"To
write fiction is to create a parallel universe." - Mr. Jay Salvosa, during
one of the meetings of Fiction Friday
It is not uncommon for most children
(adults, even) to be unaware of the fact that ants can carry items
approximately ten to fifty times their own weight, but Little Charlie knew from
his mother, and he was not above putting it into a test.
He was, after all, one of the finest
eight-year-old empiricists of his generation.
It did not take long for Charlie’s
curious, piercing eyes to locate a platoon of garden ants marching tediously
along the wall of his blue-painted room. The black-clad army came from a
half-closed window—few of them bringing along morsels of unidentified things
(Charlie did not recognize any of it aside from a torn-off grasshopper’s
limb)—leading its way through a crack in a dusty corner.
For five minutes he observed, and with a
flick and a silent tap his little index finger found the abdomen of his
unsuspecting lab specimen. The rest of the foot soldiers quickly broke ranks,
perhaps thinking that the Armageddon was upon them, and the unfortunate ant
Charlie had preferred struggled helplessly as he took it away to the other side
of the room, where his previously eviscerated piggy bank was lying in its own
copper entrails.
Another day, another casualty, reported
Squad B to their Queen.
Later on, Charlie deemed the experiment
a failure, and was disgusted at her mom’s lies. What he didn’t know (and would
not, until he reaches fourth grade) is that the weight of ten coins is more
than fifty times heavier than that of a garden ant.
Charlie would eventually forget his
first pre-meditated murder until six years later, when he would vaguely recall
the incident after his professor in Biology force-fed them with information
about the Phylum Arthropoda. Thus, he would then furtively scribble at the
edges of a page in his book, two minutes before the class was dismissed: Ants
and Coins: Ant-countancy? Neat.
In his mind, the possibility was already
running like an Olympic athlete. He chuckled at its absurdity.
-----
It was very unlikely that the action of
fourteen-year-old Charlie had been felt, seen, or heard of during the time that
it was committed, at least by any human-standard-intelligent being occupying a
planet or heavenly body in the Milky Way. However…
The moment a period was placed after the
letter “t” in one of the pages of the book, Biology for Real Dummies, a black
hole formed by itself exactly two million light-years from the spiral galaxy
nearest to where Charlie’s galaxy was. If, and only if, there is a safe way to
go in and cross through the wormhole, one will find a universe not unlike
Charlie’s, where the third planet from Charlie’s sun also exists. There will be
land, and trees, and people, and Charlie himself.
And there will be ants—the same ones,
but they will not be compared to soldiers, but to bookkeepers.
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