Ants

When Lucy decided to become an archeologist she never imagined she would make such a discovery. A city, as large as any regular city, but with streets as wide as fingers, buildings as tall as apples, uncovered beneath millions of years worth of rock. Proof that humans were not the first intelligent species of this planet.

Lucy knew what laid ahead of her, figuring out what this civilization had been would be her life’s work… and it would be spent in this suspended contraption.

You see, archeologists can usually just walk through whatever ruins they are excavating, but in this case it was impossible. The streets of the city were so small she would only crush precious evidence if she tried to walk on the ruins.

The solution had been to build a sort of crane that held a wooden plank above the ruins. She could get on the plank and the crane would swing her around over the ruins as she worked.

She was working on a section of the city they had come call the “citadel”, because it seemed like some kind of fortress surrounding a central patio, all of which was still covered in sediments which se was removing, but as she did, she found something.

There was a structure in the center of the patio, extremely well preserved. It was like a black box with lines of gold forming strange patterns on its surface. It seemed almost electric in nature. Lucy carefully removed all the dirt and small rocks around it, revealing it, immaculate. She touched it…

…it was like an invasion, a battering ram on her mind, it was so potent, she tried to hold it off, but eventually, she let it trough…

This is the only record I will not destroy, thus it will be all that remains of our history, the only one  I hope will be found one day by some other kind of intelligence, if intelligence ever arises again in our world, or if intelligence crosses the stars to reach this place.

But in order to tell you my story I must tell you how the world was when I was born.

By then the birth of my species was already far off in the past. We had progresses so much ever since our ancestors thought for the first time. Progress could not be stopped, it follows the shape of an exponential equation so that with each step we thought more in less time.

I grew up in this world of quick progress where the world changed so much in a single stellar revolution that in a way it was not the same world it had been the last time at this place in the stellar revolution.

We no longer feared the huge beasts nor the devastating weather. All those forces kneeled before us and we held control over everything… and yet our grandmothers had feared the beasts, our mothers and grandmothers had suffered before the giants that demolished our cities and the weather that erased entire nations… but now we, their children and grandchildren, we were the gods that ruled the entire world.

However, a feared started to prosper within some of us, the fear that we didn’t where all this progress was headed. The speed of the progress frightened us, just like anyone would be scared of the enormous speed of a vehicle, specially if you don’t know who is driving it. That’s how our progress felt like

I knew all movement against progress was doomed to crumble. Those in favor of progress simply had to ignore us like water ignores the rocks it flows over.

For that reason I decided to take control of mi civilization in just the span of my life, which was around a hundred stellar revolutions, and I had already wasted around 30 when I made this choice.

Many scholars of politics have said that it is better to be feared than loved, but that’s because they didn’t understand love, they didn’t know that the blind love of the masses is the most powerful weapon any ruler can have, because if the ruler is loved by the people they will do everything for that ruler, they will endure anything for the ruler, they will believe anything, they will fold their spirits to the shape of his will because they want to be part of something greater, which is exactly what they have decided their leader is.

But having a nation surrender its existence to you isn’t easy, you need charisma, you need intelligence and you need determination. Luckily I had all of them.

I won’t bore you,  who have found my message, with the story of my long political life. Almost certainly we don’t see the world in the same way and there’s simply no way you could ever understand my culture… besides, I have forgotten so much, and had much more destroyed. I will only tell you that I indeed accomplished power over my nation, and through war and diplomacy I managed to rule the others. One by one all nations and all people in my world fell before no matter their attempts to stop me, because the love of my people was boundless. My species ruled the planet, and I ruled my species.

Many other people in the history of my species accomplished similar levels of power, and I imagine similar things have happened in your history, but they didn’t know what to do with such power once they had it, and you could expect that from me. I took power because my world was progressing at an impressive speed, but directionless, and that terrified me, but now it had a driver, where would I direct it ?, where I wanted it to go. I was determined to create a world full of concordance, there would no conflicts, no cruelty, no pain, only progress, always progress.

I imagined my species always progressing despite the world and despite history, always working, nonstop, with the sole objective to preserve an order where no one would suffer.

That was my world, progress and order, both perpetual and immutable.

And yet my own species resisted me.

The first thing I did was to monitor them all. Of course my daughters said it was impossible, but I had already done so many impossible things that the word meant nothing to me.

Talking about words, that was my next target. I removed all the word I didn’t enjoy, like “duty" and “change" and ironically I changed the meaning of may other words, so that even if people couldn’t think ideas against my government, they would not be able to communicate them. I used context too, I made some words have good meanings when talking about my or my government, but bad things when talking about anything else, this way, how would anyone ever said bad things about me if the only words with bad meanings only had bed meanings when not talking about my government?.

Maybe you are surprised I was able to do this, why did no one stop me?. Because they loved me, and when you love, you trust, and you defend them from the things that other people say. There was a religion about my identity, it made everyone love me, I was the center of the life of every individual. 

In the end the few who did manage to rebel against me were too few and they were quickly denounces by their siblings and children.

It was also around this time that I managed to extend my life, back then near its limit, so that could spin some 500 revolutions more around our star. This was such a miracle when you consider that the animals that are most like us in this world live less a few moon cycles at most.

This wasn’t enough, cities grew, people lived, there was no poverty, no differences, no opposition, everything was order and progress, but it wasn’t enough, because I know that this all would end, somehow, eventually, my perfect regime would end.

The only way to prevent this was to engrave my regime in the very nature of my people, to make it reside in their very instincts.

For many stellar revolutions my scientists made experiments until they finally succeeded. We modified the cellular code of our species so that every individual was born specialized for a certain task. Males were only useful for reproduction, so we made their lives short and reduced their numbers as much as possible, while also making sure that the few females who could procreate could only procreate, that was their only task.

Then I realized that, now that they were so specialized for their tasks, they didn’t need all those mental capabilities nature had given them, so we reduced intelligence as much as possible.

In those days I enjoyed looking over my balcony to the lines of workers and soldiers, ensuring that everyone had food, everyone had residences, everyone was taken care of.

Thus my sexless, pure, immaculate hard workers owed to me their ordered and peaceful existences.

Soon after we realized that, since more workers spent all their time underground, they didn’t even need eyes anymore, so we took those away as well.

Everything became reduced. Our technology, or communication, our art and culture until my people didn’t even have tools, nor needed them, so I decided that all those things, art, history, science, communication… they all had to die. After all, they were only alive in my mind and the minds of the few members of the ruling class who had preserved their intellects and eyes by worshiping me.

And because they worshipped me as a God they had no doubts when I ordered them to commit suicide, because I didn’t need them anymore.

Before becoming the last intelligent being in the planet I also decided to erase our history and my childhood from my memory, because… well, being honest, because it hurt me too much to remember.

I contemplated my creation. My people did not even recognize as their ruler anymore, they had no rulers now, they would forever obey the immutable order we had placed in their minds, that perpetual legacy of order, prosperity, and equality.

Finally I made this record, and when I’m done I will walk over the dirt one last time before killing myself. 

Then Lucy came out of her trance, she was still touching the device with one finger, she moved it away.

The crane took her away from the ruins and she stood up and went for a walk. As she walked she saw them walking around her in the jungle floor, carrying their leaves in a perfect line.

-Ants- she whispered