DISCLAIMER: This story is a lil’ longer than the others.
I appreciate the small things in life, like how my lunch was still in the office fridge, untouched.
I know it was only 10.30am, but I couldn’t help but feel a little bit positive. Would today be the first day in a month that my lunch would not be stolen? I doubted it. I returned to my desk and checked my email. No new mail. As a new CEO of the world’s biggest cloud storage company, I couldn’t believe my luck. Before I could make the most of it, my day took a turn for the worse.
‘The ants are revolting!’ I heard the words, but they didn’t really make sense. I responded automatically.
‘Connor, they’re not that bad. They don’t even smell.’
My humor was lost on my younger brother. He was the newest recruit at Uplift, Cloud Company. The technological boom at the beginning of the 21stcentury had seen the birth of new possibilities, such as the ability to store and access data from anywhere using a cloud service. Fast forward many, many years to the current day, and the only thing Humanity was yet to achieve was uploading the human mind to the cloud.
I wanted to be the pioneer and lead Uplift towards the first steps at achieving immortality, however skewed and imperfect it was. My first action in my new role was to test the process on animals, and so I hired my brother and a dozen of his colleagues from his animal research lab. The results had been outstanding, and the abstract concept became a reality. Uplift had successfully the minds of several species to a central cloud. To further this, we developed the ability to control said minds through a central processor, in essence, mind control. There were scientists working with a wide range of animals, from monkeys to bees. My brother’s speciality was working with ants.
‘No, I mean they’re revolting. As in they’re rising up against the system! It’s anarchy!’
With every word he shook his head violently, his thick, black rimmed glasses were millimeters from flying across the room. My brother had always been animated and quirky, and even though moment’s like these were highly inconvenient, I genuinely enjoyed having him around.
‘Charlotte, I’m not kidding around here,’ he said.
Connor gripped my doorframe to stabilize himself. His scruffy brown hair began to settle on his head.
‘This is an emergency, I’ve lost control of the ants.’
‘Wait, you’re not serious, are you? You’re telling me you’ve lost control of…’ I paused a moment to recall the figures. ‘… billion ants?!’
Out of the corner of my eye I saw a vending machine mysteriously move several inches to the left and stop. I ignored it.
‘It’s not my fault. The central processor’s been hacked! I can’t even access individual ant brains without being locked out. We’ve been compromised.’
I drew my gaze away from Connor’s rapidly cycling facial expressions and stared blankly at my desk. If I told you that a passionate couple who were about to make love on my desk, had done a half sweep of its contents, and then decided that they had better things to do, you’d believe me. My desk was a mess, random piles of things and papers, different colonies for different ecosystems. It always had been that way and always would be. It’s just how I am.
‘So, who do you think is behind this?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know. Could be the MRA, SCD or ARPA.’
I let a little laugh out at my brother’s suggestion. In the same sentence, he had mentioned the world’s biggest terrorist organization, the Soviet’s cyber department and the local university’s animal rights student club. The ARPA consisted of a handful of students, who were more concerned about appearing on social media to be activists than actually being activists.
‘You think terrorists have hacked a billion ant brains?’
I felt stupid for entertaining the idea.
‘If you control the ants, you control the world!’
If Connor was any less melodramatic, I would have been concerned that he had been cloned and replaced. If we stood next to each other, you wouldn’t pick us as siblings. There was about 6 years between us. Growing up, the age difference was awkward. I was too young to feel like I could be a mother figure, and too old to feel like I could relate to him. As his older sister, I wasn’t always there for him, but I was working hard to change that. His ants had been more of a family to him than I, and that made me sad. Connor’s rambling interrupted my feelings of guilt.
‘…what if our own government is behind this?! A conspiracy theory! Jeez, what if they can hear us now?’
The parts of my doorframe Connor had been gripping had become shiny with sweat, his fingertips white from the pressure.
‘Can you please calm down, nothing is happening. Everything’s a conspiracy theory with you though, are you sure that this isn’t just another Garry incident?’
Garry was a colleague of Connor’s who had come across with the lab. You could probably consider Garry and Connor to be arch enemies. It all started years and years ago when some of Connor’s Bullet Ants had killed one of Garry’s Ibises in a freak accident. Ibises were scavengers, birds that were notorious for eating out of bins and aggressively chasing humans for their food. In a retaliatory strike, Gary had let his most aggressive Ibis ‘Stella’ into Connor’s office and she turned the entire place upside down searching for food scraps. Since then, both men have been on edge, suspecting each and everything that goes wrong to be because of the other. Connor’s paranoia is constantly fueled by the presence of the ‘Ghost Ibis’, a lone white Ibis that stares through his bedroom window at night. Only Connor has seen this Ibis.
‘Hmmmm, could this just be Garry messing with you?’
The mention of Garry’s name had a visible effect on Connor. It looked like his legs were giving out underneath him. The vending machine in the background moved another several inches, but this time to the right.
‘I don’t know. No, it couldn’t be. He’d need my access ID code. The only people who know that, are you and I.’
Access ID codes were extremely confidential, they were the equivalent of your digital fingerprint. The only reason I knew Connor’s was because as a favor, I’d upgraded some of his permissions in the company. I wrote it down on an old school memo and stuck it to my desktop screen to remind myself. I looked at my desktop to check on the memo.
It wasn’t there.
I looked to that other place where I put my memos.
It wasn’t there either.
I looked to the other, other place I put my memos.
No memo.
My gut seized up. I froze entirely, except for my eyeballs, which now frantically scanned the warzone which was my desk. My veins turned icy at the realization that I may be to blame. I had lost Connor’s access ID, and with it, control of a billion ant minds, all linked and controlled by a central computer. I spun around on my chair and looked out the window to the street below. There was a car on its side, moving slowly down the street. It was surrounded by a mass of brown and black. People were running and clambering onto whatever they could find. There was a street bin on fire. The chaos looked like an out of control game of ‘the floor is lava’. I turned back to Connor. I’m not sure if he was breathing or not, but he didn’t look well. I felt a little tickle on my leg.
‘I don’t know how this could have happened,’ I lied.
I began to reflect on my three months as CEO of Uplift. Although it had been short lived, I had enjoyed my time. Apart from the time I had given an unknown terrorist organization easy access to a billion tiny soldiers, things had gone really well for me. My reflection ended and panic set in harder than before. I didn’t know how this was going to play out. Would the Government collapse? Would Humanity become the slaves to the ants? I shuddered. I probably should have taken more care with that memo. Connor caught sight of me imploding.
‘Charlotte, are you ok?’
Somehow, seeing me in distress had caused Connor to calm down, reversing the roles.
‘Yeah…I’m fine. Look, leave this with me. I’ll sort it all out and everything’s going to be ok,’ I lied again.
I put on a brave face and my naïve little brother bought it. He gave a little nod and left. I sat for minutes, unmoving until I gained the strength to activate my body again. With a heavy breath I rose up from my desk and walked over my filing cabinet, which had previously been on the other side of the room and not covered in ants. I opened it up and started to pack up my belongings.
Half an hour later, I had collected my most important possessions and packed them neatly into a box. Once or twice, while my back was turned, the ants carried the box out the door, but I very calmly followed after it and returned it to my desk. Lastly, and most importantly, I made my way to the office kitchen to grab my lunch to take home. I opened the door and reached into the fridge. My fingers fell on empty space. I checked my watch, it was at least an hour before lunchtime. I swore so loud that some of the ants next to me did a little jump out of surprise.
The ice which had previously occupied my veins was flushed out with the hot rage that came with having something that was rightfully mine, stolen. On the shelf where my lunch had once been lay a single ant, most definitely cold and dead. I shut the fridge door and spun on my heel and headed for the door. I stopped suddenly. I had stepped on something. Carefully lifting my foot, I saw that I had not stepped on an ant, but rather a single piece of rigatoni pasta.
Curious. I bent down and touched it. The pasta was cold, but the trail was warm. Several paces ahead, I found another piece of rigatoni being carried by many ants. I followed the ants down the hall to find several more pieces of pasta being carried by groups of ants. My heart skipped a beat. Whoever had stolen my lunch was going to regret it. I was a woman with nothing left to lose.
The trail of ants had taken me on a journey throughout the whole Uplift building, down to the basement where my brother and his colleagues were working. In the distance, I caught sight of a rectangular red plastic container being carried by ants into an office. I ran. I burst into the office, my fists clenched and heart pounding violently in my chest.
I found Garry bending down and picking up the container, the ants waiting patiently by his desk. As he sat upright, he saw me glaring at him, holding my lunch. His jaw dropped. I had found our terrorist and evil mastermind behind this, extremely elaborate heist. He had stolen my lunch for the last time. I looked at Garry, and then at the Ibis that sat on his desk, and for the life of me, I could not tell them apart.
I fired him right there and then.
