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The Apple store “pinged” the GPS in my iPad-mini and gave me the coordinates to find it.

When I did, the battery was shot but it was otherwise okay. I’d passed through a forgotten Idaho town on my way to Seattle and didn’t notice my pad was missing until the next coffee stop in Bend – more than two hundred miles away. But I couldn’t just leave it, so there I was.

Behind the counter was the pretty owner that’d slipped me a free muffin because of something I said in passing. Bethany or Beth, I wasn’t quite sure, liked the idea that I always looked for the Starbucks wherever I stopped – and then bought coffee from the nearest local place still in business against them.

A day after that encounter, the six-square-inch pad was just lying on the counter, where I must have stashed it while distracted. I remember thinking she was too young to be the boss of the place and turned the thing off while I put too much sugar in my coffee – again, distracted. The screen was a little dusty, with what turned out to spilled sugar – but that was all. She was surprised to see me until I picked up the pad and waved it at her. We both laughed when she asked if I wanted “the usual”.

I sat down in the place that couldn’t have more than ten customers a day and hooked into the AC. The self-diagnostic ran as Beth delivered my coffee. Then, without me doing anything, this message popped open on the note pad:

“I don’t deny that it’s brilliant, they get full credit for an amazing bit of genetic tampering but I wonder, if anyone is really wise enough to dabble with such things?

One decade after the turn of the century, four men (two Germans, a Frenchman and an American) devised the scheme. This is the first large-scale project and, if you look at it strictly from their point of view, it is a miracle in service of mankind.

Klaus Rell and Rene Dussard engineered a change in a small portion of the genome of a common African Army ant.

I’m sure you’re well aware of the common ant – the one that leaves those tiny pyramids of sand, even up through the cracks of the sidewalk. You’ll never find a cleaner sand than that either. Each grain has been sculpted to size and licked clean of all contaminants – and the ones that you’ve seen – those

are the discards. The workers quickly and carefully choose, carve and muscle into place, each grain to make a seamless, “natural” tunnel which can stand up to years worth of heavy traffic, and they do it all by instinct.

Dussard was the first to propose the idea. No one took him seriously until he manufactured the company logo – in grains of table salt on the American lab manager’s desk. He poured out a fast-food packet of salt and a small dish of ants. They quickly built the design and returned to the container. That was all it took to convince everyone else. The instinct part of the gene-map could be rewritten, apparently at will, to have the workers construct any form desired.

Instead of making tunnels, these little six-legged pests could be programmed to separate gold from ore, clean carbon from gasoline engines... even cart off radioactive debris. True, in the more toxic environments, a single ant would only last a few minutes, but hundreds of thousands of them could be put against a single task and who would weep for a dead insect? Or even a billion of them? This could finally be the answer for Chernobyl!

But a test was needed. Something obscure but useful, where no one would question it too closely. So here, spanning a chasm that Knievel would have shied away from, is the final fruit of their labors in that test: The Snake River Keystone Bridge.

Where the Snake and Owyhee rivers carve a deep gash in the edge of Idaho, state highway 78 carries a couple hundred vehicles a day through the Owyhee Canyon – halfway between Boise and the Oregon border. The worst bit of that road is now straighter and safer because of a keystone bridge.”

I stopped reading as Beth passed by to refill my cup. That’s something else you’ll never get at Starbucks. We shared a smile, but nothing else. I was drawn back to whatever it was I was reading. Some sort of e-book, no doubt... but from where? When I looked back down I realized this note hadn’t been just typed into the pad. It was in the system memory. It was as if this document were an app of some kind and it engaged the auto-translator function that I thought I’d removed a couple months ago – because it never quite worked. I swiped onto the next page and, after a moment, text in English appeared:

“Looking at it from my perspective, I don’t know that someone like you would even think of it as a bridge. It is a single, four-lane wide, plank joining one former hairpin turn of the canyon to another. There are no braces, no arches, no suspension wires, and no latticework of steel beams – just a solid shaft of stone that now bridges the most treacherous part of the trip.

Nine hundred trillion ants, laying down one microscopic grain of quartz or feldspar at a time, built it all. And they did it in just 66 hours, connecting to the original roadway during a one-night detour the American had arranged with no more than a couple lies.

Layering their nearly molecular sized stones in an interlocking pattern based on the fractal from which granite is formed, they laid out the roadway. Tiny warning bumps for the lane edge markers and large, smooth shoulder guards – even the lighter-colored lane dividing-stripes where inlaid. Woven layers, grooves and stones increased traction and allowed water to pass straight through – in one direction only. There was also a slight cupping of the surface that would make driving over the edge virtually impossible. The roadway is perfect... and the ants? They had a special self-destruct feature built into their new “instincts” as well.

The impact on the natural environment always being of concern, the genetic program was further altered to allow the ants to safely feed – on the previous generation as they expired. Once the bridge’s pattern was complete, all the ants would turn to cannibalism, eventually leaving just one. Due to the accelerated metabolism – developed so that the road could be built in the shortest time – a hundred or so of generations were needed to build the bridge. Only one generation was needed to dispose of “the waste” and that took but 6 hours after construction was complete. But, as someone might have predicted, in a hundred generations, evolution does take a hand and, who can say what might become of the one altered ant left behind.

The unfortunate part of this whole affair is, as I said at the outset, in manipulating the genome of even a simple ant, mankind doesn’t really know what it’s getting itself into, or letting itself in for... that’s also the reason for this, rather long-winded, note. You see I’m pretty sure those unquestionably brilliant scientists never intended, well... me.

By the way, thanks for the sugar.

So, until we meet again,

Dorylus"

I thanked Beth for the coffee and made sure I packed the pad in my shoulder bag this time. But the strange story continued to bug me until I arrived at my new job in Seattle.

It’s a good job with the biggest of computer companies and truly brilliant coworkers... some of whom look at me a little oddly when I pull out my Apple-based tablet. That’s why I’ve only shown the note to one of the top lab guys. He's positive that it’s a joke of some kind, but wants to take the unit apart to see exactly why it works so differently than any one he’s seen before.

So far, I’ve held him off but I’ve also made a few calls. Several things still disturbed me about the message. First of all, the original can’t be erased. It’s written right into the system. And it's in French.

Second, there is no bridge of the kind described here anywhere in the world, let alone on some white supremacist farm road in potato country.

Third, though genetic research hasn’t ever had the ability to do anything like this, each of the scientist mentioned in the note are real and at the top of their field. Unfortunately each of them is either missing, unavailable or dead.

And Beth, at that coffee shop, doesn’t answer her phone.

Impressum

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