The Little Ant with the Criminal Mind (10/25)

(10/25 @ 10/23) The little ant with the criminal mind felt exhausted from always guessing what other ants were thinking, whether he was doing what the colony wanted him to at any given moment.  How did you ever really know what the colony wanted at…ever?  The other ants all seemed to know all the time, or at lthe very least they never seemed to worry about it.  Sometimes it was the will of the colony that an individual ant should die.  And most of the time it seemed that the ants that died were those that were not doing the will of the colony at that moment, who had lost the picture, who had lost track of the pheromones, and they were then almost immediately done in by some foolish mishap or as often as not, by their fellow ants.  The other fatalities tended to be the ones carried off by predators and one could only feel sorry for them because it seemed to have little to do with the will of the colony.  The colony.  Now he was kidnapped into an alien colony where there was no expectation that he be able to read what the will of the colony was for him.  He was now and henceforth perforce an atheist – he no longer served any god.  There was no communion with a being greater than himself that was intimately concerned with his own personal well-being and the furtherment of his genes and the furtherment of the success of its own genes along with all the rest.  He was spiritually adrift, and for him, in a very big and personal way it was very liberating.  He still felt horribly lonely, but at least there was a reason for it other than that he must be fundamentally and irreparably broken or suchlike.  Now it was natural that he be lonely – it was no longer his fault – he was adrift amongst aliens with whom he could barely communicate and whose customs and language he barely understood.  He was at peace, a kind of peace the like of which he had never known.