How to Outsmart a Billion Robot Bees

by Paul Tobin

Then he looked to me.

  “Where’s Melville?” he asked, looking around as if my bee might be swimming below the surface of the water, perhaps after having dived off the high board, neither of which is something that bees ever do.

  “Not . . . below water,” I said.

  “Of course not,” Nate said. I think he was embarrassed. Sometimes he gets so caught up in the higher calculations that he forgets the lower truths.

  By then the only people left in the entire pool were me, Nate, and then Jeff King, who was still holding us underwater. Where had everyone else gone? And why? It was very strange.

  Nate said, “I’m calculating a 97.9 percent chance that Melville got mad about you being held underwater and went on a stinging spree.”

  “Ooo,” I said.

  “Hmm,” I added.

  “That’s not good,” I stated.

  I reached up to Jeff’s hand and slowly disengaged his fingers from my hair. He didn’t resist my efforts. Once I was free of his hand, I moved to one side, and surfaced.

  I looked around.

  Took in the situation.

  I sank back down under the water.

  “What’s going on up there?” Nate asked.

  “I calculate a one hundred percent possibility that your hypothesis about Melville going on a stinging spree was correct.”

  “If it’s a hundred percent, that would technically make it a fact, not a possibility.”

  “Then it’s a fact that a lot of people have big red melon-shaped bee stings on their arms and shoulders and faces,” I said. “And, see this . . . ?”

  I pointed to Jeff King’s legs.

  “Yes?” Nate said.

  “This is one hundred percent of Jeff King that’s not covered in bee stings.”

  “Ooo,” Nate said.

  “That’s what Jeff keeps saying. Except in a much higher voice. Like a painful whine.”

  “Did you see Melville?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Perched on Jeff’s face.”

  “Did you tell her to quit stinging him?” Nate asked.

  “No.”

  “Oh. You didn’t?”

  “Should I have?”

  “It would’ve been the nice thing to do.”

  “I know that.”

  “Oh,” Nate said. I decided it was probably best if we left the pool, so I reached over and worked Jeff’s fingers out from their clutching grasp on Nate’s hair. Again, Jeff didn’t resist. Once we were free, I stood up with my head out of the water. Jeff’s face was entirely swelled up with bee stings. Melville was circling him like a tiny, angry plane. A tiny, angry, heavily-armed plane.

  “That’s my bee,” I told Jeff.

  He said, “Aghhhh.” It was a whisper. Melville, spotting me, gave a buzz of joy and landed on my shoulder.

  “Been stinging people?” I asked her. I was just making conversation. It was, after all, entirely obvious what she’d been doing. She gave a noncommittal buzz, as if she was worried that she might get in trouble over what she’d done. I just shrugged. She’d certainly overreacted . . . since the pool was currently surrounded by possibly sixty people, most of them sporting bee stings . . . but I couldn’t blame Melville too much for stinging Jeff, and why had everyone gotten out of the pool and just gathered around, anyway? Why didn’t they keep running? It’s not like Melville was only guarding the water. If anything, once everyone got out of the pool, they were even easier to sting.

  “That crazy mad bee is on your shoulder!” Candy Crable yelled. She’s in her early twenties. Short hair. She reminds me of someone I’d see in a television commercial about surfers. She was frantically waving a flotation device back and forth, which I suppose she thought would ward off any imminent bee attacks.

  “Oh gosh,” I said, pretending I was in danger, because I certainly didn’t want everyone to know that Melville was my bee, that I’d brought her to the pool, and that everyone getting stung was, you know, sort of totally my fault. Above all else, that had to be kept secret.

  “No problem!” Nate shouted to everyone. “The bee is hers! It belongs to Delphine! Delphine Cooper! She brought it to the pool!”

  He turned to me and said, “There. That should calm everyone down.”

  Well.

  It didn’t.

  Nate and I were able to escape the enraged mob, though not because we are superior climbers or first-rate runners. We weren’t necessarily faster than everyone else when we were running across the parking lot, and we definitely weren’t more agile when we were scrambling over the chain-link fence, because I had to help Nate climb, and by the time we made it to the top there were several people who almost grabbed us, like in the horror movies where the heroes barely escape the zombies.

  The truth is, Nate and I would’ve been brought down from behind if it wasn’t for Melville dive-bombing anyone who came too close, or if Betsy, Nate’s car, hadn’t heard our distress call (which was me yelling distressful curses at the top of my lungs) and zoomed forward to meet us, not even stopping as we piled into the back (Betsy had flung open her doors) and squealing away from the parking lot with Melville riding on the front of the car like a hood ornament.

  Anyway, Nate and I did make our escape, and we did run fast, and I would seriously like a video of me climbing that fence, because while Nate didn’t do all that well (he claims his hands were still slippery) I think I probably set a world record in the combined Climb & Scream event.

  And I’m absolutely sure I took first place in the Punching Nate in the Arm for Announcing the Bee Was Mine competition.

  We were blocks away when it hit me that we’d not only left all our normal clothes behind, but that we hadn’t managed to disable Jeff King’s bee transmitter.

  “Oh dang,” I said.

  “Already on it,” Nate said.

  “Already on what?” I asked. We were zooming through Polt’s fashion district. There were fashionable people loitering about, which is what fashionable people do. I mean, almost everyone loiters about, just on a casual basis, but fashionable people do it on a very conscious and even professional level.

  Nate said, “Well, I could tell by your increased irritation levels that you’d remembered how we left all our clothes and belongings behind, and that we, in your mind, weren’t able to disable Jeff King’s transmitter.”

  “In my mind?” I said. “What do you mean by that?” Nate was behind the wheel (Betsy was doing all the driving, of course, and projecting an image of a distinguished gray-haired man behind the wheel) and had asked Betsy to turn all her fans on high in order to dry us quicker. It really wasn’t working all that well, but Nate’s hair looked nice blowing in the wind.

  He said, “It’s just that we did disable the transmitter.”

  “We did?” I was rolling down the window because I could tell that Melville was tired of riding on the hood. Not surprising, I suppose, because she must have been exhausted after stinging so many people.

  “Because of her,” Nate said, pointing to my bee as Melville flew in through the window and landed on the dash.

  “Because of her?” I said.

  “Well, all we needed to do was disrupt Jeff’s biorhythms in order to un-attune the transmitter.”

  “Yeah?” Nate has a tendency to teach me answers rather than tell them to me. I know it’s best for me in the long run, but I was sitting in a car wearing nothing but my sopping wet bathing suit and I was in an entirely “short-term” frame of mind.

  “So, even a single bee sting could accomplish that.”

  “Oh,” I said, remembering what Jeff looked like after Melville was through with him. “Yeah. I see what you’re saying. He certainly did look disrupted.”

  “Yeah,” Nate said, smiling. “He did.”

  “But what about our clothes?” I asked. “What did you mean when you said you were already on it?”

  “I’ve dispatched Sir William to collect them,” Nate said.

  “You
did? You do know it’s not normal for robot gulls to go into locker rooms and take clothes, right?”

  “They won’t know Sir William is a robot.”

  “You do know it’s not normal for a gull of any type to go into a locker room and take clothes, right?”

  “Sure. But I don’t like being any kind of normal, and you don’t, either.”

  “Hmmm,” I said. “You’ve won this debate.” By then we were pulling over to the side of the street, just short of all the booths and tables for Polt’s Saturday Antique Market, a street fair where an amazing array of furniture and art and trinkets from the past were for sale.

  “What are we doing?” I asked Nate.

  “Well, we’ll need clothes, and the nearest place is here. You don’t mind vintage clothes, do you?”

  “I love them,” I told Nate, already jogging through all the various booths, because the fabrics on vintage clothing are always so strange, so colorful, that whenever I wear them I feel like I’m the star of a movie or a television show, either of which was preferable to my current feelings of being sopping wet in a bathing suit with bunny decorations.

  So I pressed through the crowds of eager shoppers and I ran past all the vendors who were aggressively trying to make sales, hurrying past all the antique furniture and the vintage collectibles and the booth selling handmade chocolates, finally stopping at a tent with racks of vintage clothing. There were skirts, Capri pants, and amazing shoes, and hats and gloves and shirts and stockings still in their packages from the 1960s. Nate had barely begun looking at trousers before I’d assembled a small selection of no more than eighty items that I wanted to try on, and I was searching for a dressing room when the woman running the booth stepped in front of me.

  “Excuse me,” she said.

  Her tone was unpleasant.

  Her eyes were narrowed.

  She was a short woman with big glasses perched on her nose, and the sound of her voice was so chilling that everyone around us, all of the other shoppers in the tent, went silent. Even the other vendors . . . the ones at the nearby tables who were yelling about all their fabulous items for sale . . . went quiet. It was so quiet that I could hear the water dripping from my swimsuit.

  “Perhaps you could come back at a time when you’re not a puddle?” the woman suggested in her unfriendly tone, tugging at the clothes I had in my hands. From the corner of my eye, I could see Nate coming forward, ready to help, holding out his special credit card, the transparent one with the golden elephant’s head symbol, with Nate’s name below it, along with a row of numbers and a big fat letter A. It’s called a gold elephant card, and there are only three of them in the entire world, because in order to have one you have to be unthinkably rich. In fact, you have to be so rich that nobody will ever yell at you for trying to buy clothes even if you’re dripping water everywhere.

  “Here,” Nate said, whispering, holding out the credit card so that the woman could see it, but his voice was so hushed that she didn’t even look in his direction. Why was he whispering? It was clearly time for decisive action.

  I took the card from his hands.

  I held it up where everyone could see it.

  And, as I was saying, “Don’t worry! We have a gold elephant card!” I could see, from the corners of my eyes, Nate’s own eyes going wide as he waved for me to stop.

  As I finished my loud declaration, Nate’s shoulders slumped.

  Then . . . the entire market went silent.

  The woman with the big glasses immediately quit pulling at the clothes I was holding. Her mouth was hanging open. Seconds ticked by. And still, there was just silence, which felt extra silent considering how all the vendors had been causing such a clamor, yelling for everyone to buy things.

  Then, from out of the silence, from a couple of tables away, I heard a voice.

  “Did someone just say she had a gold elephant card?”

  “I think so,” said a different voice from maybe twenty feet away.

  “Here? In our market? A gold elephant card?” That was a man’s voice from several rows away. His voice sounded . . . hungry.

  “Where is it?” another voice asked. “I have things to sell!”

  It was then that people began peeking in the tent. A crowd was gathering. A crowd of vendors. A crowd that was shambling forward. A crowd that was staring at the credit card in my hand, the one that Nate was quickly taking away from me, trying to hide it before . . .

  . . . the crowd surged forward.

  So Nate and I were running again, and Melville was again stinging people, trying to keep the crowd from catching us, much as she’d done at the pool when Nate had foolishly yelled out the totally wrong thing at the totally wrong time, which was entirely different from how I’d yelled out something entirely understandable.

  Nate and I had to leap over tables and dash past booths, running through the crowds while all of the vendors were reaching out for us like zombies, so that we were barely able to grab a few pieces of vintage clothing (and eleven handfuls of homemade chocolates) and make our frantic escape, scrambling over a wall while the crowd surged behind us, yelling about all the cool things they could sell to the owner of a gold elephant card.

  Fifteen minutes later we were back in the car and I was wearing coffee-colored Capri slacks and a yellow button-down shirt with matching yellow shoes, holding an incredible purse from the 1920s that was absolutely covered in glittering stones but somehow still subtle. Nate looked dashing in vintage slacks, shoes, and a dark brown sweater. Melville was flying all over in the car, looking at us from different angles, playing the role of an insect fashion critic. I had to wonder what bees know about fashion. A lot, probably. They pretty much rock that “black-and-yellow” look.

  “Hmmm,” Nate said. “Look at that.” He pointed up through Betsy’s windshield. I leaned forward and peered into the sky. There was a black speck, high in the air.

  A helicopter.

  “Is that . . . ?”

  “Reggie Barnstorm and the League of Ostracized Fellows. Yes. Looking for us, I’d expect. Betsy, could you magnify?”

  In the next second, Betsy’s windshield acted like a magnifying glass, and our view of the black speck became a large black dot, and then a helicopter, and in only moments I was looking at an image of Reggie Barnstorm and his green suit standing in the open doorway of the helicopter, a few bee stings evident, blowing a bubblegum bubble as he held a strange device out the door. It looked like a 1990s cell phone with a small satellite dish.

  “What’s that?” I asked Nate.

  “He’s scanning for us. Looking for our DNA signatures and other trace identifiers.”

  “He doesn’t look very happy,” I said. In truth, he looked mad. He was energetically scowling.

  “No,” Nate said. “The nano-bots in our systems disguise us. There’s no way he can find us like that. They can’t, either.” At this last, he gestured outside, to where two men in red suits were stomping along the sidewalk, pushing people out of their way, using a similar device to the one Reggie was holding.

  “The Red Death Tea Society,” I said. The men were both holding cups of tea. “You sure they can’t find us?” My stomach was turning over, again.

  “Positive. Like with the League of Ostracized Fellows, the nano-bots will disguise us. And Betsy’s holograms make us appear like other people through the window, and even make her look like an entirely different car. So they can’t see us, but we can see them. We can work undetected.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But, let’s get out of here. Where’s the next transmitter to disable?”

  “Gordon Stott is at Popples,” Nate said. Popples is a burger restaurant. You put in an order (I prefer the Turkey Meteor) and then sit at a table where a series of hidden conveyor belts soon whisk your order to you, with the food popping out of a trapdoor in your table like a jack-in-the-box.

  “How do you know he’s there?” I asked.

  “Tracking,” Nate said.

  “Tra
cking?” I asked.

  “Tracking,” Nate said, more emphatically this time.

  “Driver Nate,” Betsy said. “I believe that passenger Delphine would enjoy an explanation of what you mean.”

  “Huh?” Nate said. “Oh. Yeah, I guess that makes sense.” I nodded, reaching out a hand to touch Betsy’s dashboard as a gesture of appreciation. Just as I did, the windshield went black for a moment, and then the view of the outside world was replaced by a detailed map of Polt.

  “What happened to the windshield?” I asked. I wasn’t overly concerned with how I could no longer see out of the car. I mean, maybe that’s something I’d normally panic about (in fact, it is absolutely something I’d normally panic about), but since Betsy just drives herself, I was guessing she could see.

  Nate said, “It’s not a windshield. It’s an interactive thought pad.”

  “Thought pad?”

  “It’s like a touch pad, except you don’t need to touch it. You just think about what you want it to do, and it registers your command.”

  “And, how does it do that?” I asked.

  “Would you understand if I told you about linked nuclei harmonization?”

  “I don’t even understand your question about whether I understand what you’re talking about.”

  “Okay then, just . . . just make believe that tiny robots are in your brain, relaying your thoughts to the screen.”

  “Is . . . that true?”

  “Hmmm,” Nate said. “I suppose it’s possible. Once I created my nano-bots they had a small chance of developing individual intelligence.” He waved off the thought with a quick gesture and said, “But that’s not exactly how the technology is based. It’s . . . uhh . . .” He hadn’t stopped for his usual reason (meaning that I wasn’t showing my particular expression of confusion, the one where Nate knows it’s useless to continue) but because the windshield had suddenly gone all wonky. It was now just a series of fuzzy colors with repeating patterns, a chaos of reds and blues and greens and so on. Looking at it made my head hurt. It made no sense at all.