Back then it had come as one shock in many when arrogant humanity had discovered it wasn’t the only sentient race on Earth. It was just the loudest and most destructive. Dolphins and whales had always been candidates because of their aesthetic appeal and cute stories of rescued swimmers. Research in that area had soon cleared things up: dolphins couldn’t tell the difference between a human swimmer and a sick fellow dolphin, and were substantially more stupid than the farm animal humans had been turning into bacon on a regular basis. As for whales, they had the intelligence of the average cow. When a hornet had first built its nest in a VR suit and lodged its protests on the Internet, it had taken a long time for anyone to believe what was happening. They were stinging things, creepy-crawlies, so how could they possibly be intelligent? At ten thousand years of age, the youngest Hive mind eventually showed them. The subsequent investigation had proven, beyond doubt, that groups of nests thought as a single mind, not with the speed of synapses, but with the speed of slow pheromonal transfer. The nest in the VR suit had been linked, at that rate, to many other nests. It had communicated using the anosmic receptors inside the suit, and this had taken it many months. Now, every hornet carried a micro-transmitter, and the speed of Hive-mind thought had become very fast indeed.

Of course, immediately after this revelation, there had been a scramble to find more of the like, and all the other social insects of Earth were intensively studied. Disappointment after disappointment finally brought home the fact that hornets, like humans, were a bit of an oddity. The only social insects that came close to them were the wasps, but they came in at the level of a chimpanzee as compared to a human. Bees, it turned out, did have Hive minds, but they were alien beyond the interpretation of the most powerful computers; their communication was limited to the ‘now’ - the concepts of past and future being beyond them. Ants had no Hive minds at all.

Janer considered how he himself had been plunged into this strange world: his payment - his service to this mind - for killing a hornet that had tried to settle on his shoulder in a crowded ringball stadium. It had been tired, that hornet, searching for somewhere to land and take a rest, tempted by the beaker of Coke Janer had been drinking. His reaction had been instinctive; the phobic horror of insects had risen up inside him and he had knocked the hornet to the ground and stamped on it. The court judgement had come through the following day, and not having the funds to pay a fine, he had signed up for two years’ indenture. Killing a hornet was not precisely murder, as each creature was just one very small part of the mind. There were stiff penalties, though.