The Great Harvest (Part One)

A Short Story by Lawrence L. Pierson

Chapter One

Six Thousand Years Ago

There had been no major world wide disasters in the last six thousand years, only the relatively minor events that caused a lot of death and destruction locally while the rest of the world continued on hardly noticing. There had been no mass extinctions, and no major die offs until recently. In fact, for four thousands years the planet had been in an equilibrium of sorts where populations of the various species rose and fell in regular cycles. It was only in the last two thousand years that one species had begun to exert it's dominance and the balance was becoming skewed as the population of great reptiles exploded and they began to eliminate all competitors.

But on this day, at the beginning of Spring in the Northern hemisphere, the sun began to enter a very long and radical cycle of change. The energy being emitted and the spectrum of light streaming from the ever turbulent surface began a rapid series of chemical and magnetic changes that would in tern trigger a change in the earths atmosphere, oceans, and more importantly the internal workings that made life possible on the surface. The mixture and percentages of atmospheric gases on the small blue planet were reverting to a time six millenniums in the past, and the internal changes were beginning a subtle reshape of the surface. The earths magnetic field began to weaken and the poles started wandering and became unstable. Other things began to move also, the ground began to shift, slowly at first, but over time it would begin to move and shift and visibly change with noise and rumbles and great electric discharges. The oceans sloshed back and forth as these land movements became more pronounced and mountains rose and sputtered out their fury at the sky. All of these things were a prelude to the coming great harvest.

Each of the mighty beasts of earth had always thought themselves to be the dominant species and over the years large territorial wars had been fought. The giant lizard like creature against the beasts of the air, or the horned beasts verses those that battled with tooth and claw. It was the warm blooded against the cold, and those that dwelled in the trees against those that moved across the earth or that flew through the air. But while these struggles were going on and unbeknownst to these mighty giants, a tiny creature that they hardly gave a passing thought to was secretly the most dominant lifeform on earth. They were the first to notice the changes that were taking place and they knew that there was a great day coming that they had been waiting for, thousands of generations of ants had come and gone but the secret of the time of harvest had dutifully been passed along within each ants DNA. There are over twelve thousand species of ants in the world and more than seven hundred different types. Many of these, like the other life forms on the planet, had fought over territory many times over the years. But now that the time of harvest approached these things were pushed to the side as every species and type of ant began to frantically prepare and work together in concert as one species.

In the first phase the ants moved away from their normal dwelling places and began to built large cavernous structures. They also made use of every natural structure that they could find, they closed the entrances of caves and covered over crevasses. They claimed the abandoned dens of animals at first, and then they started killing the inhabitants of the dens and taking the now empty homes for themselves. In each location the queen would lay special, extraordinarily oversized eggs that would hatch into much different looking types of ants that would perform the same functions as their normal relatives, but they were much larger and more vibrantly colored with starkly contrasting hues. These changes were similar to the difference between a normal grasshopper and a locust, the new hatchlings of ants were successively three sizes larger than the previous phase. One of the eggs from each new phase would hatch a queen, who then would begin to lay even larger eggs. During the third phase the last and largest queen would be hatched.

The Dinoponera are the largest of all ants and inside a gigantic cave in the Southern Hemisphere thousands of these ants were massing in preparation for the harvest. They now ranged in size from the normal three to four centimeters to those being produced by the third generation queen who were over three meters long. Each species of ant had it's own purpose, each type a different job in the harvest, and all over the world colonies of oversized ants awaited the signal for the harvest and for them to begin their age old ritual of cleansing the planet in a grand super cycle of life.

On the first day of the harvest, darkness came to the entire planet. The sun had suddenly went dark and it would not shine again for three days. There also could be heard groaning from deep below the surface of the earth. The magnetic poles wobbled and then settled in a new location while enormous ruptures appeared on the surface with violent shaking and deep rumbles from below. The ants came out of their dens in a rush upon the unsuspecting and disoriented world. Scouts ran ahead and sent back messages of prey or other available sources of food. The warriors scurried to the scene and swarmed over every living thing from the greatest to the smallest. With paralyzing and agonizing stings or with huge snips from razer sharp mandibles they created grotesque and horrifying scenes wherever went. The landscape was filled with views of the massacre, but these horrors did not remain for long as they were quickly cleaned up by the worker ants who took all of the edible leftover remains not eaten by the soldiers and the scouts back to the nest to feed the queen and the young and to gorge themselves in preparation for the next slaughter that was already underway.

While this carnage was taking place among the animal kingdom, the leaf ants and the carpenter ants were cleansing the planet of all plants and wood. Trees were stripped bare and the ground became void, only the dirt and large stumps remained after the ants had passed through an area. Chop, cut, eat, and clear the ground of residue, then move on to a new location to build new nests and clear more territory. On the fourth day the sun began to shine again but it blinked and dimmed and the color was often darker and sometimes as red as blood. Through the strange light those still alive could see that the planet was being stripped clean. Except for an occasional missed seed, or a fortunate creature that had found the perfect hiding place, or the few that survived simply by chance having been missed by the ants completely, little remained after the onslaught of the various varieties of ant armies had had passed through a location.

There were also a few islands that had been devoid of ants before the harvest that had survived along with the ecosystem that they supported. And there were animals that took to the water, or the ice, in order to escape the terror. The great beasts and most of the mammals in all of their pride, were gone now, as were any of the birds that could not find a refuge. Insects too had suffered great losses, only the creatures that lived in the water were protected. But many of the surviving land creatures would soon succumb to starvation, because there was little remaining resources to be shared and every survivor was at risk of becoming the next meal of some other survivor.

The end slowly came for the ants also as the food began to run out. Now, as scarce remaining sources of food were found it was taken straight to the queens to keep them alive as long as possible. But soon the soldiers and the scouts began to die from starvation as their job was now complete, then the workers died, and finally the last of the queens starved to death. All that remained were the normal sized ants who now survived off of hidden stores of reserve food that they had stowed away in places too small for the bigger ants to get into. This preserved them until life began to return again to a new normal. The sun shined once more with its familiar golden rays and the magnetic poles eventually returned to their places and the land masses stood still. The planet was quiet again and at peace, now the long wait until the next harvest began.