“If Priscilla is damaged, time is of the essence. With the loss of Hannah last season, we have only three scouts left and can’t afford to risk the integrity of one to rescue another. And, Oliver, you know I can’t leave the safety of the ranch without a companion.”
“I know,” I grumbled. “Rule number one.”
Rule number one. Protect Roger. Without Roger, the entire farm collapses. He must never leave the ranch alone. He must be maintained weekly. Protect Roger at all costs.
The other two honeybee scouts, 410 and 413, whatever their names were, were in their three-times-a-month repair sequence and recharge. To remove them prematurely would supposedly damage their already deteriorating systems. And because of reasons I didn’t understand, we always had to charge two at a time. The charge happened every Saturday on a rotation, so each of the three charged two weeks in a row, took a week off, and then started again.
We called them honeybees, but I knew they were much larger than the Earth bugs they were named after. Apparently, the earliest versions of these things had been based on dogs. We had three different models. The vast majority on the ranch were the drones designed with bigger batteries and less autonomy. We had three scouts left. Two if 418—Priscilla—was gone. They were a little smaller than the drones. And we also had Roger, the “hive queen” AI unit. He was the smallest of them all, about half the size of the rest. The size of a cat.
It’d been seventy years since the planet was first settled. My grandfather Edward Lewis—though everyone just called him Lewis—had been born on theForlorn, one of the fifteen hulking generation ships that had brought settlers to the planet. He had been trained as an engineer and honeybee mechanic. They were already in orbit when he was born, and he’d been seventeen years old when they first settled on the city of Fat Landing. Four years after that, his group settled here in the Baja peninsula, seven thousand kilometers away near the edge of the great ocean, and created the agricultural hub of Burnt Ends. Grandpa Lewis had been assigned a fleet of roughly five thousand honeybee production machines, complete with an additional fifty hive queen bots, and for the next five years, he’d overseen the construction of most of the farms and industrial buildings in the area. A fact, fifty-plus years later, he would never shut up about. Not until the day he died.
The honeybees had an intended lifespan of five-ten years of heavy labor, after which they would start to break down. As far as I was aware, the four hundred thirty remaining honeybees on our farm were the sole enduring honeybees on the entire planet. Roger, whose real name was actually Roger-Roger, was the last hive queen in existence. Once he finally fell out of commission, that would be it. We’d still be able to send the drones out on simple agricultural tasks using the control center, but they wouldn’t work in unison like they did now. And the scouts, if any were left, would cease to function.
By the time my grandfather’s outpost-establishing mission was complete, he’d been only twenty-nine years old, and as he explained it, he’d been told to “fuck off and die on a farm somewhere.” So that was pretty much what he did. He established a farm with my grandmother Yolanda, and five years after that, they had my mom. It was around the same time he’d discovered the local government had all the remaining honeybees just sitting in a warehouse somewhere, decommissioned and doing nothing. He’d requested two thousand units so he could see if he could repurpose them to help with agriculture. They’d agreed.
“I have found Priscilla’s signal,” Roger said as we reached the top of a small hill rising out of the swamp. The mud and reeds were replaced with large round bushes that leaked a thick sap that was next to impossible to get out of clothes. The shrubs were called plica bushes, and they were everywhere. They smelled something awful, like the wet underside of a lamb with a skin infection. They grew fast, too, and I had to be constantly vigilant they didn’t get a foothold on our land. Their roots were a bitch to dig up, and as helpful as the honeybees were, they were shit at digging up roots.
We reached the top of the hill, and I wheezed for breath. I looked south, trying to see if I could see the great ocean. I couldn’t. All I could see was more bush-covered hills. I was finally starting to sober up, but I still felt I was going to be sick at any moment.
“How far?”
“Just one more kilometer past that next hill.”
“What was she doing out this far anyway?”
“We detected an unknown radio signal on the surface, and one of Priscilla’s duties is to investigate unknown signals.”
I stopped dead. “Wait. You detected an unknown radio signal out here on the surface in the middle of nowhere, you sent out a scout bot, and the scout disappeared? Don’t you think—I don’t know—that you should have led with this information? Or maybe sent another scout with her?”
“Oliver, the other two active scouts were unable to investigate because they were occupied taking your unconscious form back from the other ranch. They had already entered their scheduled maintenance when Priscilla disappeared.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
Shing!The correction stinger emerged from Roger’s abdomen, and faster than I thought possible, he zipped forward and stung me in the arm.
“Goddamnit,” I said. “Gah!” I cried a moment later as he stung me a second time.
“Rule number four. No swearing, Oliver,” Roger said.
“Roger,” I said, breathing heavily, “I hate you.”
“It’s customary for unruly students to hate their tutors, Oliver. Students are less likely to learn in too permissive environments.”
“You’re not my teacher anymore. I’m not a student. I haven’t been for years. You’re a hive queen. If you weren’t so valuable, I’d turn you into yard art.”
“Artistic interests are fine if they are pursued during your leisure time, but you should focus your attentions on furthering your core studies. Yes, artists are important to the persistence of culture, but artisanal skills must take a back seat to functional skills when a colony is still in its early stage. Your band is a good example of this. Luckily, your percussion talent is such that a career in music will never be possible.”
I started to say something back when I was interrupted by thesound of something mechanical coming from the next ridge over. It was a hissing followed by aclang, clank, clang. There was something else, too. It sounded amplified, like it was coming through the loudspeaker at the community auction house, but it was still too far for me to understand. It almost sounded like…like screaming.
“Roger, what is that?”
“It sounds like a juvenile having a temper tantrum,” Roger said. “It is amplified through a public address system. I am detecting multiple strange signals in that direction when there were none just a few moments ago. This signal is closer than Priscilla’s.”
“Yeah, but what’s the machine? It sounds like a tractor with a thrown tread.”
Right at that moment, the large colorful contraption crested the distant hill. It was maybe a hundred fifty meters away. I just stood there, dumbfounded.
The machine was about three meters tall, and it walked on two legs, though one of them was heavily damaged, probably the cause of the loud clanging. Each step came with the sound of scraping metal followed by a noisy clank.
