The night was coming with a fanfare. The sun though still a large orange fruit on a moody red platter, for most of the being living on the ground it was the sign of their day ending.
Stay out after dark and you risk losing your life; the rule couldn’t have been any simpler or clearer.
Still, many creatures both big and small would die tonight, some for straying away from their herds and others for stalking the darkness for a little life-threatening adventure.
One among them was a worker, an oddball of an ant, who would see his life change by the end of this very day; just not the way he expected it to. That worker was me before the change, before the awakening of my greed.

As for the moment, while the sun was still up and the outside temperature a mellow 23 degrees Celsius, though dropping, the worker was busy digging into dry soil underground as the only wingless princess of his colony had demanded, politely. The thin ends of his mandibles were like the edge of a pickaxe while the thick base gave them stability and could absorbed shock. His pair of mandibles was a fine specimen of natural craftsmanship.
He wasn’t alone in this large and time crunching endeavor. More than three hundred workers were working day and night to carve a series of veins and arteries to connect the floor to the city.

The three square meters large floor was being dug separated from the city Agnee-rath-Ji — a personal space for the queen to be. That was her only option as a wingless princess, to be a secondary queen and spurt more life into the already bludgeoning veins of the main city.

While other workers were busy digging through the solid thick dirt, scraping a new path grain by grain, our little worker was being intelligent. He carried an abdomen full of water to dampen the dirt while digging, not only making his job easier but also reducing the strain on his mandibles. The damp dirt also helped him in clearing the tunnel faster, because where the other workers had to carry the individual grains, he could compact them and make a pellet to increase workflow.

However, he wasn’t a vain being. He had shown his method to just about everyone other than the supervisors, but they had ignored him, saying things like: why would anyone want to work harder? Just complete your community labor and go away; know your station.

As a result, he was far ahead of his pears and making them look bad.

It was hard work, digging, requiring much endurance and focus. Yet, that’s what made a worker different from a soldier and a constructor different from a caretaker. However, it was also an easy life —a safe living— and heavily sought by ex-scavengers and harvesters. 

While working ahead, thinking about his upcoming days of no more community labor, open field, and warm sunshine, our little guy got careless and chomped a bit too hard at the wrong time. He struck something strong. It was probably a pebble, like the hundred others found daily, but the pain that shot up his face from the base of his left mandible was something new. It was aggravating and horrifying. Pheromones of pain and warning, of danger and need, shot out of his antennas and filled the tunnel he had dug. He waited and waited but no one arrived to help. Not helping him carry larger pebbles was one thing, but to deny help when he was in pain? He found it unbelievable.  

Sometime later, when the pain subsided, he carefully dug the pebble out. It was a small thing the size of his head, large enough to completely fit his mandibles but small enough that leaving it there and diverging from the path would lead to problems with the authority. The supervisor would chew him inside out. 
So hurt as it may, he decided to take the pebble out and seek help. Trash heap it was. The wingless princess was generous he admitted. Those working under her had meat and water and honey at their disposal, things usually reserved for soldiers. He was sure she would let him rest for the night, believing a night's rest would stop the pain. He hoped at least because there was no other option. He either recovered completely to enjoy the life of a harvester or became a mercenary after his injury aggravated to be thrown out as a shield at the front line in a time of war.

The pebble was an unusual dull orange, shaped like a raindrop, and had a surface glow to it. It couldn’t be a rock or just a large granule of dirt because it was uncharacteristically warm to touch. So warm in fact that his limbs relaxed like they do when he bask under the sun. Strength filled his limbs and the pain reduced further. He lifted the smooth pebble in a single swoop and headed up the path he had dug. It wasn’t a long walk, but he remained careful despite the strength and confidence surging inside him. The smallest mistake causes the largest blow: he had learned the lesson by trying to be helpful.

Out of the tunnel, he saw his first fellow in hours. Our little guy released a happy greeting. But the worker wasn’t so happy to see him.

They looked alike, both of them: the same shape and almost the same size. They both had a jet black body from the tip of their antennae to the end of their segmented abdomen with hints of red flakes here and there like embers flying around in ash.
Hence the name: Ember ant.
At half a centimeter large, they were big among the many other species of ants that lived nearby — at least that’s what our little worker had heard in stories from ex- scavengers and harvesters, while they still talked to him.

That being said, how to approach the princess was a big question he hadn’t yet the answer to. He was in this state of contention when he sensed a scent sweet and strong, attracting him from the other end of the tunnel. He knew the scent. It belonged to the princess. Even being sexless couldn’t stop him from becoming muddle-headed after being washed in her arousing scent. The slower he got to the end of the tunnel the heavier his mind swayed.

His antennae stood sharp in front of his head to greedily take in more of her natural sweetness. It was not every day that a worker got to bathe in the scent of a princess. She was a different bred of ants with a different set of responsibilities. Workers were aplenty in their colony of two hundred thousand, but there were only five hundred princesses and not a single one of them were allowed to go out of their chambers.

This wingless princess was special. She was kind and polite and everything our little friend expected from a future queen. It wasn’t her first time around and she actively tried to help anyone with their needs. So our little friend was sure she would listen to him.
But she wasn’t all sweetness and sugar. The princess could also be strict when needed. There was a pheromone called leave pass that she had invented just for the sake of making sure no worker could bunk community labor. Many workers called her narcissistic for trying to steal their freedom. The little guy considered her intelligent. It was the perfect thing to deal with lazy workers, he believed.

He found her in the chamber at the end of the tunnel standing with her antennae coiled around those of her ward, performing an internal communication. That was an honor that none of the attendance deserved. What she needed to convey must have been very important otherwise she wouldn’t have gone to such lengths and chosen such an intimate form of communication.

Believing that he shouldn’t interrupt their communication the little guy moved to one side and stood there. He watched them intently but so did the others. There were close to twenty ants in the chamber, many workers, two soldiers, and the sergeant of the worker division who was likely waiting for his orders.

The sergeant was a giant being, the bulkiest in the chamber. The soldiers appeared small in front of him. There was a call from the sergeant which the little guy couldn’t ignore and he had to explain himself to the giant. The sergeant intelligently moved away from the duo in I.C to his interruptions to the minimum.   

The giant tapped the little guys head, asking what he was doing there while reading his designation: worker said the first segment of his antennae, number ⁵99₆ (5^th gen, 6^th lay, number 99) told the second one, on 31 days of community labor came from the third.

The little guy made his reply: to talk with the princess about leave — Direct and affective. The sergeant was neither surprised, nor angry. The guy was on his last day of community labor. And if he remembered correctly, it was this guy giving a bad name to the workers union by working too hard. The sergeant didn’t despise hard workers. He nodded and allowed the little guy to stay which he did by putting the pebble on the ground.

Right about then two soldiers entered the chamber from a different artery of the same digging site. They were dragging a worker behind them. The worker was agitated and shaking, releasing pheromones without control. She had most likely gone crazy working in the tight, humid site. It was easy to forget who you are while digging. Many even break down. Some said community labor was a test to see a worker's capability to handle pressure; others called it a form of tempering. For the little guy, it was but a passing route, nothing less and nothing more.

The crazy worker continued leaking her emotional state with the pheromones as the soldier dragged her.  The little guy made himself comfortable. The sergeant moved back to his position beside the princess, in wait. The princess came out of I.C. And just as she did, the crazy worker slipped out her bounds and lunged at her. The sergeant was quick to act. He tried to snap her in his mandibles, but she was too small a worker and he was too big an ex-soldier. By the time he realized, she was past him.

The scent of panic filled the chamber. The soldiers went after her.

The princess was in a dazed state of mind from the I.C and didn’t understand the gravity of the situation. She stood a still target for the worker, completely unaware. But when the crazy worker's mandibles clipped, she found them wound around the mandibles of another worker and not the princess. The little guy held her off. The bout aggravated his injured mandible, but he didn’t let off. The crazy worker pulled back and their mandibles separated. A second time she came, but the sergeant was already recovered from his previous blunder. Still, her mandibles wound around 99’s chest before the bulky ex-soldier cut her head off.

By the time the soldiers separated the worker's head from the little guy’s chest he had already leaked a lot of warmth and was feeling cold. The ants released warning scents, as our guy staggered toward the princess. His mind was all rattled from the expenditure and the battle. She stood stock-still as he passed her and went toward the orange pebble. He dug into it again, his mind telling him to throw the trash out, looping it over and over again.
 
He squeezed the pebble with all his might and his left mandible finally gave away. It broke, while the right one punctured into the orange glowing gem. There he grew cold, but the voice inside his head grew strong instead. Throw out the trash. Refill your water. Only one more day of labor. Live. The voice echoed but wasn’t received by anyone living.  

More soldiers arrived soon to figure out the reason for the disturbance, but everything had been sorted out by then. The princess personally tried to revive the little guy by sharing some of her warmth and calories with him, but he didn’t move.

In the end, the soldiers who were carrying the crazy worker were reprimanded and the little guy was thrown out in the trash heap with the pebble still attached to his mandible. They couldn’t get it off him.

In the trash heap, he remained until night passed and the sun rose in the sky again. That’s when the gem that had grown darker, shone, and pulsed with life when a ray of sunlight fell on it. Its shine grew stronger and heavier, and madly it absorbed the sunlight, only to flash once and disintegrate. It disappeared, but not completely. A second later the same orange glow rose from the once dead ant and it revived. Life returned to his comatose limbs like the season of spring after the onslaught of a cold harsh winter.

He moved. The twitch of a claw transformed into the coiling of his stiff-straight antennae. His legs stretched one by one, exoskeleton crackled as his body came into motion after the night of cold. The cold left him as a transparent fog of golden light and warmth from the sunlight charged his batteries. The lone curved mandible and clanked, and light returned to his eyes.

That’s how I was born.