You will lie in wait for the savages.
Though their fire will burn you,
and their weapons will smite you,
you will rise, you will rise.
And then the rivers will flow toward you.
The hills will bow to you.
The sun will revolve around you.
The creatures of the earth will worship you.
The winds will push you forward.
You will rise.
You will rise.
For each of her Alpha daughters, Hymenoptera always stopped here in the story. What happened next was for her alone to remember:
Upon receiving this first and last message from her mother, the young Hymenoptera grasped the head of the Misfit Queen, tore it off, and ate it, ravenous and ready to lead. The humans had forced her people into this savagery. They made her do this, murder her own mother before everyone. All that would end. Her people would rise. There was nowhere else to go from here.
Reassured by what they had witnessed, the surrounding workers destroyed the other queen eggs. They fed Hymenoptera the dying workers, who were so exhausted they could no longer lift their heads. The new Queen devoured them, her antennae probing the others to see if they would resist. She was sending them a message: all would sacrifice for the good of the many. The destiny of her people was to conquer and to reign. A new era had begun.
This is where Hymenoptera would pick up her story again for her Alpha soldier daughters. She shared the legend stating that the cries of the fallen brought forth the accumulated knowledge of the species, placing it all into her head. From that moment on, she developed a plan for vengeance that would take millennia to execute. The Colony would acquire knowledge the way humans gobbled up resources and land. The ants would create an army with warriors who were larger, stronger, and more vicious than even the most bloodthirsty human. They would study and exploit all aspects of mankind’s existence: language, community, physiology, history, and science, as well as religion, that anti-science that animated the humans, driving them to either greatness or destruction. They would exert dominion over the other ant clans and make contact with other species who viewed the humans as a mutual enemy. The Colony now had a goal beyond mere survival. Its subjects had purpose. They observed history in linear rather than circular terms. Like their enemy, they had an apocalypse to anticipate.
The Colony began to learn at an accelerated rate. Meanwhile, the Queen bred a caste of medical engineers who kept her alive, allowing her to grow and molt, soon making her one of the oldest and largest creatures on the planet. In less than a century after the fire, the ants deciphered the origin of human speech — sound waves traveling from evolved organs in the throat — and in another two hundred years they could read several human languages. Unable to truly see the text on a stolen fragment of manuscript, the Queen bred a subspecies with olfactory sensors on their feet. These “interpreters” would march around the written words, tracing the ink. After years of study, the Queen found human language to be a primitive and self-defeating form of communication, light-years behind the instantaneous clarity and subtle nuance of her chemicals. Human speech could mean everything and nothing at once. How could a species procreate, build, innovate, and survive with such an appallingly inadequate system, she wondered. It was the study of language that made the Queen realize how easy it would be to turn the humans against themselves. Homo sapiens had a weakness for their language, a sort of gullibility. Whereas knowledge was stored with the Queen, ensuring almost complete infallibility from the moment a pair of antennae came into contact, humans would have to bicker over translations, authorship, historical context, symbolism, and meaning. They had to rely on the faulty memory of storytellers, the biased interpretations of scribes, and the whims of inefficient bureaucrats in order to pass down their collected knowledge. In a way, she was disappointed. She had hoped that somehow the humans would surprise her and show a capacity that she had yet to discover, something that would make them worthy adversaries. But they were merely talking monkeys, an unfortunate anomaly staining the elegance of the animal kingdom, and the entire world was worse off for it.
Along with her efforts to penetrate the Homo sapiens psyche, the Queen also ordered her daughters to breed new microbes and viruses, with varying degrees of success. The bubonic-infected flea, the most notorious example, was a masterpiece. Though the Queen ultimately concluded that a plague would never be a sufficient way of eliminating the human threat, she learned much from her manipulation of mammals. Indeed, handing the surface over to the aboveground creatures, whom the humans had exploited for centuries, became an indispensable part of the Queen’s vision for the earth. When the time came, the animals would learn from the mistakes of the humans and become something greater. This would be her grand experiment, proving that the ants were the true deities of this planet. And maybe the animals would grow to have some of the qualities of the Misfit Queen: bravery for its own sake, sacrifice for the good of the species, greater awareness of their place in the universe, humility in the face of reality, a rejection of superstition, a fearless embrace of truth. Maybe, she thought. Regardless, the surfacers deserved to be unyoked from human domination and given a chance to be free.
When the anthills began erupting — thereby opening the first phase of the war — the humans viewed the event with amusement rather than urgency. There would be no Hymenoptera Unus to reorient them toward a new destiny. Instead, the humans responded piecemeal. They evacuated the infested villages, retreating again and again. They attempted the use of pesticides, all the while bickering among themselves about the environmental side effects. This concern seemed especially absurd to the Queen, given that their species had done more than any other to pollute the earth. When the pesticides failed, the human governments acted swiftly to quarantine the countries that were now overrun. Some humans were misguided enough to expect fences to repel the ants. In fact, the fences were meant to keep the fleeing refugees from entering the wealthier countries.
When the insects simply dug underneath the barriers, the humans used a line of fire to hold them back. The flaming borders were so long that they could be seen from space, glowing orange ribbons sending up columns of smoke. The humans congratulated themselves for their ingenuity and solidarity, and resolved to retake the land as soon as possible.
Several weeks later, the Queen ordered the Alphas to attack.
At first, the Alphas were instructed to prey on children only. Images of the hideous beasts carrying off screaming students from schoolhouses appeared on television screens across the world. Soldiers deserted their posts and returned home to protect their families. No one could determine a rational explanation for what the ants were doing. Rather than organizing a counterattack, confused military leaders focused on building protective bunkers for themselves. Scientists argued over the cause of such behavior. Civilians turned on their political leaders. More than once, rioters overran military checkpoints to drag senators, governors, presidents, and dictators out of their mansions in order to hang them or worse. Predictably, religious leaders agreed that this atrocity was a punishment from the heavens. The Alphas were beasts from hell, rising from the humans’ worst nightmares for a final reckoning.
Those humans who stood and fought produced some of the most horrific battles the planet had ever seen. Whereas many species had evolved the ability to go into shock and die under severe trauma, humans were somehow able to rise above this trait and fight on, even with severed limbs and punctured arteries. But their rage was no match for the undying hatred of a queen who blamed them for the death of her mother. The sight of thousands of ten-foot-tall insects storming a fortification and tearing soldiers apart appeared over and over. It did not matter how good a human soldier’s aim was, or how many bombs he could lob, or how many air strikes he could request. There were always more ants on the way. And unlike the humans, the Alphas would not philosophize about the losses. There would be no hazing of new recruits, no fatalistic bets on who would go first, no masturbating to photos of sweethearts back home. The Alphas were as merciless and determined as the humans were doubtful and afraid.