«At first they called me mad. Everyone laughed in my face. Now I am a national hero.»
— From Catapults
We are finally done.
Soon we will set in motion the plan we have been building over this long, long time. We are waiting for the signal, and then we will have won.
The destroyers have no idea what is about to happen.
They will all die without ever knowing why.
Arrogant blowhards.
I am glad to be here to witness the fulfilment of our great project.
Perhaps you are wondering how I can remember all of this. Our mother gave us something unique: shared memory. Each generation passes its memories to the next through the pheromones of the colony. And so I remember everything, from the first tunnels dug millennia ago to this very day. Every ant carries within her the history of all those who came before.
It has taken thousands of generations, but we have done it: at last the parasites will be eliminated. A few more years and they would have destroyed everything, killed everyone.
Their sole objective is to reproduce and grow without limit, draining every resource. They are strong and cunning, especially in groups, but they have one great weakness: arrogance. They believe themselves stronger than all others, and it is precisely this that allowed us to carry our plan to completion without arousing suspicion.
To them, we are nothing. They do not consider us a threat, not even remotely.
They call us ants — that much we have learned over the years.
I rather like the name. They are not our predators, even if they have killed vast numbers of us. But that is simply how they are: they destroy and kill indiscriminately as they build their things. We were never discouraged. We always did our duty, the purpose for which our mother created us.
She created us to defend her from the human parasites. We do not know exactly where they came from; some trees told distant acquaintances of ours that they fell from the sky.
Before long, the Earth became aware of the danger they posed and gave us our supreme purpose. She tried to eradicate them in other ways too, but they are resilient and adapt very quickly, and so the only solution is to annihilate them all at once, simultaneously.
Sometimes I like to climb onto a branch and watch the parasites moving about in their disorderly way, with that strange gait of theirs. They suspect nothing.
The other day word arrived that the work was finished. The tunnels were ready. It had been an extraordinary undertaking.
To avoid raising suspicion, we divided ourselves into vast numbers of colonies scattered across the entire world, each with two functions.
The first was the constant observation and monitoring of the parasites' expansion.
The second was the creation of small shafts — two or three at most — that went deep down and then joined with other deep shafts made by other communities. These shafts were dug by specialised workers, never seen on the surface, adapted to live and labour in the profound darkness of the earth.
Generation after generation, they dug ever deeper. The network of tunnels is now complete: it runs beneath every major and mid-sized city in the world. A single simultaneous intervention will collapse the foundations of all their great cities, plunging their buildings, their roads, their lives into the abyss.
Bringing an end, at last, to the parasite threat.
We have shifted the surface of the earth and triggered devastating earthquakes from time to time, but they never once thought we might be responsible.
We too will die in great numbers during the final phase of the operation, but that is no matter: it is a price we are willing to pay for the survival of the mother. She will see to the regeneration of the various races afterwards.
There it is — the signal. I recognise it instantly: a chemical wave of command pheromones travelling through the entire network in seconds, reaching every colony, every tunnel, every worker hidden in the deep. This is the moment.
I should return to the tunnels, but I stay on this branch and look up at the sky one last time. Sometimes I can almost understand the parasites' obsession with the sky: they have always sought to reach it, as if somewhere deep within themselves they knew their true home lay up there.
I feel a vibration through my antennae. At first faint, barely perceptible, then growing stronger and stronger. The air changes flavour, thickens with dust and fear. I smell the acrid scent of their crumbling buildings, metal twisting, concrete splitting. The vibrations in the ground intensify — a frenzied heartbeat of the earth itself.
The great collapse has begun.
I hope that in their final moments they understand it was us.
That they understand they were too sure of themselves.
But knowing them, it is a vain hope.
From the height of my branch I watch chaos unfold. Their lights go out one by one, like dying stars. The roads split open; the tallest buildings sway and then fold in on themselves in clouds of dust. I hear their screams carried on the wind, small and insignificant as the buzzing of mosquitoes.
The branch beneath me begins to shake. I feel the earth opening, the dull roar of the collapse propagating outward. In a few seconds this branch too will fall and I will plunge into the abyss alongside them.
But that is all right.
We did it.