Mafia boss Xry'ptagkviop has been caught by the galactic police in his dirty acts, and was sentenced to prison for life. Because he could not change his old ways, raping and torturing younger alien inmates and attempting several times to break out of prison, he was sent to the maximum security prison of the galaxy - the supernova prison.

The supernova prison practised solitary confinement: each cell was completely separate from the others, and he could have no access at all to other inmates. Xry'ptagkviop, who used to find joy in the pain of others, was deeply disappointed, and decided he had to look for something to do. After ambulating a few times around his rather capacious prison cell, he noticed an ant colony at one corner!

Elated, he starting stamping his foot on the ants, hoping to derive pleasure from the cold-blooded act. But his initial excitement soon died out as he realised that the ants would not perish. Soon after they stepped on the ants, they were revived, and they started crawling onto his shoes and into his pants!

He promptly took off his pants and desperately tried to shake off the ants. It didn't work. The ants were still in his pants! It took a few hours to rid himself completely of the creepy-crawlies.

After several incidents of a similar nature, he decided that he had had enough. He pounded on the cell wall and demanded the prison guard transfer him to another cell. To his pleasant surprise, the guard instantly complied. Soon enough, he was in another cell, quite distant from the original.

This time, he silently promised himself not to make any trouble again, and he did not. A few days passed without incident... Until he woke up, again with ants in his pants! As a reflex, he glanced at the same direction where the ant colony was located in his older cell. Sure enough, another ant colony was there, looking surprisingly similar to the one in his old cell.

Horrified, he frantically shook the ants from his pants again, and demanded another change of cell. As he changed cells, he found the same ant colony again and again. After a few thousand years, he had even begun recognising individual ants, and started giving them names like Peter, John and Mary. And no matter how many times he changed his cell, the ants were still there.

This was how he found out the hard way that each cell in a 'nova has the same very ants.