[ WP ] Ants have a telepathic link to all members of their colony . It 's so specific that , as the colony grows , so does it 's collective intelligence . One such colony has become so massive that it 's about to break a major intelligence threshold .

It began with a picnic. 
 
 For almost three decades - long enough for five generations to chew through their birth-shells with new mandibles - the hill of the white leaf and the hill of the long shadow had been locked in an unending war, skirmishing back and forth across a long sandy spit that stretched between them. 
 
 Whenever one side gained a slight advantage in territory, their overextended supply lines made them easy pickings for an enemy counterattack erupting from tunnels behind the front lines. Over the years the sand had shifted constantly, built and rebuilt into long fortifications as fractal and complex as those of the western front during World War One. 
 
 Not that either side's combatants had heard of that war, or had much understanding beyond the list of behavioural imperatives that drifted over to them on pheremone-scented breezes. _Dig. Fight. Scavenge. Die_. 
 
 Since the sandy area between the colonies was relatively barren and nutritionally valueless, wherever the lines of battle were set no side truly had the advantage, since the agricultural base of both were roughly equivalent. Until the other colony was taken, no gain could be realised, no advantage fully pressed. 
 
 And then one day, a passing family on a long road trip through the mountains happened to stop for their lunch nearby. Scorning the picnic tables on the other side of the road, they set down their blankets and ziplock bags right across the sand. It was early spring, not quite fighting season, and the ants were sluggish and less visible. But at the scent of such a rich source of food hordes of worker ants from both sides spilled out of the colonies, relentlessly following their genetic imperatives. 
 
 Disgusted by their new-found company, the family quit their picnic. But in their haste, they left fully three quarters of a fruit pie behind, its crust spilling out of its foil contain onto the ground. 
 
 Crucially, the pie was a few metres closer to the hill of the long shadow. 
 
 And that, in the end, made all the difference. 
 
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 Greyjaw was one of the older ants, so known for a slight discolouration that had spread unevenly along the left side of her mandibles as she passed into her fourth summer. Sometimes she could remember, vaguely, a time when she had n't had a name; when none of them had. But as the world-tasting chamber at the center of the colony grew fuller, filled with more of the special ants they called now the repletes, she had felt her sense of self grow, like a soap-bubble on the edge of a much larger one. 
 
 Sometimes, when her day was less full than usual and she could spend a few minutes in the upper tunnels soaking in the warmth of the earth, she let her mind wander over such matters, trying to find in her memories the point where her sense of self slid smoothly apart from the constant throb of the colony's imperatives and stood alone. 
 
 Mostly, though, there was far too much to do. Like now, for instance, as she stumped through the tunnels down towards the world-tasting chamber. Her hindleg joints were beginning to ache more and more now, and she could sense that a few years ago, or perhaps in a different colony, she would have spent an increasing time in the upper tunnels, using the warmth to ease the stiffness. 
 
 But ants were different now, she thought with something like wryness. _All_ the ants were different. Whatever the world-tasters were doing, it was leaking out into all of the white leaf ants, from worker to queen. 
 
 At the tunnel that led to the chamber she was stopped by a burly soldier, waving oversized mandibles to flag her down. She noticed that he, or someone else, had daubed a white pigment over his thorax. Greyjaw had noticed a few of the soldiers doing that. It was a young ant thing. 
 
 She waited patiently while he scented her and finally let her through into the chamber. 
 
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 It was a - sight? sensation? - she could never get bored of, entering the chamber. First, there were all the sensations she felt in herself, in her ant-body: The endless rows of repletes lining the walls, their abdomens swollen with the memories of smells and of the outside world, the vaguely-luminescent edible fungus that lined the walls between them, casting a dim purple light. The fungus had not grown in such quantities until the first repletes had been born, she remembered, but now it was all they ate, in some kind of complex feedback cycle. 
 
 But on top of her own bodily impressions, there was the welcoming wave of... _ant-ness_ that washed over her, the feeling of a much larger mind that encompasses and simultaneously _was_ her own. She was not just aware of the chamber, but also herself entering the chamber, and of the tunnels above and around her, the individual ants like tiny pinpricks of light in a miniature galaxy. 
 
 And, far to the west, the baleful presence of the hill of the long shadow, with the dim, flickering lights of its aggressive colony of idiots, pre-world-tasting ants. 
 
 It was a source of considerable pain to Greyjaw and the replete hive-mind that the hill of the long shadow lay in darkness, and that its residents could not be brought into the light of world-tasting together. 
 
 Not just because of wishy-washy feelings of wanting oneness for all ant-kind. 
 
 But because for the first time in generations, the unthinkable was happening. The hill of the white leaf was starting to definitively lose the war. 
 
 

