There were unusual ants living in a clearing of a cozy thick forest teeming with delicious plants. They were of different species and had different colors: black, red, white, even blue. Each species had their own nest or colony, to be precise, meaning a separate territory and own distinct way of life. It is common knowledge that all ants are highly organized creatures living in colonies with strictly allocated responsibilities and rights; each knows his place, being assigned the job he can do best and doing it most laboriously. Every ant nest is surrounded by a cobweb of well-trodden paths along which ants deliver grain, seeds, construction materials, and toys for the young. In an emergency all colony members are immediately summoned to the site and proceed with the required search and rescue operations, building dams in heavy rains or repairing walls brutally damaged by a human shoe. If it is necessary to build a new colony, all of the ants collect and glue fallen leaves or pine needles or pile earth to form a pyramid.
This was how all of the ant colonies lived in that forest clearing. All except one, known as Colony X. Those living nearby had long noticed that something strange was going on in that particular colony, although not a single sage ant had been able to fathom what exactly was wrong. Meanwhile, a host of things about that colony were wrong. To begin with, the ants there fed in a special way. They did not collect grain and nor did they plant fungi down their pyramid or milk aphids — they did not do the things all the other ants did. Some researchers even suspected that Colony X was inhabited by insectophages, meaning that they ate each other, that the white ants devoured red ones, the red ones fed on black ones, and that the black ones ate the other ants on an equal opportunity basis.
Also, there was a constant shortage of manpower — agricultural ants, janitors, soldiers, even queens — in Colony X, perhaps because of that diet or because the starving residents were deserting to look for other nests. In any case, that colony’s exterior attracted the attention of both neighbors and travelers, because it was not an anthill in the true sense of the word; it was not comfortable, solidly built, shaped as a geometrically perfect cone, providing adequate dwelling and protection from the enemy, although the weird inhabitants had more than once tried to build it anew. Every time things seemed to go well at the beginning, some of the ants treading paths, others lugging pine needles, still others producing the glue and looking after the queens and the young.
At a certain stage, however, most often right after the foundations had been laid, something irrational would happen. All of a sudden someone would shout hop! And all would stop whatever they were doing and climb on top of the foundation, still damp, and start waving all their legs, grabbing each other by the antennae, and running around like lunatics. In the ensuing pandemonium the ants living nearby would never be able to understand what exactly was going on. Some would be convinced that, contrary to three-dimensional laws, each of the millions of ants at Colony X was moving in the opposite direction. Imagine: as many ants, as many directions! Some time later, the opposite phenomenon would take place, as some invisible inexorable force would unite all the Colony X residents, workers, soldiers, amazons, and generals alike, pushing them to one side. The ants would fall in, line up, execute an about turn, and set about dismantling the newly erected foundation. A bacchanalia of destruction would commence, with ants of all colors participating with equal zeal. Of course, this work would be well coordinated and proceed quickly, so much so that the neighbors would later swear that even before they could wink the construction site had turned into a demolition dump. It should be noted that independent observers did not register a single case when such touching unity at Colony X was aimed at construction, not destruction.
After there was nothing left to destroy, the ants would pounce at each other, with vegetarian agricultural ants sinking their teeth into soldiers, wingless queens devouring their offspring, the red ants grabbing and swallowing whichever ants happened to be close enough, and this was true of all the recent allies now engrossed in the lofty cause of ruination.
After the massacre ended a handful of survivors would just sit among the debris, scratch the back of their heads, and wonder what had happened to those hard-working and friendly, sentimental ants? What had haunted them? Why did nothing like that ever happened to their neighbors? And once again they would proceed to gather stones together.
