Of Ants and Dinosaurs

8 The Information Age

Another millennium whizzed by. Cretaceous civilisation progressed through the Electric Age and the Atomic Age and into the Information Age.

Dinosaur cities were now immeasurably vast, on a scale even larger than those of the Steam-Engine Age, with skyscrapers that towered 10,000 metres into the sky – or more. Standing on the roof of one of these buildings was like looking down from one of our high-altitude aircraft, putting you way above the clouds that seemed to hug the Earth below. When the cloud cover was heavy, dinosaurs on the perpetually sunny top floors would phone the doorman on the ground floor to check whether it was raining down there and if they’d need an umbrella for the journey home. Their umbrellas were voluminous, of course, like our big-top circus tents.

Though the dinosaurs’ cars now ran on petrol, not steam, they were still the size of our multi-storey buildings and the ground still trembled beneath their wheels. Aeroplanes had replaced balloons and these were as bulky as our ocean liners, rolling across the sky like thunder and casting titanic shadows across the streets below. The dinosaurs even ventured into space. Their satellites and spaceships moved in geosynchronous orbit and were, naturally, also colossal – so colossal, in fact, that you could discern their shapes quite clearly from Earth.

The global dinosaur population had increased tenfold and more since the Steam-Engine Age. Because they ate a lot and because everything they used was on a massive scale, dinosaurs consumed foodstuff and materials in astronomical quantities. It required untold numbers of farms and factories to meet these needs. The factories were powered by hulking great nuclear-powered machines and the skies above them were perpetually obscured by dense smoke. Keeping dinosaur society functioning efficiently was an extremely complex operation and the circulation of energy resources, raw materials and finance had to be coordinated by computers. A sophisticated computer network linked every part of the dinosaur world, and the computers involved were necessarily enormous too. Each keyboard key was the size of one of our computer screens, and their screens were as wide as our walls.

The ant world had also entered an advanced Information Age, but the ants obtained energy from completely different sources; they did not use oil or coal but harvested wind and solar power instead. Ant cities were cluttered with wind turbines, similar in size and shape to the pinwheels our children play with, and their buildings were covered with shiny black solar cells. Another important technology in the ant world was bioengineered locomotor muscle. Locomotor muscle fibres resembled bundles of thick electric cables, but when injected with nutrient solution, they could expand and contract at different frequencies to generate power. All of the ants’ cars and aeroplanes were powered by these muscle fibres.

The ants had computers of their own: round, rice-sized granules that, unlike dinosaur computers, used no integrated circuitry at all. All computations were performed using complicated organic chemical reactions. Ant computers did not have screens but used pheromones to output information instead. These subtle, complex odours could only be parsed by ants, whose senses could translate the odours into data, language and images. The exchange of information across the ants’ vast network of granular chemical computers was also effected by pheromones rather than by fibre-optic cables and electromagnetic waves.

The structure of ant society in those days was very different from the ant colonies we see today, bearing a closer resemblance to that of human society. Due to the adoption of biotechnology in embryo production, ant queens played a trivial role in the reproduction of the species, and they enjoyed none of the societal status or importance that they do nowadays.

Following the resolution of the First Dinosaur–Ant War, there had been no major conflict between the two worlds. The dinosaur–ant alliance endured, contributing to the steady development of Cretaceous civilisation. In the Information Age, the dinosaurs were more reliant than ever on the ants’ fine-motor skills. Swarms of ants worked in every dinosaur factory, manufacturing tiny component parts, operating precision equipment and instruments, performing repair and maintenance work, and handling other tasks that the dinosaurs could not manage.

Ants also continued to play a critical role in dinosaur medicine. All dinosaur surgery was still performed by ant surgeons, who physically entered the dinosaurs’ organs to operate on them from the inside. They had a range of sophisticated medical devices at their disposal, including miniature laser scalpels and micro-submarines that could navigate and dredge dinosaur blood vessels.

It also helped that ants and dinosaurs no longer had to rely on word corps to understand each other. With the invention of electronic devices that could directly translate ant pheromones into dinosaur speech, that peculiar method of communicating, via formations comprising tens of thousands of ant soldiers, gradually became the stuff of legend.

The Formican Empire of Gondwana eventually unified the uncivilised ant tribes on every continent, establishing the Ant Federation, which governed all ants on Earth. By contrast, the once united Saurian Empire split in two. The continent of Laurasia gained its independence, and another great dinosaur nation was founded: the Laurasian Republic. Following a millennium of conquests, the Gondwanan Empire came to occupy proto-India, proto-Antarctica, and proto-Australia, while the Laurasian Republic expanded its territory into the lands that would become Asia and Europe.

The Gondwanan Empire was mainly populated by Tyrannosaurus rex, while the dominant group in the Laurasian Republic was Tarbosaurus bataar. During this long period of territorial expansion, the two nations engaged in almost continual warfare. In the late Steam-Engine Age, the militaries of these two great empires crossed the channel separating Gondwana and Laurasia in massive fleets to attack each other. Over the course of many great battles, millions of dinosaurs were slain on the wide, open plains, leaving mountains of corpses and rivers of blood.

Wars continued to plague both continents well into the Electric Age, decimating countless cities in the process. But in the last two centuries, since the dawning of the Atomic Age, the fighting had stopped. This was entirely due to nuclear deterrence. Both dinosaur nations amassed colossal stockpiles of thermonuclear weapons; if these missiles were ever deployed, they would transform Earth into a lifeless furnace. The fear of mutual destruction kept the planet balanced on a knife edge, maintaining a terrifying peace.

The world’s dinosaur population continued to expand at a dramatic rate. Every continent suffered from extreme overcrowding and the dual threats of environmental pollution and nuclear war became more acute with each passing day. A rift reopened between the ant and dinosaur worlds and a pall of ominous clouds settled over Cretaceous civilisation.