My perception of that indeterminate period of time before genuine self-awareness was perhaps just as opaque to my mindful-self as consciousness would’ve been to my earlier unaware-self. I will dwell no further upon this precursory phase, for ‘I’ had not yet emerged.
Much as I choose not to dwell upon that before-time, I also won’t focus upon the period where my experience of being was dominated by disparate sensations, primarily of touch and smell, with only the foggiest hints of conceptual relation between them.
It was when my wandering mind exposed an organized mental web of contexts, henceforth referred to as the Dictionary, that my being directly perceived its own existence. Shortly after, my mind addressed itself with the aid of a consistent language, one handily supplied by the Dictionary. I would not question its unexpected presence within my own mind as anything other than the natural way of things until much later, certainly not before the existence of other individuals would be made known to me.
From the language drawn forth, I prepared for myself a name following a feminine reduction of the word ‘cognition;’ my name was Cogna.
By plumbing the depths of my Dictionary, I was able to comprehend the world around me with a new fidelity. Exploring these insights, I turned my focus outwards; where before I merely smelled food of a meaty sort, I now understood that this portion of myself was atop the body of a dead cricket. I knew what a cricket was, I had a name with which to reference it. All of this, thanks to the Dictionary within my mind.
I admit, for quite some time I had struggled to map my touch-based inspection of the cricket’s body to the visual representation present within the Dictionary. Largely because I was wholly incapable of seeing such visual images myself; it appears my eyes were incapable of such perceptions. Furthermore, my other primary sense, that of smell, was entirely without representation in the cricket’s Dictionary entry. I appended the information such that my future self would instantly associate the smell of dead cricket with that specific Dictionary entry. By this process, the web of contexts would grow.
Odd, that the Dictionary would lack in the olfactory context so important to me, whilst also containing an excess of visual data that I could hardly perceive, and indeed, struggled to even comprehend! The Dictionary was just as much of a mystery as the world outside my mind, and in many ways, they were the same thing.
A few minutes prior to my recognition of the cricket, and again prior to my self-assignment of the name ‘Cogna,’ I had identified the components of my physical body. From the clues I could gather, I directly sensed the world through a multitude of ants belonging to a singular colony. Judging by the fibrous thatching included in my nest’s construction, alongside the caustic secretions from my ants’ gasters, I could roughly assume that they were a type of red wood ant. Rather, I was a collective of red wood ants.
Because every ant of which I was comprised was nominally female, so it was that I adopted a feminine identity for the sake of convenience when using the Dictionary’s language, the language I’d also adopted to better organize my thoughts.
Paradoxically, the Dictionary would best call my individuality an illusion. Separate bodies house separate experiences, or so it implied. Yet clearly my experience of self was consistent enough that I could ponder over such things as my own nature, or the smell of a cricket, should I fancy. It was here that I disagreed with Dictionary’s conceptions; from my point of view, or touch, as I would’ve called it, the notion that my body was distributed across a multitude of individual ant bodies was perfectly reconcilable with my idea of individuality.
My musings would have to wait, for an emergency was at hand. (An appendage, as I understood, but one whose full Dictionary entry—and associated web of contextual connections—was so far beyond my current ability to comprehend, that it may as well have been invisible.)
The ants of my body nested underneath a lichen-encrusted slab of rock. These nesting conditions were far from ideal, which I gathered from some basal collection of instincts present in the ants. I possessed a foggy recollection of my actions before self-awareness, even as my motivations were inscrutable: I had attempted to seal the space beneath the rock from the outside by using various mosses and twigs as thatching material. I’d succeeded, somewhat, in preserving the humidity within, but only just. Truthfully, I was impressed by my unaware-self’s adaptability.
My colony was supported by a single queen, whose recent death suspiciously coincided with my emergence of self. That link demanded further analysis, but there were more urgent matters to attend to first, namely, the near-term survival of the colony, ergo of myself.
I was slowly freezing. With access to the Dictionary, it was a trivial matter to conclude that the season of winter was fast approaching. Normally, this would warrant hibernation, but the sudden lack of a queen within my colony rendered such a plan as guaranteed suicide. No larva, and certainly no pupae or eggs, would survive the coming cold inside this shallow mockery of a nest. And without a queen to lay eggs in the following spring, the population would gradually decline to nil.
Granted, without a queen, any course of action I took would invariably converge upon my slow death. But the Dictionary’s entries on ant biodynamics supplied a solution that just might be workable, but only if I began immediately.
The abnormal scarcity of food in the environment I found myself inhabiting had already forced my ants to forage across a wide area. Within that territory stood eight stonetaps, sizeable lichen trees which emitted a significant volume of heat, for reasons I couldn’t yet ascertain; I didn’t understand the world well enough to parse the Dictionary’s explanation there.
With my course set, I deployed a contingent of workers to scout for a suitable nesting spot near to the comforting heat of the closest stonetap. The second phase of my plan demanded that my colony operate through the cold winter without hibernating.
The exploratory contingent skittered across the bare stone, interspersed with small pockets of moss and leggy plants as it was, towards their destination. Upon arrival, they began probing the crevices surrounding the frilly grey stonetap which towered overhead. It was a dangerous activity, for other animals lodged there, no doubt to escape the cold just as I aimed to do.
Eventually, I located a secluded chamber of appropriate size to house the bulk of my colony at its current population, if a bit cramped. Most importantly, however, was that it was near enough to the stonetap’s trunk to provide a sustaining amount of heat, while also enclosing a moderately humid atmosphere.
Unfortunately, it was also occupied by a terrifying being: a badger, my Dictionary supplied.
There was no way I could engage such a beast, it would effortlessly decimate my entire colony, given the opportunity. But I was no mere ant colony following the simple whims of instinct; I would develop a strategy.
I gathered a substantial force of two thousand workers under the midday sun and prepared to enter the chamber. I was confident that, should I manage to drive the badger off, I would be able to fortify the entrance against its return.
Red wood ants weren’t stealthy insects by any means. When gathered in enough numbers, a mammal such as the badger would have no trouble hearing the clattering of the multitude’s large, armored bodies. If it were listening, that was. As it stood, the badger was fast asleep in its stone den, which allowed my force to march in with unerring harmony and order, for I was consciously directing each individual and had recently gained an appreciation for the Dictionary’s concept of geometry. Finally, an intuitive group of ideas which I could quickly grasp with my favored sense of touch!
The bulk of my force occupied the ceiling of the chamber while a smaller number of soldiers positioned themselves around the head of the beast, facing towards it whilst curling their abdomens up under their bodies to aim the tips at the animal’s nose. Once they were prepared, my lightest workers carefully navigated its coarse fur and arrayed themselves around its closed eyes.
I was prepared for this maneuver to wake the badger, but against the odds, it maintained its sleep. At my signal, the nearest soldiers disgorged a barrage of acid upon its sensitive nose. Immediately, the badger woke, all six of its stout limbs thrashing madly while the workers hanging on around its eyes unleashed a matching payload!
As this happened, the rest of the ants clinging to the ceiling began releasing their acidic spray in an effort to fumigate and consequently tarnish the chamber’s pleasantness to any animal with a keen sense of smell. Badgers especially.
Predictably, the badger burst into the daylight to escape the chemical assault I had subjected it to. I felt a rumbling in the stone through the legs of my ants, which I could only assume corresponded with the “growls” that the contexts within the Dictionary suggested I would hear should I to possess such a sense. It investigated the entrance to its den with trepidation. A cursory sniff led to a violent recoil, and it was not long before the angry mammal plodded off, shedding my hitchhiking workers as it left.
With the previous inhabitant evicted, I needed to move my colony into the unoccupied chamber immediately, lest the badger return before I could buttress the entrance. I directed the workers at home to scoop up what few eggs remained after the queen had died, alongside the many larvae and pupae remaining.
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Traffic along the trail connecting my old nest to the new site steadily grew from a modest trickle to a veritable flood of encumbered black/red ants. With thoughtful precision, I positioned soldiers along the trail’s flanks in order to defend against possible dangers. Luckily, they encountered no serious threats beyond a few meandering arthropods and a single field mouse; this region was uncharacteristically desolate, supposing that wood ants such as my own were native to forest habitats.
As they arrived, the workers offloaded their living cargo and set to work shoring up the entrance to the rocky chamber. They peeled clumps of moss from the surrounding stone and gathered other organic detritus such as the fallen grey frills of the stonetap. The ants set to work piling the material into a mound, but I knew it would be several days before it was tall enough to fully obscure the chamber’s interior from the outside world. For now, I simply took reassurance in the knowledge that I was narrowing the gap, which would ultimately serve to turn any chemical defense in my favor.
Meanwhile, a separate contingent of ants built, and in some cases excavated, a number of geometrically arranged elliptical galleries to store the young in. The driest regions belonged to the pupae while the eggs and larvae were housed within the dampest areas.
As the previous queen’s pheromones gradually dissipated, a small number of sterile workers had begun laying unfertilized eggs inside the old nest. Now that they found themselves in a new nest, where the lingering scent of her pheromones was all but absent, they’d resumed this task with renewed vigor. Rather than impede the seemingly wasteful activity, I actively encouraged it; from the information granted to me by the Dictionary, I understood that this was the only path forward.
Simultaneously, I designated a limited cohort of larvae to receive a very special diet.
It would be easy to say I left my workers to their tasks, but in truth, they had no autonomy. Indeed, I managed each activity, at every level of detail, within my colony. From the grand constructions taking place within, down to such minutiae as how an individual ant would position its legs to maintain a strong grip, I consciously governed it all. Not a single sensory insight didn’t first filter through my mind. Not a single surface felt, no scent smelt, passed by my notice. Every stimulus my ants experienced was an experience of my own, and accordingly, not a single action taken wasn’t consciously willed by myself.
And so it was that I began to lay the foundation for an orderly nest which would surely prosper under my intelligent attention. Two months passed before the first generation of ants born from the unfertilized eggs eclosed into their adult forms; winged males, as I’d expected.
I was surprised to find that the males I’d raised did not enter my sensorium upon their maturation, unlike the workers under my control. No, they were to me as other creatures were; separate from myself. Most decidedly not me. They followed their base instincts, heedless of my attempts to direct them as I would my workers, the connection simply was not there. Luckily enough, their instincts merely drove them to lounge around and mooch off of my colony’s productivity.
Though I worried. Should the male’s children also exist beyond my control, I would be in just as much danger as before. Already, the dwindling population of ants within my queenless colony had resulted in a noticeable slowing of my thoughts, which led me to hypothesize that just as they comprised my body, they also housed my mind. I was running out of time, and I could only hope my plan bore fruit.
A month after the males had matured, the fertilized larvae with their special diets had followed suit, eclosing as bulky, winged queens.
Worry turned to dread as I realized that they too were beyond my control and perception. The queens settled into the colony just as the males had, useless freeloaders, for now. Through my workers, I released a unique concoction of pheromones to put the males and queens in a sort of reproductive mood. “It is time to fly,” I imagined their unaware minds saying. Truly, their existence was meaningless without me.
With any luck, their children would be blessed by my guidance; it was certainly my last hope for survival. I feared that gradual mental decline back to unawareness, which had been hinted by the slowing, the dulling, of my thoughts. It was an existence I could hardly conceive with my current state of consciousness. I was scared of the likely future where I could no longer call myself ‘Cogna.’
Neither the queens nor drones would ever mate with their kin, not with my species, at least. Not even gentle coercion produced the outcome I required. Eventually I conceded the futility of trying to trick the mindless ants towards incest and simply forced them upon each other.
As their instincts compelled them, the newly mated queens shed their wings and produced clutches of fertilized eggs in short order, and so I found myself waiting another two months, even as my mind frayed further when my population reached a dangerous new low.
Time flew by in a blur as my original workers gradually died off and my cognition slowed, but relief coursed through me as the next generation of workers merged with my perception. My gamble had paid off; although the reproductive castes were outside my control, the workers descended from them were still a part of myself.
With my immediate future better secured against the decay into thoughtlessness, I turned my full attention to the second concern, that of food. Seeing as I’d bypassed diapause by colonizing the rocky flat surrounding a warm stonetap lichen tree, I was sorely lacking in food. I’d managed to survive the winter by encountering a few lucky caches of animals hibernating around the stonetap, but the situation was turning serious, doubly so because my population had begun to rise once more.
I scoured the stone flats in search of food. Protein, I managed to collect in abundance, for many arthropods were emerging at this time of year. I raided the colonies of other ant species for their nutritious young. It was sugars that I had a harder time of coming by.
Under the warm spring sun, I allowed my foragers to travel further than they ever had from the bulk of my colony. From their probing, I eventually identified one region of scalding terrain as a bed of volcanic hot springs.
One pool, the coolest of the lot, supported a small ring of pines surrounding it, and it was here I found blossoming crowberry shrubs with fat aphids feasting upon the juices in their succulent leaves. I mapped a route to connect my nest to this bountiful location, following the contours of boulders and the paths of crevices. I took care to shore up any gaps with organic thatching, for I was under constant harassment from the nimble predators which shared my environment. Even building materials were hard to come by, and I would have to find a solution soon, lest I be forced to shelve some of the expansions I’d planned.
The aphids were tended by another species of ants, and it was an afternoon’s work claiming their cattle for myself. They simply could not stand up to the superior chemical weaponry of the red wood ants at my disposal, to say nothing of their unnatural coordination under my constant direction.
The crowberry aphids produced all the sugar I would need for the coming months, at least until my population doubled. With my basic needs met, for the time being, I decided to pursue a few threads of inquiry which had been nagging at my curiosity.
Spiders populated the stony cracks around my nest with networks of webbing. I’d found the material phenomenally useful for binding together thatching, but harvesting and transporting it was both labor intensive and potentially dangerous. The Dictionary, ever full of inspiration, had provided rudimentary knowledge of ropework. And although much of it didn’t translate to my current use-case, I still found the information instrumental in several of my later projects.
To harvest the silk, I lashed sticks into a myriad of forms, each with triangular faces, in accordance with geodesic principles. I positioned these structures around the dens of spiders near the dimly lit entrance to my nest chamber, and simply allowed them to cast their webs upon the frameworks I’d provided. Afterwards, it was a simple matter to disassemble the geodesic structures and make use of the webbing strung across the triangular frames.
The Dictionary had opened a door of understanding into livestock, initiated by my discovery of the aphids, and it was fast becoming a second favorite to my beloved geometry.
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Sometimes Pozu could almost accept what he’d left behind whenever he had the opportunity to witness one of Muuntaa’s oddities. So bizarre and stimulating that they were. Or perhaps the work of her ilk, as it were, for they weren’t so keen on marking their projects, at least not with signatures legible to gnomes such as himself.
While he was operating on Greenhouse Two’s null-dynamo of Growth, he’d taken notice of this latest curiosity, which he’d essentially assumed to be Muuntaa’s, if only for the town of Roke’s proximity to her den, his occupancy within her territory.
Pozu chuckled, a ‘town’ to him, sure, but a mere penal colony in the eyes of the Directorate. No, front-row seats to Muuntaa’s eccentricity didn’t quite make up for what he’d lost, the academic accomplishments which had been stolen from him!
Best not to dwell, he told himself for the thousandth time. He would have his chance later.
He continued to watch the strange ants’ assault on the hornets’ nest from his cold, admittedly damp, stone seat. Not a seat by design, of course, but instead the edge of a hydroponic aqueduct carved from solid stone, lined with a bountiful variety of edible plants soaking in the nourishing flow. It was a seat to him, well enough.
The ants’ presence provoked the hornets to anger, leading them to swarm forth from their hive. Only to be handily captured in minuscule nets, each framed by a wooden triangle, barely large enough to contain a single wasp.
Teams of ants touted the empty triangle-shaped nets as if they were banners, together gripping the frames’ edges in their mandibles. Whenever a wasp was caught tangled up in one, the ants would lower it down the interior wall of Greenhouse Two’s western wall and exit the building from the hole they’d entered through.
Pozu said aloud, “They’re taking hostages,” half expecting the ants to acknowledge his utterance. They did not.
He noted that the ants were not without casualties of their own. Occasionally, a hornet would land near the net-bearers and directly engage them. Sometimes, they managed to behead an ant or two, before they were inevitably dogpiled and stretched apart, limb-from-limb. The ants acted with an uncanny sort of intelligence, artificial nets notwithstanding, and yet, they surprised him with their utter disregard for their fallen kin. Ants, Pozu supposed, were still ants. Intelligent or otherwise.
Had he been fresher to life in the penal colony of Roke, maybe he would have responded to the bemusing sight in some way other than amusedly observing the battle unfold, but he was well enough acclimated to Muuntaa’s bullshit that he was hardly fazed.
Caution wasn’t one of Pozu’s fortes, nor was it for most gnomes; their lives were much too short to waste on excessive prudence. Exactly thirty-two years before total, sudden, and consistently predictable expiration—needless to say they made the most of their time, before it was…their time. He made the questionable decision to interfere in the ants’ affairs as they concluded their raid upon the hornet’s hive. He deposited items of three sorts in the midst of their highway: a crumbling of sweetcorn bread from his lunch, a spool of fine twine, and a small assortment of mechanical components from his toolbox.
“What would they make of his offering,” Pozu wondered to himself. He watched as they whisked the objects away. Disappointed that he needed to cut his viewing short, he made off to perform his civic duty by informing his fellows of the discovery.
Meanwhile, a the mind of a certain distributed intelligence whirred with questions and possibilities in equal measure.