The Colony—An Underground Megacity of Nightmare Efficiency
Aya had spent her entire first day as an ant coming to terms with three horrifying realities:
The crushing realization that her new life was somehow even worse than her soul-devouring office job.
The terrifyingly efficient work culture that made the worst human corporations look like lazy summer camps where everyone got participation trophies and free cake.
The absolute disaster of trying to "talk" in pheromone language, which mostly resulted in her screaming into the chemical void and broadcasting pure panic, awkwardness, and something dangerously close to "I think the Queen is overrated."
But none of that could have prepared her for what she saw next.
No amount of overtime, unpaid internships, or soul-crushing PowerPoint presentations could have readied her for… this.
Her newly ingrained worker instincts—stupid traitorous things that they were—compelled her deeper into the abyss. She was caught in the tide of her fellow workers: an endless, flowing river of chittering legs and twitching antennae. Every movement was choreographed, flawless, synchronized to some invisible pulse of colony-wide productivity. There were no slackers. No backroom gossipers. No one secretly scrolling through BugTube in the corner.
Aya's antennae spasmed, overloaded by the sheer density of pheromonal communication in the air. It was like being on every Slack channel at once, while also listening to ten managers yell into ten megaphones about ten completely different emergencies.
Then, rounding a tunnel corner, Aya stopped in her tracks.
Her tiny mandibles dropped open.
This wasn't a nest.
This was a city.
No—worse. A megacity. An underground insect utopia of precision and horror.
It sprawled endlessly, a vast subterranean world hewn from dirt and instinct. There were highways of hardened earth where traffic flowed faster than Tokyo during rush hour. Elevator shafts that used living ant chains to transport food and materials between levels. Overhead, workers scurried upside down along ceilings, delivering pheromone mail with terrifying speed.
Everywhere she looked, things were in motion.
And none of it made any sense.
The Nursery Chambers
She was first funneled into a sector known only as the Nursery. Aya had imagined maybe some cute baby bugs and a soft, damp bed. What she got was a pulsating, twitching chamber of horror.
Eggs. Larvae. Pupae.
Thousands of them.
They squirmed in mass clusters, their pale, rice-grain bodies writhing in silent unison. Nurse ants moved like surgeons on fast-forward, cleaning, feeding, shifting the newborns with careful precision. Aya had never seen something so simultaneously wholesome and horrifying.
"Is this what a bug maternity ward looks like?" she muttered instinctively, before remembering she didn't have vocal cords anymore.
One of the nurse ants looked at her. Its gaze felt… judgmental.
Aya promptly fled.
The Food Storage Sector
Next, she found herself herded toward the food chambers.
It was a nightmare buffet.
Piles of scavenged materials—dead insects, crushed leaves, sticky organic goo, and chunks of something that might once have been a squirrel (she didn't ask)—lay stacked in disturbing symmetry. Conveyor lines of ants marched tirelessly, hauling food in perfect rhythm. The scent here was putrid: part decaying sweetness, part raw death, all concentrated misery.
Aya recoiled so hard her legs tripped over themselves.
Her instincts screamed at her to help. Her soul screamed at her to leave.
But no one left.
You worked, or you got worked over.
The Resting Chambers
"Oh thank the stars, a breakroom," Aya thought as she entered a dimly lit burrow humming with stillness.
She was wrong.
This wasn't a breakroom.
It was a pit. A massive, heaving pile of unconscious ants collapsed on top of each other like a horrifying game of buggy Jenga. They twitched. They snored. One of them was probably having a dream about chasing sugar.
Aya hesitantly joined the pile, curling her legs in. She lasted four seconds before some ant twice her size drooled on her back.
She fled again, traumatized.
The Communication Halls
A long, winding corridor filled with sentinel ants spraying messages via pheromone bursts into the air like living printers. Aya tried to "read" one of the messages and ended up learning how many calories were in the last dead centipede someone had eaten. Another signal talked about cleaning mandates and the urgent need to sterilize tunnel 43-B due to a mold outbreak. Another said: "Glory to the Queen or die trying."
She shuffled away quietly.
The Queen's Chamber
She didn't even need to see it.
Just thinking about it made her entire exoskeleton tremble.
Every whisper about the Queen was laced with reverence—and pure terror. The Queen was an unstoppable factory of eggs, and the heart of the colony. Her guards were monstrous things, hulking and sharp-jawed, bred for one purpose: protect the Queen or crush intruders into paste.
Aya caught a glimpse of one such guard—a red-armored soldier twice her size—marching past with the kind of presence that made her want to play dead forever.
The Future Queen Chambers
No one spoke about these chambers directly, but Aya could feel the hum of reverence from the workers that passed near it. Were they grooming successors? Performing strange rituals? Eating the failures?
She didn't know. She didn't want to know.
Some doors were better left metaphorically—and literally—sealed shut.
And then, amidst the crawling horror of her "first-day orientation," realization dawned on her.
This was an office building.
A twisted, dirt-covered skyscraper of doom.
Except there were no water coolers. No sick days. No paychecks.
And instead of getting fired…
You just got recycled.
She was starting to panic again—pheromone signals leaking out that smelled like "panic attack in progress"—when she felt a chill. Not just fear. A signal. Something alien. Darker. Wrong.
She turned a corner and saw… it.
The First Horror
A group of ants were gathered in a shadowy alcove. It wasn't part of the standard sectors. It smelled wrong. Off.
Aya crept closer.
And then she saw what they were doing.
An ant—smaller, weaker, twitching—was on the ground. Wounded. It looked like its back leg had been crushed by a collapsed tunnel.
The others weren't helping it.
They were eating it.
Not cruelly. Not angrily. Just… efficiently. Like a team of coworkers slicing up a leftover birthday cake, except the cake was screaming.
Aya froze, chemical terror exploding off her like bug-sweat.
No one blinked. No one hesitated.
And deep in her mind, the system approved.
🔔 Notice: Worker deemed unproductive. Nutrient recycling in progress. Efficiency increased by 2.4%.
Aya backed away. Slowly. Carefully.
She realized she was shaking.
Cannibalism.Cannibalism was an employee benefit?!
And this was only Day One.
She had a hundred more questions:
Could she survive without becoming protein paste?
Was there a transfer option to a friendlier species?
Did the colony offer dental?
But for now, all she could do was keep moving.
Because the colony didn't wait.
Not for anyone.
The Retirement Plan is Death. And Death Means… Dinner.
Aya had just finished a particularly humiliating shift of moving ant poop.
Yes, you read that right.
Ant. Poop.
Apparently, even hyper-efficient megacolonies didn't have automatic sanitation. So someone had to carry the tiny turds to the compost chambers, where they were recycled into weird fungal paste that doubled as insulation and emergency food. Gross? Absolutely. Necessary? Unfortunately, yes. Aya didn't even have the dignity of a shovel. Just her face. And her back legs.
She had never been so intimately involved with feces in her life.
So when she finally dragged her smelly, traumatized little body down the main tunnel, her only thought was, Please let me collapse somewhere non-poop-adjacent for five seconds.
And that's when she noticed it.
A subtle shift in the rhythm of the colony. Something off in the pheromone-saturated air. Like a record skipping in a song that was supposed to be perfectly looped forever.
A worker ant had collapsed.
At first, Aya tilted her head. "Oh wow, break time?" she thought, her poor fried brain short-circuiting with hope. "Wait. Should I be doing that too?"
But then she realized.
It wasn't break time.
It wasn't resting.
That ant… was dying.
Its legs twitched weakly. Its thorax was sagging inward, like a deflating balloon. Its mandibles chattered silently, like it was trying to scream in a voice too small for anyone to hear. Its antennae flickered, broadcasting only static—no orders, no pheromone commands, just raw, blank confusion.
Aya froze.
A heavy silence (well, ant-silence) settled over the nearby workers.
For one terrifying, gut-wrenching moment… it looked like they were mourning.
Until they weren't.
They swarmed.
Without hesitation. Without ceremony. Without emotion.
A wave of worker ants descended on the fallen one like a flood of black armor.
Aya's first thought—bless her innocent, formerly-human heart—was, Oh, thank God, they're helping it! A medical team! Maybe there's a sick bay! A healing protocol! A union rep!
Then—
CRUNCH.
A spray of hemolymph—ant blood—splattered across the tunnel wall.
Mandibles sliced. Legs pinned. Heads bent.
They weren't helping.
They were eating.
Aya's soul evacuated her body.
Metaphorically. Spiritually. Emotionally. Possibly literally.
The dying ant let out one last twitch—barely a shiver.
Then… nothing.
Just meat.
The surrounding workers didn't slow down. They didn't hesitate. They stripped it clean like it was just another item in the lunch rotation. It was horrifying. But it was also efficient. Perfectly timed. Perfectly executed.
And totally normalized.
Aya stood paralyzed in the center of the tunnel, her antennae flaring wildly as her brain short-circuited for the third time in a week.
"NOPE. NOPE. NOPE. WHAT THE ACTUAL BUG-FLIPPING HELL?!"
She tried to scream. Nothing came out.
Because, surprise!
ANTS.CAN'T.SCREAM.
And worse?
ANTS.CAN'T.VOMIT.
So she just stood there, shaking, as her so-called coworkers casually committed workplace cannibalism two inches away from her face.
At that moment, Aya's mind did something tragic.
It connected the dots.
She imagined her future in the colony.
• Endless labor• No promotions• No health benefits• No sick leave• No weekends• No retirement parties
Just… collapse. And then lunch.
Her stomach flipped. Except it couldn't. Because ant physiology.
Was this their HR department? Was this their version of an exit interview?
"Thank you for your years of dedicated service! You may now be consumed by your peers in a celebration of nutrient efficiency!"
No warning. No ceremony. No gravestone.
Just crunch.
Her thoughts spiraled. Rapidly.
"If I trip one day… if I fall behind… if I so much as limp—"
"They'll do this to ME."
"They'll eat me while I'm still warm!"
The horror was so complete, so profound, so hilariously overwhelming, that her antennae began broadcasting high-frequency panic signals. So much so that one nearby ant turned, sniffed the air, and briefly twitched in confusion.
Aya immediately cut the signal and stood stiff as a corpse.
"ACT NATURAL. BLEND IN. DON'T GET FLAVORED."
She tried to walk away.
Her legs were trembling.
Her steps were awkward.
The others didn't care.
They had finished the body and were now divvying up the parts for processing. A piece went to the protein chamber. A limb was passed toward the larva feeding halls. The mandibles? Probably turned into tools or art. Or decorations for the Queen's next mood board.
Aya felt something inside her snap.
This was worse than any office job.
This was the ultimate corporate dystopia.
Where your body was the severance package. Where loyalty was rewarded with digestion. Where your coworkers didn't just gossip behind your back—they ate it.
And worst of all?
There was no escape.
Aya turned and bolted down the nearest tunnel. She didn't care where it led. She just needed to be away from the feeding zone.
The pheromone signals tried to stop her. "Return to task." "Sector deviation detected." "Efficiency drop imminent."
She ignored them.
Her mind was filled with one singular, panicked thought:
"I need a plan."
"I need an exit strategy."
"I am NOT going to die and become someone's post-shift protein bar!"
And somewhere, far deeper in the colony… something watched.
Not the Queen.
Something older. Something stranger.
It noted Aya's deviation.
It noted her independent thoughts.
It noted her panic.
And it was very interested.
Pheromones Are Still a Nightmare
Aya had seen a lot in the last few hours.
Crushing labor. Psychological breakdowns. Cannibalism as corporate policy.
But this?
This was the moment she finally broke.
She needed to scream.
To cry.
To curl into a fetal position and sob uncontrollably for at least twenty minutes while hugging a stress ball made of something not exoskeletal.
But she couldn't do any of that.
Because screaming? Crying? Human-level emotional outbursts?
Ants didn't do that.
Instead, ants had pheromones—the most terrifyingly misunderstood communication system she'd ever been cursed to use.
So when Aya's mind erupted in pure, unfiltered panic…
Her body translated it into:
⚠️ DISTRESS SIGNAL INITIATED. HIGH PRIORITY.⚠️ SEVERE THREAT DETECTED. SEND REINFORCEMENTS.⚠️ EMERGENCY: CODE MANDIBLE-RED.
Five soldier ants burst into the tunnel like armored security guards at a high-stakes heist.
Massive. Bristling. Gleaming mandibles sharp enough to decapitate a beetle in mid-air.
They didn't walk.
They stormed.
"WHERE IS THE ENEMY?!"
"WHO'S UNDER ATTACK?!"
"IS IT THE SPIDERS?! I SWEAR IF IT'S THE SPIDERS AGAIN—"
Aya, still emotionally malfunctioning, backed up in a panic."NONONONONONO, it's just me! I was just emotionally dying! Please don't murder anyone!"
But her stupid ant body wasn't syncing with her human thoughts.Instead of sending a calm, reasonable explanation…
Her antennae spasmed.
Her thorax shivered.
And out came another, even stronger pheromone message:
🚨 DANGER LEVEL MAXIMUM. ATTACK INCOMING.🚨 ENEMY FORCE NEARING THE COLONY CORE.🚨 PREPARE FOR WAR.
The effect was immediate.
The soldiers' pupils (if they had any) probably dilated.
One let out a war screech so intense it made the tunnel walls vibrate.
Another slammed her mandibles together like a pair of castanets made of pure rage.
Suddenly—chaos erupted.
Drums (yes, they had dirt drums) echoed down the deeper tunnels.
Emergency pheromone broadcasts shot through the colony like emergency sirens.
"Threat in Sector 3!"
"Mobilize reinforcements!"
"Defend the Queen!"
"Eat a snack first if you're feeling faint!"
Aya looked around in horror as an entire militarized response protocol launched around her.
Dozens of soldiers poured out from side tunnels.
Barricades made of living ants formed at key intersections.
Even the nursery ants started preparing the larvae for evacuation, stuffing them into soft dirt sacs like wriggling rice dumplings.