Invasive by Chuck Wendig

aggressive response of African honeybees.” Hannah knows that African honeybees evolved in an area where their honey reserves were persistently plundered by other animals, and so they developed a fast, brutal response. They’re hard to domesticate in terms of food production.
    â€œAny luck so far?”
    â€œNot really. We’ve gotten some foreign genes into queens, but while we’ve had the Apis mellifera genome cracked for well over a decade now, we still haven’t puzzled out the intricacy therein. Bees’ immune response is coded in there, but how that interacts with brood disease or mites, we just don’t know. You want to go see the ants?”
    â€œI do.”
    Back out of the buzzing, humming room. Toward the other door. But Will stops before he opens it. “I have a confession,” he says. “I’m a fan.”
    â€œA fan of . . . Charlize Theron? The X-Men? Mumford & Sons?”
    â€œYou. I’m a fan of yours.”
    Hannah takes a half step back. “I don’t follow.”
    â€œI read your work in Wired . I watched your TED talk—”
    â€œTEDx.”
    â€œAnd some of your university talks are on YouTube. It’s insightful stuff. And it aligns with things I already believe, which, admittedly, means I’m leaning into confirmation bias. But it’s smart. You’re smart.”
    The feeling that goes through Hannah is a strange one: she’s honored and pleased. And yet, it still feels creepy. Despite being in the public realm, her work has always been small and—to her, at least—unexceptional. And oddly, curiously, paradoxically private. “Thank you” is all she can muster.
    â€œI think about the future a lot,” Will says. He leans backward without looking and taps his wristband against the lock. “Let’s see some ants.”
    The door hisses open. Hannah’s breath is snatched away by the dueling forces of wonder and fear. The whole room is one big ant colony.
    In the other bubbles, the walls curve down with little adornment. In this pod, the walls are unseen, hidden behind what Hannah guesses is about six inches of dirt and then another clear plastic layer. In that dirt an ant colony works. All around her. Left, right, above her head. It exists in all directions but down: her feet still stand on the textured floor common to each pod within Arca Labs.
    She feels ants crawling over her skin— formication . Tingling, tickling, an invisible sensation but no less real. Minimovies of fear play out in her mind: the plastic suddenly cracking as the colony crashes down upon her, dirt in her eyes, ants in her hair, her ears, her nose—
    She takes a sharp breath. Stop it, Hannah. Get it together.
    â€œBeautiful, isn’t it?” Will asks.
    â€œIt is.” She asserts that for herself and for her own well-being. And in truth it really is a beautiful thing. This room is a feat of engineering, entomology, and even art. It feels like being underground. The sophistication of the ant colony is laid bare: the labyrinth they’ve built, the ants of different sizes and differentpurposes moving silently through the passages in an almost arterial movement. The entire nest gives the sense of a circulatory system: the churning of life through tunnels and chambers. “What species is this?” she asks.
    â€œ Pogonomyrmex badius. Florida harvester ant.”
    Harvester ant. She hears Ez’s voice in her head: The venom in a harvester ant is the most toxic in the insect world. Didn’t the venom of the modified ants closely resemble that of the harvester? She asks carefully, “Those are highly venomous, right? The harvester ants.”
    â€œHm? They do have a very painful attack—the sting is vicious. I’ve gotten hit and it swells, grows hot, starts to secrete fluid. Painful for a few days. Though the really venomous ones are the Maricopa harvesters. And even though it hurts, these