iT TOOK HER SOME TIME to read ayn rand. ants, after all, communicate via pheromones, and finding atlas shrugged and the fountainhead in pheromonic translations is easier said than done. and it could be more accurate to say she didn’t read ayn rand, so much as smelled and tasted her. and what she thought was that ayn smelled and tasted awful, like a rotted flower bud that would make her colony sick.

she, yes, she, because at least three-fourths of an ant colony is female, but also it because it is an ant—and what would ants need with concepts of gender?—but also they because an ant colony is first and foremost a collective, and as a collective, it should be plain they would find the writing of ayn rand putrid and despicable, like a fungus trying to invade their home.

no, she cannot fathom how the human woman touts rational egoism as a good thing. if she could, she would roll her five tiny eyes; no wonder humans screw themselves at every turn! even with so few—a scant 8.2 billion! ha!—they can’t get along. she and her quadrillion kin laugh at human squabbling, their paltry buildings, private holdings, and faulty governments. in what manner they bicker about how to run a society and dare name the ants’ own MOTHER as a “queen.” she has read about human queens, how they live and leech without providing, condemn and punish their own, rise and fall to the whims of the humans’ own workers. these rulers share nothing in common with MOTHER.

to live and work and die for the colony is the only thing to do—and she wouldn’t have it any other way. just yesterday worker #47,091 was swept away by a stream after helping build a bridge with their body so that her fellow ants could carry over a fat grub. even as their sister vanished from view, the rest kept on. of course they did.

what would ayn rand have them do—scatter and leave the colony foodless, defenseless? or worse, have the workers fight among herselves for the last scrap of succulent grub? yes, that is what the humans would do, because a human first thinks of oneself, and she knows this is why they will be a short-lived species. seven million years of evolution down the drain!—the ants laugh, marching on, 150 million years and counting, for there was, is, and always will be a colony to feed.