Лю Цысинь - Of Ants and Dinosaurs

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 from 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.

‘Minister, the scan is complete. No abnormalities were detected.’

The ants in the lungs felt the air pressure drop dramatically as the dinosaur breathed a sigh of relief.

‘This is your third elective scan of the night, Minister, and the third time the results have come up as normal. I really do think you are worrying too much.’

‘Worrying too much? What do you fools know?’ The minister’s voice was extremely agitated now, the vibrations it produced reaching almost fatal levels for the stowaway soldier ants. It was lucky for them that they were no longer in the eardrum danger zone. ‘It seems I am the only clear-headed dinosaur in the whole of Gondwana. Everyone else carps on and on about the Laurasian threat, pouring all of their efforts into preparing for nuclear war with the republic, and yet the real enemy is quite literally under our noses – inside our blasted noses, probably – and it appears I am the only one who understands that.’

‘But… none of the scans we’ve conducted over the last few days have shown any abnormalities.’

‘I wonder if your machines are working correctly.’

‘There shouldn’t be anything wrong with the machines, Minister. We’ve tested all of the scanners in the imperial infirmary. And this time, as per your instructions, we borrowed a scanner from another big hospital in Boulder City. The results have all been identical.’