Cast Away

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  1. That was one of the last movies I saw before I self-exiled, but it's not the topic today.

    I took the bus to the center of town. Mid-day, not too crowded, so I was able to find an empty two-person seat towards the back.

    I dunno your public transport, but ours is pretty well endo-caged.

    Lots of padded bars at levels convenient to both sitting and standing riders of all heights, so the seatback in front of me had a handhold bar, covered in cushioning foam.

    And there was a person in the seat in front of me.

    But they're absolutely irrelevant to the story.

    There was an ant.

    A very small ant.

    Not a member of the smallest type of ants I've ever seen, but this little lady (side note: if you see them, they're probably female. I thought I remembered that, so I googled it)...

    Google's first response was from an exterminator site. I hope when the aliens visit they'll be guided by the same principles.

    ...this little lady would have been dwarfed by an uncooked grain of rice. If you're the sort who buys "Himalayan" salt to feed to your salt mill, she might have been able to slip through the jaws unscathed.

    Probably not, but alive? Yeah, could do.

    So she was walking up and down the Jesus Handle in front of me. And every couple dozen steps she'd stop, rear up, and look around.

    Definitely.

    Her head and possible the front part of her abdomen would rise up, her antennae would whisk whisk whisk around, and she'd settle back down and resume her trek up and down, back and forth, over the meter-long by 10cm or whatever circumference of the handle.

    Again and again.

    I just kept watching her, wondering what to do.

    She's a creature of the hive.

    She was lost and alone.

    And even if I could catch her, I had no idea from whence she came. Guess wrong and she'd be shredded.

    Or I could kill her, put her out of her loneliness.

    As any civilized society would do to outsiders.

    ....

    She's alone...

    IAIN YOU FUCKING FUCKSTICK WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU ANTHROPOMORPHIZING A GODDAMN ANT?!?!?!??!???!?!?!??!

    Ever see the DARPA Grand Challenge? Autonomous vehicles have to go fucked if I know multiples of their own length without getting lost or catching fire or joining the National Guard or some other equally stupid and implausible thing.

    And they always fail.

    My little Antess, with a total body weight less than that of a skin tag I ripped off last week, could complete that challenge (at scale) with ease.

    Maybe when she lifted herself up and scanned the landscape, she was looking to see if that asshole Jon and his bitch girlfriend Alicia were anywhere nearby. And maybe when she saw that they weren't, she just kept exploring.

    I let her be.

    Fair winds and following seas, my little insectoid sister. Flights of angels speed thee to thy rest.
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