"Any scientist who can't explain to an eight-year old what he is doing is a charlatan."

In the dilapidated parking lot outside the Super-Duper Mart, our heroine was faced with one of the more difficult encounters in the game of life - a small, terrified child.

"Please, you've got to help me!" he said, wide eyes staring up from a round face streaked with tears. "They're going to get me!"

Julia knelt down so that she was eye to eye with the little boy. "Hey, hey. Ssh. It's going to be alright." she said, using her "gentle voice". "I'll figure out a way to help. Okay?"

I probably don't have time for this. Julia mused. Every day I delay is a day further ahead Dad gets and a day colder his trail goes. But.. argh. I can spare an hour or two to help this little kid. Otherwise the delayed guilt would eat me alive.

The kid calmed down a bit and stopped sniffling as much. "Y-you mean it?"

"I do." she said with a gentle smile. "What's your name?"

"I'm Bryan Wilks!" he said proudly, warming to the conversation now that his panic was fading. "I live in Grayditch! At least.. I did until the fire ants turned it into a cemetery."

Fire ants? The poisonous little ones from South America..? I thought they weren't toxic enough to kill a person. Maybe the kid's confused. Either way, the solution is simple.

"Well, you're safe now, at least." she said encouragingly. "If you're feeling up to it, can you show me the way to Grayditch? We can see if anyone's still there, and then move somewhere else. With less of a bug problem!"

The kid looked uncertain about the second part of that, but seemed game enough for the rest, so they started walking north. The sun was high in the sky by the time they reached the outskirts of Grayditch, and the kid let out a shout.

"Lady, get down!" he said. ducking behind a rusty car. Responding more to the kid's urgency than his words, she crouched down beside him.

"What's going on? Is it raiders?" she asked, looking around.

"No, it's one of THOSE!" he said, pointing fearfully down a side road. Peering through the window-holes of the car, Julia had a look.

What she saw was so very far from what she had expected, she almost laughed. An ant the size of a motorcycle was fighting with another, slightly smaller one on the outskirts of the town. While this display would have been shocking enough, the ants were locked in combat using their mandibles as well as fire breath.

Right. Fire ants. Makes sense, Julia thought inwardly and with a touch of mania. And why shouldn't they be giant? That's just how ants work now. Tiny elephants too probably!

"So right, fire ants." she said to Bryan, setting aside the madness of the situation. "Do you know if there's any special way to hurt them? A giant boot or something? Run them over with a car?"

"I don't think any of the cars in town still work." he said, thinking carefully. "But my pappy had a gun before, and he'd always yell for people to 'shoot for their antenner!', whatever that means. When he got a lucky shot, they'd go crazy and start fighting each other!"

"So I could just try and stay hidden, and only shoot their antennas, and try and have them all kill each other instead of fighting them?" she asked, thinking aloud.

Hold, please. her brain interjected. I realize there's a certain charm to be found in finding an impossible solution to an impossible problem here, but there's a few issues we should clear up. Firstly and foremost, we have only the testimony and speculation of a ten year old boy as the foundation of this plan.

Objection! Instinct put in. He could be older, and he grew up in the wasteland here.

Objection overruled, said Brain. He's a traumatized child witness to the death of a town, if we do this based only on his word, we're going to be ant barbecue. Besides which, I have more points to make.

Oh, fine, said Instinct. Do continue.

Most gracious. Ahem. Secondly, even if we presume that the antenna disabling method is sound, it would require some very precise shooting. We can usually manage to hit a stationary cola bottle at a hundred paces. These facts don't really gel well in this situation.

Look, you said it before, insisted Instinct. It's an impossible answer to an impossible situation. if you don't like the antenna plan, we can just charge in guns blazing and hope for the best.

See, that does sound like a nicely symmetrical plan assuming that there's some sort of cosmic balance to the universe, countered Brain in a long-suffering tone. But any person who's even dimly aware of the Gambler's fallacy would be able to bring up this third point, which is that impossible DOESN'T WORK THAT WAY.

...are we one of those people? Instinct asked tentatively.

YES. Brain answered firmly.

Well, that's that then. Let's scarper with the kid and never come back.

See? That's a much better plan. Brain said approvingly. This is why you keep me around, you know.

Bryan, not being privy to her inner monologue, replied anyway. "That wouldn't work anyway. Even when we kill a bunch of them, more seem to come and take their place. They've gotta be coming from somewhere!"

Julia straightened up a bit to have a quick look around, only to find herself facing a second group of ants that had come in from the other direction. She ducked back down in a flash, hoping they hadn't been spotted.

"Bryan?" she said in an artificially calm voice. "We seem to have gotten flanked a little."

"That's not good, lady." he said, unhelpfully. "You got a plan to get us out of this?"

Julia spent a few precious seconds spelling out justifiable infanticide to herself before responding in the negative. "Not unless you have some way to distract an entire swarm of ants long enough for us to find cover."

"Oh." he said. "That's easy! Where do you wanna run to?"

Away from this planet. "That diner over there should work for a while. The ants are avoiding it for some reason, and they should have trouble shooting fire through the windows."

"Okay then, on three, run!" the excitable lad said, fiddling with the fuel port of the nearby car. "One.."

"Wait, what are-" Julia started, eyes wide.

"-twothree run for it!" he said, bolting for the diner with his alarmed co-conspirator right behind. The ants took notice and started to follow.

"Quick, get in and duck and cover!" Bryan said, leaping through a vacant window pane and covering his head. Just as Julia did the same, a massive explosion rocked the town and shook the diner to its foundations.

I told you a stupid plan would work! Instinct crowed.

I want to find a new body. Brain whimpered.

-0-

"What the sweet blinkering Christ was that?!" Julia yelled after her ears stopped ringing.

Bryan grinned and pulled a cherry bomb out of his pocket. "If you light one of these and toss it into a car just right, it goes off like a bomb! My pappy showed me that before we moved here."

"Well, what responsible parent wouldn't teach his child how to make bombs?" Julia said, just rolling with the punches by this point. "That's his right as an American. Or.. whatever."

She pinched the bridge of her nose and soldiered forth. "Moving on. What can you tell me about things that happened around the time the ants started showing up? Did anyone new show up in town? Weird sounds at night? Strange lights in the sky?"

"Nothing like that.." Bryan said, his small face a mask of concentration. "Oh! But Doc Lesko moved out of Dad's shack just a few days before!"

"'Doc Lesko?' Sounds promising. What was his deal?"

"He was a strange man." Bryan said, recalling. "A while back he paid Pappa some caps to help him build a shack and carry a bunch of junk into it. Pappa called him an egghead, but his head was shaped regular, so I didn't get it."

That seems like a recurring theme. Julia thought. But a scientist goes missing right before the town is overrun by mutant ants? I think I've seen that movie. And now I'm living it. My life, eh?

"Do you know if he left anything inside the shack when he left?" she asked. "Notes, computers? Books?"

"He had all kinds of weird doohickeys in his place!" Wilks said, part skeptical, part wondering. "Boxes with lots of lights, some funny glass bottles… oh! And a big, clunky, shiny man too!"

"He had a robot?" Julia said, remembering her earlier misadventure in the Super-Duper Mart. Was that really this morning? Jeez. Wasteland life is rough. "Isn't that dangerous?"

"No, it was always really nice to me!" Bryan beamed as only a child with a robot friend can. "I haven't seen him since Doc Lesko left, though."

"Can I get into the shack? I might be able to find something that can help get rid of all the ants there." she said, coming to a decision.

Bryan shook his head. "The door is locked. But my dad has the key, you can go get it from him!"

"Wait, if your dad is around, why isn't he out here helping us?" Julia asked, scanning the outside for a gap in the ant patrols.

"He's, uh.. busy. Guarding the house." Bryan said evasively. "But if you go there, he can help you out, I'm sure of it!"

"Okay, I'll go talk to your dad." she said. "Are you coming with?"

Bryan shook his head vigorously. Guess it's up to me. Hell, I want to go hide, too. I can hardly blame him.

"Alright then kiddo. Stay safe!"

She tossed an old tin can out the window, taking advantage of the distraction its landing caused to dash across the street and into one of the old apartments, the one Bryan had indicated. With a quick glance to either side, she ducked inside, closing the door behind her.

Immediately after turning to face the room, she regretted doing so, as a wave of pure stench wafted over and climbed up through her nostrils into her brain. The only reason she managed not to vomit was that opening any part of her face was literally unmanageable at that point. Eyes watering, she quickly surveyed the room from her vantage point pressed against the door in a vain effort to run away from the smell without actually going anywhere. After regaining her wits somewhat through sheer bloody-minded stubbornness, she identified the source of the smell pretty quickly - a partially decomposed corpse lying in the middle of the room.

Oh god, she thought. That must be Bryan's dad.

OH GOD, she then thought. I'm going to have to check his pockets!

She did throw up then, but only after facing away from the body. Her panicked animal hindbrain toyed with the idea of just going out to get eaten by the ants instead, but she wrested control of the motor functions and detached herself from her actions.

Ammo, old shell casing, dust, snack cake wrapper DON'T THINK ABOUT FOOD URGH HWULP oh hey a key got the key let's get out of here

Holding the key in a pale, shaking fist, she bolted for the door and ran back to the diner. Four bullets whizzed past her as she went, but her panic ignored this as she dove back into cover.

"Geez, lady, what gives?" Bryan demanded on her return, holding an old hunting rifle. "You didn't look or anything, you almost got torched!"

"I - don't go in there - not good." she wheezed in between difficult breaths, already calming now that she was away from the.. situation.

"Are you okay?" Bryan asked, noting her distress.

"Yes, I'm - I'll be fine." she said, color returning to her cheeks. "Bryan, I'm sorry, but I have some bad news about your father. He's dead."

"Yeah... I snuck back home a little while ago and found him laying there." he said, shaking his head. "It was a couple of days ago. I've had to scavenge on my own since then."

"You could have said something before I went in there." she said testily.

"Maybe." he said, shrugging. "Did you find the key?"

Did I find the - is he okay? His dad is dead! How is he functional?

He's coping with it by pretending his father is still alive, for now Brain pointed out. He'll probably mentally edit that part out of this conversation later on and keep going with it.

That doesn't seem healthy Instinct grumbled.

What, and just repressing any reaction to things being out of your control and acting like you can just continue on like always is a healthy way to handle things? Brain asked skeptically.

Your face is ugly and we're done with this said Instinct, bringing them back into realtime.

"Yep, got it right here!" she said, pushing aside Bryan's oddness and showing him the key. "I just need to take a quick breather before I go look at the shack."

-0-

Julia had used one of the old diner napkins as a makeshift face bandana to ward off smells, and entered the shack brandishing her pistol. Be there corpses or lethal robots, she'd at least put up a fight before succumbing. One of the monitors blinked in a way that could have been construed as threatening if you squinted, but other than that, it was quiet. She sighed and lowered her gun.

The room was, oddly enough, still full of equipment. Perhaps the good Doctor hadn't been able to take the machinery with him when he left - but then what would he be using now? Observe first, speculate later, she reminded herself. Some of the devices she recognized from her studies - a pre-war centrifuge, a high powered microscope, various petri dishes, miscellaneous other instruments. Others she definitely did not recognize - one looked like a small cube that had been manufactured before the Great War, and was softly whispering blorple noises, others looked like they'd been assembled and/or invented on site. A large cylinder in the corner much like the one the robot at the grocery store had come out of stood empty in the corner. Various bits and bobs were scattered about, and an empty coatrack was next to the door. Finally, sitting on a table along the back wall was a computer terminal.

Hello, gorgeous. she thought at the computer, flashing a predatory smile. You're going to tell me everything you know.

Life in a Vault didn't give one much in the way of wasteland survival skills, but computer hacking? Julia had learned that when she was still short enough to need a large book to sit on to use the computer. "No, you can't read that yet" was a powerful motivator. About twenty minutes later, she had root access and was sifting through Lesko's files. Fortunately, it seemed he was the type to keep a log. She started calling up the entries, beginning with the most recent.

-0-

Lesko's Logs

July 3, 2276

Ten years. It's been ten years since my wife and child were taken from me in that one hellish night. My dear Anna, so beautiful and full of life. Our daughter, not even fully grown. A lesser man would have been destroyed by such a tragedy, and even I must admit I was nearly undone. My mind felt as if it would fly apart against the raw, surging tide of emotion. I wanted to cry out against the unfairness of it all, to demand some type of justice from this uncaring universe. To rip and tear at the fabric of reality with my bare hands until I could pull back my loved ones. I did none of these, obviously. I simply sat in my room at the Institute quietly going mad. What use was my research, I thought, if it couldn't save little Tanya? My supervisor would come check in on me occasionally, but even his patience (or more likely, his free time) waned to nothing. I did not eat or sleep or dream. After what could have been a month or as little as a week, I managed to pass out and fall out of bed. I was weak enough not to awaken immediately, so when I finally regained consciousness, I was in somewhat of an awkward position. I was upside down, with my head facing the wall. I could see very little except for greenish cinderblock and the faint glow of the room lighting. But one thing did catch my eye. An ant - a small one from one of the pre-War specimen collections by the look of it - was trying to tunnel through the mortar holding the wall together. Ant! I recoiled in anger, more mentally than anything else due to my complete lack of energy. Ants had taken my girl! But in my state, something about that ant resonated in my battered psyche. This single ant was attempting something it could never do simply because it felt it had to be done. It would gnaw at that mortar until its chitin fused rather than give up. How could I, someone who had given up so thoroughly that I wasn't even eating anymore, judge such a creature? I laboriously shifted myself into a position I could move my arm, and reached over with a steel button from my stained lab coat. With that, I made a tiny chip in the mortar of the wall. The ant moved to try and widen the hole. I smiled.

I spent the next month regaining my strength and reading everything I could about the genome of the Formicidae family. My formal training was in genetics, so I didn't have to start from scratch. More than anything, my physical frailty got in the way of my efforts. I had lost fifty pounds during my convalescence, and it had cost me. My old colleagues from the genetics lab were more than eager to help out - after all, here I was. The celebrated geneticist Wenton Lesko, back at work with a fire they'd never seen before. For you see, now I had a purpose. I was going to redeem the ants.

They were too big. That remains a decent summary of the problem even now. Thousands of pages of printouts, gallons of genetic sample fluid, and as much technical data as you could stuff into two ZAXes, and.. they were too big. Whether it was just the radiation from the war, or some bizarre chemical leak, or some freak combination of factors, the genome of the common garden ant had been irrevocably twisted into Brobdingnagian proportions. As genomes go, it's not terribly complex, but it's not exactly simple either. Days turned to months, months turned to years. I'd narrowed the problem significantly, but I was hitting a wall. I needed to work with actual specimens. I needed drones, a nest, a queen. But the Institute turned me down. They wouldn't risk their precious toy soldiers trying to recover an ant queen. Fine then, I said. I'll do it without you. That very evening I packed up most of the equipment I would need and headed south, after tendering my resignation.

I'd been in the Wasteland before, of course. The Institute could hardly do its work as a completely sealed environment, no matter what that loon Zimmer from cybernetics might insist. Scientific progress is based on discovery, and you have to actually go look at things to do that. To that end, I found myself in a quiet little down west of the National Mall called "Grayditch". I played up my "bumbling professor" act a bit to convince the locals I was harmless. They seemed nice enough, but one of them kept staring at me like he didn't believe me for a second. Fortunately, I was able to convince one of them to build me this shack in exchange for my old bottlecap collection. To think my mother had called that a worthless hobby! There was clearly some type of hive nearby, and it was simple enough to convince the townsfolk to supply me with fresh samples in exchange for bits and bobs and the occasional checkup. So far, so good. I do believe I may be able to finally bring the noble ant into the modern age. For tonight, it's enough to finally have a lab again - so I and my special bottle of whiskey will bid this journal adieu.

-0-

Lesko's Logs

January 22, 2277

There is a Queen nearby! I had known there was a plentiful source of ants, but I hadn't imagined a full queen! She has to live in the nearby Metro station - it's the only location that makes sense. I'll have to task my Science Robot with tracking her down - after dark, so that Wilks child doesn't try to follow it. The boy is bright - he reminds me of myself at his age - but he lacks any sort of proper education, and I lack the time to provide one. I hope he finds his way out of this place, but I don't hold out much hope. Besides, his father is the one who brings me the most specimens by far. Regardless, once I have access to a queen, I can finally begin synthesizing serums!

-0-

Lesko's Logs

April 16, 2277

I've hit a wall again, but I'm so close! The Queen's royal jelly holds the key - that's where the transformative effect is occurring. But the DNA is resisting me. It's as if the genes themselves don't want to change back! Fortunately, I have a next step. I smuggled a small vial of Forced Evolutionary Virus out of the gene labs before I left the Institute. The databanks were full of warnings about it being powerful yet dangerously unstable - but what does a master geneticist have to fear from a mere viral sample?

-0-

Lesko's Logs

July 9, 2277

Using the FEV has produced such valuable data! I've run through serum after serum, tweaking each chromosome just so like a sculptor chisels his clay. I'm close to a breakthrough - I can feel it! I should have a viable serum by next month.

-0-

Lesko's Logs

August 11, 2277

I'm having my Science Bot inject the Queen with Serum A27 as I write this. I can hardly contain my excitement - ten years of research culminating tonight! Finally, ants will be as God intended them to be - small, industrious, harmless. If not friends to mankind, then at least not our foes. And maybe then the souls of my family can finally be at rest.

-0-

Lesko's Logs

August 12, 2277

can't write long. mutation went wrong - suspect mutation of venom sac. not small or harmless

must go to backup lab near queen chamber before ants burn the door

pyrosis

A/N: I'm not dead yet! Just.. very busy. This is still very much a thing that's happening though, so if you're one of my handful of followers, fear not! If not, hey, you do you man. Also yes, those of you familiar with the game won't recognize Lesko's characterization much, and that's because as written he doesn't make much sense. Or at least, he's not very interesting. So eff it, I'm the author, and I'm writing a story.