Rachel Kaplan

She is the Chair of the University of Michigan's Samuel Trask Dana Professorship of Environment and Behavior.

Everyone has a story in their brain, it is said. Most people don't really develop these stories, and indeed, sometimes the stories only mean something to the owner. I thought as much about the story I am going to share with you tonight. However, when I gave a taste of it to my friends on Myspace through a blog post, I only got positive responses. This encouraged me.

Let me tell you about the origins of this story... I was twelve years old. My parents were divorcing, my peers didn't understand me, and I was about to move out of the only home I had ever known.

I spent a lot of time inside my own head.

A couple of weeks before me, my sister, my mother, and soon to be stepfather were going to leave our house, I found an ant colony nesting in a broken radio in my back yard. I was fascinated by this, the confluence of the man made and the natural. I also think I was a bit inspired by a Don Bluth animated film, of which I think you can all figure out which I am referencing...

Any ways, for the next fifteen years, I developed the stories and technologies of two warring tribes; ants and cockroaches. Yes, I was a weird kid. They left the dirt, spread their vendetta amongst the stars, and have been part of my daydreams for over half of my life. All in my head. Except for the Myspace post, I don't think I wrote anything down.

Any ways, all rights are reserved on the following creative work...

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Joliet woke to the sounds of sirens. That never made for a good start for a work day. Nova kicked her bunk while screaming "Come on, JAN! We need to turn it off before the aphids freak out!" Nova jumped over Desi's empty bunk. Or rather, what used to be Desi's empty bunk. Joliet still didn't really believe what she had seen last night, Desi's limp carcass being fished out of a four hundred milliliter honeydew tank. Joliet chose aphid farming because she thought it would be safe.

Hatchling number 863 of the twenty third of January, on the thirteenth year of the fourth expansion colony, Joliet for short, dropped out of her bunk. Her prosthetic hands on her two front legs itched. The life alchemists still didn't know why. That didn't really matter right now. What mattered right now, was that aphids needed to be soothed, and that she and ten other ants were the only ones trained to do it.

She also knew that she hated the warrior caste at this moment. Here she was, in the greenhouse cavity, 100 centimeters down, with two and a half centimeters of concrete between her and the dirt, stolen LEDS shining down on the aphids and their plants. She can't evacuate the animals, and there is only one entrance into the cavity, through which she would have to go through the rest of the colony to get out to the surface.

If the raiding party made it this far, she was already dead. The siren just scared the aphids and robbed her of sleep.

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Moxie Firebrand hated luxury raids. She didn't join the Cobwebton Defense League so that rich roaches could pay a nickel less per milliliter of honeydew. Still, until the agronomists and biologists learn how to farm the damn things, she resigned herself to riding in the APC, with two arsenic laced pikes on her front legs. She would surely kill at least fifty ants today.

All for bug sweat.

Still, Moxie loved it, in a way. It was amazing, watching the Stirling engine warm up and then engage, all from the heat of a stolen kitchen match. Indeed, the APC itself was "stolen", in a way, an eight ounce aluminum cola can scavenged from a nearby highway. She also was looking forward, in grisly fascination, to when the wheels roll over the classic wall of defenders. She almost felt sorry for them. Almost.

The APC lumbered on, its spider coat of arms slightly smudged from the driver getting too close to some grass, and the painters not finishing the job soon enough. It was always like that. It was amazing that Roach culture existed at all.

"Spiders...", Moxie muttered under her breath. To think that her tribe, not ten years ago, hid amongst webs of the beasts, in fear of the Ants. No longer. No longer, indeed.

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Any ways, that is really, truly, sincerely, the first time I have ever tried to flesh out any sort of characters from my day dreams. Please, I beg of you, be brutally honest. I don't really care about Joliet or Moxie. They are really just placeholders, more than anything else. I am going to try to build up a backstory on how these creatures came to be. A certain movie with turtles was another inspiration for me, but maybe an escaped ant queen from a genetics lab, and a tribe of roaches that escaped from a bug spray factory lab is more feasible, or something...

If it's crap, PLEASE, tell me as much.