Of Ants and Dinosaurs

by Cixin Liu

  ‘Yes indeed,’ replied the professor. ‘To avoid a global panic, operations Leviathan and Luna were carried out in absolute secrecy. Even in the dinosaur world, only a very few knew the exact details. Both teams designed their systems so that they could be maintained without ant involvement. A great deal of money was spent on ensuring that the equipment was super reliable, and the containment systems were built using replaceable modules. As a result, the Ant Federation knew nothing about it until today.’

  *

  Joya’s account shook every ant in the command centre to the core. The mood in the room had plummeted. Where previously the ants had been celebrating a great victory over the dinosaurs, they were now staring into a terrifying hellhole.

  ‘This is beyond madness – it’s depraved!’ Kachika cried. ‘An ultimate-deterrence strategy predicated on the total destruction of the world renders all political and military considerations meaningless. It’s an abomination.’

  Field Marshal Jolie tossed her head contemptuously. ‘Is this not, Professor, an inevitable consequence of the very curiosity, imagination and creativity you so admire in the dinosaurs?’

  ‘Let us stick to the matter in question,’ replied Joya, unperturbed by Jolie’s snideness. ‘The world is in grave danger and we should be focusing on that.’

  Kachika began to formulate a plan. ‘At least we know that those two fragments of antimatter are still intact and untouched in their magnetic containment vessels. The destruction of the world is therefore not an inevitability.’ She glanced over at Jolie. ‘Do you agree, Field Marshal?’

  The field marshal dipped her antennae. ‘I do. This sort of operation is on a par with a nuclear-missile strike. It will have been designed with an extremely complex system of security locks. The command to detonate the antimatter will only be valid if issued by a dinosaur at the highest level, and the dinosaurs with that degree of authority will certainly have been eliminated by now. Therefore, the order will never be given. Regarding malfunctions or breaks in the chain of command, those won’t be a problem either. The slightest anomaly will send the system into lockdown.’

  Kachika turned to the professor. ‘How long can the magnetic fields within the containment vessels be maintained?’

  ‘For a considerable period,’ Joya replied. ‘The magnetic fields are produced by a circulating current in a superconductor, which decays very slowly. In addition, Leviathan and Luna are both equipped with nuclear batteries capable of supplying power for a long time, so the systems can replenish the charge lost without outside interference. According to the dinosaurs, the confining magnetic fields can be maintained for at least twenty years.’

  ‘Then it’s obvious what we should do,’ Kachika said firmly. ‘We must immediately find Luna and Leviathan, build shields around the containment vessels and insulate them from all external electromagnetic signals, thereby eliminating the possibility of a signal from the outside world detonating either weapon.’

  ‘And then,’ said Field Marshal Jolie, ‘we must think of a way to launch the vessels into space. Although it will be difficult, we have time on our side. With the spaceships and rockets the dinosaurs left behind, we should be able to do it.’

  Now that victory was potentially in their sights once more, the ants broke into animated discussion about operational details.

  But Professor Joya was having none of it. ‘If we follow the supreme consul’s plan, Earth is doomed,’ she said.

  The ants turned to stare at her, incomprehension on every face.

  ‘This concerns the command-loss timers mentioned by Dodomi and Dadaeus in the recording,’ Joya said. ‘In the beginning, the two dinosaur powers controlled Leviathan and Luna exactly as we’d expect. Signal stations on their own soil were kept on standby, the idea being that the moment one country was attacked, a remote-control signal would go out from the victim’s station, detonating the antimatter in the attacker’s harbour. But both sides soon realised that there was a flaw in this system. Let us consider this hypothetical scenario: Laurasia suddenly launches a conventional nuclear strike against Gondwana – I use the term “conventional” advisedly, as that is what nuclear weapons are nowadays. With lightning speed, the Laurasians bring overwhelming force to bear on the entirety of Gondwana’s territory, with Gondwana’s command-and-control sites particularly hard hit. Before Gondwana can respond, it sinks into a state of paralysis much like the state it finds itself in now. It cannot detonate Leviathan. Furthermore, Laurasia will have anyway taken certain measures to prevent the detonation signal from ever reaching Leviathan – with strong jamming, for instance – thereby increasing the republic’s chance of victory.

  ‘To stop this sort of pre-emptive-attack scenario from becoming a reality, the two dinosaur powers, almost simultaneously, put Leviathan and Luna into a new standby mode. This was the so-called command-loss timer. From then on, the two signal stations would no longer transmit a detonation command to the antimatter containment vessel. They would do the opposite. The command they now transmitted stopped the vessel from detonating. Each vessel was set to permanently count down to detonation, and only when it received the interrupt signal from its own side would it interrupt the current countdown and start over, until it received the next interrupt signal. And so on. Those interrupt signals were sent in person by the Laurasian president and the Gondwanan emperor. That way, if either side were to be crippled by a pre-emptive strike, the interrupt signal would not be sent, and the container vessel would detonate the antimatter. This standby mode made a pre-emptive strike tantamount to suicide, as the enemy’s continued existence was now a prerequisite for each country’s own survival. The significant drawback, of course, was that this placed the Earth in greater danger than ever. The command-loss timer is the maddest – or in the supreme consul’s words, the most depraved – deterrence strategy ever conceived.’

  A suffocating quiet blanketed the room until eventually Kachika responded. There was an unsteady fluctuation in the intensity of her pheromones. ‘In other words, Leviathan and Luna are standing by for the next interrupt signal right now?’

  Joya dipped her antennae. ‘Two signals that may never come.’

  ‘Meaning that the signal stations in Gondwana and Laurasia have already been destroyed by our mine-grains?’ said Jolie.

  ‘Indeed. Emperor Dadaeus told me the locations of both the Gondwanan station and the Laurasian station. After I returned, I searched for them in the Operation Disconnect database. Because their purpose was unclear to us, we planted only a small number of mines in their communications equipment. Thirty-five mine-grains in the Gondwanan signal station, thirty-six in the Laurasian station, severing a total of seventy-one wires. That number might seem low, but it was enough to completely disable the signal-transmission equipment in both stations.’

  ‘How long is each countdown?’

  ‘Sixty-six hours, or about three days. Both the Laurasian and Gondwanan countdown timers begin nearly simultaneously, and the interrupt signal is usually sent about twenty-two hours after the countdown starts. The current countdown started twenty hours ago. We still have two days.’

  ‘Why is the countdown so long?’ asked Kachika. ‘Surely one or two hours would have been more sensible. In this set-up, if one side launched a crippling strike as soon as the other side reset its timer, they would still have almost three days to dispose of the other antimatter containment vessel by sending it back into space.’

  ‘The containment vessels and the ships which house them are inextricably linked,’ said Joya. ‘Any attempt to separate the two would result in the shutdown of the confining magnetic field and the detonation of the antimatter. Perhaps with concerted effort over an extended period the vessel could be safely detached from the ship and launched back into space, but two or three days would not be sufficient. Dadaeus did talk to me about the time-lag. Mad as the dinosaurs were, in this matter it seems they were uncharacteristically careful. They designed the countdown so that, in the event of something un
foreseen and relatively innocuous preventing the sending of the signal, there would be time to deal with the situation. They were primarily concerned about sabotage by ants, apparently. With due cause, of course.’

  ‘If we knew the exact content of the interrupt signals, we could build our own transmitter and continually reset Leviathan and Luna’s countdowns.’

  ‘The problem is that we don’t have that information, and we have no way of finding it out. The dinosaurs did not advise me of the signals’ contents, only that they were long, complicated passwords that changed every time they were sent. The passwords’ algorithms were stored in the signal stations’ computers. I doubt any dinosaur alive knows them.’

  ‘So the signals can only be sent by the signal stations?’

  ‘I presume so.’

  Kachika’s decision came swiftly. ‘Then we must repair the stations as quickly as possible.’

  18

  The Battle of the Signal Stations

  The station responsible for the transmission of the Gond­wanan Empire’s interrupt signal was located on a barren tract of land on the outskirts of Boulder City. It was a small building with a tangled array of antennae on the roof and looked no more arresting than a weather station.

  Security at the station was lax. It was guarded by just one platoon of dinosaurs and they were there mainly to pre­vent the occasional Gondwanan citizen from inadvertently wandering too close. Enemy spies and saboteurs barely figured on their list of concerns. In fact, Laurasia was more interested in the safety measures at the station than Gondwana was; they had lodged numerous protests with Gondwana, demanding that security be tightened. Other than the guards, just five dinosaurs were responsible for the day-to-day running of the station: one engineer, three operators and one maintenance technician. Like the guards, they had no idea as to the station’s purpose.

  In the station’s control room was a large screen displaying a sixty-six-hour countdown. The countdown had never passed the forty-four-hour mark. Every time it reached that point (typically in the morning), the image of Emperor Dadaeus would pop up on another blank screen. The emperor only ever uttered one short sentence:

  ‘I command that the signal be sent.’

  The operator on duty would stand to attention and answer, ‘Yes, Your Majesty!’ Then he would move the mouse at his terminal and click once on the ‘Transmit’ button on the computer screen. As soon as he did that, the large screen would display the following information:

  – INTERRUPT SIGNAL SENT

  – INTERRUPT SUCCESS RETURN SIGNAL RECEIVED

  – COUNTDOWN RESET

  Then the screen would reset to 66:00 and restart the countdown.

  On the other screen, the emperor would watch these proceedings intently until the reset countdown began anew. Only then would he breathe a sigh of relief and depart.

  For two years, this process was repeated every day like clockwork. No matter where the emperor was, whether in the imperial palace, on tour or even on a state visit to Laurasia, he always called the signal station every day at this time. He had never missed a day.

  The dinosaurs who worked at the station found all this perplexing. They had been told that under no circumstances was the signal to be sent without the emperor’s order, but if the emperor wanted the signal sent every day, he had only to say the word: there was no need for him to personally give the order every day. Even the operators themselves were unnecessary. A transmission device on an automatic timer would do the job perfectly.

  The sixty-six-hour countdown was also most mysterious. What would happen if it was left to run its course?

  The only thing they knew for certain was that the signal was extremely important. The intense expression on the emperor’s face as he watched the signal being sent told them that much. But of course there was no way they could possibly have imagined what was really at stake – that this signal deferred Earth’s death sentence by one more day.

  Today, however, their routine of the last two years was disrupted because the signal transmitter had broken down. Given that the station had been outfitted with equipment of the utmost reliability and employed a high degree of redundancy, with multiple backup systems, it was obvious that this total operational failure was neither accidental nor the result of normal wear and tear.

  The engineer and the technician immediately began to look for the source of the problem. They quickly discovered that several wires had been cut – wires that only ants could reconnect. They attempted to phone their superiors to request an ant repair team, but the line was dead. As they continued to investigate, they found more severed wires. The appointed time for the emperor’s transmission order was now rapidly approaching, so the dinosaurs had no choice but to try and do the reconnection themselves. Unfortunately, though, their bulky claws made that impossible.

  The five dinosaurs grew frantic with worry. Although the phone line was out of action, they felt sure that communication would soon be restored and the emperor would pop up on the screen when the countdown reached forty-four hours. To them, his daily appearance on the screen was as inevitable as the rising of the sun. Today, however, the sun rose but the emperor did not materialise. For the first time ever, the countdown got to forty-four hours and then carried on.

  After a while, the hordes of dinosaurs fleeing Boulder City began to pass by the signal station. It was from these badly shaken refugees that the station team learnt of the situation in the capital. The ants had disabled all of the machinery in the Gondwanan Empire with their mine-grains, including the signal station’s transmitter, thereby paralysing the dinosaur world.

  The members of the station team were nothing if not conscientious and they kept on with their attempts to reconnect the severed wires. But it was an impossible task. Most of the wires were in places that the dinosaurs’ stubby claws simply could not reach. As for the few exposed wires they could get to, the ends kept slipping from their clumsy fingers and could not be joined together.

  ‘Those blasted ants!’ The engineer sighed and rubbed his aching eyes but then quickly did a double-take. There were ants right in front of him!

  It was a small contingent of about a hundred or so, rapidly advancing across the white surface of the operator console. Their leader was shouting to the dinosaurs, ‘Hello! We have come to help you repair the machines. We have come to help you reconnect the wires. We have come—’

  Unfortunately, the dinosaurs didn’t have their pheromone translators turned on, so they couldn’t hear her. In fact, even if they had heard her, they wouldn’t have believed her. Right then, their hatred was all-consuming. The dinosaurs swatted and pinched the ants on the console with their claws, muttering through gritted fangs, ‘Lay mine-grains, will you? Destroy our machines, will you?’ The white surface of the console was soon covered in small black smears, the crushed remains of the ants.

  *

  ‘Supreme Consul, I have to report that the dinosaurs in the signal station attacked the repair team. We were wiped out on the console,’ a surviving member of the team informed Kachika.

  They were standing beneath a small blade of grass fifty metres from the station. Most of the members of the Ant Federation’s high command were also present.

  ‘Send in a larger repair team!’

  *

  ‘Yikes, ants!’ shouted a dinosaur sentry standing guard on the front step of the signal station.

  His cry drew several other dinosaur soldiers and their lieutenant outside.

  A mass of ants was swarming up the step, four or five thousand by the look of it, like a swath of black satin slowly gliding towards them. A number of individual ants broke from the mass, waving their antennae at the dinosaurs, as though shouting something to them.

  ‘Get a broom!’ the dinosaur lieutenant hollered.

  A soldier immediately fetched a large broom, and the lieutenant snatched it from him and made a few savage passes over the step, sweeping the ants into the air like so much dust.

  *

&
nbsp; ‘Madam Supreme Consul, we must find a way to communicate with the dinosaurs in the signal station and explain our intentions,’ said Professor Joya.

  ‘But how? They can’t hear us. They won’t even turn on their translators.’

  ‘Could we phone them, perhaps?’ an ant suggested.

  ‘We tried that earlier. The dinosaurs’ entire communication system is down. It’s been completely disconnected from the Ant Federation’s telephone network. We can’t get through to them.’

  Field Marshal Jolie interjected. ‘I suggest we look back to what our ancestors used to do,’ she said with quiet authority. ‘In bygone years, before the Steam-Engine Age, they would communicate with the dinosaurs by arranging themselves in different formations, to make characters. You should all be familiar with this ancient art, no?’

  Kachika sighed. ‘What’s the use of telling us this? That art has been lost.’

  ‘No, Kachika, it has not.’ Jolie drew herself up as tall as her diminutive height would allow. ‘The unit currently under my command has been trained to form characters. I wanted the soldiers to remember the glorious achievements of our ancestors and to experience for themselves the collective spirit of the ant world. I had hoped to surprise you all during this year’s military parade, but now it seems this training can be put to practical use.’

  ‘How many troops are assembled here at present?’

  ‘Ten infantry divisions. Approximately 150,000 ants in total.’

  ‘How many characters can be formed with these numbers?’

  ‘That depends on the size of the characters. To ensure that the dinosaurs can read them from a distance, I would say no more than a dozen.’

  ‘All right.’ Kachika thought for a moment. ‘Form the following sentences: “We have come to fix your transmitter. It can save the world.”’

  ‘That doesn’t explain anything,’ Professor Joya muttered.

  ‘What choice do we have? It’s too many characters as it is. We’ll just have to try it – it’s better than nothing.’