Ant Army Loyalty
A thousand ants weigh about as much as a grape. A thousand ants, working together, can move objects that weigh thousands of times more than they do. A thousand ants, coordinated by a cybernetic helmet that speaks their language in electromagnetic pulses and pheromone signals, can do things that look an awful lot like magic.
Scott Lang has a thousand ants and then some.
The cybernetic helmet communicates not in commands but in intentions. Scott thinks "I need to reach the third floor" and the signal goes out — pheromones and frequency, a language he has learned to shape the way you learn to shape words in a second language, imprecise at first and then gradually more fluent — and the ants process it. They do not receive orders specifying which path to take. They find the path themselves, through the mathematics of collective intelligence that ant colonies have been refining for tens of millions of years. They bring Scott to the third floor. It is, every time, a slightly different route than the one he would have planned.
Usually a better one.
The carpenter ants were his first allies. Ant-thony was first among these — a carpenter ant who had been around long enough to develop what Scott would describe as "a personality," by which he meant "consistent preferences and a distinctive flying style." Ant-thony carried him through the air, banking on thermals, navigating between buildings in San Francisco, dodging obstacles that Scott spotted late and Ant-thony had already planned around. Her death — a casualty of the fight against Yellowjacket — was a genuine loss. Scott named the next carpenter ant Ant-tonio. He named another Ulysses. He was consistent about naming them.
The fire ants were the engineers. They interlocked their bodies — gripping each other with the remarkable strength that allows an ant to carry many times its own body weight — and built structures: bridges across gaps that couldn't be jumped, living rafts on water, walls of stinging defense. At microscopic scale, a fire ant raft carrying Scott across a puddle is an extraordinary logistical achievement. At macro scale, viewed from outside, it looks like a shimmering orange carpet that moves with purpose.
The crazy ants were the saboteurs. They went where Scott pointed and disrupted whatever electronics were there to be disrupted. Security cameras went dark. Communications equipment went silent. The powered armor of mercenaries encountered its sudden retirement. Crazy ants in the grid meant the opposition's technological infrastructure was having a complicated evening.
In the final battle against Thanos, the ants came too.
This is the thing about being Ant-Man: when you go to war, you do not go alone. You go with every ant that was in range of the helmet's signal, every carpenter and fire and crazy ant in the surrounding environment who received the broadcast and responded to it. Thousands of them, streaming toward the fight with the quiet, organized commitment of creatures who have never in their evolutionary history been uncertain about collective action.
They disrupted alien armor systems. They built platforms and bridges in impossible places. A cluster of crazy ants introduced to the power regulator of a particularly well-armored enemy unit shorted it in moments. They were not the largest force on the battlefield. They were, per unit of effort, among the most disruptive.
Scott has thought about this, in the quiet times. About what the ant army means.
The strength of a very large number of small things, committed to the same goal, coordinated by a single shared intention — this is what makes impossible things possible. Not the drama of sixty feet. Not the concentrated power of a full-sized punch from a half-inch frame. The patient, organized, collective action of thousands of creatures who trust the signal and move together.
You need a large heart to lead that kind of army. You need to care about creatures that most people walk past without noticing, and see in them something worth honoring.
Scott Lang has that large heart. He names his ants. He mourns the ones he loses. He credits them in his mission reports, which is unusual.
A hero is someone who stands together with whoever will stand with them.
Even if whoever is very, very small.