Johnny Paltrice knew how to concentrate. He knew how to lose himself in his work. His focus ran deep—he often tuned out everything around him, and his world became nothing but the lines of code that scrolled down the computer screen.
So deep, in fact, that on that day, he didn’t notice the thing crawling up the back of his chair. Was the crawling thing too small to notice, or was he just too far gone in his own sequestered world?
So much code, so little time, so much pressure.
From his chair to the sleeve of his white Rookman Oil Company lab coat.
Johnny still didn’t notice. This code was a bitch. Trying to digitize the instinct of survival, modify it, then code it into an artificial intelligence unit designed to interface with biological organisms is far harder than it sounds, and it already sounds hard as fuck.
Up his sleeve, to his shoulder.
Stupid code, why won’t you just WORK?
The thing on his back moved in small patterns, almost like a dance.
From his shoulder to his neck.
He felt a tickle.
He reached up, absentmindedly and gently grabbing at his neck as if he had to pluck away an errant dust ball that had drifted onto his skin.
But he didn’t feel dust; he felt something the size of his thumb. Something … squiggling.
“Fuck!” Johnny instinctively slapped and wiped at his skin. The thing that had been on his neck landed on his keyboard with a five-key clack.
That clack cued another sound—the sound of a man and a woman, giggling.
Johnny Paltrice looked at the crawling thing on the keyboard. Three inches long, (three and a half, if you counted the jagged black pincers), stubby insectile legs and a black, textured shell marked with slightly shiny lines where the thing had suffered scratches. This thing (or its relatives) had once been a leafcutter ant, but any resemblance to that tiny creature now remained only in its realm of behavior.
Johnny turned to look at Dae Kim and Chantrelle Carlson. Their bodies shook with laughter. Shaved-head Dae held one of the small remote-control testing units, while Chantrelle, the blonde slut, held a video camera.
Dae wiped tears from his eyes. “Dude, you should have seen you jump! You got big ups, like LeBron James.”
“Fuck you, Dae,” Johnny said.
Dae wiped again, then looked at Chantrelle in mock surprise. “Why, Chantrelle, is that a phone in your hands?”
She looked at her hands, seemingly shocked to see they were holding something. “Well, gosh, Dae, it is a phone! Shucks, it looks like I recorded the whole thing! Let’s watch, maybe the bugger spelled something.”
“Fuck you, Chantrelle,” Johnny said.
“You wish,” Chantrelle said. And she was right. He did. Every man did.
Dae and Chantrelle bent their heads over the video camera’s tiny screen. Dae waved Johnny over.
“Fuck you both,” Johnny said. “I’m not going to watch your latest infantile attempt at humor.”
“Oh, come on, J-Masta-J,” Dae said, his big grin blazing. “Come on, it was just fun. You don’t want us to think you’re a douche, do you? Only a douche would get all mad about a little joke. Come on.”
Johnny stared at them, at their contagious smiles, then he laughed. His adrenaline was still raging from feeling that giant ant on his neck. Dae and Chantrelle were just having fun with him—at his expense, which was nothing new.
The three co-workers hovered over the phone’s tiny screen. The picture jiggled, which was clearly from Chantrelle’s hands shaking in time with her muffled laughter. The picture showed the two of them coming up the hall toward Johnny’s station. Then it showed Dae undoing a clear Tupperware bowl covered by a red lid riddled with holes. He tipped the bowl, letting the ant fall out. It landed, righted itself, then started wandering.
The wandering didn’t last long—it stopped when Dae pulled out his black remote-control device. The thing looked like an old Atari joystick, only with more buttons. Dae had designed it to look like that. He called Atari “the godfather of the computer age.” Whenever he said that, he would follow up with the phrase “ju only gotta tell me one time, mayng,” even though that phrase had no application to the conversation. Johnny had heard it was a line from some Al Pacino movie, but he’d never seen the film.
On the screen, Dae held the remote in the palm of his left hand. His left fingers curled up and around the base, working the side buttons, as his right hand maneuvered the straight black joystick. When he twitched it, the bugger twitched in the same direction. The response was almost instantaneous.
“Holy crap,” Johnny said. “You’re really getting the control down. You implant a Mark Eight?”
Dae shook his head. “No sah, no sah. That’s still a Mark Seven. It was implanted in the larval stage. Implanted by other workers, mayng—not by me. What you see here is a full-on field test of a self-sustaining, self-replicated controller.”
The tiny screen followed the bugger as it scuttled toward Johnny’s chair. It crawled up the chair and onto his back. Johnny had no idea why he hadn’t felt something like that. The ant weighed almost 40 grams, just over an ounce, twice as much as a typical lab mouse.
Chantrelle started laughing again. “Oh, snap. I think the little guy can spell! I think I got a close-up! Let’s watch!”
Dae started snorting, the noise he made when his laughter just got to be too much to control.
Johnny watched the black ant walk in patterns on his white lab coat, patterns that made letters:
D …
O …
U …
C …
H …
“Fuck you, Dae,” Johnny said.
E …
“Ha!” Dae said. “See, even the buggers think you’re a douche! Oh man, oh man, wish we could put this bad boy on YouTube.”
Johnny hated their jokes. He wished he could come up with one, but his brain didn’t seem to work in that way. When it came to humor, Johnny’s only skill was being the punch line.
“You know, you guys, this really isn’t the time to be screwing around.”
Chantrelle tapped the phone, closing the video. “Is there a better time to be screwing around?”
Dae held up a finger. “Confucius say, no better time for fuckery than the present.”
Johnny felt his temper flaring. Why did they always have to laugh at him?
“We’ve got important work to do, you assholes! In case you haven’t been keeping up on current events, someone nuked Saudi Arabia yesterday!”
Dae and Chantrelle slowly stopped laughing. He’d made things serious again. It felt good to remind them that life wasn’t all fun and games.
“We might have a replacement energy technology here, when the oil industry could be going to shit,” he said. “You think that maybe we could stop playing little games on each other and be mature for a change?”
Chantrelle folded up the camera’s screen. “Johnny, why you always gotta be such a douche?”
Dae nodded. “Yeah, like we could forget that millions of people just died. Like that might have just slipped our minds. Lighten the fuck up, Johnny-J. If you weren’t so busy being a fucking tight-assed el douche-a-bag, you’d realize that what we just performed was a genuine field test, okay? I had to see if the ant-to-ant Mark Seven implant would work. We just wanted to put some fun into it.”
Johnny took a step back. Dae was right. It was a real test because the Mark Seven controller had been implanted in the nest. Implanted in a larvae by other workers. And, obviously, it worked.
The three of them had done it.
As long as they kept providing a supply of implants, which were nothing more than tiny radio receivers and cost all of four cents to make, every worker in the colony could be controllable by the central AI brain.
“Dae,” Johnny said quietly, “which nest is this? How many workers have the Mark Sevens?”
Dae shrugged. “Nest Seventeen. Queen came online thirty-nine days ago. She’s laying about three hundred eggs a day. We’ve got a fifteen-percent failure rate from egg to larvae and the same from larvae to pupae, but we’re near a hundred percent from pupae to adult, so now … probably fifteen hundred or so.”
Fifteen hundred ant-to-ant implanted workers? That was more than enough for a self-sustaining colony. Maybe Dae and Chantrelle had good reason to be so happy and excited despite the overwhelming news of world events.
“Okay,” Johnny said. “You guys are right. I’m a douche.”
Dae nodded. “El douche-a-bag, mayng.”
“Fine,” Johnny said. “I admit to being an el douche-a-bag. You win, now let’s go take a look at Nest Seventeen.”
• • •
Rookman Oil Lab 13-B was assumed by many to be nothing more than a check-mark line-item in a bullshit advertising campaign titled “Strong Castles Stand the Test of Time.” That was Rookman Oil’s feel-good alternative energy spin, touting how the company was hunting for new sources of fuel including nuclear, clean-burning coal and biodiesel.
Except it wasn’t just a bullshit advertising campaign.
Lab 13-B sat six hundred feet beneath the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station in Arizona. Oddly enough, nuclear energy is a clean-burning alternative to oil, but for some reason, the people that rail against the influence of foreign oil also rail against nuclear energy. Those were the people that company president A.U. Rookman called “confused fucking hippies.” A.U. Rookman loved confused fucking hippies. Confused fucking hippies kept things, well, confused. And in confusion, a moneymaking status quo—namely, oil and gas—isn’t going to change, which suited the elderly oil tycoon just fine.
That being said, the bottom line was that someday the world’s supply of oil would run out. Probably not for a century or more, but there was a definitive empty bottom to that big glass of Texas Tea. Add to that mix Rookman’s take on the people who controlled much of the world’s oil reserves, people he lovingly described as “those Venezuelan cocksuckers,” “the cluster fucks in Iraqiraniistan” and, of course, “those goddamn money-grubbing commie bastards in Russia,” and the last dregs of black gold might not wind up in the hands of a God-blessed American. Should that ever come to pass, Rookman wanted to make sure that Americans were not beholden to Venezuelans, Iraqis, Iranians or even those goddamn, money-grubbing, commie-bastard Russians.
Americans, you see, should be beholden to no one—no one, except A.U. Rookman.
Piss on ’em, as A.U. would say.
No hassle at the Castle—indeed.
Johnny wondered why Rookman obsessed so much. The oil would last at least another hundred years; A.U. wouldn’t last longer than ten more, at most, so the whole thing was kind of moot.
Should the pinko-commie-socialist-Arab coalition ever really take control of their own destinies, America and Rookman Oil would need alternative sources of energy. Hence, Rookman’s investment in the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station. And, hence, his investment in the sixteen thousand square feet of labs built underneath it.
Lab 13-B was divided up into four wings, cleverly named North, South, East and West. The South Wing held living quarters and labs, including state-of-the-art facilities for genetics, entomology, computers, artificial intelligence, fuzzy logic and biomimicry. The living quarters consisted of four small suites for people who didn’t want to go home at night, people who worked all the time, which was basically all of the six-person staff on the project. They had a giant entertainment center, enough food to last three or four days, Internet access, an exercise room — there was really no point in leaving. They could leave if they wanted to, taking an elevator up to the nuke plant. They left the elevator through a locked, unmarked door, and their badges read “Rookman Corporate Liaison.” Aside from Chantrelle getting whored up to go out and fuck some burly trucker every other night, the staff rarely left, and when they did, it was usually to talk to suppliers or vendors. Even though the entire staff was young and of the ideal going-out-and-partying age, they stayed underground because of what was in the other three wings.
The North Wing held nests One through Ten. Only two of these nests were still functioning. The rest had died out, filled with the dry husks of ants of multiple sizes. Each hive filled a 40-foot by 40-foot by 40-foot cube — sixty-four thousand cubic feet of living space for the buggers to grow and breed and dig and gather.
The bottom half of each cube held dirt, sand and rocks. The top half remained open, sixteen hundred square feet of surface covered with plants and topped by artificial lights that matched the day/night illumination cycle of Kansas.
Kansas was where Rookman wanted to grow sawgrass, hundreds of thousands of acres of it.
The West Wing held hives Twenty-One through Thirty. Only four of these, Twenty-One through Twenty-Four, had been seeded, and that seeding had taken place just two weeks earlier. That meant the West Wing held nothing but new strains of queens, their eggs and a few early larvae. No way of knowing how those nests would turn out.
The East Wing, however, held hives Eleven through Twenty. All of these were fully functioning and producing mature adults. All except for Nest Twelve, which had died out just the day before for reasons yet unknown.
Johnny, Dae and Chantrelle walked down the East Wing’s barely lit main hallway. They stopped in front of the huge glass window of Nest Seventeen.
Each nest had hundreds of fiber-optic night-vision cameras embedded throughout. You could sit at any monitor in the facility and feast your eyes on a reality/peep that was the Real Lives of Insects. Even with that kind of monitoring access, however, all queens were still strategically placed in a chamber that touched the window. Watching the buggers on ghostly green night-vision monitors was okay, but it was nothing like seeing them right there, on the other side of an inch of glass.
The concrete hallway ran along the base level of the forty-foot-deep nest cubes. That meant twenty feet of dirt, separated by the glass, rose from the floor to tower overhead. At the cube’s twenty-foot mark, which was dubbed the “surface level” for obvious reasons, a black metal deck ran the horizontal length of each forty-foot window. Four sets of ten steps each, also black, switchbacked up from the base level to that deck. The dark hallway had five ant cubes on the left and five on the right — walking down the hallway felt a lot like walking down a canyon or even being some geologic Moses parting the earthen sea.
Dae pointed to the queen, safe in her earthen chamber. “There she is,” he said. “There’s our little moneymaker.”
His fingertip stroked the glass. Behind the spot he stroked sat a huge queen, an eighteen-inch-long black ant the size of a lobster with the thick legs to match. Her exoskeleton was pitted and wrinkled, lacking the smooth, often shiny surfaces one saw on most species of ants. Her head was the freaky thing: as big as all the castes were (and they were fucking big, on the order of several hundred times the size of the largest ants ever discovered), the queen’s head was just kind of fucked-up. Long, thick and wide, it kind of looked like a jagged, modern-art cell phone with huge, glossy eyes. And those mandibles … she would probably never leave this chamber, but if she did, her three-inch-long snappers could decapitate a Pomeranian in one bite.
Considering the hundreds of generations of intensive gene manipulation, the cost of the facility’s construction, daily operation, equipment, supplies and the salary paid to several of the world’s best scientists, this queen alone was worth about seven million in raw cost.
Her creation was almost exclusively the work of Paulie “Cowboy” Heyde. Paulie was black but considered himself an African-American just about as much as he considered himself a Martian. Paulie was third-generation Texas rancher; that’s where he would have been happy as a pig in a poke if it weren’t for his I.Q. of 185 and his amazing affinity for ant genetics.
“Man,” Johnny said. “She got even bigger.”
“Big like a pickle,” Dae said.
“And I’m still gettin’ paid,” Chantrelle said.
Johnny knew they were quoting some ridiculous song, but he had no idea what it was.
The queen barely moved, only turning her blocky head and gently twitching her antennae to brush against the workers that swarmed on and around her. The workers were the minima, the smallest caste of the nest. Smallest was a misnomer — in normal leafcutter ants, minima were so small they could ride on the heads of soldier ants. Here, they were as big as the last segment of a man’s thumb. A mini-swarm of minimas crawled on the queen’s back, her head, even over her eyes. She didn’t seem to mind.
Acromyrmex rookmanicus, like its leafcutter ant ancestors, consisted of four castes: queen, minima, the media (or workers) and the majors (also known as the soldiers).
Johnny hated the soldiers. They were just plain freaky.
Although termites had been heavily considered, leafcutter ants proved to be the ideal subject. Paulie and the others had also toyed with cockroaches and a few species of beetle, but in the end, you needed to guide, if not outright control, the behavior of millions of individuals. For those kind of numbers, you needed a eusocial insect — a single breeding queen and the work of the individuals to support that queen.
Long before any gene manipulation, the Acromyrmex genus was already adept at agriculture. For millions of years, the species had cut leaves, dragged them back to the nest and stored the green bits in underground chambers. The plant material decomposes thanks to a fungus that the ants actually raise for this purpose. The fungus — seemingly a reward for dedicated care and feeding — produces gongylidia, special fruit-like growths that the ants eat. That’s right: the ants farm, cultivate and harvest a crop.
“Where’s Paulie Cowboy?” Johnny asked.
“He’s up top with Max and Tia,” Dae said. “Max was concerned the ants were eating the sawgrass too quick, so he went up to triple the order for trays. Paulie Cowboy and Tia went with, just to get out of here for a bit.”
Max was the botanist. He’d earned a Ph.D. from Michigan State University, focusing on sawgrass ecology. Max found out he’d passed the peer review of his paper not from the school, but from the representative of Rookman Oil who showed up at his apartment with a six-figure contract. Tia had a Ph.D. in some genetics discipline that Johnny couldn’t follow, but on this team, she was little more than an assistant for Paulie Cowboy. Tia’s I.Q. of 165 was apparently just enough to understand and implement Paulie Cowboy’s instructions. Tia, oddly enough, didn’t seem to mind. Something about being “privileged to work in the presence of a real genius” or some pandering bullshit like that.
Next to the queen sat an artificial black clump the size of the cardboard toilet paper roll left over when all the tissue was gone. Inside that clump, the AI that computer-directed the nest’s basic instincts. When they’d first made the rubber-encased computers two years earlier, they were about the size of the queens. In the last two years, however, Paulie Cowboy’s work had resulted in ever-larger queens until they reached the lobster-sized beauty that sat on the other side of the glass.
Johnny turned to Chantrelle. “How’s the surface-level look?”
She nodded at the black stairs leading up. “Look for yourself. They’re clear-cutting. That’s why Max went up to get more trays. We’re going to have to bring in a lot more raw material. I mean, like, a lot.”
Johnny practically ran up the steps. He was winded by the third flight. He reached the top and rested his hands on his knees as he looked through the filtered glass out onto sixteen hundred square feet of heaven.
The filter kept the surface’s blazing light from spilling out into the hallway, ensuring the base level stayed dark. This close to the glass, however, he could see the emulated daylight blazing off of greenery. The surface level looked like any wild grassland area — undulating ground covered with grass and trees, a few bare patches of dirt and rocks. There was even an artificial breeze to make the trees rustle and the sawgrass sway.
And ants.
A thick, living trail of ants.
Big ants, each the size of Johnny’s thumb, including the pad that reached to the base of his wrist. Those were the workers, the same kind that had crawled on his lab coat to spell D-O-U-C-H-E.
The undulating column made it hard to see the individual ants, but as a whole, the wiggling black trail made a monstrous tentacle that was impossible to miss, a stream that simultaneously flowed away from the six-foot-high anthill and also flowed toward it, supporting chunks of torn green. The way the ants held the rigid chunks of sawgrass in their big pincers, the cut leaves looked like a thousand little green shark fins swimming down into the nest.
Footsteps next to him told Johnny that Chantrelle and Dae had come up, but Johnny couldn’t look away from the ant column’s hypnotic dance.
“Dae, are you controlling them?”
Dae shook his head. “The AI is.”
The AI’s chlorophyll sensors could detect potential biomass sources. Once detected, the AI used the remote-control ability to guide naturally foraging ants toward that biomass. All that mattered were the first few ants — once the foragers found a good food source, they brought it back to the nest, leaving a chemical trail all the way. From there, natural instincts took over: the ants formed a column and followed the trail. The more ants that traveled the trail, the stronger the trail became. The stronger the trail became, the more ants traveled it until the source of food was gone.
The sawgrass grew in trays. The room was big, sure, but normal-sized leafcutter ants could completely strip a twenty-foot tree of foliage in less than twenty-four hours. Acromyrmex rookmanicus could probably do the same in five. The four-foot by four-foot sawgrass trays were grown in greenhouses a few miles from the nuke plant. That way, Max could constantly drop in new trays to provide a consistent source of living material without having to plant anything and wait for it to grow.
The project’s overall strategy was actually quite simple. The Acromyrmex genus already had the instincts needed for success. They gathered plant material. They reproduced in droves. They worked as a unit, each worker gathering a little bit, but all workers bringing the material back to the same place. If a company could produce queens, and those queens could establish colonies, that company would have a self-sustaining, independent army of biomass harvesters.
That ant army didn’t collect a paycheck. It didn’t need health benefits, Social Security, workers’ comp or even vacation days. Ants didn’t form, as A.U. would say, fucking lazy-ass liberal-commie unions. Ants just worked until they died, then they were replaced by other ants.
So really, the project came down to two things: first, changing the size of the ant so it could collect more material and collect it faster, and second, changing the ant’s food. That required genetic engineering of a fungus, and that’s where Chantrelle came in.
Chantrelle Carlson was a slut who seemed to fuck everything that moved. Everything except Johnny, that was. He wanted her in the worst way but couldn’t find a way to tell her. His desire for her churned inside of him. So beautiful, so smart … but why couldn’t she be more ladylike? She was so forward, hitting on the men she wanted — and not hitting on Johnny. Wanting her, knowing that she made her own desires perfectly clear to the world and knowing those desires didn’t include him: it made him angry and humiliated, brought home the fact that he wasn’t that attractive, that a woman of Chantrelle’s caliber would never come after a guy like him.
Whatever his emotional response to her, however, he had no illusions about her brain power. That part of her, at least, he respected immensely. Chantrelle had modified a species of fungus, Leucocoprinus gongylophorus, turning it into an energy-producing goldmine.
The fungus still produced the fruiting bodies, the only food that the ants ate, but she’d tweaked the selectively bred genome gongylophorus to attack the tough fibers of sawgrass. She also learned how to make the fungus “sweat.” That’s what she called it, anyway, especially when she was singing some obscure old song by C+C Music Factory. Chantrelle like to say the word sweat — she would lift her chin a little bit when she said it, lift her chin and blink real slow, dip her shoulders back almost imperceptibly. The way she said it gave Johnny an instant, raging boner. She did it on purpose, just for that reason. Chantrelle liked the reaction she could get out of men, even if she didn’t want that man at all.
Fucking whore-tease.
Paulie Cowboy’s work with the ants was amazing, Nobel Prize-winning when they released it, but in truth the ants were just a cultivation and harvesting mechanism for the project’s real target: the fungal secretion.
The ants brought biomass back to what the team had dubbed “the sweat grid.” The sweat grid was a long, metal mesh that could support over a thousand pounds before it would be considered “full.” The giant ants gathered sawgrass plants, masticated them down to fibers, then covered the fibers with the modified fungus. The fungus digested the fibers and produced about ten times more energy than it needed to survive and create the fruiting bodies that fed the ants. The fungus secreted that excess energy in a liquid form — the sweat — which simply dripped away through the mesh.
Through the mesh and into a funnel that led to a buried storage tank.
Rookman Oil trucks pumped the collected fungal secretion from those tanks and transported it to a biodiesel refinery. The liquid converted at a ridiculously profitable two-to-one ratio: two gallons of “sweat” made one gallon of biofuel.
All of that from the trays of sawgrass that were placed in the forty-by-forty-by-forty cube. Johnny had been involved with the project from the start, but now here they were — everything was finally coming together. He stared into the tank, barely able to believe that they were on the cusp of changing the world forever.
Chantrelle pulled out her phone. She held it to the glass, recording a panning shot of the rapidly vanishing sawgrass. “Max said that at the current rate of foraging, and factoring in the expected population growth, everything on the surface of this nest will be gone in about four hours. That’s why he hauled ass to personally make sure more trays get here fast.”
Johnny nodded. “Whatever Max needs. How long has the foraging been going on?”
“About three days,” Dae said. “There was only a hundred or so workers in the first brood, so it started slow.”
This had been going on for three days? “Why didn’t you guys tell me?”
Dae laughed. “We tried, bro. You were lost in that code. You either didn’t listen or you called me a fucking gook-slant and told me to go fuck myself.”
Johnny’s face flushed red. “I … I said what? Seriously?”
Now Chantrelle laughed. “Dae, stop screwing with him. It’s okay, Johnny, you’re not a closet racist. But you did tell both of us to go fuck off.”
Johnny rubbed the right side of his head. He didn’t even remember talking to either of them. “How’s the converter?”
Dae bowed and gestured to the stairs — a gesture that said see for yourself, good sir. After you.
Johnny ran down the steps to the ground level. Dae followed him, while Chantrelle looked down from the railing. Johnny came of the steps and looked at the wall-mounted flat-panel showing stats on the secretion storage tank.
“Good googly-moogly,” Johnny said. “There’s seven gallons in there!”
“Ju can say that more than one time, mayng,” Dae said.
Seven gallons in about three days. As the nest size doubled, tripled, quadrupled, so would the secretion output. Factor in that Rookman planned on seeding thousands of nests, and what did you have?
Johnny Paltrice and his team had just solved the world’s energy crisis.
Johnny turned and pulled Dae into a big bear-hug. “Holy crap, you guys! We’ve done it!”
And that, unfortunately, is exactly when the red mercury bomb blew the fuck out of everything.
• • •
A concussive wave. Johnny felt something pushing down on him, felt the ground drop out from under him, then lift up with the strength of a god. He flew into the air. Everything shook, everything roared. He hit the floor, or maybe the floor hit him, he didn’t know, and consciousness slipped away.
• • •
“Johnny, wake up!”
Johnny blinked his way back into consciousness. Clearly, someone had cracked open his skull, filled it with fifteen pounds of rancid cow shit, then sealed it back up with a nail gun. That’s how bad it hurt. He could barely see.
He heard a strange cracking sound. Sort of like a fire in a fireplace, but not quite.
Emergency lighting dimly lit up the hallway. Bits and pieces of ceiling, dirt and chunks of glass covered the floor. Johnny looked at Dae, who was holding his left arm with his right hand. Blood spots stained the left sleeve of his white lab coat.
“Dae?” Johnny said. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” Dae said quietly. “Chantrelle is dead.”
That pushed Johnny’s pain away until it was a far-off echo.
“What? Dead?”
Dae nodded to Johnny’s left. “Look for yourself.” His voice sounded thick with sadness, pain and confusion.
Johnny looked left. Chantrelle had fallen off the railing above. She’d landed on her head. She lay glassy-eyed in a pool of blood. Her once-beautiful face was a ruin, the right side of her temple smashed flat like the shell of a hardboiled egg dropped on the floor. She’d landed there, all her weight coming down on that one spot, then rolled onto her back.
Johnny had never seen death. Not human death, anyway. When he’d been in his early twenties, his dog Mooch had run away. Mooch got hit by a car, then was picked up by a state trooper and taken to a vet. The dog’s back was broken; the vet had put Mooch down even before calling the number on the dog’s collar-tag. Johnny’s number. By the time Johnny got the message, the dog had been put in a freezer. His one face-to-face experience with tragic death was a frozen dog corpse. While that had been horrible, it was nothing like looking at the dead woman lying in a pool of her own blood not five feet from you.
A few moments ago, she’d been a genius helping to change the world. She’d been beautiful. Now she was just dead.
“Holy shit, Dae,” Johnny said. “What the fuck happened?”
“Chantrelle fell, and I broke my arm. That’s what happened.”
“No, I mean what happened? Did something explode?”
“I don’t know. I can’t reach the surface. And by that I mean, like, at all. No TV signals, no radio, no Internet, no nothing. The elevator is totally fucked. I think something big blew up on the surface.”
Johnny’s stomach flipped.
“You think it’s …” His voice trailed off, but Dae knew what Johnny was asking.
Dae nodded. “There’s radiation. Some of the rad counters from the surface are still working. We’re getting rads down here, but it’s not too bad.”
“So the plant didn’t melt down?”
“Not yet, at least,” Dae said. “Can’t say for sure. Something big went off up there. The rads could be from the reactor’s core, or they could be …” Now Dae trailed off. He didn’t want to finish.
Johnny swallowed. It hurt his head to do even that.
“Dae … did we get nuked? You think the Saudis launched nukes?”
Dae shrugged. “I don’t think that’s it. We wouldn’t be here. Maybe a dirty bomb, I don’t know. I don’t know how we’re going to find out, man. We’re stuck down here.”
“We have to call the surface.”
Dae looked at the dirty, glass-strewn floor. “I told you, man, there is no way to do that. Everything is out. Everything. And if we have a measurable rad count down here, that means up on the surface, it’s bad, Johnny. If anyone lived through whatever hit us, which I doubt is possible, then they’re cooking alive from radiation. Even if we could reach the surface, there’s no one to reach.”
If Johnny Paltrice had been standing, he would have sat down. As it was he stayed where he was, right on his ass.
That strange crackling sound seemed louder. It echoed through the long hall. “What’s that noise?”
Dae shrugged. “Beats the fuck out of me,” he said. He used the heel of his foot to slowly draw abstract symbols on the dirt scattered across the floor.
Johnny again looked at Chantrelle’s body … looked at the ant sitting next to her head.
Minimas were as big as the end of his thumb, workers were the size of his thumb including the big pad, but this specimen was as big as his whole hand, from the tip of his index finger down past his wrist. That measurement didn’t even count the pair of mandibles, each of which were as long as his pinkie.
If Johnny picked it up, he’d need two hands to hold it.
This one was a soldier.
“Dae, look,” Johnny said quietly.
Dae looked at Johnny, then to Chantrelle’s body. “Oh,” he said. “That’s not good.”
Johnny looked at the ant tank. Huge cracks ran up and down the thick glass, like a model of translucent tectonic plates. In some spots, the glass was gone entirely, replaced by a negative space surrounded by sharply undulating shards that reflected the red emergency lighting in a thousand ruby facets.
“The ant tank broke,” Johnny said.
Dae gently picked up a big shard of glass, a shard as big as a butcher knife, then held it up for Johnny to see. “Gee, you think?” He put the shard in his pocket.
“How long have I been out?”
“About three hours, I think,” Dae said. “I was out awhile myself.”
Three hours.
Johnny got up slowly. It wasn’t like the ant was going to attack or anything, but it was still bigger than a tarantula, and when you saw something bigger than a tarantula with pincers the size of your pinkie, you tended to move with caution.
Johnny tested the black switchback stairs that led to the metal deck twenty feet above. The stairs were twisted and bent, but they seemed stable. He took the stairs one at a time, just to be sure. The farther up he went, the louder the crackling sound. He reached the deck, also bent but also stable.
Johnny looked out at the ground level of Nest Seventeen. No greenery. All brown. The sawgrass was gone. All of it. Even the tree had been stripped clean of leaves. The tree looked much smaller, much thinner. Was the tree … black? In the red light, the trunk and branches seemed to wiggle and writhe.
Ants covered the tree.
As Johnny watched, he heard that familiar cracking noise — one of the branches fell off and hit the ground.
“Dae?” he called down.
“Yeah?” Dae called up.
“I think maybe we need to get out of the hall.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because the ants ate all the sawgrass. Now they’re eating the tree, and the tree’s almost gone.”
• • •
Dae’s leg was broken. It took them thirty minutes to reach the main control room, the same place Johnny had been sitting when that ant had called him a douche. Like everywhere else, the only illumination came from the emergency lighting’s red glow. Bits and pieces of ceiling tiles had fallen here and there, a couple of computers had sailed off of desks and smashed on the ground, but overall, it wasn’t that bad.
Johnny set Dae into the main control chair.
“See what systems are still online,” Johnny said. “Someone’s got to come for us soon. We need to see how long we can hold out.”
Dae nodded and started working the keyboard with his one good hand.
Johnny tried two more computers before he found one that worked. He tried to think of their situation as a problem that needed to be solved: what resources did they have, what harmful conditions needed to be managed or mitigated, and how could they maximize their ability to stay alive until someone came for them.
Dae turned in his chair. “Backup batteries are still on line.”
“How much power? How long will they run?”
“Uh, give me a second, let me adjust for what systems are out.”
Johnny typed commands to call up the internal cameras. In typical A.U. Rookman fashion, everything in the facility was watched and recorded from at least three angles. Rookman did not like investing millions of dollars to see someone steal information or to have someone sabotage the experiment.
“No good,” Dae said. “If everything were fully operational, we’d have three days of power.”
“Calculate emergency lighting only,” Johnny said. “Shut down everything except this room, the kitchen and the hallway to walk back and forth between the two. We need water to the control room bathroom, but that’s it. We’ll sleep here.”
“What about normal lighting in here, at least? It’s fucking spooky in here, man. If we keep it normal only in here, the power should last a week, at least.”
Would they need more than a week? Maybe they could go with normal lighting for a few days, just until they reached someone and got some kind of estimate on rescue.
“Sure,” Johnny said. “Normal lighting, but only in here.”
Dae typed in commands with just his right hand. The control room flickered to partial normal illumination, courtesy of the few unbroken lights. Still it was better than that red glow.
The kitchen held a lot of food, enough for the whole staff to eat for three or four days without leaving. With just Dae and Johnny left, the food would last two weeks at least, as long as the refrigerator had power.
Thanks to the damage, it took Johnny a good twenty minutes to bring up the camera network. Most of the cameras were out, but with all the redundancy built into the system, they still had coverage over most of the facility.
“I see a power drain,” Dae said. “Camera system online. Do we really need that?”
“For now, yeah. Keep it powered.”
“Okay, how about the systems monitoring the nests?”
That made Johnny pause. The nests. They had just reached the breakthrough, proven that the experiment worked and potentially solved the world’s energy crisis. Not that Rookman would bring such a thing to market, of course. Johnny was liberal-minded but no fool — Rookman would keep pimping oil until the wells ran dry. But that didn’t really matter anymore; when the oil did run out, Rookman’s ants provided the solution.
A permanent, self-perpetuating solution. Johnny and Dae owed it to the world to keep things going.
“Run a full analysis of all the nests,” he said. “Once that’s done, run a full backup of all data, especially the genetic sequences of Nest Seventeen’s queen, just to make sure we have everything.”
“Running.”
The main backup was connected via a cable that ran to a buried computer bunker more than two miles away. That bunker was even deeper than the fucked-up place Johnny and Dae found themselves now. The backup bunker had been built by the same company that engineered Saddam Hussein’s underground warrens — it could literally handle a direct nuclear strike.
“Uh … Johnny? Come take a look at this.”
Johnny walked over to Dae’s computer. “What is it?”
“Look at this chart for the sweat grid in Nest Seventeen.”
Dae pointed at the screen. The simple historical line chart showed the amount of biomass stored in Nest Seventeen’s fungus grid. The fungus took a week or so to break down matter and turn it into sweat, so if you wanted to know how much potential energy was in the pipeline, so to speak, you needed to weigh the amount of matter sitting on the fungal grid. The line showed a steady increase, then at the end, it spiked up at a sharp angle.
Dae put a finger on the end of the chart. “What the fuck is that? You said they clear-cut their tank.”
“They did.”
“Well, they’ve added ninety kilos of biomass in the past three hours.”
“The tree?”
Dae shook his head. “The tree weighs fifty kilos, tops. Even if they clear-cut all the grass, brought down the whole tree, that doesn’t account for this spike. They’re getting biomass from somewhere outside Tank Seventeen.”
Johnny’s mouth ran dry. He reached for the keyboard and called up the cameras covering the main hallway.
The picture flared to life: Chantrelle was almost gone.
Ants swarmed across what was left of her ravaged body. Both arms were completely gone, as was her left leg. Her right leg was nothing more than a few inches of stump. Her guts had spilled onto the floor all around her, oozing free after her stomach skin and muscle had been torn away. They had cut apart her skull; the remaining bits gleamed a bloody red-white in the emergency lighting. Like her guts, a gelatinous mass of brains spread out from the half-head.
“Thirty minutes,” Dae said. He sounded almost conversational, as if talking about a co-worker being chopped up by ants after a nuke went off above your underground lair was something that happened every day. “It took them thirty minutes to do that. They can’t take the soft parts, but they’re taking everything else.”
Just like the trail Johnny had seen up on the surface of Nest Seventeen, Chantrelle’s body sat at the end of a thick, moving river of ants. The ants coming toward her walked through a trail of blood made by thousands of tiny footprints and leaking body parts. The trail led up the switchback black stairs and into a crack in the glass. The ants walking away from her also walked through that line of gore, but they didn’t go back empty-handed, so to speak. Each one carried a ragged chunk of flesh, a bloody bit of bone or some other semi-firm, torn-up piece of Chantrelle that Johnny couldn’t identify.
So many ants, all cutting into her. She literally shrank as they watched. Over half of her was gone; the rest of her wouldn’t last much longer.
“At least she’s not alive,” Dae said. “That would, you know, that would really suck if you were alive, and they cut you up like that.”
Johnny looked at the chart again, at the spike rising sharply up. “Wait a minute. Subtract the tree’s weight, and all the biomass we knew was in the tank. How much does that leave?”
Dae typed one-handed. “About twenty-nine kilos. No, wait, that just tipped up to thirty.”
“How much did Chantrelle weigh?”
Dae shrugged. “I dunno, maybe fifty kilos? What fucking difference does it make, Johnny?”
Johnny pointed to the computer screen showing Chantrelle’s ignominious demise. “There’s a good twenty-five kilos of her left on the floor. So maybe they’ve taken twenty-five kilos of her into the nest, and you’ve subtracted the tree and all the sawgrass—so where did that last twenty-five kilos of biomass come from?”
Dae thought for a second. Then he nodded, and simply said, “Fuck.”
He reached out his good hand and called up a dashboard that showed the status of all the nests.
The dashboard showed three columns, labeled NORTH: 1-10; EAST: 11-20; and WEST: 21-30. Each column had ten squares below it. Each square held a number denoting the nest and a status light that ranged from solid green, denoting an active and healthy nest, to red, denoting a nest in trouble, to black, denoting a dead nest.
NORTH showed two steady green lights. No change there.
WEST showed three steady green lights, as did the newly seeded Twenty-One, Twenty-Two, Twenty-Three and Twenty-Four. Those seemed to be fine. No change.
But in the EAST column, things had changed indeed. Before the explosion, that column showed nine bright green lights. Now it showed only one green light—Nest Seventeen. Nests Eleven and Twelve showed flickering green lights, just starting to demonstrate flashes of red that showed a population experiencing some kind of stress. Nests Thirteen through Fifteen showed red lights, nests that were in serious trouble. Nest Sixteen, Eighteen, Nineteen and Twenty showed black.
Those nests were dead.
Johnny called up the cameras for the queen’s chamber in Nest Twelve. As soon as the image came up, he wished he hadn’t called it up at all.
Dae let out a long whistle. “Holy moly,” he said. “That’s fucked up.”
Gigantic soldier bugs swarmed into the queen’s chamber. There were also minimas and workers and a few soldiers that seemed to fight these invaders, but all the ants looked the same — in the fuzzy glare of night vision, the queen’s chamber was a teeming, indiscernible mass of greenish-white bodies on a green background. Johnny couldn’t tell the combatants apart. The ants, however, didn’t seem to have any problem separating friend from foe.
“The sawgrass,” Dae said. “Nest Seventeen wants the plants in all the tanks. They’re killing the competition.”
Johnny shook his head. “No, no way. We didn’t program the AI for that. How the fuck could ants know to kill competitors for limited resources?”
Dae shrugged. “The Nest Seventeen ants cleared out their own cell, man. The windows must be cracked in the other cells, so now the chlorophyl sensors can detect the sawgrass in those. The AI is just doing what it’s supposed to do, steer the ants to available food.”
The status light for Nest Twelve stopped flickering from green to red; it now glowed a steady red.
In the chamber, gigantic soldier ants snapped their pincers, each snap crushing the life out of an enemy. The screen fully green with movement gradually slowed as the corpses piled up. Ruined bodies twitched slightly, beads of life fluid leaking out of crushed heads, thoraxes and abdomens.
The status dashboard for the EAST column stopped showing green altogether. Nests Nineteen and Twenty went black. Nests Eleven and Twelve moved to a solid red. Nests Thirteen through Fifteen started to flicker, only it was a flickering between a bright red and the nothingness of black.
The Nest Seventeen soldier ants swarmed in toward the queen of Nest Twelve, killing everything in their path. Her radius of defense gradually shrank until the soldiers came within reach of her three-inch-long mandibles. She snapped those mandibles, cutting the first Nest Seventeen soldier clean in half. Three soldiers broke free of her defenders and closed in. She took out another, the very end of her mandibles punching through the soldier’s thorax. She lifted it up off the ground. Its little legs spasmed in instant-death throes, but the remaining two soldiers moved in past her uplifted jaws. The soldiers’ mandibles weren’t as long as the queen’s, but at two inches long and backed up by the muscles in the soldiers’ huge heads, they were enough to do the job. One pair closed on the queen’s cell-phone-sized head, denting her exoskeleton. She dropped her second victim and tried to back away, to pull free. When she did, the other soldier bit down where her head met her thorax.
It was probably an accident. The luck of the draw, Johnny thought. Even mutated monster ants were still ants, for fuck’s sake — they didn’t know enough to cut off a queen’s head. But that’s exactly what happened. Her head fell to the ground. Free of that weight, her body scrambled backward for a few steps until it hit the chamber wall, then it fell on its side, big legs kicking randomly.
The status light for Nest Twelve went black.
So did the other nests, leaving the EAST column a dead black save for the steady green light of Nest Seventeen.
“They’re killing everything,” Dae said. “It’s not just biomass they want. There’s plenty of Chantrelle left if they just wanted biomass. I can’t explain it, but the nest — not the AI — has decided to wipe out anything that moves. I hate to break it to you, mayng, but we’re kind of fucking fucked right now.”
Johnny nodded. Fucked right about now seemed like a very accurate term. Johnny and Dae would have to move back and forth to the kitchen. Sooner or later, the predatory ants would try and attack them.
“We gotta get to the kitchen,” Johnny said. “We gotta get as much food as we can into the control room, then seal it up.”
“You go,” Dae said. He stared at the screen. “I’ll stay here, keep an eye on things.”
“Dae, come on! We’ve got to get our shit together.”
Dae laughed. “Don’t worry about shit, el-douche-a-bag, ’cause shit is soft, and the ants can’t take the soft parts.”
He just kept staring at the screen, at the wriggling, steadily shrinking pile of what used to be Chantrelle. Johnny opened his mouth to plead again, then stopped — he didn’t have time to convince Dae. He had to hurry. As long as the ants of Nest Seventeen were tied up with Chantrelle, with the other ant nests, he could probably get to the kitchen without running into any of them.
Johnny reached past Dae and called up the camera that showed the hallway just outside the control room door.
No ants.
Johnny ran into the hall and headed for the kitchen.
• • •
He moved as quickly as he could, carrying the weight of two canvas bags filled with canned goods. He’d grabbed all the cans he could carry and two can openers (just in case one failed). He hadn’t brought anything perishable. He could just eat right out of the cans; that would save not only on what he needed to carry, but also on any energy they might need for cooking.
He turned the corner and stopped cold.
Ants.
Not a lot of them, and not the big soldiers. These were workers, just five of them, wandering around the floor. Wait, six, because there was one on the wall.
They weren’t a column; they were scouting.
Scouting for more food.
Johnny started to run, but after only five heavy steps, he put on the breaks.
They ants had all turned to face him. Turned when he stepped.
They could feel the vibrations of his feet.
Johnny stood still, hoping they would move on. Then one started moving in his direction. It moved a little forward and to the left, then turned, moving forward and to the right.
Scouting. Scouting for the source of the vibrations.
Johnny Paltrice was being hunted.
Well, fuck that. Johnny was the human here. These were ants. Big fucking ants, to be sure, but still ants.
He took two steps forward and stomped his left foot. The worker ant crunched, exploding like a thumb-sized jelly doughnut.
The other four ants on the floor scurried toward him. The one on the wall scampered down.
Johnny stepped toward the second ant, planted his left foot and almost slipped from the squished-ant slime still on the sole of his shoe. He regained his balance and stomped down with his right, killing a second ant. He dropped both bags, spilling canned goods across the floor, then jumped in the air with both feet and came down on the third ant. Strands of insect-fluid shot across the floor.
Something on his right calf.
Johnny kicked with his left foot, kicked at his own calf. He felt the ant come free, but he almost lost his balance again. He stumbled, then planted his left foot to regain control — the gut-strewn sole slid, and his foot shot out from under him.
He fell, hitting the ground hard, the back of his head thonking against the concrete floor. Pain swelled up in his skull, a flashing roar that wiped out all thought.
But he had to think, had to get up. There were still some ants, he had to get up!
Johnny Paltrice rolled to his hands and knees.
Before he could rise, he felt the pain in his left hand.
Searing pain in his left middle finger.
His left hand shot up to his chest, pulling away from the pain like he’d touched an oven burner. He was on his feet before he knew what he was doing and running only a split-second after that. As he sprinted, his right hand covered up his left and felt the hot wetness of blood.
The red emergency lights lit the last thirty feet between him and the control room. He used his right hand to try and open the door, but his blood-slick skin slipped on the door knob. He wiped his palm against his pant leg then re-gripped the door knob, opened it, ran in and shut it behind him.
Johnny stumbled forward, head thick with the pain that seemed to take up his whole hand. Again clutching his left hand with his right, he turned, sat his ass on a desk, pulled his feet up and stood. Standing on the desktop, he looked at the door, waiting for them to come through.
He saw no movement.
What he saw instead was a trail of blood. A trail leading from the door to the desk upon which he stood.
Johnny Paltrice didn’t want to look at his hand. He knew what he’d see. But he had to look because that’s what you do when you’re hurt.
He held up his hand. His left middle finger was gone, cut clean off just below the first knuckle, leaving only a stub pulsing soft gurgles of blood.
“Oh, fuck,” he said. His finger. Fucking gone. Not just gone, but out there in the hall, where the ants were probably already taking it back to the nest.
Johnny stared at the bleeding stub. With his right hand, he gathered up the end of his white lab coat and pushed hard on the stub. He let out a small scream, then choked it off — of course, it hurt, like dipping the whole hand in acid, but he had to stop the bleeding.
“Dae!” Johnny said, still staring at the door. “Dae, do you see any ants in here?”
Dae didn’t answer.
“Dae, do you see any goddamn fucking ants in here, goddamit?”
Dae still didn’t answer.
Johnny couldn’t look away from the door, but he had to; Dae wasn’t answering. But what if he looked away from the door and they came through right then, slid under the door maybe or came in some other way, followed the trail of blood and came after him again?
“Dae, stop fucking around and answer me!”
Again, nothing.
Johnny forced himself to turn, to look away from the door, away from the last barrier against the ants. His hand hurt so goddamn bad. Could he stop the bleeding? Of course, he could, just direct pressure. Just a finger. Just a finger go fuck yourself Johnny it’s not just a finger it’s your fucking middle finger how are you going to type your Ds without your middle finger?
He looked at Dae, who sat in the chair before the main terminal, back turned to the door, back turned to Johnny.
Dae wasn’t moving.
“Dae?”
Johnny looked at the floor under Dae’s chair. No ants, but there was a puddle of blood. A big puddle of blood.
“Oh, no …”
Still jamming his bloody lab coat to his finger stub, still feeling every ounce of the agony, Johnny Paltrice hopped down and walked slowly toward Dae.
Dae still wasn’t moving.
Johnny had to walk into the puddle of blood to look down on his co-worker. Dae’s eyes stared out glassy and blank. His hands hung at his sides, almost to the floor. Each of his wrists showed a deep gash running from the base of the hand all the way up to the elbow. His open palms also showed big lacerations. Then Johnny saw it — in the puddle of blood on the floor, he saw the broken shard of glass from the window, the shard Dae had taken when they left Chantrelle’s body.
This couldn’t he happening. Couldn’t be. Johnny could not be alone down here.
Alone.
“Dae what the fuck did you do what the fuck are we going to do. That was really stupid man come on get up get up now that was really stupid we have to do something.”
Dae didn’t get up.
So much blood.
A crackling noise.
Johnny’s head snapped to look at the door, but he saw nothing. Or did he? Was that door moving? Maybe a little?
The trail of blood running from the door to the desk drew his attention again. Man, he’d bled a lot. How was he going to type his Ds? Could he spell “dumb” just “umb”? Would people get that? The blood trail. Big splatters, not quite a solid line, but not far from it.
He would have bled like that in the hall, too, a line of blood leading from the hall right into the control room.
No, not a line …
A trail.
A loud snap punctuated the crackling sound.
At the bottom of the door, Johnny saw a quick flash of something.
Something small, something narrow, something black.
A piece of the door vanished. A small piece, only a quarter-inch maybe, right from the bottom, the fresh, white wood showing against the gray paint. Then more flashes of black. Another piece. Then another. More black, lots of black. The hole was a half-inch now, almost big enough for them to come through, to follow the trail of blood.
“Go away,” Johnny said quietly. “I know you think I’m a douche, but I’m not, ’cause I can’t type my Ds. I’m just an ouche, so go away.”
The ants didn’t listen.