How to Outsmart a Billion Robot Bees

by Paul Tobin

  “I seriously have to go to the bathroom,” I said. Very softly.

  “What?” Luria asked, leaning down. She put her lips right to my ear and started to whisper something, but it was at that moment that Melville stung Luria on her lower lip.

  “Glakkk!” Luria yelled. There was a generous helping of agony in her voice. If she’d been somebody else, I would have sympathized. But she wasn’t somebody else. She was the only woman I’d ever met who’d clamped a chillingly cold hand onto my shoulder and talked about dissecting my brain.

  So, instead of sympathizing, I yelled, “Hah!”

  And then I said, “Gurgle. Huck! Hghh!”

  This was because when I’d first opened my mouth to yell, “Hah,” Melville had dropped the pill halfway down my throat. I’d immediately started to choke and cough. My eyes were watering, but I still noticed Nate digging into his pocket for something. And then the men with the strange glass-like weapons opened fire, and a beam of light hit a chair next to me, missing me by inches.

  The chair turned to smoke and ash.

  It was . . . gone.

  “What the piffle?” I said. “That is entirely not good.” The pill slid a bit farther down my throat as I spoke, but it still wasn’t what anyone with any reasonable knowledge of how to take a pill would consider as “swallowed.”

  I needed something to drink.

  Luria was holding her lip and trying to swat Melville out of the air, so I took advantage of her distraction and nabbed the cup of tea from her hands and had a quick drink, washing the pill down my throat.

  The rude men opened fire again, and the three women started gymnastically flipping over the tables and chairs, charging closer, but then . . .

  . . . all the lights went out.

  I mean all of them.

  I mean the overhead lights were gone.

  The sunlight from the windows . . . ? Gone.

  All the light.

  Everything.

  Gone.

  It was pitch black. Space black. Extra super-black.

  I asked, “Did everybody else just go blind?” The last thing I could remember seeing was Nate holding up a device he’d taken from his pocket. It looked like a black lollipop, like one of those horrible lollipops that taste like licorice. Except this one put out a burst of sparks and then . . .

  . . . yeah.

  Everything was black.

  “Wait for it,” I heard Nate whisper. He was right next to me. He reached out and held my hand. I heard Melville buzz to a landing on my shoulder.

  “Stay calm!” I heard. It was Luria’s voice. “This is obviously some trick of Bannister’s. It won’t work. Don’t let them leave alive. Everyone, block the doors.”

  “How? I can’t see.” This was a man’s voice, somewhere out in front of me.

  “Wasn’t there a back exit?” Another man’s voice.

  “Spread out, keep our hands linked.” This was from one of the women who’d been pretending to be teenagers.

  “Are we . . . are we blind forever?” This was another man’s voice, and I have to admit I was somewhat interested in the answer.

  “It will only last ten minutes,” Nate said, but he was only whispering to me. How had he found me in the darkness? In the absolute darkness?

  “Can you see yet?” Nate asked. “You swallowed the tablet, right?”

  “Yes. I mean, at first I was choking and then I had some tea to wash it down and . . . and . . .”

  “Yes?” Nate said.

  “That was some really good tea.”

  “Oh. Yes. They do make excellent tea. Smells like a citrus blend. Luria makes the teas.”

  “Should I compliment her? Would this be a weird time to do that?”

  “This would be a weird time to do that.”

  “Yeah. I figured.” Nate was still holding my hand, guiding me around the tables and the chairs and the various members of the murderous society of assassins.

  I said, “So, you can see?”

  “No. I memorized the layout of the entire room. I always do. You never know when it will come in handy. But, we should both be able to echolocate pretty soon.”

  “Say again?”

  “Echolocate. The way bats navigate. We’ll essentially be able to see shapes. We won’t have full definition, not the way we normally do. Instead, we’ll sense sound bouncing from all solid objects, echoing back to our ears, and we’ll ‘see’ in that manner.”

  “You’ve turned me into a bat?”

  “No. And just temporarily. It’s not as if you look like a bat. You’re still as beautiful as ever.”

  I wondered if Nate could see me blush. I mean, do bats know when their friends are blushing? Would it be more socially awkward to be ignorant of a blush, or less? It probably wasn’t a topic to bring up with the others in the room, as they were generally trying to dissect us.

  Nate and I were moving through the restaurant, but it felt like we were heading away from the door. Luria was shouting orders, and I could occasionally hear the awful noise of one of those glass pistols firing (the noise was like an electric chicken being startled), and she was ordering the men to quit panicking, telling them that Nate had likely used some sort of disruptor (it was, Nate explained to me, a coordinated swarm of our nano-bots charged with interrupting light to everyone’s ocular receptors) and that she would solve it quickly enough and, until then, just move toward where they remembered the exits and guard them, and it was at that point that one of the men started yelling, “I’ve got him! I’ve got Nate,” and there was the sound of a struggle, with chairs and tables crashing, and I looked in the direction of the noise, and . . . I saw them.

  Sort of.

  What I saw was shapes. No colors at all. It was still just blackness. But . . . blackness in the shapes of tables and chairs and . . . the men. I could see how two of the Red Death Tea Society assassins were wrestling each other, each thinking they’d caught Nate, and I thought it was really funny.

  Then the whole room suddenly smelled like freshly baked bread.

  “What’s happening?” I asked Nate. I was still getting accustomed to the bat-vision. I could see Luria coming closer through the tables and chairs, walking way too confidently in the darkness and easily ducking an outstretched hand from one of the men as he tried to feel which way he was going. But everything I could see was just . . . shapes. Like black paper figures on a background of darkness. And that bread smell was everywhere.

  “This is how bats see?” I asked Nate.

  “Some of them. But much better than this. Most bats see the way we normally do, though. Their echolocation is in addition to their regular vision, which is actually pretty good.”

  “Huh,” I said. I’d never known bats had two types of vision. No wonder they’re so sneaky in the air. I concentrated harder on using the bat-vision (or . . . half of a bat’s vision, I guess) and saw that Nate was tapping that pencil thing of Luria’s all over a wall. I couldn’t tell what he was doing, though. My best guess was that he was writing some nasty graffiti about the Red Death Tea Society, which was something I could definitely get behind, but it was maybe not the best use of our time right then? I was on the verge of telling Nate my personal opinions on the benefits of “running away” versus “writing clever graffiti” when Luria interrupted us.

  Because she was so very close.

  She was reaching out to grab Nate, and he hadn’t noticed her. She was moving so silently, and he was faced the wrong direction, with no way to see her. How could she even see us? Did she have bat-vision, too?

  Even in all the blackness, I could see her smile.

  Then Nate, all without looking back, held up a tiny spray can over his shoulder and pressed the trigger. There was a burst of compressed air, a billowing cloud that looked like a ghost to my bat-vision, and Luria shrieked.

  Loud.

  She stumbled backward, hopping on one foot and bellowing a string of words that I’m quite sure would’ve impressed my brother Steve, who pri
des himself on his curses.

  “What did you just do?” I asked Nate, watching Luria fall over backward, holding her foot.

  “Toe-stub spray.”

  “You’re going to have to explain that,” I said.

  “Hold on a moment,” he said. “I’m pushing this wall over.” He put his hands on the wall and shoved. A huge section of the wall fell over, leaving a gaping hole.

  “You’re going to have to explain that, too,” I said.

  “In a minute,” Nate said. “We’re in the middle of a dramatic escape.” He grabbed my hand, and we tromped over the fallen wall into an alley outside. I’d have thought that there would be light now that we were outside, but it was still bat-vision. Nate was obviously accustomed to it, though, because he was racing us along at full speed, running through the alley and out into the parking lot.

  He said, “Toe-stub spray stimulates neural synapses to trigger the exact same pain receptors associated with stubbing your toe.”

  “You’re serious? Toe-stub spray? You were actually sitting around your house one day and decided you needed to make a spray can full of toe-stubs?”

  “Well, I was in my tree house when I made the decision, but otherwise . . . yes. And if you’re wondering about me pushing the wall over, I sliced through the wall using Luria’s cutting device.”

  “Good idea.”

  “It was the best course of action, since they were guarding the normal exits. It’s funny, really.”

  “What’s funny?” I asked, hoping he wasn’t going to say it was funny how people were using strange weapons to try to disintegrate me, because I did not find it humorous.

  “It’s funny how they were so concerned about the regular exits,” Nate said. “It’s that way all throughout the world. Everyone tries to do things in the normal way. To follow along with the herd. To say the same things. To act the same way and go through the same doors. It might be an easier way to live, but it’s not nearly as satisfying. It’s much more rewarding to create your own doors and blaze a new path.”

  “Bees,” I said. A strange response, I’ll admit, and it confused Nate.

  “Bees?” he said.

  “Specifically, those,” I pointed up.

  There was a swarm of bees in the air.

  A blimp-size swarm of them.

  We were obviously taking too long to disable the bee-summoning transmitters. The swarm had tens of thousands of bees. If Nate and I weren’t able to un-attune the transmitters, who knew how many more bees would swarm the city? This was not looking good.

  Speaking of how things were looking, to my bat-vision, the swarm looked like a swirl of dots, constantly merging into larger shapes, collecting together, then moving apart, tens of thousands of individual black spots acting as one. I’m not sure I’d have recognized them as bees except for how I’d grown attuned to the shrill buzzing of their wings.

  Melville zoomed up to meet them but only went a couple of yards before she stopped, buzzed in an inquisitive and confused manner, and then zoomed behind my back, hiding.

  “That was not reassuring,” I told her. “I thought they were your friends?”

  “She’s not part of the swarm anymore,” Nate said. “She’s part of our swarm now.”

  “We’re a swarm?” I asked, watching the bees (and thus all their stingers) zooming closer. “I don’t feel like a swarm. I feel like target practice for a blimp-size army of impolite bees.”

  It was at that moment I heard the peeling of car tires on the parking lot, and then Betsy, our car, was barreling closer, racing the quickly descending bees, putting on an amazing burst of speed and sliding to a stop next to us.

  Her door popped open.

  The bees were only a few yards away.

  I dove inside.

  “Safe!” I said. But . . . the door was still open. Nate was still standing outside. He was absolutely not diving to safety. He was only leaning inside the car, grabbing for his canvas messenger bag, the one with patches of Nikola “über-genius” Tesla, Isaac “apple to the head” Newton, Jim “I created the Muppets” Henson, and Albert “bad hair” Einstein.

  “Get in the car, Nate,” I said. To be honest, I screamed it. This had the unfortunate side effect of improving the clarity of my echolocation, so that I could now see the oncoming swarm of menacing bees with far better definition.

  “Just a second,” Nate said. He still wasn’t getting in the car.

  “We are not debating,” I told Nate. “We are getting into the car.” He was rummaging through his bag. It was full of various plastic vials, tiny ones.

  “Hmmm,” he said. “The labels are difficult to read when I’m seeing only with echolocation. I’ll have to keep that in mind for future experiments.”

  “Yes, Nate,” I said. “You do that. But here in the present, how about you get in the car and we close the door? Unless you’re thinking about letting the bees inside the car, too? Giving them a ride somewhere?”

  “Is this one of those times when you’re being sarcastic?” Nate asked.

  “This is one of those times when I’m screaming in fear,” I said. Or rather I screamed it. Fearfully.

  Nate was murmuring, “‘Speed-Reading Pills.’ ‘See Ghosts Pills.’ ‘Talk French Pills.’ C’mon, c’mon, where are they?” He was hurriedly pulling bottles of pills out from his bag and tossing them in the backseat.

  “‘Make Any Animal a Zebra Pills,’” he said, tossing another bottle into the backseat. This one bounced off my head. I grunted a bit in displeasure, but Nate didn’t react to it. This was possibly because my soft grunt was disguised by my roaring scream of fear. In defense of my scream I should point out that the sky had turned into a solid mass of swarming bumblebees, and they were zooming toward us. The lead bees were now only a few feet from us, and the bees to the rear of the swarm were a good hundred yards back, and in between the front bees and the rear bees it was all just . . . more bees.

  “‘Shower Pill,’” Nate said. “‘Toad Finder Pill.’ Where’s . . . ooo, here it is!” He popped the cap off a bottle and quickly swallowed a pill. Then he tossed another of the pills in my mouth, which was easy for him to do because I was still doing that one thing I’d been doing. Screaming, I mean.

  “Glunk,” I said, swallowing the pill, just as Nate took my hand and pulled me outside the car, directly into the giant swarm of bees.

  Not exactly the move of a genius.

  So, the bees were upon us. All around us. I couldn’t see anything. Echolocation wasn’t doing all that much good besides giving me the mildly comforting knowledge that Nate was standing next to me, but that everything else was bees.

  I heard Betsy calling our names, and she was even cursing at Nate (the first time I’d ever heard her do such a thing, as she really does have admirable restraint), and then after a bit I couldn’t hear anything except the overwhelming roar of the bees.

  I said, “Ouch!” when the first bee touched me, because I was positive I was going to get stung, having experienced the agony of bee stings only that morning.

  I said “Ouch,” when the second bee touched me, too.

  I said “Ouch” and “Piffle” and a few more things as a seemingly infinite number of bees landed on me, crawling all over me, but there’s no reason to go into everything I said because it was almost entirely foul, and it was whispered for the most part, owing to how I had a precise limit as to how far I was willing to open my mouth. That limit, which I was strictly enforcing, was . . . less than enough space for a bumblebee to crawl inside.

  So, yes, I was whisper-cursing, and I was bumblebee bombarded, and I was whimpering, and I was likely doing a “bees don’t touch me, please” dance that my brother Steve would have absolutely loved to post on the Internet, but what I wasn’t doing was . . .

  . . . getting stung.

  Huh.

  The bees weren’t stinging me.

  Weird.

  While my morning had proved that I wasn’t the most knowledgeable person in the
world, bee-wise, I’d definitely had one major bee belief cemented as fact: bees sting. But these bees . . . weren’t.

  I could feel Nate press something into my hand, another of the pills from his messenger bag, and I managed to ask, “You want me to take this pill?” all without opening my mouth more than half the height of a bumblebee.

  “Yes,” Nate said. “Please do.”

  So I took the pill, pushing it past my lips rather than opening my mouth, only then realizing that Nate had spoken clearly, and that I’d heard him clearly, despite the constant tornado-level buzzing from the bees.

  “Did you take it?” Nate asked. “And don’t open your mouth, just . . . think the answer.”

  “Uhh, yes?” I said. Or, rather, I thought I said. I mean, I didn’t say anything . . . I just thought about saying it.

  “Great!” Nate said. “I suppose you want an explanation.”

  I thought about saying yes. I mean, I didn’t just consider saying yes, I actually thought of saying it.

  “Excellent,” Nate said, apparently having heard me. Then there was a pause and he said, “Hmmm. You’re getting the hang of it, but . . . did you know that you’re thinking of a lot of curse words?”

  “Yes,” I said. Or, thought. Whatever.

  “Oh,” Nate said. “Well, here’s the deal. Almost all of our senses, our smell, taste, our vision, they’re based on chemical reactions, but hearing is an entirely mechanical process.”

  “WE ARE SURROUNDED BY A FAT BLIMP OF BEES!” I said.

  “Ugh,” Nate said. “Could you turn your brain down a bit? You don’t have to worry. We’re safe. The first pill we took made us members of the bee swarm. They consider us as a part of them, now, and won’t sting us.”

  “They don’t notice that we’re, like, a million times bigger than they are?”

  “No. They’re not very smart. Well, actually they are, but they’re not very smart in that way. It’s strange how sometimes people can be very smart in a lot of ways, but completely oblivious in other ways.”