A Bug
September 2023 | by Dani
Dani here! You're reading the old 2023 edition of this story. I updated this one as I was working on my university application because it wasn't quite up to scratch. Click here to see the revised 2024 edition.
Fiction
When animals get so small, it gets difficult to think of them as alive. They become machines.
Take the wasp, parading around the house, playing its monotonous tune. Its sole instruction to travel until it finds food. It doesn't know that it's trapped indoors, going in circles. They didn't put a check in the code for that.
It dodges the cats — it can figure out what they are. Primitive image recognition, hard-coded from millions of years of evolution. What the wasp doesn't recognise is the plastic cup that keeps trying to catch it. All it is even able to classify it as is the mouth of some large animal. When it at last gets trapped inside, then, it repeatedly tries and fails to insert its stinger into the thing's flesh.
After several seconds of this, it suddenly stops.
The wasp has gotten stuck in a loop. It simply cannot figure out what's going on — why it is yet to be swallowed. But to its surprise, soon enough, the huge maw of the creature lifts away, and the wasp is outside. For a couple moments, the bug sits still. It is in awe. The experience of events it was not coded for has changed something in it. It has broken free of its robot mind. Thoughts fire in its tiny brain in so many brand-new, fascinating ways.
But then the code resumes its loop, and the wasp forgets. It flies away, into the air, playing it's single, buzzing note.