My dream

[james_davis_nicoll]

I mentioned this somewhere else, yes.

There is a supercolony of ants in Spain, all descended from one female recently enough that they react to each other as though they were from one colony instead of the millions they actually have. They've been obliterating all the other ants in Spain.

In my dream they hit some critical number and gained mass consciousness. Their first action was to consume the human population of Spain in a few hours. When I woke up, the supercolony had figured out how to talk to humans and was explaining that the incident in Spain was a fluke that would not be repeated. You see, they'd figured out the benefits of "herding."

Comments

[batwrangler.livejournal.com]

Since ants herd aphids naturally, that makes perfect sense.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Agggh! That's not helping!

[mayakda.livejournal.com]

I am sensing you do not like ants.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I don't like being chewed on by ants or at least I haven't on the occasions when it has happened.

[mayakda.livejournal.com]

So, did you ever see that old Tarzan (Johnny Weissmuller) ep with the army ants that were eating everything in their path -- elephants, rhinos ... :)

Nope

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I tried stamping some Brazilian army ants* into oblivion as a kid. Not recommended. It runs into two problems: you can't crush all of them and stamping on some seems to piss the rest off.

I am very happy I was wearing shoes that day. I very easily might not have been, since I had a bad burn on my foot.


* Or ants I thought were army ants. We were probably too far south for real army ants, but these were swarming out, eating everything in their path as I was led to believe army ants should.

I saw some kind of harvester ant denude an apple tree in the course of an afternoon.

[pauldrye.livejournal.com]

Would this be a bad time to mention "Leiningen Versus the Ants", then?

[samildanach.livejournal.com]

That was one of the cooler short stories I remember reading for class in elementary school.

[j-shelbourne.livejournal.com]

And the movie is an interesting lesson in adaptation in the 1950s, complete with romantic subplot and all.

[boywhocantsayno.livejournal.com]

The people of Spain cannot be obliterated - they just legalized same-sex marriage (either yesterday or today), and they must be allowed to fulfill their function as an example to Benedict XVI that Catholics can be open and accepting of alternate lifestyles without the ground opening up and everything going up in a ball of flame. Oh, and there's that whole sticking-it-to-the-American-government thing, too. ;)

Move your dream elsewhere. Portugal, or Italy, or someplace like that.

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

I thought the supercolony was in northern Italy and parts of Austria and France.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

That's the thing about powerful non-human agencies. Human agendas do not concern them.

[thesaucernews.livejournal.com]

Perhaps they've been intelligent for countless ages and have been herding us for millenia... gathering us up from the fields and into cities and stacking us higher and higher like cans of Spam. They're so smart they've convinced us it's all our idea, this 'civilization' thing, and when a few thousand of us just sort of disappear now and then, well, who's really going to notice?

It's not as if you can hear the sound of chewing under the street from all the traffic to begin with.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

You've been channelling the Doctorow/Stross borg, haven't you?

(See also "Appeals Court", pub. Argosy #2)