Photo by Peter F. Wolf on Unsplash
Before the war in our infinite wisdom we decided as a collective to abandon nuclear, coal, and fossil fuels and to run everything through clean and green technologies - wind, solar, and hydroelectric dams to power our homes and businesses, all synched up to the cloud where we thought that nothing could go wrong. It was hack- proof, they said. People danced in the street; there were quiet tears and infinite hugs when the world had finally listened and embraced green technology. What could go wrong?
We still do not know who struck first. If you believe the talking heads on the news, it was either the Russians or the Chinese, or it could have any number of Muslim worshipping terrorist cells. A lot of them claimed responsibility, but it was said that they did not have the capability to launch an attack of this magnitude.
The Nuclear Electromagnetic Pulse nuclear warhead detonated hundreds of kilometres above the Earth's surface, affecting all of the world satellites that control most, if not all, of our day to day lives.
Flights were grounded. The stock market crashed, and all business grounded to a halt. In further devastation, the deep-sea fiber optic cables that we depended on for our internet were simultaneously bombed. More than 90 percent of Global Web Traffic was affected. Only the lucky few in various governments around the world still had active internet.
The aftermath of these attacks was civil unrest, looting and rioting. The people who voted in the government and wholly approved of these technologies nonetheless blamed the government and demanded the politicians fix the crisis. Our military planes, tanks, and weapons were rendered useless by the attacks – we still had access to our nuclear weapons, as they were not on any cloud grid and were still analogue to avoid such an attack. We did not know who to fire these weapons against. Even before we could, under enormous pressure to find a bad guy to blame, the president was impeached and removed from office and the vice-president installed.
His first course of action was to re-open the nuclear power plants, the desalination plants and the mining industry to begin to mine for coal. Fracking was introduced again to supply the gas homes needed. The new president went even further, cracking down on protestors and jailing dissidents under the Patriot Act. After a while the mass rioting and looting eased, although not completely. There were still some green groups protesting a return to green technology, although no-one took them too seriously. People were happy to just have power in their homes and clean water to drink again.
The year 2049 was when the world changed.
His name is Dr. William Ergate and this is his story.
Ergate grew up in Arlington, Virginia the only child of Sarah and Ernest Ergate. He was small for his age. He didn’t particularly like sports and therefore was shunned by his fellow classmates; he preferred it this way, he preferred his own company and thought his classmates were boring.
He studied hard and his best subjects were biology and chemistry, so he decided to pursue a degree in pharmacology. He was accepted to the Pharmacology program at William and Mary in Virginia. This was his dream college, as one of his heroes, Thomas Jefferson went there.
His specialty was molecular biology and genetics. He did this not to help humanity, but rather the compensation was better than the rest of the fields.
He quickly made a name for himself and excelled in his field. He was praised by his colleagues and professors alike. He was offered a postdoc position at TAN Corporation and quickly rose amongst the ranks when his work on a new drug, OUTLIVEATOL, which regulated the protein that controls aging and slow the aging process, attracted global acclaim. If successful, he would be incredibly rich.
It became his obsession and it dominated his waking life – all of his focus was on this one singular goal. Any external pleasures of the carnal persuasion would have to be postponed until he was rich and successful, and then he would indulge his desires (and oh! what those desires would entail). Until then, he had to be disciplined and get to work (although infrequently he did act on his impulses to relieve his burden, only to chastise himself afterward and throw himself deeper into his work).
That was fifteen years ago. He was still at the TAN corporation working, albeit in a more junior role than he thought he deserved– he was more an assembly line worker than in research and development where over the years he had spent too much of the company’s resources, promised too much and delivered little. He let his ego go unchecked too many times and convinced of his genius and the revolution that his drug would provide, he was given free reign for a while until he wasn’t – that’s when a woman named Sheila McDonaugh filed a sexual harassment charge against him, saying he touched her inappropriately.
This was an outrageous lie, he protested. The way he remembered it was that one day Sheila, always a clumsy woman, was walking past him and stumbled. Trying to stop her from falling he inadvertently put his hand on her chest, and one of his hands was unfortunately placed on one of her breasts. He removed his hand quickly like he had been scolded after she aligned herself again, he did not squeeze or move his hand or anything of the sort. She had even thanked him for helping her, or that’s what he recalled.
After a lengthy interrogation by his superiors, led by his boss Dr. Feinstein, he admitted to Feinstein that he did not know Sheila McDonaugh and that the only time he ever talked to her was when he asked her what perfume she was wearing as it made the lab smell like fly spray. Dr. Feinstein had it in for him, he was sure of it, he was sure he wasn’t listening to his explanation and that Feinstein was jealous of his gifts. Feinstein a man in his late sixties and was still a handsome man; he had kept his hair and only had some greying at his temples. He was very popular with his colleagues, and he kept William Ergate at a distance. He was happy to leave him alone and let him go about his work, although he could not let Ergate and his ego get away with any tomfoolery towards his female colleagues.
Ergate never did find out if his clumsy suburban hands were guilty of fondling Sheila’s breasts. The whole matter was dealt with by the lawyers, and he did not hear anything else about it, although people in the lab started to treat him differently. He seemed to have lost the respect of his peers and colleagues (if he did have it in the first place), he was demoted, and his resource grants were severely affected by “Fondlegate” as he heard his colleagues whisper about it. Ergate was completely disgusted by the whole process, so he cowered away in his lab even more than before.
Time passed. Ergate woke up one day and realized he was lonely. He had decided that he would take a wife if he could find someone suitable. He had some fleeting relationships with women; they were not successful although he took no blame on his part, as it was their inability to appreciate his potential and his incredible gift to mankind, OUTLIVEATOL.
He started to drink heavily when one saint of a woman named Alison had said, quite sincerely, that she believed in him, only to leave him a year later, saying he was too eccentric and that she wanted a simple man who wanted to start a family. She had believed that was what she wanted, not someone who kept complaining all the time about work and the fact that his bosses were idiots and no-one understood the magnitude of what he was trying to accomplish.
That’s when the world changed.
Ergate began clipping his toenails in the lab one day when no one was there. Alison used to tell him how long and disgusting they were – his pride insulted - instead of just cutting them (she even offered to cut them herself one time) he couldn’t oblige, preferring to cast himself as the victim once again as was his wont. In a rare insight, he thought that he should have let Alison cut his toe nails, and then he was sure they would still be together. He tried to call her several times, although she had blocked all his calls due to an unfortunate incident that he did not want to talk about due to its unpleasantness. In the corner of the lab near the vent, the clippings from his toenails were on the floor. Instead of cleaning up after himself he left them there, until some ants had gathered, taking away his toenails to their colony for food.
I didn’t know how I started off thinking, but this is what I thought. I do remember my colony bringing a substance that was made of a tough protective protein called alpha-keratin, which derived from primate’s claws, although I did not know how I knew that or where they would find such a thing and in abundance, judging by the stockpile they have brought in.
I thought it was maybe the day when the research labs had a container leak of radioactive water and it spilled on the floor of the labs is when I started to feel – there it is – I can feel, just ant larva but I can think and feel? Is this normal, can everyone think and feel? How did I know about the radioactive leak? I kept on having these memories that he thought were not his. Although they felt real, I was not sure that they were mine. I was starting to grow bigger and stronger now and I think that was my purpose – do I have a purpose?
I was fed clippings most of my cycle from an egg to a larva to what I was now a pupa – why did I have these thoughts of something not being quite right? I had these feelings of anger and despair and I felt like I wanted to destroy everything and everyone – how can I have these feelings even though I was not alive yet? Was I alive, did I exist?
The lab was empty, and he was eating his favourite sandwich that he had every day – tuna and mayonnaise. Alison used to make them all the time for him and at the time he complained that he wished she would make him something different, but he got used to them and now he couldn’t bring himself to eat anything else.
He felt different today, like a new voice had begun to control his inner monologue. Had it always been there, hidden beneath the noise of his thoughts, or was this a new phenomenon? These thoughts were urgent, hinting at a fantastic passion that seemed to take him by surprise. These thoughts were telling him to abandon his lifelong goal of stopping the ageing process for humanity, these thoughts were telling him to create a virus and to END all humanity.
He let out a chuckle and shook his head.
I grow stronger every hour of the day. I still don’t know what I am but I feel like I am speaking to someone or that I can communicate with some entity on the other side (whatever that may be). I never knew my mother. Did I have a mother? I wonder what will happen when I finally get out of here. When I am born, I will with my brethren seek to vanquish humanity and reign supreme. How can I do this?
Something inside me says that I am half human half ant, and that I will grow to be ten feet tall. I cannot wait to be born. I feel that I have an ally on my side. I just have to figure out who it is. Why do I have two voices in my head? Is that normal? I feel angry and excited, could you be that at the same time? I feel like I am growing stronger all the time, new insights are coming and going through me at a speed that I cannot control and that I feel that I need to try to focus my energies on the voices in my head, and then once I have mastered my voices I will gather my brothers and rise.
Ergate kept on having the same thoughts over and over. It seemed that no matter what he did, no matter what music he would play to distract himself, the same constant narration would be swirling around in his brain. It felt like it was an external voice in his mind that kept telling him he needed to prepare for annihilation, and that he and he alone has been chosen for the task and that, as he was a man of such intellectual power and creativity, only he would be able to accomplish this.
Ergate had found it very hard to go to sleep, his inner monologue was driving him to distraction. Was he finally going crazy? Was everybody right about him? Was he mad? He knew it would be easy to just introduce an element to a virus that they had in the lab and create a bioweapon. This was the dirty little secret, that no-one knew how easy it was for him to introduce this element into the general population, and for it to create panic and deaths akin to the coronavirus epidemic of the 2020’s that eventually killed hundreds of thousands of people before it was contained. The numbers killed by the coronavirus were nothing; Ergate knew that he could create something that could kill a thousand-fold more.
The day is fast approaching when I will be born. It is coming. I can feel his mind breaking and when it does I can control it. Then I will be free.
Dr. William Ergate opened his brown paper bag like he did most days and took out his tuna and mayonnaise sandwich. He looked down and it was crawling with ants. He looked at the sandwich and an anger welled inside him; he started to feel his chest tighten and his eyes moisten. He couldn’t remember the last time he had cried; it must have been at least twenty years ago when his mother had passed away, and even then it took him a few days after the funeral to really let his emotions out. Ergate thought of all the disappointments in his life and all the failures, and he thought of Alison as she was the only woman who had believed in him, although she had left him like everyone had left him. He could not hold the tears in any longer. He wept openly, hot tears streaming from his face he sat dumbly on his stool and wept for everything he had not accomplished and for all the people who had not believed in him. If they had only believed in him, he would have made something of himself and not be the wretched fool that he was, sitting here crying for all the world that he lost. Ergate’s tears still flowing, he clenched his fist and gritted his teeth and then started to violently strike the sandwich. He pounded the sandwich until it was a paste – then his focus shifted and he started striking his desk, trying to kill every single ant that had participated in this travesty that was his lunch. He kept hitting the table, squashing every ant he could find and yelling frightful obscenities into the void as he crushed them. He was still shaking with rage when he stood up and rumbled through his drawers, where he found a can of insect repellent that he had stored away a few years earlier and started to spray the remnants of the sandwich. Then he moved to spray his desk, the floor, and finally the vent above his desk. He started coughing with the fumes that had enveloped him. Ergate sprayed and continued to spray until the whole can was empty.
I am almost ready to be born. What is that smell?
Dr William Ergate left work that afternoon at 13.32p.m. The last time anyone had seen him was when he walking to his car with his hand bloodied and his tie askew, hair ruffled and yelling for the “voices to leave him alone”.
Ergate got into his Hyundai and then drove north on Lee Highway until he took Exit 7, then headed into the Potomac River where six hours later his car was found.
The cause of death was drowning, and during the autopsy the coroner found an inordinate number of ants in his stomach, which had baffled them. How had these ants found their way into his system?
Dr William Ergate did not leave a suicide note, and as he did not have a next of kin, or leave a will, the company out of courtesy to his years of service paid for his cremation. All of Ergate’s research was boxed up as he did not have a mentor to mentee relationship with anyone, therefore no one could or would continue his research.
Ergate’s ashes were not scattered anywhere, and his urn was placed in the boxes with his research and put into storage in the basement level, where it stayed there until it was eventually overrun with ants.
Michael Lafontaine was educated at Macquarie University, Sydney Australia. You can buy his poetry and short story books online.
Professor Michael John Peek is Associate Dean and Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the Australian National University.