The chief security officer smiled with pride. ‘The ants who work in the tower are strictly prohibited from entering this room without authorisation. All maintenance work is performed under the close supervision of dinosaurs.’ She unhooked a magnifying glass from the door of the nearest server cabinet. ‘As Your Majesty can see, we use these to monitor the ants’ work. Whenever we have reason to dispatch an ant into the interior of a server, we keep them under continuous and rigorous surveillance.’ She gestured expansively around the room, drawing the visitors’ attention to the magnifying glasses hanging on every server-cabinet door.

‘Excellent.’ The interior minister inhaled sharply. ‘And what have you done to prevent infiltration by unauthorised ants?’

‘For a start, we’ve hermetically sealed the server room to stop intruders from gaining access.’

‘Hermetically sealed it?’ interjected the security minister, who’d been silent until now. He gave a hollow guffaw. ‘That’s a laugh! Let me tell you, I have had the dubious pleasure of seeing the most airtight room known to dinosaurkind – namely the vault in the Imperial Bank of Gondwana where the ants’ currency is stored.’ He shook his head in weary disgust. ‘Do you know how tightly that vault is sealed? No? I can assure you: it’s a vacuum inside there. Not even air can get in. Air! Think about that for a moment. It’s a perfect seal. And yet…’

Even the emperor was all ears now. He and the other three dinosaurs waited patiently for the security minister to get to his punchline.

‘There was a particularly clever gang of ant thieves at large and the bank knew it would be targeted sooner or later. So the manager installed a number of highly sophisticated super-sensitive gas detectors inside the vault. The idea being that as the ants drilled through the wall, trace amounts of air would leak in from the outside, triggering the sensors and setting off the alarm. But blow me down, do you think that worked? Did it hell!’

The minister narrowed his eyes and drew himself up tall as he finally got to the point of his tale. ‘No! Those damned critters still managed to rob the vault without setting off the alarm. And they left no discernible evidence, not a whit. But I tell you what I think – I suspect those crafty buggers mounted a miniature vacuum chamber to the vault’s exterior wall before they started drilling. That way, no air leaked in, no air leaked out. Be under no illusion, my friends, the ants’ cunning is far beyond what we can imagine. And their tiny size gives them an enormous advantage. No way can we secure the massive buildings of our cities with ant-proof seals. It’s impossible.’

Emperor Dadaeus was not going to be fobbed off that easily. ‘But can the servers themselves not be hermetically sealed to prevent the ants sabotaging them?’ he asked.