“I can do more than just talk, you know,” the ant declared proudly.
“Okay,” Amaranth replied. She was already wondering what had been slipped in her iced tea to allow her to hear an ant talk.
By her limited knowledge of ants, she was talking to a regular ant; medium sized (for an ant), with a smooth dark body. She began searching the web on her phone to determine what kind of ant this was.
“I am an Odorous house ant,” the ant self-identified. “If I am crushed, I smell like licorice. But, please, don’t crush me.”
“I wasn’t planning to,” Amaranth promised. “My name is Amaranth.”
“That’s an unusual name. Amaranth. Like the weed?”
“Some say weed, some say superfood,” she replied. “Like some say ants are pests, and others say they are industrious hard workers.”
“Touché,” the ant replied. “My name is Steve. Nice to meet you, Amaranth.”
Amaranth was sitting in a corner booth, fairly hidden from the rest of the small café. The cooks and waiters were watching a soccer game on the television. There weren’t many other people in the restaurant, and most of them were mindlessly fixated on their cell phones.
Amaranth had earbuds in, so if anyone noticed her talking, the rational explanation was that she was chattering with someone on the phone. Not conversing with a small, talking ant with vocabulary and cognitive skills equal to hers.
“Where do you come from?” Amaranth asked.
“That’s your first question?”
“You’re small. You have little, tiny ant legs. You can’t be traveling that far. Yes, that’s my first question.”
“I escaped from the back room,” he replied. “That’s where the lab is. I like to get out from time to time. I don’t like it in there. I don’t like being confined. Even if that’s where they say I belong.”
“There’s a lab in the back of the crêpe place?” she asked.
“Not the crêpe place,” he answered. “The seemingly abandoned building attached to the crêpe place.”
“It used to be an overpriced bookstore,” she told him.
“Well, now it is a secret lab,” Steve illuminated her. “Hidden in plain sight. No one pays it any attention. But they are making super smart ants in there.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Why would you make super smart ants in a secret government-funded lab?” he perfected her question. “We’re proof of principle for intelligence gathering hardware and software. They even implanted little bitty amplifiers and processors in us, so you can hear us talk. My guess is that someone must have secret photos of someone who is stupid rich. And payment for keeping those photos secret is having this little experiment funded. It’s honest graft, though. The experiments are actually working.”
“I can kind of see the possibilities,” Amaranth pondered. “You could infiltrate almost any location. Learn secrets and tell them to your handlers.”
“You’re pretty smart, for a human. That is the plan.”
“Well, you’re really smart, for an ant. Are all the ants in the experiment as smart as you?”
“Only a few,” Steve sighed.
Amaranth cut a small piece of her strawberry cheesecake crêpe off and put it on a napkin in front of Steve. “Do you like crêpes?”
“Oh, yes,” Steve replied. “Especially the sweet ones. We Odorous house ants like sweets.” He began to nibble at the food offering.
“Are there a lot of ants back there? In the secret lab?”
“Quite a few. But not all are as advanced as I am. In fact, I am the only one this advanced. Some of the others are dullards if you must know. I think that my abilities are more due to my being special than the skill of scientists. Some of them are dullards as well, by the way.”
“Dullards,” Amaranth giggled.
“It’s a real word,” Steve said. “It means someone stupid.”
“I know the word,” Amaranth replied. “It’s just that it sounds like ‘mallard.’ Like the duck. I like ducks.”
“Do you like ants as much as you like ducks?”
“I like you.”
“Hmmm,” Steve said. “People have this terrible tendency to like animals they think are cute. And despise the rest of us. Ants are extremely useful parts of the ecosystem. You humans should like us more.”
He went back to nibbling on the crêpe.
“I guess we’re afraid of you. For example, a friend of my mom’s got his arm all bit up by ants,” Amaranth replied. “He had a flat tire, and as he was on the ground fixing it, he inadvertently put part of his arm in a fire ant mound. He was so focused on his car repairs that it took a few moments for him to realize how badly he was being bitten. He had to go to the hospital. They gave him a hydrocortisone cream and an antihistamine. I saw a photograph of his arm. It looked awful. He was in a lot of pain. I wouldn’t want that to happen to me, for sure.”
“Fire ants have an alkaloid venom called solenopsin,” Steve said. “It is very painful. But they were probably reacting out of self-defense.”
“How does this much knowledge fit inside that tiny brain?” Amaranth asked. “No offense. It’s just that you know more than some humans do.”
“Nano-computer,” Steve replied. “Connected to the Cloud and integrated with my ant brain.”
“Do you think of yourself as an ant with a human mind, or a human with an ant body?” she asked.
“What kind of question is that?”
“A valid one,” she answered, a bit defensively. “If I woke up to find my mind hard-wired into an ant body through the Cloud, I would still see myself as human.”
“I still consider myself an ant,” Steve told her. “And a nice ant, at that.”
Amaranth checked her watch. “I have to get going. Maybe you too? Won’t they miss you in the lab, doing some sort of subject count or something?”
“No,” he said. “I hide when they inventory the ant farm. I have a feeling that things could go from weird to worse for me if they knew about my level of advancement.”
“Well, I won’t be telling anyone. So, your secret is safe with me.”
“Who would believe you, anyway?”
“Precisely. Have good evening, Steve.”
“You, too, Amaranth.”
Amaranth and Steve met almost daily. She would sit in the café, and he would crawl up from underneath her table.
“I’m concerned,” she said one day.
“About what?”
“Are you a male or female?”
“That’s a personal question,” he objected.
“Female worker ants can live up to five years. Males live a few weeks and die after breeding. Male or female, Steve?”
“I’m a male.”
“We’ve been talking about a week,” Amaranth calculated. “That’s like twenty years to you.”
“A day is a day long, no matter how many we have,” Steve noted. “But you bring up a valid point. My life is already half over.”
“Do you want to spend your entire life in the lab?” she asked.
“No,” Steve replied. “Some of the other ants are okay with it. No predators, a predictable environment, decent food. To be very honest with you, most of the ants just annoy me. I want more than survival. I want my worth to be more than what I am worth to someone else.”
“Does the colony have a queen?”
“No,” he answered. “They want to keep us alive. So, no queen. That means no breeding, so we have longer lifespans. A few weeks is good for the experiment. Enough time to get data, but not for us to live long enough to become a threat. Not having a queen messes up the hive a little. Lots of ants spend their days just wandering around, aimlessly.”
“I can’t imagine,” Amaranth said.
“Do you want to see the lab?” Steve asked.
“Isn’t it monitored?” she asked. “Locked against unauthorized access?”
“The camera that supposedly surveilles the place isn’t working,” Steve told her. “I heard the human scientists talking about it. They think the dead camera is deterrent enough, along with the nondescript appearance of the facility. And I’ve learned the access code. They don’t cover the pad when they enter it. 08122#003. No one is ever there after 5 p.m. They all have lives to get to. I suppose their work doesn’t qualify as life. One of the differences between humans and ants. Our work is our life. That’s why we all must find something to do. That’s why I found you to talk to.”
“People are a little more complicated than that,” Amaranth apologized. “Sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. Do you enter through the door behind the café? The one marked ‘Deliveries Only?’”
“You’ve already scoped it out,” he noted.
“Of course, I have,” she replied. “A talking ant tells me about a secret lab, what am I supposed to do? I must investigate that. At least a little.”
“Can you come by this evening?”
“I will,” she said. “My Mom has an old lab coat from her research days. I’ll borrow it. That way if anyone does see me, I can claim to be the clueless new lab assistant.”
“Sneaky,” Steve observed. “I like that in you. You seem inclined to rebel against the status quo, in your own shy academic way. See you at about 6 p.m.?”
“That’s our secret lab tour hour,” she agreed.
Amaranth keyed in the code: 08122#003. The door obediently clicked open. She walked in.
She listened for a moment. The building was quiet. No human noises. No one was in the laboratory facility but her.
And the ants.
There was a door with a sign on it that read “Ant Room” in big Helvetica font. That’s all it said. Not even the obligatory “Authorized Personnel Only” was written on the sign.
“Well, nothing says unauthorized personnel can’t enter,” she said as she pushed on the door.
The room was dark, lit only with low blue lights. Fans hummed.
“Pssst!” she heard. “Over here!”
“Steve,” she recognized, following the sound.
“I want you to get me out of here,” Steve told her. “Now.”
“You want me to steal an asset from a secret government lab?”
“I want you to steal me from a secret government lab.”
“Well, that makes it so different,” she said.
Steve was sitting on top of raspberry placed inside a medium-sized glass cage that served as the ant farm prison. She could see other ants: lots of other ants. They were milling around, doing ant things.
That gave her the creeps. She remembered the photograph of her mom’s friend’s arm, eaten up by fire ants until it looked like raw hamburger meat.
“They put the lid on tight at night,” Steve told her. “During the day they leave it askew. That’s how I can come and go before they close the lab down. Be a doll and unlatch it, won’t you, please?”
“Be a doll?” she asked. “Are they teaching you to be spies or pulp magazine detectives?”
“Very funny. Just do it. Please. I want out of here. They’re talking about sacrificing us to check how the nano-computers have attached to our neurons. That means I’m more than half-way done with my life; I’m a day or so away from dying.”
Amaranth unhinged the top, moving it slightly. Ants began to move towards the glass, sensing the gap as the air from the fans circulated into the cage.
“Now pick me up,” Steve asked. “Please – quickly! Just pick up the raspberry that I am standing on.”
Amaranth reached inside, picking up the raspberry. But as she did, she felt ants rushing onto her skin, crawling on her arm, making their way inside her sleeve and up towards her armpit.
She screamed and tossed the raspberry towards a wall, brushing the other ants off her arm. She just kept seeing that image of the fire ant devastated arm in her mind, even if these were not the same species of ant.
Then she remembered: “Steve!” she cried out.
She had thrown the raspberry hard against the wall. Where was her friend?
She found the raspberry, but Steve was not on it. Had she killed him in a moment of panic?
“Steve!” she called. “Steve!”
But no response ever came.
Meanwhile, the ants were crawling all over the place in the dark room.
She despaired of what she may have done as she hurried out of the room.
Days went by.
There was no Steve at the café.
Amaranth watched unmarked movers and unmarked white vans take unlabeled brown boxes out of the nondescript building.
“I’ll never trust the mundane again,” she thought, knowing they were closing a secret lab hidden in the middle of everything.
She felt awful.
She had been given such a unique experience, and in a stupid moment of panic, she had lost her self-discipline and killed Steve. She missed him. Even though he was an ant, he was as good friend as she had. He just wanted to live, and in the end, she had been the one who had taken his life.
She got back home.
“You look down,” her mom noted. “Anything I can help you with?”
Amaranth shook her head. “No. Just a bummer day.” She sighed.
Amaranth went to her room and sat at her desk, taking a textbook out of her backpack.
“Calculus,” a small voice said. “Linking the concept of differentiating a function with the concept of integrating a function. Like ants and humans are different, but you and I have managed to be friends.”
“Steve!?”
The ant crawled out from behind one of her houseplants. “The one and only. You miss me?”
“Miss you? I thought I’d killed you! How are you alive? I chucked that raspberry across the room.”
“A hell of a ride,” Steve acknowledged. “Let’s never do that again and say we did. Ants are resilient critters. Most insects are. Exoskeletons have their perks.”
“How did you get here? To my house?” Amaranth asked.
“I crawled on the back of your shoe when you were looking for me in the lab that night. You didn’t notice me.”
“Why didn’t you let me know you were okay sooner? I thought I’d killed you!”
“Because your mom likes spiders. A fact you didn’t tell me. She lets the jumpers have free range in this place. A bit of a hazard for a scrumptious ant like me.”
“So, where are you living?’ Amaranth asked.
“In your English Ivy,” Steve replied.
“Do you know what happened to the other ants?” she asked. “The ones in the lab.”
“Ha!” Steve laughed. “I ran into a fellow escapee a day or so ago. He said that the scientists thought we ants had figured out how to unlatch the cage. That we’re all genius ants. So, the other ants were all collected – as many as them as possible – and sent to a more secure lab.”
“They weren’t killed?”
“No. They are considered too promising to kill now. In liberating me, you saved all of them, too. Not bad for a girl who gets so skittish just because an ant tickles her wrist.”
“Well, I am relieved that I didn’t kill you,” Amaranth reiterated.
“All’s well that ends well. You know, Doll, regret doesn’t change the past, and anxiety doesn’t change the future. Just some wise old ant advice.”
“Funny that you mention that, because I’m a little anxious about that upcoming calculus exam,” Amaranth replied. “Does that nano-brain of yours really know calculus? Because I have a test in two days and could do with some help.”
“I live for elementary functions!” Steve exclaimed. “Far more interesting than serving some queen and dying after the first date. Hit me with the books! Well, not literally, of course. That could prove disastrous.”
“Agreed,” Amaranth said, opening her notebook. “Figuratively it is, then.”
“You’re never going to tell anyone, are you?” Steve asked. “About the experiment? About us ants?”
“I need my credibility,” Amaranth said. “I may have secret government labs to expose, sometime in my future.”
“Good point,” Steve said. “Speaking of credible rebel scientists, maybe Sir Isaac Newton had a talking ant help him. Perhaps an ant told him to look again that falling apple?”
“The apple story was Newton’s Law of Gravity, not his invention of calculus.”
“Still, doesn’t preclude the role of an ant in either event.” Steve quipped.
Amaranth dug about her backpack, pulling out a small container partially filled with fresh fruit, remnants from her lunch. She put a blackberry in front of Steve. “A piece of my favorite fruit, in exchange for your help.”
Steve sat next to the blackberry. “Sounds fair to me, Amaranth. Named after a weed.”
“Weed? Let’s see what Steve means,” Amaranth said as she checked her phone. “Steve means ‘crown.’ I like that. King Steve of the Secret Spy Ants.”
“Amaranth doesn’t really mean weed; it means unfading,” he replied. He paused, amazed that he knew her name’s meaning. “I don’t know how – or why – I know that. The knowledge must be programmed somewhere in my nano-brain.”
“Maybe you learned that,” Amaranth suggested. “Maybe it was something you wanted to know.”
They started to study, both knowing they only had a little more time together.
They wanted to make it count.
Over seventy of Laura Campbell’s short stories have appeared in Chilling Crime Stories, Road Kill: Texas Horror by Texas Writers Vol. 6, Reader Beware: A Fear Street Appreciation Anthology, and other publications. Laura’s short stories “From the Garden” and “416175” can be heard on Spotify’s “Scare You to Sleep” podcast. Her story “Mr. Highjinks” is featured on the Poppa Redwood Reads YouTube channel. Most of her recent works are available on Amazon. Laura is encouraged in her writing by her children, Alex and Sami.