Introduction to the real world of ants
One of the creatures most
ignored by humans are the ants. This is good, considering that through
the use of this human ignorance the ants have managed to conceal one of
the most technologically advanced civilizations in the universe, not to
mention ignoring the humans right back.
A good example of the way
that the ant world contrasts from the human world is that many of the norms
in the ant world are somewhat different from those of the humans. For example,
in human culture one of the greatest aspirations is to travel in space...
ants have been doing that for more than 200 years, and consider it to be
one of the worst jobs that an ant can get. For an ant, the highest aspiration
is to run around sidewalks randomly seeking discarded chewing gum. In fact,
random gum seeking is a professional sport that is televised. Ants in the
R.G.S.L. (the Random Gum Seeking League), are revered and often do T.V.
commercials.
Another team sport is 36,000
ant "Congalining", where a team attempts to cross great distances in two
directions for no apparent reason. Collecting the trading cards of the
teams can, however, be a real bitch.
In another example of how
ant society is nearly the polar opposite to the human world, most ants
are female. They dominate the society as a whole and administrate every
aspect of ant life through the use of massive "councils" that micro-manage
and make decisions based strictly on the fact that those making the decisions
will not have to be involved in the implementation. Thus it is the role
of the male ants to go out and get squished, killed, blown-up, maimed,
mangled and vaporized while the female of the species tends to the administration
of more critical issues. In general, these administrative councils are
known as "The Merscery" among Cruman ants and "The supreme death administration"
among the Dorrilian ants.
Human scientists say that
most ants are “sterile females”, but none of those scientists have ever
said how it is that they know this. The fact is that one day a human researcher
inadvertently captured a player from the Random Gum-Seeking League’s “FleaNailers”
team whose name was “Strile”. When the captured ant was examined under
the micro-scope, the researcher misread the ants sports jersey as “Sterile
Female” instead of “STRILE” “FleaNailers”. The error was entered into the
researcher’s text on ants which was widely published. From then on all
ant seen scurrying around seeking gum were considered by humans to be to
be sterile females.
A state of constant mortal
conflict exists between some ant societies, such as the Cruman ants, [pronounced
"Krum-in"] and the Dorrilian ants, [pronounced "Door-ill-ean"]. The Dorrilians
are sworn to annihilate all other ants, but they have a special disdain
for Cruman ants. Unfortunately, there are more than 18 trillion Cruman
ants and less than three billion Dorrilians, so it is a daunting task.
| Most
major conflicts between the Crumans and Dorrilians take place right under
the noses of the humans, yet are completely un-noticed. Historic battles
have taken place in patio cracks or on rooftops of suburban homes while
major sea battles have been conducted in small ditches or storm sewers
or even on sewage ponds.
Ants have been conducting operations
in outer space for more than a century and have a very advanced system
of space travel. Based on laws of physics that we humans have yet to discover,
the ants take for granted their ability to zoom around the cosmos, but
are still restricted by that darned warp 55 speed limit.
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