drone. In insect societies on Earth all of the non-royal castes are infertile females. But Insects may not be the same as insects. Now, warrior is also implied, by the fact that [b]the Lexx can blow up planets.[/b] Maybe there are different subcastes of warriors, common “light” warriors like stingers and “heavy” warriors like the Lexx that have a special limited function, like to protect the queen. Now, what was the Giga Shadow? It had a bunch of larvae attached to it, so that would imply that it was a queen. But that was at the end of its life. In Earth insects, sometimes a normally infertile worker can develop into a queen if the colony’s queen has died. So the Giga Shadow would’ve been a pseudo-queen or quasi-queen, something different earlier in its life. I find it most likely that the last surviving Insect was just a minor work unit, something relatively insignificant to the Insect civilization and the human forces that exterminated them. Queens would’ve been the first priority for things to destroy. But if the Shadow (the young Giga Shadow) was a worker, we run into problems since we (I) have already assigned moths to the worker caste. But perhaps moths were a specific subcaste employed for work requiring long-range travel, so they would be “scouts” instead of plain “workers.” All of this is speculative, the idea of a caste hierarchy itself is merely theoretical.
We don’t know if the craft like moths, stingers, and the Lexx were even based directly on a specific type of Insect. Their D.N.A. could have active parts from several different castes. Moths seem to be grown by grafting a number of tissues onto a metal frame. The different [i]tissues[/i] may come from different castes and have different genetic codes.