How to Outsmart a Billion Robot Bees

by Paul Tobin

  “Fourteen belches!” he said. “Fourteen is a companion Pell number, and an open meandric number, and the base of tetradecimal notation, and—”

  “Yes. I know I’m belching a lot, Bosper. I can’t help it.” Melville came and landed on my shoulder, buzzing in querulous fashion, probably worried about me. Do bees ever belch? I was thinking of asking her, or asking Nate, and so I was looking to Nate just as he finally thought to switch off the button on his magnifying glass so that Melville’s giant version disappeared, but . . . something else appeared instead.

  Something far more hideous.

  Maculte.

  “Eww,” I said. “Nate. Make that go away.” I waved to the image of the smirking leader of the Red Death Tea Society.

  “I’m . . . not doing this,” he said. He was looking at his magnifying glass, clearly confused. It’s not often I see Nate confused. I didn’t like it.

  “Hello, children,” Maculte said. My skin went cold.

  “Bosper makes attacks!” Bosper yelled, and he leaped for the hologram, and of course right through the hologram, and then smacked into the floor, tumbling to a stop.

  “Bosper does not make attacks?” he said.

  “It’s just a hologram, Bosper,” Nate said. “You can’t bite it.” Nate had shaken off his confusion and was now facing the hologram.

  He said, “So I assume you’ve overridden my input data for the quad-laser control? That’s how you’re projecting your own image?”

  “Of course,” Maculte said. “And I assume you’ve understood that I’ve taken control of your trained bumblebees, and that I now have a vast army poised to strike?”

  “Yes,” Nate said. “Obviously.” Bosper was now attacking the hologram again, chomping his teeth on nothing. Melville was buzzing angrily on my shoulder.

  Maculte said, “You’ve failed to respond to my invitation to join my society, Nathan. And you’ve failed to hand over the Infinite Engine, as demanded. So now the time is up. The entire city will fall to a bumblebee plague, endlessly stung, succumbing to my army. All of Polt’s citizens . . . eliminated. That is, unless you join the Red Death Tea Society and present me with the Infinite Engine, right now, at this very moment. You have no other options. Join now, or fall with the city.” I’d been thinking that Bosper was being silly with the way he was biting at nothing, but . . . listening to Maculte, seeing that smirk . . . I found myself kicking at his intangible shins. And also belching.

  Nate said, “How about instead of doing what you want, I fight? How about Delphine and I stop your bee army?”

  “You don’t understand, boy,” Maculte said. “You have no bargaining chips. No recourse. Your time is up. We will commence our bumblebee attack in ten—”

  “I predicted something like this,” Nate said. “Which is why I’ve had Sir William, my robot gull, deposit a colony of genetically modified super-termites on your Ceylonese silver-tip tea crops near Nuwara Eliya in Sri Lanka.”

  “You’ve . . . what?” Maculte asked. His smirk had vanished. He was actually shivering.

  “The termites will reach adulthood in a matter of hours,” Nate said. “At which point they will be hungry. So very, very hungry. If I were someone who wanted to protect my tea crop, I’d be doing something about it, right away. Immediately. As in . . . now.” Nate’s eyes had narrowed like an Old West gunfighter’s, and his smile radiated that sense of power he has, and I’m sure the drama of the moment wasn’t overly diminished by the astounding volume of the burp I accidentally let fly.

  “You . . . can’t,” Maculte said, staring in horror at Nate. He could barely give voice to his words. “I . . . you’ll . . . this isn’t over, Nathan.” With that, the hologram vanished.

  Nate turned to me and said, “Well, that’s given us some time, but we’d best hurry.” I either belched in agreement with Nate’s thoughts, or I just plain belched. It was a solid one, either way.

  Nate frowned at me and said, “I . . . don’t think I should serve tree juice or bowls of olives anymore.”

  “Please don’t,” I said, patting my stomach.

  “The chocolate in the apples, though, that was a good idea, right?” He looked so very hopeful that I couldn’t possibly break his heart with something so callous as the truth about his snack-serving skills.

  Instead, I did something much more soothing. I put a hand on his shoulder and I said, “Nate, let’s go fight an entire army.”

  Nate and I were at Polt Pool, the best swimming pool in our city, largely because it’s free and because Polt Pond (which is actually a lake, but “Polt Pond” is more fun to say than “Polt Lake”) is sixteen miles out of the city and it’s apparently a huge chore to drive children that far. Or at least to drive them home afterward, because parents are twitchy about having wet children in the car. I know this because it’s one of my parents’ lectures, along with “Seriously, don’t forget to seriously clean your room, seriously” and “No, you cannot have a pet bear,” the latter of which wasn’t my fault because the bear cub followed me home after Nate and I had been in Polt Park (eight thousand acres of possible bigfoot sightings, by my own personal reckoning) and weird things tend to happen when Nate is around. I’ve mentioned this to him, and he contends that I’m one of the weird things that have happened to him. He meant it nice. And I took it that way.

  Hmmm.

  I wonder how my parents are going to react to a pet bee. At least bees don’t cost much to feed. But all of that was for another time. What was important now was to protect the Infinite Engine (before we left his house, Nate went off for a bit and then told me he’d secured the Infinite Engine in the safest area possible) and of course we had to disable the transmitters before Polt was swarmed with bees.

  So we went to the pool.

  Jeff King was there.

  He’s entirely unlikable. A pest. His mother is mayor of Polt. This causes ongoing problems. Simply put, Jeff is a thriving menace. I haven’t ever been able to convince Nate to send Jeff to the moon, but I have come close. And while I normally avoid having anything to do with Jeff, this time Nate and I simply had to get close enough to him to somehow disable the bee transmitter, before millions of bees attacked the city.

  Nate and I were standing at the edge of the pool, watching what Jeff was doing. When some people go to the pool, they like to hang out with their friends, talking, paddling around, playing games. Other people like to swim, or dive in the deep end, sinking all the way to the bottom to get that uncanny feeling of isolation.

  Jeff’s a bit different. He likes to sneak up on people and dunk their heads underwater. He also really enjoys holding people underwater after he’s dunked them.

  “How are we going to do this?” I asked Nate. I was wearing my new one-piece bathing suit, the one with an image of a fluffy bunny on the front and a drenched bunny on the back. Nate was wearing a pair of swim trunks. They were black. Or green. Or red. What I mean is that the colors were constantly changing. One minute his swim trunks would be red and the next they’d be entirely green. I’d asked about that, and he’d said that it was an unfortunate though interesting side effect of all the mechanics woven into the fabric. I’d thought about asking what mechanics could possibly go into a pair of swim trunks, but Melville had buzzed meaningfully just before I asked. I’d looked to my bee. She’d buzzed again, and I’d realized she was right. I didn’t want to know.

  Nate said, “Follow my lead.” He began walking toward the deep end, which is my favorite area. I love diving. There’s something about that moment when you leave the diving board, and all you can do is fall. All the choices have been removed, and there’s nothing left but the action. It’s exciting.

  Nate climbed up to the lowest diving board. It’s five feet above the water. He considered it, but kept climbing. I was glad. There’s not much of a rush with a five-foot dive.

  He climbed up to the ten-foot diving board, thought about it, but again kept climbing. I wasn’t as happy about that, because that meant we were goi
ng to be diving from the twenty-foot board. Usually I’d be all for that, but two Sundays ago I’d tried a double flip from the twenty-foot board and had managed what was definitely history’s all-time best belly flop. If you want to know what it felt like, I can tell you this: you’re wrong, you do not want to know what it felt like.

  But . . . I was still following Nate’s lead, and so up we went.

  “There he is,” Nate said, pointing to Jeff King in the shallow end. There were maybe fifty people in the pool, not counting however many people Jeff was holding underwater at the time. So, make it sixty people, tops.

  “Are we going to jump him from here?” I asked. It’s true that Jeff was all the way across the pool, but I’ve learned not to underestimate Nate.

  “Umm, no,” Nate said. “That’s a bit far. Although I’ve learned not to underestimate you. We only came up here to dive, though. I thought we might as well have some fun while we’re at the pool, and I remember that you like diving.”

  “Do you enjoy diving?” I asked.

  “I could,” Nate said.

  There was . . . something about the way he answered.

  “You’ve never dived from a diving board, have you?” I asked. The thing is, the people who make fun of Nate in school, the kids who say that he’s just an egghead and that he never gets out of the house, doesn’t play any sports, and so on . . . those people are wrong. Nate is an egghead, sure, though I would never call him that, because it’s somehow come to mean something negative, even though it means you’re really smart. People should be smart. People should want to be smart. It’s fascinating. It means there’s always something new happening in your mind, which is more than I can say for most people, and if I ever did have a boyfriend, I’d want him to be a lot like Nate, or in fact exactly like Nate, except not Nate. Of course.

  And, back to the topic at hand, Nate does get out of the house. A lot. And he participates in a variety of sports. They’re just not . . . regular sports. This is, after all, a boy who’d once, on a Friday the thirteenth, taught sword fighting to a mouse. I suppose that’s a sport, but not even Polt Middle School . . . where we are normally considered somewhat offbeat . . . has a sword-fighting team for rodents. So, no, Nate doesn’t play football, or baseball, and while he does enjoy watching me at soccer practice, he’s not what you’d call an athlete. So, yes, this was his first time diving in a pool.

  He shrugged, ran to the end of the board, bounced once, and then did nine flips, entering the water with barely a ripple. Melville let out a huge bzzzzzz of applause.

  “Hah!” I said, looking down at him once he’d surfaced. “If you think you can beat me with a paltry nine flips, you’re absolutely right! There’s no way I can beat that!”

  “I think you’re missing the point of trash-talking,” Nate said, treading water twenty feet below me.

  “You’d better hope I miss you,” I said, leaping off the board. I did a very respectable two and a half flips on the way down. What was less respectable was that I was trying for three flips. Still, there wasn’t a ripple when I entered the water. Because it was more like a tidal wave.

  “Grahhh!” I said, but just in my mind, because on my recent horrific dive I’d yelled out a certain word (whatever word you’re thinking of, it was worse), and of course yelling things underwater is not the work of a genius. This time, I knew better.

  I plunged about ten feet down into the water, then kicked back up to the surface, right in front of Nate.

  “That looked like it hurt,” he said.

  “Owww.”

  “Did you mean to do that?” he asked.

  “Owww.”

  “You need to hug your legs more when you’re spinning. And tuck harder, because it gives your flips more power.”

  “Owww.”

  “Diving is just math, really,” Nate told me. “Executing a dive is merely transforming an equation into physical form.”

  “Owww,” I said. Melville let out a sympathetic bzzzz and landed on my head. Nate started to say something else, but Melville buzzed out a warning to him, and then, together, the three of us swam over to the shallow end.

  Time for business.

  “Let her up, Jeff,” Nate said. Jeff King was currently holding Emelia Soney’s head underwater. Emelia is four years old and aspires to be a pony. There isn’t anything about her, as far as I know, that should make anyone want to dunk her head in a pool, other than that she cries when it happens. Some people are into that. I have a name for those people, but I am not allowed to say it at the dinner table. Or in the kitchen. Not the living room, either. Or my own room, the laundry room, the hallways, bathrooms, closets, yard, car, streets, sidewalks, or anywhere at all, though I had screamed it when falling from the helicopter at fourteen thousand feet above the ground and so far I wasn’t in trouble. Maybe I’d found a loophole.

  Jeff King turned around when he heard the authority in Nate’s voice. Jeff’s shoulders were slumped, knowing he was in trouble, but when he saw it was only Nate talking to him, Jeff broke into a big chubby smile. His head-dunking hand quivered in anticipation.

  “Or else I’ll be mad,” Nate added. A ripple went through Jeff’s body, and his smile became even more enthusiastic. I knew what he was thinking.

  He was thinking that he couldn’t believe his luck.

  He was actually being challenged.

  By Nate.

  “Thank you,” he whispered.

  So, Jeff King dunked Nate. Just reached out and grabbed the top of Nate’s head like one of those arcade claw machines, the ones where you always think you’re about to grab the absolute best prize, but then the claw is clutching nothing but air. Except in this case the claw (meaning Jeff’s hand) actually did grab the absolute best prize (meaning Nate’s head) and instead of dropping that prize into the chute, the claw plunged it underwater.

  I think maybe I’ve lost control of my analogy. What I mean is that Nate was dunked underwater. And held there. Likely drowning. My first impulse was to yell for Candy Crable, the lifeguard, but of course she was all the way on the other end of the pool, flirting with a group of boys, oblivious to what was happening. It was all up to me. I grabbed Jeff’s arm, but he was like a rock. I couldn’t force him to let Nate back up, but I struggled for a bit, nonetheless, or at least I struggled until there was a menacing glunk sound that turned out to be Jeff’s other hand grabbing my head.

  “So much dunking!” Jeff said. There was something like a giggle.

  “Dunking all the time!” he said. He was steadily pushing my head underwater.

  “All this dunking is so . . . so wonderful!” I think maybe he was starting to weep out of pure joy. He really was in his element. I, however, was not. My head was barely out of the water.

  “Whooosh!” Jeff said. And he pushed down.

  “Whooosh!” the water said, as it thematically whooshed up past my mouth and my nose, rushing over the top of my head.

  And then I was being held underwater, looking over to Nate.

  Nate gave me a thumbs-up, which I thought was out of place. I mean literally out of place. Underwater is not the place for a thumbs-up. And then I noticed that Nate wasn’t having any trouble breathing, which is kind of odd because not only should a normal sixth grade boy have trouble breathing underwater, but he shouldn’t be trying to breathe underwater in the first place. Such things are just not done.

  Nate’s fingers were tapping on the side of his shorts (they were currently black) in what I at first thought was a nervous gesture, but then I noticed he was actually typing. There was a keypad on the side of his shorts. Nate was entering a string of numbers and then he said, “It’s okay if you breathe.”

  I said, “It’s no use talking underwater, Nate. I can’t possibly understand you.”

  “You just did, though. And you talked back, too.”

  “Yeah.” I shrugged. No sense in trying to understand it. I figured Nate was going to explain what was happening soon enough.

  Right on
cue, he said, “I’m using kinetic water flow to promote oxygen patches and eliminate dangerous nitrogens.”

  “That’s truly excellent,” I said, not having any idea what he was talking about.

  “The nano-bots I talked about earlier, they make it easier for you to adjust.”

  “Of course they do,” I said, as if I were someone who had understood something, which I was not.

  “Your body wants to continue on a single evolutionary path,” Nate said. “But the nano-bots open other possibilities, other paths. Like breathing underwater.”

  “Thanks for the help, nano-bots,” I said, giving them a thumbs-up. It was at that point that I noticed Jeff King was wearing swimming trunks with pictures of horses and monster trucks, neither of which are particularly known as aquatic, and therefore do not belong on swim trunks. I also noticed that, despite how Nate and I weren’t fighting against our class bully (why struggle when you can breathe water?), Jeff himself was seriously thrashing around, struggling with all his might. I wondered what was up with that.

  Nate began saying something about his tiny robots, the ones I’d apparently breathed in at some point, telling me they were processing our vastly reduced oxygen intake in some way, but I became more intent on the legs of everybody else in the pool. That’s all I could really see. A bunch of legs. Skinny legs. Short legs. Thin legs. Long legs. Hairy legs. Tattooed legs. There were a lot of legs. And all of them were doing the same thing . . . moving as fast as they could to the edges of the pool, hurriedly leaping up and out of the water, fighting for the ladders and that sort of thing. Everybody was suddenly in a big hurry to leave the water. Everyone except Jeff King.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Not sure,” Nate said, noticing the mass exodus along with me. “Let me do some calculations.” His fingers began tapping on the sides of his swim trunks again. He frowned. Looked around. Nodded. He reached out and poked Jeff King in the leg. Nodded. Entered some more numbers.