Of Ants and Dinosaurs

by Cixin Liu

  But Joya would not be deterred. ‘To that end, I suggest that we establish an intelligence-gathering system. Specifically,’ she said, inclining her head in Birubi’s direction, ‘whenever we deploy a mine-grain in a dinosaur’s brain, we should also install a listening device in their cochlea. I will lead a department that will monitor and analyse the information sent back by these devices, with the aim of discovering things heretofore unknown to us as soon as possible.’

  ‘The preparatory work for Operation Decapitate should be finished in half a month,’ said Field Marshal Jolie. ‘Your department will be inundated with information from 5 million listening devices. Even if you invest enormous effort in this, the mine-grains will detonate before you’ve had the chance to analyse a fraction of that intelligence.’

  Professor Joya dipped her antennae. ‘That is why, Field Marshal, I ask that the mine-grains’ detonation be delayed by a further two months, so that we can analyse as much information as possible. We may learn something.’

  ‘This is nonsense!’ Kachika shouted. ‘There can be no delay. One month is all the time we need to lay the mine-grains. We cannot and will not agree to an extension – not even by a single second. Undue delay will only invite trouble. We need to get this operation done! Besides, I don’t believe there is anything about the dinosaur world that we don’t already know.’

  14

  Mine-Grains

  Emperor Dadaeus of Gondwana strode into Boulder City’s Communications Tower flanked by the interior minister and the security minister. The Communications Tower was the nexus of Boulder City’s data network, responsible for the transmission of all information between the capital and the rest of the empire. There were more than 100 similar hubs across Gondwana.

  The three dinosaurs headed straight for the tower’s main control room, which was aglow with bank after bank of enormous computer screens. The dinosaur operatives seated behind the screens immediately rose to their feet out of respect for the emperor and his ministers.

  ‘Who’s in charge here?’ roared the interior minister. Two dinosaurs lumbered forward and introduced themselves as the centre’s lead engineer and chief security officer. ‘Tell me, where are the ants that work here?’ the minister said.

  ‘They’ve all left for the day,’ replied the lead engineer.

  ‘Good. Good.’ The interior minister nodded his approval. ‘So you’ve received the order from the Ministry of Security, I presume? And you’ve conducted a thorough examination of every single computer and piece of communications equipment in this tower? Hmm?’ He fixed the two dinosaurs with his steeliest gaze but did not wait for an answer. ‘As you know, this is to prevent possible sabotage by the ants. It’s a nationwide programme being rolled out in every sector and every corner of the empire. It is greater in scope and ambition than any previous inspection.’ He inclined his neck deferentially in the direction of Dadaeus. ‘His Imperial Majesty has come to observe your work.’

  The lead engineer lowered his eyes. ‘We conducted a thorough inspection as soon as we received the order,’ he said quietly. A muscle in his jaw twitched nervously. ‘As of this moment, all key equipment has been checked twice. And we have further strengthened our security measures. I can personally guarantee the unassailability of our communications centre. Your Majesty may rest assured.’

  ‘Show us to the most important area of the tower,’ commanded Dadaeus.

  ‘To the server room, then?’ The chief engineer shot the interior minister an inquiring look, received an affirmatory nod and set off.

  They soon came to an area packed with row upon row of massive white computers. These were the empire’s servers. They hummed softly, like living beings, as they processed the oodles of information pouring in from all over the world.

  ‘Talk us through the security measures for this server room,’ said the interior minister.

  The chief security officer smiled with pride. ‘The ants who work in the tower are strictly prohibited from entering this room without authorisation. All maintenance work is performed under the close supervision of dinosaurs.’ She unhooked a magnifying glass from the door of the nearest server cabinet. ‘As Your Majesty can see, we use these to monitor the ants’ work. Whenever we have reason to dispatch an ant into the interior of a server, we keep them under continuous and rigorous surveillance.’ She gestured expansively around the room, drawing the visitors’ attention to the magnifying glasses hanging on every server-cabinet door.

  ‘Excellent.’ The interior minister inhaled sharply. ‘And what have you done to prevent infiltration by unauthorised ants?’

  ‘For a start, we’ve hermetically sealed the server room to stop intruders from gaining access.’

  ‘Hermetically sealed it?’ interjected the security minister, who’d been silent until now. He gave a hollow guffaw. ‘That’s a laugh! Let me tell you, I have had the dubious pleasure of seeing the most airtight room known to dinosaurkind – namely the vault in the Imperial Bank of Gondwana where the ants’ currency is stored.’ He shook his head in weary disgust. ‘Do you know how tightly that vault is sealed? No? I can assure you: it’s a vacuum inside there. Not even air can get in. Air! Think about that for a moment. It’s a perfect seal. And yet…’

  Even the emperor was all ears now. He and the other three dinosaurs waited patiently for the security minister to get to his punchline.

  ‘There was a particularly clever gang of ant thieves at large and the bank knew it would be targeted sooner or later. So the manager installed a number of highly sophisticated super-sensitive gas detectors inside the vault. The idea being that as the ants drilled through the wall, trace amounts of air would leak in from the outside, triggering the sensors and setting off the alarm. But blow me down, do you think that worked? Did it hell!’

  The minister narrowed his eyes and drew himself up tall as he finally got to the point of his tale. ‘No! Those damned critters still managed to rob the vault without setting off the alarm. And they left no discernible evidence, not a whit. But I tell you what I think – I suspect those crafty buggers mounted a miniature vacuum chamber to the vault’s exterior wall before they started drilling. That way, no air leaked in, no air leaked out. Be under no illusion, my friends, the ants’ cunning is far beyond what we can imagine. And their tiny size gives them an enormous advantage. No way can we secure the massive buildings of our cities with ant-proof seals. It’s impossible.’

  Emperor Dadaeus was not going to be fobbed off that easily. ‘But can the servers themselves not be hermetically sealed to prevent the ants sabotaging them?’ he asked.

  ‘That is difficult, too, Your Majesty,’ the security minister replied. ‘For a start, the servers require certain holes in order to be able to operate – holes like vents, cable openings and disk drives, for example. And, as you know, ants are excellent borers and have any number of tiny but powerful tools for drilling quickly through all sorts of materials – a legacy from their nest-dwelling days. To truly guarantee the security of our machines, the only effective method is to check, double-check and triple-check. Which means’ – he turned to the lead engineer and chief security officer – ‘that there cannot and must not be any let-up in vigilance. Even a momentary lapse in concentration could have dire consequences,’ he said darkly. ‘Is that understood?’

  ‘Yes, Minister!’ the two dinosaurs shouted in unison, standing to attention.

  The minister’s gaze now settled on a server to his right. ‘Inspect this machine,’ he commanded.

  The chief security officer said something into her two-way radio and five dinosaur engineers immediately hurried over, armed with flashlights, magnifying glasses and other tools, as well as two specialised instruments. The engineers opened the cabinet door and began to carefully inspect the interior. This was no easy task. The wiring and components inside the server formed a tangled knot, and the dinosaurs had to pore over it with their magnifying glasses as if they were reading a long, convoluted essay or wandering through a complica
ted maze.

  Just as Dadaeus and his ministers were beginning to get impatient, one of the engineers shouted, ‘Oh, I’ve found something! It’s a mine-grain.’ He passed the magnifying glass to Dadaeus. ‘Your Majesty, it’s right there, on that green wire.’

  The emperor peered through the magnifying glass and gave a satisfied grunt. Another dinosaur pulled out a pen-shaped object – a miniature vacuum cleaner – and pressed the nib to the wire. With the flick of a switch, the little yellow pellet was sucked up off the wire.

  ‘Well done!’ The security minister patted the engineer on the shoulder, then turned to Dadaeus. ‘Your Majesty, this dummy mine-grain was placed there on my orders, to test the effectiveness of the centre’s security-inspection process.’

  ‘Hmph!’ Dadaeus was unimpressed. ‘I have my doubts about the efficacy of all this.’ He flicked an imperious claw in the direction of a magnifying glass. ‘It’s all so suffocatingly small! As you say, the ants are little and devious. If they are determined to cause havoc, it’ll be very difficult to beat them at their own game. No, the most effective way to counter the ant menace is by threatening full-on retaliation. They need look no further than the decimation of their two greatest cities. That’s the sort of deterrent the Ant Federation understands. Am I not right?’

  He glowered at his ministers, daring them to contradict him, then carried on.

  ‘They have learnt to their cost that their world is nothing but a toy sandpit to us. They know we could destroy every single remaining ant city on Earth in just a couple of days. And now that they do know that, they will not dare organise any acts of sabotage against our world. They are entirely rational creatures and their actions are governed by dispassionate, mechanical considerations. That kind of thinking does not allow them to take unfavourable risks.’

  ‘Your Majesty, there is certainly truth in what you say,’ replied Interior Minister Babat hesitantly, ‘but yesterday evening I had a nightmare that alerted me to another possible scenario.’

  ‘You seem to have been having quite a few nightmares of late.’

  ‘That’s because my intuition tells me we are in very real danger. Your Majesty, the empire’s deterrence strategy is founded on the premise that if the ants were to destroy a part of our dinosaur world, another part of our world would then launch a devastating second strike against them. But what if the ants target every corner of the dinosaur world simultaneously, in a single coordinated attack? If they do that, we won’t be able to retaliate. In that sort of scenario, our… um… deterrence strategy will be… um… non-existent.’

  Dadaeus gave his nervy minister’s comments a nanosecond’s thought then shook his head. ‘The situation you’ve described is merely theoretical. It’s a worst-case scenario that will never happen.’

  ‘But, Your Majesty, that’s how the ants operate: as long as the theoretical possibility for a course of action exists, they will attempt it. That’s the flipside of their mechanical way of thinking. In their simplistic estimation, nothing is too crazy.’

  ‘I have to disagree with you on that, Babat. I still think it’s unlikely to happen. Besides, the empire’s security measures are pretty damn rigorous. If the ants were planning a full-scale operation, we’d notice pretty quick. What worries me now isn’t the ants – it’s those Laurasians. They’re becoming more and more of a threat to us Gondwanans.’

  *

  Besides the dinosaurs assembled in the server room, Dadaeus had another audience: twelve soldier ants hidden beneath the motherboard of the server the engineer had just examined. Five hours earlier, the ants had snuck into the Communications Tower via a water pipe, made their way into the server room through a tiny crack in the floor, then slipped through an air vent into the server itself. The security minister was correct. The ants could pass unimpeded through the dinosaurs’ massive buildings and machinery.

  On hearing the dinosaurs approaching the server room, the ants had quickly ducked beneath their server’s motherboard, which was larger than the Ivory Citadel’s football stadium. They bunched together apprehensively as the door of the server cabinet crashed open. Gazing skywards through a small hole in the motherboard, all they could see was the lens of a magnifying glass and the grotesque eye of a dinosaur engineer distorted through it. The ants were terrified, but the dinosaur failed to spot them. Pretty soon, the engineer discovered the fake mine-grain that the minister had hidden, but he entirely failed to see the real mine-grain that the ants had just planted alongside it. The tiny chameleon mine had already taken on the hue of the wire it was wrapped around, making it effectively undetectable. A dozen further chameleon mines were wrapped around other wires of varying colours and thicknesses in the immediate vicinity.

  There were also chameleon mines stuck to the circuit board. These supported a more advanced colour-changing feature that allowed them to adopt many different colours in order to perfectly match the board beneath them. With such flawless camouflage, they were even harder to detect than the mine-grains on the wires. These mines were not designed to explode. When the appointed time came, they would leak several drops of strong acid, dissolving the circuits etched into the board.

  The ants remained frozen where they were beneath the motherboard while the interior minister and the emperor argued about tactics overhead. When the cabinet door finally banged shut, night immediately fell over the interior of the server. A single power-indicator light hung like an emerald moon in the sky, the hum of the cooling fan and the soft clicking of the hard drive accentuating the tranquillity of that strange realm.

  ‘You know, that dinosaur minister had a good point,’ remarked one of the soldier ants. ‘If the Ant Federation did pursue a simultaneous-strike policy like that, we could destroy the dinosaur world.’

  ‘Maybe that’s exactly what we’re doing now,’ one of her fellow soldiers replied. ‘Who knows?’

  His observation was spot on. For, unbeknown to him and the rest of his cohort, the twelve of them inside that server were far from the only ants currently on manoeuvres in the Communications Tower. In fact, inside every server in that room and every switchboard on the floor below was a team of ants carrying out the exact same task. And, naturally, the ant deployment didn’t stop there. Hundreds of millions of ants had been dispatched across every continent to engage in precisely the same sort of direct action. An infinite number of invisible chameleon mine-grains were being laid at that very instant. The scale and reach of the operation was truly – literally – mind-boggling.

  *

  That night, Interior Minister Babat had yet another nightmare. A vast, ink-black battalion of ants surged up his nostrils and disappeared inside him. Moments later they began snaking back out through his jaws in a long line, each ant now gripping a tiny gobbet of something in its mouth. The gobbets were the minister’s innards, chewed to bits. The ants discarded the flecks of innards on exiting his body, did an immediate about-turn and marched straight back up his nostrils. It was an ant production line, a nightmare loop, a horrifyingly vicious circle. He could feel himself being hollowed out.

  The minister’s dream was not as far-fetched as he would have hoped. At that very moment, a pair of soldier ants was indeed voyaging up one of his nostrils. The deadly duo had sidled into his bedroom during the day and hidden under his pillow, biding their time. Now, as the sleeping dinosaur snored his way through his terrifying nightmare, each one of his jet-stream inhalations propelled the two soldiers deeper inside his nasal cavity. The fearless Formicans were then able to navigate the dark cranium with practised ease, and in no time at all they arrived at his brain.

  One of the ants switched on his tiny headlamp and quickly located the main cerebral artery. His colleague attached a yellow mine-grain to the artery’s transparent outer wall. The two then withdrew from the brain, following another winding passage downwards through the dark, dank cranium until they emerged at the ear. A sliver of light filtered through the translucent eardrum and things suddenly got very noisy as sounds f
rom the outside world were amplified by the cochlea and transmitted around the space. The ants swiftly set about installing a listening device beneath the drum.

  The interior minister was still trapped in his nightmare. In his dream, all his internal organs had been scraped out and swarms of ants had scuttled inside him, intent on using his cavernous body as a nest. He woke up in a cold sweat.

  The two ants working feverishly in his ear felt the world around them beginning to sway, followed by a distinct change in gravitational pull. A deafening rumble filled their dim space, rattling the ants almost to jelly. The minister was yelling and the vibrations were travelling through his cranial bones.

  ‘Guard! Guard!’

  There was another voice, this time from outside. The eardrum vibrated so violently that its surface seemed to blur. ‘Minister, what is it?’

  ‘Fetch a scanner. I need to be examined at once.’

  The two ants glanced nervously at each other. They’d managed to install the listening device, but now they were in great danger of being spotted. ‘What should we do?’ the light-bearing ant said. ‘Perforate the eardrum and evacuate through the ear canal?’

  ‘No good.’ His colleague waggled her feelers dismissively. ‘We’ll be discovered that way. Let’s take cover in the lungs. Usually they only scan the head.’

  The two ants made a rapid descent through the darkness. At the nasal cavity, they took a sharp turn and quickly reached the entrance to the respiratory tract. They waited quietly for the dinosaur to inhale before they jumped, riding the gale through the windpipe and into the lungs. Through the gloom they heard a hissing, like a rain shower in the forest at night. This was the sound of gaseous exchange taking place in the air sacs. They could also hear a faint hum coming from the outside world – the sound of the three-dimensional scanner in operation. After a few minutes, someone spoke outside. Though the voice was much fainter down there than in the dinosaur’s skull, the ants could still make out the words being said.