Requested writing prompts b/c I didn't have the internet. Lovisa responded with "There was an ant that lived next to the tree and south of the lake. One day, the queen died unexpectedly and the ant..."
This was actually a hard one to work with, b/c there are lots of different types of ants and depending on which type they are, different things will happen when a queen dies. Some colonies die. Some join other colonies. Some steal other colonies' queens! For some, the workers are sterile because of a pheromone the queen emits, so when she dies the pheromone is no longer present and the other ants become fertile and they select a new queen (in many colonies, all the ants are female). Some colonies have multiple queens. There are probably other outcomes, too.
I spent a lot of time researching and couldn't decide what should happen, finally I decided to just reduce the need to be factually correct, and anthropomorphize them a bit.
So, how should our ant behave? One possibility is that the queen's death subverts a hierarchy, and our ant is suddenly able to explore its individuality. I contemplated this, but it didn't really fit, the ants' eusociality is not like humans. In humans, organization like this is usually top-down, the queen would represent a tyrant, someone with power imposing their will on the workers. In ant colonies, decisions are made collectively, the workers are not slaves, decisions emerge from collective behaviours. They each have a role and they fulfill that role to facilitate the colony. They care about the queen because she lays eggs, an important role, but one that can be satisfied by a single ant. This allows the other ants to allocate their energy to other tasks. In eusocial societies, specialization like this emerges. In fact, that is the metric for eusociality. In the colonies that haven't evolved that far (eg where other females are not sterile), some amount of energy and focus is lost in the other ants that don't need to lay eggs. As a consequence, their colony is less viable and other ant colonies can take over their territory. So I thought it would be inaccurate to represent the ant as suddenly freed to be an individual. The ant is not a slave, it's an avid participant.
If we take a moment to contemplate consciousness, it ha some interesting implications for our ant. Note that this is all my conclusions and hypotheses, I can't say it is true, it's just what makes sense to me. Consciousness is an abstract idea, it manifests in humans because our brains are neural networks, capable of being iteratively modified to better model our surroundings. By modeling our surroundings more accurately, we are better able to reason about them and make decisions that are informed by our reality. One hugely prevalent piece of our reality is ourselves, because our behaviour directly impacts the environment we live in. So it becomes useful to have a representation of ourselves within our model of reality. In humans, this representation has been optimized to the point that the distinction between our brain's representation of ourselves and our actual selves becomes blurred (eg the model can directly affect our physiology without our pausing to recognize that the model is just a representation of self and we are not obligated to abide its decisions and conclusions). This is how I model human consciousness, and it makes sense as our neural network will historically be rewarded for doing a better job of this (ie if the model thinks it is about to be hit by a car and it's decision to jump back is sent directly to the nerves that control our muscles, then we live, so our brains are incentivized to empower the model and we have consciousness).
But this is not true for ants, the best thing for the ant is not to see itself as an individual, but to see itself as part of a collective, part of something bigger than itself. This trait does manifest in humans, especially in religion, where people see themselves as agents of their gods, or express desire for an external purpose. In ants, there would probably be a model for self, since the ant is capable of acting, but there would also be a model for the colony, and the ant would be incentivized to emphasize the model of the colony over the model of self. Thus, if it models reality in a way that sacrificing itself saves the colony, then it will choose to do so. This would select against the ant's consciousness identifying with the representation of the ant, and for identifying with the representation of the colony. Thus, it is probably fair to say that the colony has consciousness, it is just distributed among the neural networks of each member. Imagine a chess player whose mind is distributed across each of the pieces, the pawn sacrifices itself because that's what the chess player would have the pawn do. Interestingly, the pawn doesn't really exist as a conscious actor, but rather as a facet of the chess player's consciousness. If my model is accurate, the same could be said about the ants, they are not individually conscious, they are part of the consciousness of the colony. The emergent consciousness is the colony's, not the ant's. From this abstraction, the emergence of superorganisms is much less surprising.
So, assuming that is a reasonable way to make sense of ants, we will remove the ant's agency as an individual, it is not an individual, it is part of the anatomy of the colony.
At a mechanical level, the colony does not care about the queen in particular (when there are multiple queen contenders, the ants will kill the weakest, until only the most viable queen is left). This is similar to how a chess player may choose to sacrifice a queen, or a climber may cut off his arm to dislodge himself and survive. The queen plays a role in the superorganism in the same manner as the climber's arm. However, the role is important, so it is likely that the colony would see her as integral to its survival, and her role is important enough that there are likely to be hard-coded neural circuits in place to protect her (in the same way that a human parent is dosed with oxytocin when giving birth, which increases their emotional inclination towards their child, who is unable to care for itself).
So I think it's fair to assume the ant will have some neurotransmitter whose firing corresponds to an emotional inclination for the queen and distress/urgency at her peril. The experience of those pathways firing is probably similar to the experiences we've named "love" and "fear" and "sorrow".
So, I've decided to have the ant lament the queen's death, and express the grief of the colony. I don't know how it should speak, part of me wants it to use "I" language, but have "I" mean the colony rather than the ant. But the mechanics of this form of consciousness are very different, so perhaps it should use "we", not in the sense of ants as individuals, but rather as shards of the colony's consciousness (this manner of thinking is actually quite fascinating, I suspect it could provide insight into Alan Kay's model of object oriented programming, and into our own biology). In the end, I just had it avoid any references to itself in particular, and instead express the distress of the collective.
I interpreted its distress in a rather human manner, which I'm not sure is valid. But emotions are subjective and nonsensical, based on meaningless chemical predispositions that happened to be useful, and an internally inconsistent neural circuitry (sufficiently aberrant neural circuitry is labeled "perversion", but there's no obvious way to predict which behaviour will be normal and which perverse, it's all incidental and subjective). So, I can't think of a good way to infer how the ants distress would manifest, and have decided to interpret it in a human manner.
How do humans react when someone they deeply love dies? How do humans react when they lose hope for the future? Another advantage of writing it this way is that the audience, being human, will have an easier time empathizing with the ants' sentiment.
The tunnels constrict today.
There's no air in the lair.
We wander without purpose
or intent to arrive anywhere.
The workers went wayward,
some unable to learn.
Others take off in tandem,
and never return.
We are listless and lost without you our Queen.
Hungry when full, insatiable appetite and soul without you our Queen.
We are frenetic, fraught with fear, unfocused and fazed without you our Queen.
Unabated compulsive abrading, chafing and crazed without you our Queen.
The hill howls with the wind today,
it intertwines with the wailing of the hive.
Sanity has left us.
You have left us.
Madness embraces us unfortunates left alive.
The soldiers are scarred,
the minims twitch as they nurse.
The broodlings are born
broken and cursed.
We'd have forded the lake and swarmed the world for you our Queen.
Taken the tree and conquered the bees for you our Queen.
We'd have seethed through the country side for you our Queen.
Fought without fear until we died for you our Queen.
- Queen - The ant that lays eggs
- Workers - Ants whose role is to do some form of work, some forage for food, some clean the hive (sanitation, they have a garbage pit at the bottom of the hive), some are undertakers, some care for the young, some carry leaves, there are other roles, based on the type of ant.
- Mimin - workers that care for the young and the garden (in leaf cutter ants, they get their food from a fungus garden)
- Soldier - Ants whose role is to protect the colony. They are usually shockingly larger than the workers, they may patrol within the hive, or protect a line of workers (eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVkdw5s3joI).
- Tandem Running - When one ant leads another, usually to the location of food or a nest, the following ant uses its antennae to keep track of the leader ant by frequently touching its legs and abdomen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandem_running
- Broodlings - I'm not actually sure this is a valid word, the brood is the collection of all the larve, I used it to imply a subset of that
It was pretty difficult to arrive at something I was satisfied with. I found this beautiful metaphor "frothing gagging minds" and was going to use it after the "frenetic, fraught with fear, unfocused and fazed without you our Queen", but couldn't get it to fit well. But, I eventually swapped the two stanzas that end with "our Queen", because I thought that the line "died for you our Queen" seemed like the only reasonable way to end it. That line goes well with the rest of that stanza, but the stanza itself goes better as the third stanza than the last. Maybe, now that I swapped them, it would fit well (I'm not going to try to fit it in there, though, I've realized I'll tweak this thing indefinitely and not really find something I'm totally pleased with)
The line "Hungry when full, insatiable appetite and soul" was difficult. I thought it sounded much more natural with plural "souls", but wanted to attribute the soul to the colony rather than the ants individiually. I also contemplated "sharded soul" or "splintered soul", which would address this, but they required adding "an" eg "an insatiable sharded soul", which just didn't sound right. It was difficult to get that stanza to sound right, I still can't tell if it sounds better with "insatiable appetite and soul" or "insatiable in appetite and soul" (my opinion changes when I read it by itself and when I read it in the context of the whole piece). Also contemplated "insatiable sorrow soaked soul" for quite a while.
I think "Chafing from unabated compulsive abrading" expresses the thought more coherently, but didn't sound as good.
An earlier version had "our will washed away", which has a beautiful consonance, IMO.
Here are some words I thought had merit, but didn't wind up using: manic, neurotic, paralytic, anhedonic, depraved, caverns, gestalt, collapse, trepidation, maudlin, ennui