Chapter 4: Genesis of the Sentients

After searching for a while, Yate found that the most outstanding specimen was a beetle‑shaped creature.

"It has armor, it's agile, and most crucially, its head is covered by a plate—no hair… it's you, lucky one. You will become the bald Homo sapiens overlord of a future epoch, even several epochs to come."

Yate picked up the ant‑sized beetle with a pair of metal tweezers and placed it into a clear test tube. Then he gathered the food needed to raise this creature and brought it to a fresh one‑square‑meter test plot, where he released it.

Cell‑division rate: ×10,000!

In no time at all, their population exploded—death and rebirth driving the numbers into the hundreds of thousands.

Yate lined up a large batch of empty test tubes on the ground. "Come on, line up and get in—three hundred per tube." Influenced by the mother‑hive signal, the little "ants" queued obediently and filed into the tubes, where Yate affixed batch numbers.

He diluted the chimpanzee blood and let a single drop fall into each tube. Then, by controlling the mother‑hive, he forced them to pierce their own exoskeletons so that their hemolymph mixed with the chimp blood. A massive blood‑rejection reaction ensued, instantly killing them all.

Yate wasn't any kind of high‑level biologist—his method was simple and brutal, something even a child could do:

Survival of the fittest. Any that can't endure the blood‑mixing reaction must die.

Over two days and countless batches, tens of millions of giant beetles perished. In the end, only three tubes—#1042, #2041, and #2415—showed mutants that survived the gene‑rejection.

Survival, however, didn't guarantee perfection—many survivors were grotesque deformities. Yate examined all three tubes and chose the most successful variant: tube 2041. Inside it was a tiny, exquisitely formed creature, even smaller than a normal ant, densely covered in hair and resembling a little black‑armored ape. He named it the "Insect‑Ape." Unfortunately, it was exactly the opposite of what he'd intended: instead of being bald, it was covered in lustrous fur—even its head was thick with hair.

In its test tube, the Insect‑Ape banged on the glass and let out a furious, alien cry.

"bald head!"

"bald head !"

The cadence slowly shaped itself into a recognizable word:

"????"

Yate was stunned.

He'd wanted it bald—yet here it was, mocking him, the bald creator! "bald head " was merely a short‑term side effect of chemo; with a month's rest, hair would regrow. Clearly not a good specimen.

He took a deep breath, ready to crush it. "I might be the only one in the world mocked by my own creation for being bald." But in the end, he paused. After so many rounds of culling, this was the sole survivor of the gene‑rejection trials—he couldn't kill it… not yet. He put it back into the test plot, vowing to remember this insult and deal with it later.

Within moments, accelerated cell‑division (×10,000) ran its course: the Insect‑Ape perished, but not before propagating a tribe of tens of thousands across the surface, marching like a dense swarm of black ants and shrieking:

"bald head !"

"bald head !"

"bald head !"

These tiny, delicate Insect‑Apes roamed their sandbox world, blissfully unaware of the creator whose petty grudge would one day shape their fate.

Yate growled, "You really are toxic." He decided to introduce the second genome—termite—but despite seventy‑odd attempts and the deaths of over a hundred thousand "bald head " Insect‑Apes, none could successfully fuse the termite genes.

"It must be too primitive to handle multiple genomes at once."

Resigned, he shelved the termite project and instead accelerated their division (×10,000) en masse, hoping that sheer generations might birth true intelligence. Yet no matter how many generations passed, they remained mindless, endlessly shrieking "bald head"

Then he realized his mistake: at ten‑thousand‑fold acceleration, a creature that would normally live decades was born, bred, and died in seconds—no time to think, create language, or build a civilization.

"I need to dial it back."

Consulting the mother‑hive's data, he learned: at ×1 speed, one year passes in one year; at ×10,000, one day equals ten thousand years. But at ×100, something new happens: brain cells and neurons divide fast enough to accelerate thought a hundred‑fold, synchronizing body and mind so that their perception of time slows relative to the world around them.

"At one hundred‑fold speed, their bodies and minds both accelerate a hundred times—everything looks slow, and they can think and act in harmony."

He commanded the mother‑hive: Cell‑division rate: ×100 for that region. Instantly, the ant‑sized Insect‑Apes' thoughts raced, and their movements matched—blurs of motion like afterimages.

Curious, Yate asked the secondary core, "Can I also accelerate my cells a hundred‑fold?"

The mechanical reply came: "No—you lack Insect‑Tribe cells. You'd simply accelerate your cancer cells and die immediately."

Meanwhile, on the larger sandbox, two days' worth of experiments at ×10,000 equated to another twenty thousand years: towering trees and massive Jurassic‑era beasts—giant, black‑disk‑headed armored predators the size of house cats—now roamed. On the scale of the ant‑sized Insect‑Apes, they were like a hundred‑meter Tyrannosaurus.

"How will they survive?" Yate wondered. He slowed the big sandbox from ×10,000 to ×100, giving its inhabitants the capacity for thought.

Experiment complete.

He grabbed a tube containing three hundred of his accelerated Insect‑Apes, donned his plastic shoe covers, and strode through the miniature verdant valleys of his sandbox, crushing delicate trees underfoot. In one leafy forest, animals fled in terror at the tremors.

"Here will do."

Yate released the three hundred into a tree‑ringed southern canyon of the sandbox—and watched as "bald head " rang out in miniature choruses under the looming green cliffs.