Living with Them – Part 1

Dave watched the flying drone’s video output on a twenty-four-inch screen that he perched on a shoulder height outcropping of rock in front of him.  It was flying at about three hundred feet of elevation over the landscape in front of him.  It was typical Northeastern US second growth forest; a mixture of conifers and deciduous trees breaking out into overgrown fields, swamps and rocky hills.  But in one of those fields, he could see the tell-tale earthen cone.  It was a hundred feet in diameter. Twenty feet high with a ten-foot round hole in the center.  And sure enough, there were five specimens of Camponotus vicinus gigas.  They ranged from nine to fifteen feet in length and were carrying the remains of some dairy cattle that they must have torn apart.  Sending the drone in for a closer look he saw that one of the ants was transporting what looked like human remains.

Dave geolocated the nest and then released two projectiles that plummeted from the drone directly into the entrance.  They were black and spherical, about six inches in diameter and they popped upon impact and released a cloud of red colored dust that thoroughly coated the entire entrance area.  Dave typed in a report on his actions and attached the geolocated video.  He also recommended that all human habitations within fifty miles be contacted and warned of the nest.  He specifically mentioned the dairy cattle and human predation.  Then he said a short prayer for the poor victim.

The rest of the day was uneventful.  The drone had covered the rest of the area in his portion of the grid and nothing else was found.  When the drone returned, he packed it up and waited for the transport to pick him up.  The transport landed in the clearing where he was set up.  Dave looked admiringly at the huge machine.  It was a two-hundred-foot square hovercraft with armor extending completely around a central deck.  There were guns located on all four sides and powered hoists on booms located in the center of the craft.  One of these booms was lowered toward his drone package and snagged it and hoisted it into the craft.  When it was clear Dave walked over to the closest door on the perimeter and waved his ID in front of the scanner and walked through the opening door.

Once inside he walked across the open deck to the control room and checked in with the supervisor.  The pilot was already starting the engines in order to head to home base.  The supervisor was already reading Dave’s report and said, “That hive is a disappointment.  We thought we cleared this whole sector three years ago.  Maybe the current virus isn’t 100% effective anymore.”  Dave nodded his head wearily, “Yeah, same old story.  Nothing works forever.  Eventually munitions and poison gas are what make the job thorough.  Anything less is just too dangerous.  We can’t have people getting torn to pieces by these monsters.  It’s not right.”

The supervisor gave him an angry look, “Look, we’re making progress.  The safe zone in this area of the grid used to be fifty miles square.  Now it’s five hundred.  We’re winning.  There are bound to be failures.  Stop getting so emotional.  Just do your job and be part of the solution.”  Dave grimaced but inside he knew the man was right.  Mankind had been dealing with the ants for over seventy years and for the last twenty years the tide had turned against the creatures.  Starting at the poles and working toward the equator the ants were being driven toward the tropics.  No one believed they could ever be extirpated from the amazon or equatorial Africa or Southern Asia but it was hoped that the temperate zones could be completely cleared and an effective barrier strategy established.

When Dave exited the transport in Fort Peterson in the White Mountains he headed for the local watering hole and joined up with his friends.  Half of them were miners in the local quarries and half were like him bug hunters for the government.  All being in the twenty- to thirty-year-old age group most of the talk was about where the best-looking women could be found.  But after they were finished lying about their weekends some of the miners were curious to know how the bug hunt was going.

The senior hunter at the table was Craig and at twenty-eight his vast knowledge of the project didn’t impress anyone too much but he attempted to give an authoritative lecture on the theory and practice of bug hunting, “What we’re seeing is a steady and comprehensive rolling back of the infested area throughout North America.  All of what was the Canadian territory except for British Columbia is already cleared.  In the former United States, New England, the Great Lakes region and the Mountain West is clear all the way to Eastern Washington and Oregon, down as far south as Colorado.  Projections indicate ten years will bring us down to the old Mexican border.”

Dave looked bleakly toward Craig and said, “We found a nest two hundred miles south of here that had just finished off the human and bovine residents of a dairy farm right before we got there.  I’m guessing ten years might be a little optimistic.  What have the university researchers published this year, Bob?”  Bob was a former academic who had joined the hunt after he lost his family to an infestation a few years earlier.  Biological modelling had been his field of research and he still had contacts within the bug modelling project.  The small bespectacled young man looked up at Dave and quietly began to talk, “Well Craig is right that we have turned a corner.  In the first twenty years of the war humanity lost essentially the entire human population of the tropical zone that was forty percent of the 2.69 billion people living, about a billion people.  We lost another billion people everywhere else.  After that we only lost another two hundred million over the course of fifty more years.  And this year was the first net population gain.

As far as the bugs.  Initially their population increase was asymptotic.  In the last twenty years it’s levelled off.  We don’t have any hard numbers but we have reduced their territory substantially in the last ten years.  The modelling I saw showed a hundred-year estimate to clear the temperate zones but that’s a low confidence study.  The problems with resistance to the viral agents we’ve been using makes it almost impossible to extrapolate the curves for anything more than a year with high confidence.”

Dave nodded his head, “That’s what I heard from someone in the headquarters this week.  Not particularly cheering.”