Lightning cut through the leaden clouds, and the air was filled with the salty smell before the rainy season.
The little boy squatted under a tree in the garden. His snow-white face was expressionless, his black eyes were motionless, and he stared at the ants lined up in a long line and crawled towards a higher place.
"... He's six years old, but he still can't speak..." "The whole family has such high IQs, but the youngest son is mentally retarded..."
People's whispers came from a distance and disappeared at the end of the corridor. The little boy seemed to be deaf and had no reaction until a young man's voice came from behind him:
"What are you doing?"
The little boy turned around.
Behind him was a man in his early twenties, tall, with black hair. His face with obvious mixed-race features looked very sharp, and his pupils were a rare gray-green color, like the sky that was brewing a rainstorm. His eyes fell on the little boy's hand.
He held a piece of melted honey in his little palm and was holding it against the ground near the ant hole. Some ants that had just crawled out of the hole changed their route and crawled towards his hand in groups.
"... Slow." The little boy blurted out a word.
The amount of his thoughts was so huge that his language system could not keep up at this age. After a while, he turned around and pointed at the slope not far away, stumbling out a few words: "Behind... the rain... melted, molecular heat, diffusion..."
"You mean to say that the worker ants at the back don't have time to move to higher ground before the rain, so you melt the honey to speed up the molecular thermal motion, thereby increasing the molecular diffusion rate, attracting more ants to crawl into your hand, and then you carry them to the slope?"
The little boy nodded vigorously, and the man's condescending face was reflected in his black pupils.
"The odor-sensitive nerve cells in ants' antennae are among the most advanced in nature, and the nerve endings of the odor receptors are in contact with the glomerular clusters, which means that increasing the rate of molecular diffusion is not very useful for attracting ants—and."
The man leaned over, grabbed the little boy's hand and threw it, and the melted honey was thrown into the grass on the slope.
"You give the ants too much honey," he said sternly. "The ants won't thank you, they will just stick to the sugar and die, you idiot."
Bean-sized raindrops fell with a crackling sound, and the ant colony that had no time to migrate was dispersed.
The little boy was at a loss as to what to do. He wanted to pick up the soil, but it was too late. He tried to catch ants and was bitten on the palm of his hand. In the chaos, he crushed several ants to death. The man grabbed his arm and dragged him back to the corridor.
The whole world was submerged in the gray rain curtain. No one knew that an ant colony had fallen apart and disappeared completely in the blink of an eye.
The little boy opened his eyes wide, with tears gathering in his frightened eyes.
"Ants in the world have their own way of evolution. Interfering with the survival of the fittest with foolish kindness is bound to be a futile attempt. Don't you understand such a simple truth?"
"… "
The man folded his arms and looked down at the child, not hiding his helplessness and annoyance. After a long breath, he murmured, "Forget it."
Such weakness, sentimentality and fragility should be additional manifestations of low IQ.
"Go back to the secure floor," he ordered. "The experiment has reached a critical stage. Don't come out and disturb others."