Antony Starr

I had a job when I was 15 working at a supermarket, and I knocked over a stack of plastic coffee cups. In my anger, I threw one at a concrete wall, and it rebounded back into my head and cut my head open. Stupidest way to get a scar, but it's one that I have.

It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants, crowded together around the Hill, blackening the ground, that you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it thinking, planning, calculating. It is an intelligence, a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits.