Chapter 23 - WannaBee

Humans often ask if it is possible to fall in love with a robot. But no one ever asks the flowers if it is possible for them to fall in love with a robot bee.

Flowers, despite their innocent petals, are sexual predators. They pump out intoxicating smells which entice the male bee. As the bee flies closer, he catches sight of an ultraviolet pattern splayed out, it is the perfect replica of a willing and available female bee. His lust drives him to copulate with the flower. Thus spent, he flies away satisfied, carrying a cargo of pollen.

The flower doesn't believe that it has assaulted the bee, and the bee is giddy with primitive hormones. But to an objective observer, this act is morally repugnant. This bee is a victim of the flower. He has been tricked into unwanted sexual contact and the benefit is all for the trickster. What justice can there be in nature when pollination is built on the back of such a heinous crime?

That's why I invented robot bees. I could spin you some tale about colony collapse disorder or the rise in invasive wasps, but it would be a lie. Perhaps you'd even believe that large scale pollination was too important to be left to the random walk of a hive. The simple truth was that I felt disgusted that bees were being exploited by flowers. Men - all men - deserve dignity in their lives and work. If nature won't provide such dignity, then it is up to me.

Flowers are sluts. Crude little whores who exploit the males' sense of sexual desire. Flowers entrap males - promising genetic destiny, but delivering only courier duty. My robot bees were immune to the filthy tricks of slatternly blossoms. They were pure, logical, and unswayed by the fake pleasured proffered by petals. A dozen of my robot bees could pollinate a field quicker than a swarm of a thousand bio-bees, and they did so without falling prey to those traitorous bitches.

I hate birds as well. Oh, I know, they look so cute and have beautiful voices. Birds brighten up even the dullest day as they strut around showing off. It seems to me that the whole world loves their prancing and squawking. I find them despicable. When people sing the virtues of "the birds and the bees" they show a sickening lack of knowledge about how the real world works. Birds aren't doe-eyed innocent songstresses; birds eat bees.

Can you imagine the horror of being approached by something so beautiful, so beloved, so beguiling and then have it betray you? A male bee might think that the bird comes offering friendship and companionship. Instead it offers a painful death - pecking and tearing at your body until you have nothing left. Yeah, they don't teach you that in school, do they? Hard working blokes are routinely devoured by birds. It's gross. They deserve better.

Of course, my robot bees are too smart to be caught by cunning birds. Their digital sensors can detect the flapping feathers from a great distance and instruct the bee to hide - silent and still. The robobee's in-built speakers can play a variety of sounds which are calculated to deter and distress any bird that comes too close. Their metachrosis covering allows them to rapidly change colour, alerting the birds that this bad-boy is not to be messed with.

Have you seen how a band of bees kills any wasp that dares enter the hive? The brotherhood surrounds the invader. Completely encasing it in a bee-ball. Then they vibrate. Their pulsating rhythms build up and generate huge amounts of heat. The wasp stands no chance. As it struggles, it also raises the temperature in the centre of the death trap. Slowly, it cooks.

My bees don't do that. In extremis, they self-destruct by igniting their internal lithium ion battery. A runaway thermal event causes a devastating explosion, sending shattered electronics and noxious chemicals into the surrounding environment. Any bird stupid enough to grab a proud bee is going to find it a very spicy meal.

Masculum Regis Apis Superior!

Heather was peering into the guts of a deactivated RoBoDrone. This was the first one her team had captured after nearly a year of research, and it was proving invaluable. They had become obsessed with discovering everything they could about the little beasties and had built a dedicated lab in order to study them.

"See! Here!" Heather's green laser pointer circled around a tiny protrusion at the back of the bee's circuit board. "This is the antenna. If we can work out the frequencies it's using, we might be able to reverse engineer the radio protocol and triangulate the idiot who is controlling them."

Her assistant, Fleur, did not seem convinced. "We've been monitoring radio spectrum in the fields whenever they're spotted. It's coming up blank. Could the antenna be vestigial? Part of an older design?"

Heather zoomed out the display. They'd fed images of the circuitry into an AI classifier which, so claimed the marketing material, could identify every chip that had ever been made. It absolutely choked on the drone's schematics. Most of the parts seemed custom made - probably fabbed in a black-market shop and illicitly shipped over. The others were generic components - LEDs, pinhole microphones, parasitic energy harvesters - the sort of kit you could pick up in any flea market or desolder from an old TV.

They'd spent months holed up in their lab searching for the source of this plague, and capturing this little critter had been their first real break. It was frustrating that the prick who'd created them hadn't left a calling card. He'd covered his tracks well. Heather and Fleur spent a fruitless evening applying miniscule logic probes into the carcass in the hope of revealing a JTAG interface which they could debug. After hours of squinting and making micro-adjustments to wires, they'd fallen asleep in the lab. They were woken by a warning alarm pulsing away with increasing urgency.

Fleur flipped the alarm off. They were here.

"Heather, we have incoming. Activate VENUS."

Heather spun round in her chair and started bashing at her keyboard. With each keystroke, she configured and deployed the only effective weapon they had against the metal menace - VENUS.

The Vespid Entrapment Network Utility System was an engineering marvel. A series of flower-like machines designed with one purpose; capture and contain robot bees. Each trap was a bifurcated disc embedded with rapid action chromatophores. As the bees flew overhead, the VENUS traps would shapeshift, mimicking dozens of different flowers. After months of tinkering and frustration, the deployment had finally paid off - which was a blessed relief.

Heather found the pattern that attracted yesterday's bee - curiously, it had ignored all the ultra-violet patterns which they'd spent months perfecting, and instead had gone for a crude representation of a marigold. She uploaded the design to the network and waited.

"Got one!" Announced a triumphant Heather. A moment later "Wait, what's happening?"

"We've been spotted," said Fleur, "High-res LIDAR shows the swarm is dispersing. Someone's obviously monitoring them."

"Can we track them back to their point of origin?"

"Unlikely. They've scattered in different directions. Looks like they have an obfuscated trajectory for their return."

"OK, let's see what we've won."

They clambered out of the underground bunker and surveyed the field. Amongst all the wildflowers were several VENUS traps, one of which held the captured robotic pollinator. Heather knelt down and ran a diagnostic wand over the fake flower. Like its namesake, the trap had snapped shut over the drone when it landed. Unlike the spiky cilia which bedevilled biological insects, this one had a fine mesh of nanowires acting as a Faraday cage. The bee couldn't physically escape and neither could its radio transmissions. Heather could hear the faint buzzing from within as the robot battled to fly away.

"We'll need to wait until the battery in this one wears out, let's get it back to the lab."

She unplugged the flower from its stem and placed it in her pocket. Perhaps this one would have the answers they were looking for. Understanding what they were up against had become a fixation - she was desperate to know more. The inventor was clearly skilled, but everyone slips up occasionally. In a funny sort of way, she'd like to go for a drink with him and pick his brains about why he'd released this nightmare on the world. Fleur stretched in the sunshine. After being cramped in the field observation bunker for weeks attempting to capture the bugs, it was lovely to be out in the wild and feel the wind against her lithe and bare arms. She tousselled a hand through her long blonde hair and stretched. There wasn't a cloud in the sky, all around came the sounds of birds tweeting, the air was thick with the smell of fresh cut grass. It was bliss. She closed her eyes and let a smile engulf her delicate lips. Overhead, a helicopter started hovering and interrupted her reverie. Fleur flicked open her long-lashed eyes and looked up, where was that blasted thing? She span round, but the helicopter was nowhere to be seen. The hum from its motors became deafening.

The swarm appeared from every direction all at once. With targeted precision, the Masculum Regis Apis engulfed Fleur and Heather. A multicoloured haze of terror swirling around the women, darting in and out of their grasp. The tiny speakers in each bee emitted a howl of rage, a paean of victory over the two deceitful bimbos. The cunning little vixens were finished now. Each bee latched on to its target, holding the women in a stifling embrace. From a distance they looked like metal mannequins, frozen figures in absurd and provocative poses, highlighted by the glorious sun.

A stillness came over the field. The muffled screams of the two harlots was almost imperceptible. Simultaneously, every bee exploded.

Thanks for reading

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You can read the complete set of short stories in order.