#the reference to death in the wip title is significant but I don't want to be too spoilery

[vault-heck]

for the wip meme, I'm definitely curious about the raspberry ant pie one!

Hey, thanks for asking! This is a WIP chapter for my nanowrimo project, and I'm really excited about it, but it does take some setup/infodumping to explain. For context, the setting is soft sci fi/spec fic set in a 2055+ technocracy.

At this point in the story the MC, Laramie, has discovered a horrific betrayal from someone close to her. She's a programmer in the emergency services sector, and intends to get revenge on the person by messing with his personal records somehow. She realized pretty quickly that hacking into anything meaningful is beyond her skill set, but when her friend Clementine complains that she needs a way to dispose of a particularly large colony of Raspberry Crazy Ants, Laramie has an idea. Here's a snippet!

Laramie drew slow, careful breaths as she sheathed her arm in a glove that reached into a contamination reduction zone around the Raspberry ants enclosure. She tapped a button with her free hand, which moved a panel and gave her just enough room to pick up the cylindrical vessel. Seeing it clearly was another challenge, as the bait was extremely effective, and the whole thing was covered with millions of tiny, hungry ants.

She lifted it and shuddered as hundreds of thousands of them fell free. She couldn't actually feel them through the thick leather glove, but their uncanny movements fooled her mind. She tapped the button to her left again, shutting their main enclosure. Careful to close the container snug and switch on its microscopic ventilation, she captured most of the ants inside. The ones that didn't fit gradually slid down the glass designed to funnel them back into the enclosure before sucking the top section of all its oxygen. They would leave the dish there for thirty minutes to let any stragglers leave the airlock, just in case.

“Nice job. I wasn't even nervous watching you do that.” Clementine beamed at Laramie, and her ears quickly went warm.

“Will this be enough to take out his data center?” Laramie asked, eyes fixed on the quarantined vessel. It might as well have been a grenade, and might be even more unsettling to hold in her palm.

In the thin space between the glass, thousands-- no, probably millions-- of ants swarmed in a cloud of tiny appendages. Laramie wondered what emotion Poe would attach to the movements if they were to paint the scene. Anger, probably. And they were so, so small. She shuddered.

Clementine looked at the dish and her eyebrows shot up. “More than plenty. A single tap will take out 5 towers, for sure.”

Yeah, so... If you've never heard of/read about Raspberry Crazy Ants... they're terrifying. They're the ants that are next to impossible to kill and they really do infest electronics.