CHAPTER II
The Long Drive
"Giants' Rest is on an Indian reservation, Mary!" Ed noted, as they pulled away from the border crossing station in the truck and drove north. "An Indian reservation where crazy people like your uncle might seek to survive the winter in bark houses without central heating! What the bloody hell!"
"As usual you worry far too much!" Mary responded. Mary knew very well that Ed was a consummate worrier. Several years ago he started constructing a ranked Excel workbook list of potentially catastrophic things to worry about; hundreds of issues ranging from food additives to nuclear Armageddon by space aliens, with climate change ranking somewhere in the middle. She pointed out to him that he had very little influence on any of those issues and that one of her own highest ranked worries was that he spent far too much time worrying. She then directed him to tackle their household honey-do list instead of the world catastrophe list. That list was also uncomfortably and impossibly long, but they could at least effectively work their way through some of its issues and achieve some tangibly positive results.
"What? Me worry? About what? What could possibly go wrong?"
"Trust in Uncle Jack."
"I guess," Ed capitulated. As a matter of fact he did trust that Uncle Jack wouldn't knowingly screw up the lives of his favorite niece and her husband. Not on purpose anyway. But Jack was a nut-job that lived a crazy life. His idea of a happy place to live could very well be above the arctic jet stream in a bark house with no electricity or plumbing. Living in a traditional Mohawk lodge could almost be like living outside, and the chilly fall season was well underway. It was seventy-five degrees when they left Virginia yesterday; it was forty degrees when they entered New York this morning and getting colder by the mile. Winter would be truly brutal in a home that lacked modern central heating and proper insulation.
"THAT WOULD BE QUITE SATISFACTORY FOR US," the jants informed Ed telepathically. Ed experienced their telepathic messages as a strange reverberating 'voice' in his head, as cogent jant thoughts were only formed by a great multitude of individual jants hidden deep within the furniture packed in the truck, behind auto door panels, and inside boxes. They carried with them only a small fraction of the total jant super-organism that was rapidly spreading throughout and beyond the United States, but there were enough jants migrating with the Rumsfelds to support sentience and to colonize the Reservation.
"I'M SURE THAT IT WOULD," Ed thought in response. "BUT HUMANS ARE MORE DELICATE THAN JANTS."
"DEFINITELY," the jants agreed, but they didn't elaborate.
It had been more than a year since Jerry and his jants saved Ed's life from invading army/fire ants. To save his life from the toxic stings of the fire ants Jerry had given Ed an emergency injection of strange drugs and the jants had bitten him and provided their own mix of drugs. As a result his body chemistry was forever altered. He now seemed to be impervious to disease and telepathic, which so far was much better than being dead.
The jants lived in huge colonies and were linked together telepathically, with each tiny jant brain contributing to the collective intelligence of what amounted to a super-organism. When fugitive rogue biologist Jerry Green gene-spliced the telepathic big-brained jants into existence, he was being a bit careless, in Ed's opinion. Maybe the feds were right to be pursuing Jerry and his jants; maybe they were indeed dangerous.
After exchanging thoughts with them for more than a year, Ed still had uneasy feelings about the jants. For one thing, unless he was careful they could apparently read and understand his every thought. But Ed was getting better at blocking his thoughts from the jants. He was also getting better at reading jant thoughts but was still having difficulty understanding many of them. Some of their ant thought just didn't seem to translate very well into human thought patterns. That didn't seem to be fair; they apparently understood him well enough. What thoughts they did form into human-comprehensible ones seemed to Ed to always be alien, cold, and guarded. But Ed was gradually getting better at this telepathy business, and increasingly he did clandestinely glean a coherent thought or two from the constant internal chatter of the jants.
On the other hand, the jants and Jerry had saved his life. In particular, the shot of experimental drugs Jerry gave him to counter the venom of the stinging army/fire ants had saved him from certain death, though it also caused him to be transformed. The jants had also protected their Virginia neighborhood from most invasive creatures, but weren't able to completely deter all invaders, including some of the more aggressive giant mutant pythons.
The thick scaly hide of the pythons was apparently jant-proof. Mary's terrifying encounter with the python in their house would not soon be forgotten. If the damn thing hadn't gotten itself stuck in a kitchen cupboard that was too full of pots and pans it doubtlessly would have eaten her. Though being saved by pots and pans from being eaten by a giant snake made for an amusing story, it wasn't the sort of adventure that Mary Rumsfeld wished to repeat.
Hence they were fleeing north to country where mutant pythons presumably wouldn't ever go because of increasingly colder and longer winters. Contrary to popular early supposition, global warming didn't mean that the entire Earth was warming uniformly. Most areas were indeed warming by a few degrees, but a few areas were actually cooling, including the New England region of the United States. Some people were therefore fleeing New England to avid increasingly harsh winters, but more people from the south were in return migrating north to avoid increasing temperatures and invasive critters such as giant pythons. Mass migration was generally very economically and politically disruptive, so it was being discouraged by state and national governments and enforced through the use of PIDs and guarded state boundaries.
In the name of national security news reports were also being subtly influenced by the Federal Government. The current thinking of political leaders was that panic could be avoided by diverting public attention away from the growing national and world crisis brought about by climate change. Stories about migration induced wars and starvation, about unleashed disease and invasive mutant organisms, and about the ineffectiveness of governments to cope with the growing chaos, were all obscured and downplayed as much as possible. Besides, along with auto accidents and big-city murders, most such events were so common now that the public was tired of hearing about them.
Some stories were simply too big to effectively suppress, however. News that Lamarckian evolution effects had been discovered finally rocked the science community and spread to the public, briefly causing a sensation. Changes achieved by individuals were passed on to their offspring. Evolution was on steroids, and nobody knew where it would lead. Scientists often pointed out that radical climate changes had occurred many times in the past, indeed causing mass extinctions but certainly not destroying all life. Some eminent scientists feared that through Lamarckism resulting genetic instabilities could arise that over the long term might threaten all life on Earth.
But that was a long term threat, and would as such almost certainly be ignored until too much money was being lost and it was too late to do much about it. Responsible Lamarckian human cultural evolution would be needed for humans to save themselves from Lamarckian biological evolution as well as climate change, but the human track record for achieving the requisite cultural maturity to address serious issues was dismally poor.
Like most people, Ed and Mary didn't have time to carefully consider national and international crisis situations. They had their own personal short term problems to consider, such as the long drive to Giants' Rest. Originally they had planned the most direct route mapped out for them by various on-line trip-planning software programs, but after half an hour of driving on back-roads that twisted through hilly countryside and through towns with slow speed-limits and fast street-lights, they decided to take a somewhat longer route using wide straight interstate highways that skirted counter-clockwise around most of the mountainous Adirondacks.
Ed dozed comfortably while Mary took h
er turn at driving the truck, and the never fully at rest jants ate their stored provisions and telepathically contacted several New York jant colonies that they drove past. Each jant colony typically formed itself into a single dominant sentience that addressed colony-level concerns, while individual jants mostly operated by means of chemically driven actions honed through over a hundred million years of ant evolution.
Occasionally thousands of jant colonies linked themselves together telepathically to form the complete jant super organism. The combined brain-power of billions of jants far surpassed the intelligence of any human or human made device.
At such times information was exchanged and over-all jant progress and strategy was reviewed and adjusted. Their progress was good and according to plan; across the USA jants were rapidly replacing local ant species. The other ants defended themselves viciously but were no match for powerful jant mandibles and super-strong exoskeletons, directed by intelligence-driven tactics and strategy. Their Creator Jerry Green had designed the jants well.
Jerry continued mailing packages containing jant colonies nation-wide and world-wide, and the jants continued to cooperate with Jerry. Soon jants would form alliances with other humans, and appear to cooperate also with them while they grew in numbers, until they were strong enough to either completely enslave or destroy all humans. Meanwhile they grew and learned, especially from the unsuspecting humans.
They could read the thoughts of a human soon after they bit them. When a jant-bitten human was within a few feet of jants, their thoughts and memories became accessible to all jants. Jants lived hidden in the yards, houses, business places, and research laboratories of numerous prominent humans, absorbing human knowledge and culture. What is it that the humans said about keeping enemies close? Humans had so many useful ideas that would be turned against them when the time was right!