I wrote this short story in January 1995 while under notice of impending layoff. I tried to create a "worst case scenaro" for a quintessential industrial technical communicator. My daughter's ant farm supplied not ony the crucial metaphor, but the general idea for the story. As it happened, at the last moment I was not laid off, but transferred to another division in the company.

While this works well as a short story, it is so relevant to the job situtation in corprate America currently that I am expanding it into a novel.

I painted the picture as a study for possible cover art for the novel version.

The Last Ant

As a gag gift on his 50th birthday, Anton, whose nickname was "Ant," received an ant farm from his colleagues at the office. The farm consisted of two 9-inch by 12-inch panes of glass held in a plastic frame. A sealed pouch contained enough white sand to fill the 1/8-inch space between the glass panes. Ants for the farm could be obtained through air-express by mailing the enclosed card, which read "Only worker ants will be supplied."

"Imagine that: an ant farm. What a clever idea!" said Ant.

Ant was the lead writer on a publications team maintaining documentation for a software system containing millions of lines of code. In its heyday, the publications department had numbered fifteen highly competent, hard-working individuals, divided into three separate teams, each team responsible for maintaining documentation for a particular software product. With the advent of desktop publishing, the duties of writer-analysts were expanded to include everything from initial keyboard entry to production of final camera-ready copy.

The result was a reduction in force that drastically shrank the size of the publications department. Ant's team was cut to two writers besides himself, with each individual responsible for six of the eighteen manuals that described the structure and function of the highly complex system.

Ant's birthday celebration turned out to be the last office party of his diminishing department. Several weeks later, five days short of Christmas, the Corporation shut down most of its domestic facilities and terminated 80 percent of its employees. Control of products and services that were still profitable was transferred to various foreign subsidiaries. Lines of business remaining in the US were those slated to be sold or discontinued within one or two years, and thus not worth transferring overseas. These would be maintained by a minimum number of temporarily retained domestic personnel.

On that fateful December 20th, everyone in Ant's group was laid off except Ant. Ant was informed that from now on he alone would maintain the 10,000 pages of documentation. Other groups supporting Ant's system suffered the same fate: the large development and customer support organization was reduced to one programmer and two telephone helpline people.

After watching his colleagues clean out their desks, Ant went home to his sparse bachelor apartment in despair. During most of the unpaid Christmas furlough Ant stared out the window at the skeletal trees shivering in the icy wind. In an effort to cheer himself up, he eventually filled out and mailed the card requesting worker ants for his ant farm. Then he poured the white sand into the slot between the panes of glass and added the prescribed daily amount of water to moisten the sand.

A package containing fifteen medium?size red ants arrived several days later in a sealed glass vial packed in a block of Styrofoam. All the ants seemed to be in good condition. Removing the lid of the farm, which he had placed on the chest of drawers in his bedroom, Ant carefully uncapped the vial and tipped it until the queue of ants slid gently onto the moist sand. Ant watched the newcomers feed on an amber glob of honey that he had positioned with the aid of a medicine dropper, according to the instructions.

After the ants had eaten the honey, they gathered together in what looked amazingly like a business meeting, or at least an active networking session characterized by delicate, trembling antennae ever in motion, each ant interacting with first one ant and then another, as though exploring and touching upon every aspect of their collective course of action. Then suddenly the meeting broke up and the ants began pulling and shoving in the sand, excavating their first tunnel. Ant marveled at the ants' apparent grasp of logistics and was astonished at the superior cooperation that seemed to characterize their entire endeavor.

Ant wondered if the ants were concerned about concepts that affect humans, such as questions of individual self?worth and occupational dignity. How must these fifteen ants have felt, he wondered, to be imprisoned in the mailing vial? It must have surprised them to have their familiar workaday world turned upside-down. If their ability to be steadily employed was how they reckoned their happiness, then even a day or two of containment may have been hard to take. Or did the Ants appreciate having a little time off for a change?

It occurred to Ant that ants might not have a clear concept of time. If that were the case, then the period of enforced inactivity may not have been bad after all, and, in fact, might have been completely indistinguishable from any normal period of rest. Surely even creatures so indefatigable as worker ants must somehow recharge their batteries by resting or sleeping.

The matter of whether ants slept was settled to Ant's satisfaction the first morning after the Christmas furlough. By that time the ants had already created an impressive labyrinth of tunnels. As usual, Ant's alarm clock sounded at 5:30 AM to send him leaping out of bed. Flipping on the lights in his bedroom, Ant noticed that the ants actually appeared to be asleep, heaped together in a chamber that resembled a dormitory area. Ant thought it strange to see ants sleeping, so accustomed was he to seeing them always in motion.

Since Ant's manager expected him to meet milestones that had been established when there were four writers in the group instead of one, Ant not only identified with the ants in the ant farm, but was actually considering that the only way to cope with his own situation was to transform himself into a human ant, and by never-ending persistence work as though each minute had at least ninety seconds, each workday at least twelve hours, and each week at least eight workdays. On top of that, he pledged himself to compress time even further by implementing new twists on "working smart." With grim determination Ant resolved to dig in the way the ants had when they first arrived in the farm. It seemed to Ant that the ants worked as if what they were doing mattered more than why they were doing it-as if, for them, the endless construction of tunnels in the sand was by far the most important issue in the entire universe. During those periods when overtime was not required, Ant was accustomed to arriving in his cubicle punctually at 7:00 AM, taking an hour for lunch at 11:30 AM, and leaving shortly after 4:00 PM. Previously, Ant prided himself on having performed as much as humanly possible during each work day. From now on, inspired to greater zeal by the ants, he planned to accomplish even more. It occurred to Ant that it was fortunate that he lived alone, for beginning immediately he must work until the tasks scheduled for each particular day were accomplished, however many extra hours that might take.

On the way home from work Ant wondered if the ants were merely programmed to work mindlessly like machines, or whether they set tasks for themselves and established schedules. He wondered what kind of "business" they conducted at their meetings. That evening, while watching the ants, Ant had a new idea. Could it be that these meetings had a religious significance? Was it possible that the ants' endless tunneling might be a type a spiritual exercise, an act of obedience and discipline leading to transcendence of some sort? Surely there was a quid pro quo involved-but what was it? Was there some kind of light at the end of the tunnel that conferred significance on what from a strictly human point of view could be construed as meaningless labor?

While feeding the ants prior to leaving for work the next morning, it suddenly dawned on Ant what the quid pro quo might be. Perhaps the ants were serving life sentences at hard labor for spiritual transgressions committed in a previous incarnation. Maybe the reward for their having fulfilled the requirements of their present sentence was to be incarnated next time as human beings. How ironic, thought Ant, if any of these particular ants should wind up experiencing the sort of ant?like human existence that had been Ant's own fate for the greater portion of his life.

Ant wondered if his problem was that in a previous incarnation as an ant he himself had failed to measure up, and must therefore continue his sentence in the present human incarnation, even though in every other respect he was no longer an insect. Ant speculated that if the path of wisdom were to take no chances in matters affecting duty, responsibility, and reliability, then the best he could do for himself in the present situation was to strive to be as perfect a human ant as possible, each day working with the same persistence and dedication as the insect ants in his ant farm, whose lives and labors would serve as an inspiration for Ant himself from that time forward.

With a wry grin, Ant reflected that while the ant thoughts working through his brain might not be totally sane, to be on the safe side he would operate on the assumption that these thoughts were not only rational, but technically accurate descriptions of a spiritual truth too deep for ordinary human understanding.

At one time Ant was a family man with a wife and child and a job that was as high in satisfaction as it was low in pay. Ant taught Language Arts in an elite prep school for boys. He loved the daily interaction with his pupils, and generously contributed time and effort to the many athletic, cultural, and musical activities that occupied the boys' out?of?class time. An accomplished musician, Ant took special interest in the school's superb choir, comprised of choirboys age eight to thirteen attending the school on full scholarship. Ant's greatest joy was playing flute in the flute, piano, and harp trio that accompanied the boychoir whenever it performed in public. After Ant got married, his involvement in the school's extracurricular activities decreased until it finally disappeared altogether, the result of his wife's not unreasonable insistence that Ant's extra time belonged to her rather than his pupils or the school.

Ant and his family lived in a faculty apartment in one of the ivy-covered brick buildings nestled among squirrel- and bird?laden bearded oaks on the beautiful, well-tended campus. When his six-year-old daughter complained that she was "sick and tired of being where there was nothing but boys," and his wife announced that she wanted to develop a career of her own now that their child was old enough to start school, Ant reluctantly resigned from the prep school, moved his family to a large city, and took what he supposed would be a temporary position as an industrial technical communicator, working on aerospace hardware maintenance manuals.

Ant's new workplace was a fortress-like facility with no windows located inside an Air Force base. It had a parking lot with 20,000 slots, most of them occupied by the time the last day shift had begun. After walking half a mile from his car, Ant stood in line at the entrance, ready to show his photo ID and open his briefcase as soon as he reached the armed guard, who would peek into the briefcase and then wave him inside.

With a large crowd of usually silent figures mechanically blowing smoke through their nostrils and periodically flicking ashes from their cigarettes, Ant trudged into the long subterranean maze of tunnels. After about three?quarters of a mile, Ant reached his particular stairwell, then climbed four flights of stairs to a gigantic open mezzanine. The mezzanine overlooked a gargantuan construction area over a mile in length where giant cargo aircraft were being assembled to a deafening cacophony of hisses, shrieks, and agonizing groans. As seen through the partially sound?proof windows at each landing of the stairwell to the mezzanine, the construction floor far below seemed littered with enormous carcasses in various stages of decomposition, over which a huge army of ant-size creatures crawled, assisted by cranes, lifts, ladders, and scaffolding.

Ant's desk was in the center of an area containing more than a hundred desks, each with a telephone and an ashtray. All through the day telephones in the mezzanine rang in a random but persistent pattern similar to the flashes of fireflies on a summer evening. A blue?gray haze of semitransparent cigarette smoke softened the edges of the area, transforming the entire mezzanine into something the likes of which Ant had previously experienced only in dreams.

By the end of the day Ant's skin, hair, and clothes-including his underwear-reeked of cigarette smoke. After awhile the hall closet at home where he hung his overcoat smelled exactly like the mezzanine. The one aspect of his job that he, a life?long nonsmoker, could never get used to, and the issue that his wife and daughter complained about most bitterly, was the rancid smell of stale cigarette smoke that hung to him always, infecting everywhere he went, and everything he touched.

After five years Ant found a job at a significantly higher salary writing user manuals for a software company that had a rigidly enforced non-smoking rule. Ecstatic that he could finally breathe again, Ant learned to his dismay that there was a trade?off: all employees were expected when necessary to work from ten to sometimes twenty hours of unpaid overtime per week. It was as though the literal tunnels associated with his old job had been transformed into a new job with virtual, psychological tunnels out of which he never emerged for days at a time and never saw the sun except briefly on weekends.

Complaining that Ant "no longer had time for his family," his wife filed for divorce, gained sole custody of their daughter, and evicted him from the household. Ant took up residence in a rather nondescript apartment that he never bothered to fix up, since he was hardly ever home anyway. After that, Ant never moved and never tried to change jobs. After his daughter grew up he lost contact with her altogether. If she got married and had children, Ant never knew about it. Eventually his letters to her were returned stamped "Undeliverable" or "Addressee Unknown." He had lost track of his ex?wife and all of her relatives long before that, so there seemed no way to trace his daughter. He assumed that she must have attended college, but he never found out where.

After the divorce Ant never tried to cultivate any close friendships since he felt he never had time and was usually too exhausted to go anywhere or do anything in the evening except pass out on his bed or in the leather lounge chair in the living room.

Ant's work consisted of sitting in front of a computer monitor, opening, fixing, and closing one file after another all day long. Each file contained text and graphics for a particular section of a manual. His fingers moving swiftly and surely over the keyboard, Ant incorporated changes authorized by a paper copy markup, instantly transforming stylistically awkward, poorly expressed scribbling into clear, succinct technical language.

As soon as he completed one section, he would save and close the file, only to call up the next file in the sequence without so much as a pause. Ant felt at times like a miner, endlessly tunneling into a mountain of text, chipping and shaping words and phrases, formatting each tunnel by installing verbal beams and supports, constantly pushing ahead, ever mindful of approaching milestones, so intent on his task that he often forgot to take breaks, forgot to his increasing discomfort even to go to the toilet.

After the day was over Ant would stagger to his car and drive home in a stupor, sometimes discovering when he got home that the brown paper bag containing a hastily constructed sandwich was still in his briefcase, untouched. Shrugging his shoulders, Ant would wearily unwrap the no-longer-fresh sandwich intended for lunch and eat it instead for dinner.

After a particular workday even more unnerving than usual, Ant went into his bedroom to make his customary inspection of the ant farm. This time he was shocked to see that one of the ants had died. A large group of survivors was transporting the corpse through an upward-arching tunnel to an open chamber, at the far end of which a smaller group seemed to be excavating a deep pit. Ant watched in fascination as the ants gathered around their dead colleague. After a period of mutually rubbing each other's antennae, the ants nudged the corpse into the empty pit and returned to their tunnels to resume work.

Ant was in crisis mode. When he arrived for work his manager, a humorless lady in her early forties whose face twitched every time she attempted to smile, handed Ant a folder containing a sheaf of marked?up pages and ordered him to stop whatever he was doing and incorporate these changes from the field test site into the installation manual.

"Data cutoff was three weeks ago," protested Ant, pointing to a sealed box. "The installation manual was signed off by everyone including yourself just the day before yesterday. Look, it's already packed and ready for shipment to the printer."

"We don't have time to argue. Get going on these changes. Some of them are extensive. If you hurry maybe we can still ship by close of business today."

"It's not as easy as that," said Ant. "If the changes cause pages to ripple, I'll have to redo the table of contents, maybe even the index and glossary. That could take several days."

"We don't have several days, so get to it. And when you've finished incorporating the changes," said the manager over her shoulder as she left Ant's cubicle, "I want to see you in my office."

Fingers flying across the computer keyboard as he incorporated the changes to the installation manual, Ant kept thinking about the dead ant. To a distant observer, he mused, a human funeral wouldn't have looked any different. It was long past midnight when Ant finally finished rewickering the manual and printing the changed pages. By then both wrists had become excruciatingly painful and he was suffering from a case of indigestion so intense that an entire bottle of antacid tablets failed to bring relief.

The next morning at start of business Ant presented the refurbished installation manual to the manager.

"I was hoping to ship this yesterday afternoon," she said.

"If you hadn't dropped those latest changes on me," said Ant, "we could have shipped yesterday morning as planned. Nobody could have worked harder or smarter or faster than I did. Even so it took fifteen hours to do it. It was 2:00 AM before I got home, and yet here I am, back again at 7:00 AM."

"Ant, no one forces you to work 12- or 15-hour days. If that's how you want to spend your leisure time, that's your business. Don't look for special consideration as a result. And don't imagine that it's okay to slip other milestones just because you've lost a day."

"I'm not to blame for losing a day. The installation manual was already in the box ready for shipment to the printer when you made me pull it back and incorporate 50 pages of corrections from the field test site," Ant stammered, his face turning bright red.

"Let's not go over that again. Ant, I don't need to remind you that, unlike your former colleagues, you still have a job, something that could change any day."

"Well I guess I should be grateful for that," said Ant, his face becoming even redder than before.

"By the way," said the manager, "you look unusually red-faced today, why is that?"

"I guess my blood pressure has risen now that I've had to transform myself into a human ant."

"Did you say 'ant'? What kind of ant?"

"A red ant," quipped Ant, "what else?"

By the time Ant finished his next-to-last manual, a 500-page giant of a book, he was in terrible pain. The chest problem, which continued to be totally resistant to antacids, had extended down the left arm, joining the resident agony in the wrist. Now, curiously enough, the left hand had become grotesquely swollen and almost immobile. Ant's other wrist was as painful as ever, but the fingers could still be made to move, so Ant found himself typing much of the time with his right hand only. Ant observed that misery seemed to be distributed equally between the world of humans and insects. The ants in the ant farm were already dying off at the rate of two or three a day. Ant could not help noticing that as the number of ants declined, the survivors seemed to work even harder to maintain the established momentum. He felt quite certain that some universal principle was involved, a principle that ripples through all creation, and effects all forms of life.

Attrition in the ant farm had finally reduced the ants to only two individuals. Dragging himself into the bedroom to observe what was left of the farm, Ant was amazed at how neatly the corpses were stacked in the pit that served as the ant "cemetery," much more neatly than some of the medieval boneyards for human corpses, certainly neater than many modern automobile graveyards.

Ant scrutinized the tunnels for a long time before he located any movement. Then he noticed that only one of the last two ants was still alive, and it was desperately struggling to haul the other's corpse to the now overflowing ant cemetery. After the dead ant had been attended to, Ant noticed that the last ant was moving much more slowly and painfully than ever before, since two of its legs seemed not to be functioning properly. Ant reflected that his former colleagues had given him the ant farm as a friendly pun on his nickname, certainly never anticipating the irony that Ant would see himself and his own situation mirrored with such exactitude in the sad plight of these doomed insects, for whom Ant had come to feel real empathy.

With his left hand horribly swollen and throbbing, chest pain like continuous electrical shock, and wrists in such agony that he wondered if his tendons had been replaced by broken glass, Ant persevered with his work, his spirits buoyed by the thought that in two more days all the manuals would be out the door and he could finally relax and recuperate.

It was during this time that Ant began to be affected by auditory hallucinations. He kept hearing the sound of children singing. One of the most persistent voices he recognized from his teaching days at the prep school, when he was involved with the boychoir. It was unmistakably that of Jesus Garcia, a lad who already at age ten had the loveliest voice and the most perfect musicianship of any choirboy in the history of a school long recognized for the excellence of its choir. Ant recalled that after Jesus sang the Bach?Gounod arrangement of "Ave Maria," everyone in the concert hall had tears in their eyes, including the other choirboys.

Ant was puzzled at his sudden preoccupation with vocal performances that took place twenty years ago. All day long Ant kept hearing Jesus sing two separate versions of "Pie Jesu," the one from the Requiem of Gabriel Fauré and the other from the Requiem of Andrew Lloyd-Webber. These auditory holograms were so convincingly realistic that Ant felt transported back in the time to when Jesus was actually performing these poignant arias in public.

Ant reflected that his years of involvement with the boychoir had proved to be the spiritual and emotional apex of his life. The only memories from his own childhood of comparable value involved the piano, which Ant began playing when he was six, and the flute, which occupied his teen years. When Ant's flute, harp, and piano trio performed W. A. Mozart's exquisite Concerto in C for Flute and Harp to give the boys time to recuperate after a strenuous first half of their tour concert, this may have been a personal high point, but not as high as when the trio was accompanying the choir, and certainly nothing in comparison to the most precious moments of all, when Jesus sang so divinely that audience after audience could not keep from weeping. Desperately trying to sort these matters out, Ant figured that if music were the language of the soul, then the music of children's voices must be a true intimation of heavenly bliss. Comforted by this unaccustomed flood of musical reminiscences, Ant wondered if his memories of the angelic sound of the boychoir, and especially the solo performances of Jesus Garcia, were specific entries in the permanent record of his own soul. By the same token, Ant speculated that perhaps only those moments associated with his own childhood, or the childhood of those he was involved with during his tenure as a prep school teacher, were authentic enough to serve as an asset should the time come when Ant must offer up his final reckoning.

As Ant struggled to finish his remaining job tasks, physical pain receded more and more into the background, pushed there by the angelic sound of children singing. Climbing the stairs to his apartment, Ant concentrated on the music and tried to ignore the fact that at each second or third step he had to rest for several minutes to catch his breath.

Dragging himself into the bedroom, Ant saw that what he had been dreading had finally happened-the last ant was dead. Disturbed that of all the ants, only this most stalwart, indomitable survivor was left to lie where it fell and not hauled to the ant cemetery, Ant would have liked to perform a proper burial for the ant, but the ant had expired deep in the labyrinth of tunnels, and there was absolutely no way for Ant to intervene.

On the freeway driving through the darkness of a cold, inhospitable early morning on his way to work, Ant seemed spellbound by the parallel columns of red taillights and white headlights, illuminating four lanes in each direction of oncoming bumper-to-bumper traffic. Normally the traffic on the interstate highway seemed like a living organism, as mechanical and collective and indomitable as a column of fire ants. This morning, however, the procession of which Ant was a microcosmic component had slowed to a crawl, and was edging forward like a cortege of mourners on their way to a funeral. Firmly in the grip of hallucinatory music that never seemed to stop, this time the ethereal Misereri Mei, Deus of Gregorio Allegri, with its eerie, almost superhumanly high treble obbligato sung as only Jesus Garcia could sing it, Ant experienced that morning's journey as though participating in the solemnity of a sacramental observance.

Despite searing pain that seemed to be blasting a hole in his chest, Ant struggled to complete the final paperwork for the last manual. Backing up his hard disk, and making archival electronic copies of the entire library, Ant was sustained only by the internal music that felt more real than the mechanical tasks he was forcing himself to carry out, especially now that merely to touch the computer keyboard had degenerated into sheer torture.

Slipping in and out of a gentle twilight daze, Ant became aware that his manager was standing beside him. He heard words that seemed impossible to follow, little more than background noise to the swelling strains of heavenly music, phrases like "several weeks behind schedule," "too much time on the project," and "not enough bang for the buck."

Ant finally took refuge in a vivid daydream. He saw himself as a miner finishing up the day's work. Overwhelmed with happiness and relief, Ant put down his pick and shovel forever and stepped from the dark tunnel into dazzling sunshine and the glorious, triumphant, eternal sound of children singing.

Noticing that Ant seemed frozen in position, the manager stopped talking and thumped him on the shoulder. When Ant's head rolled forward, she felt his throat. Finding no pulse in his carotid artery, her face started twitching. After telephoning the emergency 911 number, she gathered up the manual that Ant had just finished and walked down the long corridor past the mostly vacant cubicles to her office.