Lost Worlds (my sci-fi short collection)

Ant World

Ant World

In a distant galaxy, far, far away, there was a planet, a very unusual planet. Instead of being home to a wide variety of plant life like most normal planets, the only plant life to evolve was a green creeper. It crept over mountains and valleys, across plains right to the edge of the crystal aqua sea. When a strand reached the water's edge it grew back over itself, continuing all the way until it reached the sea on the other side of the continent. After several thousand years the entire continent was crisscrossed millions of times with thin green highways, reaching several hundred metres up into the sky.

Around this time, nature found it convenient to produce the first animal life. She tried reptiles and mammals but they got tangled in the vines, trapped in a giant net, birds who couldn't find anywhere to nest without being overgrown, amphibians who took one look at the dense mass of vines and stayed in the water. Finally she tried insects. The winged died as did everything that couldn't eat the creepers, until pretty much all that were left were the ants and some soil dwellers.

It was an ant's paradise! Millions of pathways to run nowhere on, to carry things along, to meet and greet each other on. And if rarely, one fell off the vine, there was another immediately beneath to cling to. The ants were in raptures. Finally, they had their rightful place in the universe. The ants increased and the vines increased, stretching ever further up into the sky until the air got thin, but ants don't need much oxygen.

Eventually a million years passed since the first ant. As time ticked over into the ten thousand and first century the uppermost vine reached into space. A daring ant raced out to waver on the tip of it, and fell off.

The first living creature in the universe to achieve space flight, pre-empting Earth's fruit flies by a decade.