Читать книгу Micro-Humanity - Lippi Daniele, Daniele Lippi - Страница 8

CHAPTER 3 – SURPRISE

Everything was fine. Not perfect, of course. Perfection does not belong to humanity but mankind had never been closer to it at that time.

Until a strange thing happened. Something that nobody had expected. Something that changed everything forever and turned hope and joy into terror and fear.

It all started on a very normal late spring day in the refunded city of Angkor Wat. Two maintenance teams had been called by observers and sent together with a platoon of soldiers to check for strange reports detected by the instruments from the nearby power plant. Little more than extraordinary maintenance. Two teams of ten maintainers and a platoon of forty soldiers. Everything absolutely normal.

The maintenance teams boarded their transport drone, the soldiers theirs and the convoy was further escorted by four more defense drones. Standard procedure Nothing abnormal. The journey was uneventful. A couple of birds were driven away using the eagle call — a day’s work, it always happened. When they arrived at the plant, they landed on the roof. From the roof, the maintainers and the soldiers went to the control room. There, they identified the source of the abnormal signal. The maintainers thought it was the usual mouse gnawing wires. A team of maintainers and half the platoon of soldiers were sent to fix everything. Weapons were set up on ultrasound for mice. As always, mice were easily chased away, wires repaired, sprinkled with a brand new miraculous mice-chaser substance (they were the ones that caused the most damage) and they all went back to Angkor Wat. Everything was all right.

As soon as they returned, however, they were called back by the observers: the problem had reappeared immediately after their homecoming. They promptly left again, as per protocol.

Back at the plant, they observed that the problem was no longer caused by mice but by ants. Myriad of ants that had gathered around the wires that they had just repaired. These ants behaved in a strange way. Never before had there been ants that had shown an interest in electrical wires. At least not in such a compulsive way.

Soldiers armed themselves with specially designed (and successfully tested) pheromones throwers that were going to divert the ants far away, thus giving the Maintainers time to do their job. This time it did not work. For some reason, the ants seemed much more interested in the wires than in the powerful pheromones that had been just sprayed.

The Sergeant Commissar in command decided to change tactics by ordering his men to take up Greek fire: a very powerful acid that ignited in contact with the air and that promised to consume any living thing it touched in a few seconds. Burning ants running away were also going to burn the traces of pheromones left behind by the insects themselves, cutting the path that the others followed to get there.

The soldiers went down inside the plant and began to shower the ants in acid from an elevated position. The insects immediately caught fire and began to move convulsively in all directions, as expected. The smell of burnt ant pervaded the structure. Thick, acrid smoke rose. The soldiers continued their work until they finished the stocks in the cylinders and calmly waited for the result. Many of them had done it before and only a couple of new recruits were looking forward to the result. A result that baffled both soldiers and Sergeant Commissar. The ants had not run away, dispersing but seemed to have anchored even more to the wires until they had died.

The alarm went off in the soldiers’ helmets and visors. Ants approaching. Greek fire was over. Pheromones were ineffective. The Sergeant Commissar took up the automatic rifle and ordered to retreat. He had already dealt with ants before and knew all too well that they could get the better of some of them but not of all the approaching swarm.

At the same time, the hysterical voice of the maintenance workers shouted desperately that the wire had been melted and that the flow of power towards the city had almost been interrupted. If they did not do anything, the power reserves of the city were not going to be enough, not even for a week.

The Sergeant Commissar considered a heroic deed. He turned around. He saw the ants and escaped. He ran faster than he had ever done in his life but the ants were faster. His men were mowed one by one. When he reached the maintenance workers, he found them torn to pieces and their bodies at the mercy of other ants that were already taking them away to feed their colony. Somehow, the Sergeant Commissar managed to get on the only still intact drone as the ants were also raging against them. Such a behavior had never been seen before since drones were not food for them.

The Sergeant Commissar went back to Angkor Wat to report and raise the alarm. They thought him to be the cause of what was happening, because of his order to use Greek fire, so he was immediately tried by the martial court and sentenced to death.

Two battalions were sent to the station to solve the situation but none of them ever came back. The ants were too many, too resistant, did not know fear, and did not care dying.

Meanwhile, worrying reports from explorers talked about swarms and swarms of those insects: they seemed to be converging towards the city.

Drones loaded with almost all the reserves of synthetic pheromones were sent to trace a path impregnated with such substance that would drive them far away, to the territory of a large termite nest so that the two breeds of insects would decimate each other. A tactic that had always worked.

However — believe it or not — it was not the ants that followed that track but the termites.

The high command of the city thought this was positive. Ants and termites were still going to come into contact and so the war between the two types of insects — that had been going on for millions of years — was about to continue. Maybe a little closer to the city gates than they had hoped for, but better than being attacked by that horde of ants.

The yellow alarm was lifted and everyone resumed their lives, happy that their leaders had solved the situation.

Nature, however, is unpredictable and has a thousand ways to amaze us such as ants and termites marching together side by side without touching each other as if an absurd, improbable alliance had been declared between them.

The following day, power ran out. The emergency generators came on and were going to be enough for three days at most. Every citizen, who had served as a military, was called back. All the others were given the order to evacuate. Transport drones were stormed by panicked crowds. The spirit of survival caused scenes of cruelty that had not been witnessed for decades. It was soon clear that transport drones were not enough. Solidarity and spirit of brotherhood perished at the mercy of selfishness. In the end, only slightly less than a quarter of the population managed to embark.

The drones rose like a swarm of large insects. This drew flocks of predatory birds of all kinds that targeted them. All the assault drones were sent to protect the transport ones as well as the guns of the giants era were pointed towards the sky shooting down the birds of prey. The transport drones — also protected by the defense weapons of the nearby airport — managed to reach it and from there to get on one of the huge giants’ planes reaching safety in Phnom Penh.

Those who remained in Angkor Wat had no other choice but fighting. The ancient and huge weapons were aimed at the approaching swarms but the ants were mostly jumped into the air and not killed by their large calibers that could not stop their advance. In due course, the ants arrived and the first line of defense was swept away almost immediately. The defenders of the first line fought to the end and each of them killed at least a dozen ants and more, but the latter were so many that they eventually won.

Ants and termites seemed unstoppable, overwhelming every block and each barricade they were faced with, and after not even a day of battle the few survivors were crammed into the tower of the southern district, the only one defended by flamethrowers, the sole weapon of the giants’ era that seemed to be truly effective.

Ants and termites went on attacking despite everything, but just when the gas and gasoline reserves that supported the flames of the flamethrowers were about to run out, the insect tsunami stopped. An unexpected joy began to spread among the ranks of the survivors. Some expressed it almost hysterically, others — more cautious and superstitious — dared not give it a voice. A wise choice as a slight hum anticipated the dragonflies’ arrival.

In a few moments, they took away, torn, and threw down from the tower the defenders who were outside or lurking in the windows. Some of them entered through such windows, wreaking havoc of many humans before being shot down.

The defenders closed the windows and sealed them using steel bulkheads, thus trapping themselves inside the tower. They sent the umpteenth requests for help via radio in the hope that aid from the capital could arrive in time when the tower shook and ants began to emerge from under it. Resistance was futile and extermination was absolute.

That was the beginning of the Cambodian Syndrome — also, and more commonly, called Gea’s Revenge — that is, an inexplicable but continuous attack on humankind by insects. It had started with ants but soon many other species of insects had come together in this absurd war and, from that first time in Angkor Wat, their attacks had quickly multiplied, spreading wildly all over the globe.

Insects — and this was an even stranger and crazier thing — not only attacked human settlements but also automated systems which humankind depended upon, such as farms, power plants, plantations and they did so by cutting wires or penetrating inside robots, corroding their circuits.

Many did not resign to the lack of answers for such attacks and pursued and often made up hypotheses — of which unfortunately they were persuaded — such as plots by other states, or by some sect, or by some secret order that had developed a technology capable of controlling insects, or even the long hand of the aliens who, now that we had shrunk, no longer saw any use in us, and so on.

Actually, by that time, the only sure thing — besides the scientific and war effort of all humanity in search of a way to stop these continuous attacks — was the certainty that everyone was going to be attacked sooner or later.

To date, more than three hundred years after the big small step, the most affected states had been India, China with the whole Far East, as well as Indonesia and Australia and in that part of the world only Japan seemed a port more or less secure. Africa had also been devastated, Southern Europe was suffering more than northern Europe. The real tragedy, however, had taken place on the American continent: South and Central America had been completely overwhelmed and humankind entirely swept away from those lands.

Many, indeed almost all the fugitives from such lands had taken refuge in Texas, in Last Flame, perhaps the last stronghold against the advance of the insects that came from the south, destroying every human settlement in their path.

Last Flame had been built, or rather moved, in the middle of the country’s last oil plant and all its defenses were based on it. Eight ditches had been dug around the city where oil burned nonstop. Dozens of oil-powered flamethrowers had been placed between one ditch and another. Every citizen capable of holding a flamethrower had been equipped with it and, for months now, ammunition factories had been operating at full speed as well as those making respirators and gas masks. Yes, because — although virtually impregnable — Last Flame had a problem created exactly by what protected it: the toxicity of the fumes exhaled by oil.