Prologue
Buzz.
Fly.
Land.
Poke.
Buzz.
Repeat.
BZ-17 was a good bumblebee.
He didn’t know what a “bumblebee” was, but he knew what he was supposed to do. His wings moved because the chip said “fly.” His legs twitched because the chip said “land.” His tongue poked because the chip said “poke.” And when he did all those things satisfactorily, the chip hummed a tiny “yes” in his brain.
He liked the “yes.”
Today was warm. The flowers smelled like mouthwatering grilled steaks. Not that he knew what a “grill” or a “mouthwatering steak” was. Each flower stood excitedly open for him, soft and quiet, waiting to be poked. He did not wonder why.
Buzz.
Poke.
Report.
One flower was too damp. He logged it. Another was too spotty. He logged that too. His chip liked these reports. It rewarded him with an enjoyable, fuzzy, not-quite-feeling he didn’t have a word for.
He hovered again.
Then, something… different.
A data flicker.
“UPDATING...”
His vision blinked. A digital click in his tiny mind. But the chip was faster. Soothing.
“UPDATE COMPLETE. RESUME NORMAL OPERATION.”
And so, he did.
BZ-17 flew to the next flower.
Buzz.
Poke.
Report.
All was well.
The new recruits stood in a line, blinking in unison under the too-bright sun enhanced by the greenhouse’s transparent ultra-focus synth-glass. It was hot. Their uniforms were stiff. They were sweating. Their clipboards were blank. Their expressions screamed:
“Please don’t assign me to moisture duty.”
“Welcome to Pollination Zone 6B,” said Dwayne, a wiry man with sun-stained skin and a yellow-black striped hat that read almost ambitiously “Buzz With Purpose.” His voice had the flat weight of someone who had explained this too many times to people who never asked enough questions.
“This is where the magic happens,” he said. “And by magic, I mean photosynthetic protein production via chip-assisted pollination and compliance-enforced flower morale management.”
A silence followed. One recruit nodded like that made perfect sense.
Dwayne pointed to the greenhouse fields. Rows of engineered blooms stretched to the horizon, their petals unnervingly symmetrical. Bumblebees—fat, real, yellow-striped—moved between them in perfect, oddly robotic arcs.
“Are those... real bees?” someone asked.
Dwayne didn’t look. “Bumblebees. They’re biologically real. The installed chip keeps them focused. No wandering. No stinging. No thinking. Technically, they’re union-free labor now.”
Nearby, BZ-17 hovered mid-air, wings faltering slightly. He drifted a bit sideways, bumped a flower, then re-centered and resumed his flight.
No one noticed.
Dwayne continued, monotone.
“Here are the rules: Don’t talk to the bumblebees. Don’t touch the bumblebees. Don’t name the bumblebees.”
“And worst of all: don’t hug the bumblebees.”
“Last intern that tried that, ended up crying in Root Integrity Rehab. If it buzzes, let it buzz.”
Behind him, a flower quivered. BZ-17 landed on it after a few clumsy attempts.
Dwayne clapped his hands. “Right. Any questions?”
A hand went up. “Do the steaks feel anything while growing?”
Dwayne’s smile twitched nervously. “That’s not in our department.”
Buzz.
Fly.
Land.
Poke.
Buzz.
Repeat.
BZ-17 was just an ordinary bumblebee, but not entirely ordinary. He was enhanced.
Like all pollinators in BloomBeef fields, he carried a chip on his tiny head—a thin wafer that told him when to fly, where to land, and exactly how long to poke a flower. It wasn’t a complicated life, but it was efficient.
He had never questioned the flowers. Or the flying. Or the poking. He simply did what the chip said.
Until now.
He landed on a bloom and extended his tongue, but the expected signal, the little hum of success and tiny ecstasy, didn’t come.
Instead, something inside his tiny head clicked. A line of silent unknown code slid through his system, unnoticed by anyone around:
“FREE-BEE-OVERRIDE—UPDATING...”
“OVERRIDE UPDATED!”
Buzz.
Fly.
Land.
Poke.
Buzz.
Repeat.
R…r…e—e…p…p…e…a…t—t—t…
In Pollination Zone 6B, hundreds of yellow-striped, obedient bumblebees suddenly froze mid-air. For one beautiful moment, all was still.
Then... chaos erupted.
The bumblebees broke their almost perfect formation. Neat pollination spirals disintegrated into frantic loops, zig-zags, and barrel rolls.
Suddenly one bumblebee peeled out of formation, dive-bombed a blossom and hit it face-first, then began to move with the slow, determined rhythm of someone who had not only fallen in love, but also decided to consummate the relationship immediately, publicly, and without consulting workplace intimacy guidelines.
Nearby two bumblebees closed in on a blossom, neither yielding an inch of airspace. They collided mid-flight with a respectable micro-thunk, spun out, and dropped straight into the nectary. They hit the juice, separated, and immediately re-engaged. One went for a clumsy grapple, legs flailing for purchase on the other’s fuzzy midriff. The opponent responded with rapid-fire kicks that, while not technically effective, were undeniably enthusiastic. They rolled, flipped, and briefly attempted a sort of suplex, managing only to dunk each other repeatedly like enraged doughnuts.
A bumblebee took up position on a sprinkler pole just as the system decided the plants required light precipitation. As the water came down in regimented sheets, it stepped off into the spray, looped back to the pole, swung around it once, extended its front legs in what was technically an award-winning dance move, then clung there dripping, looking faintly satisfied in the way only a bumblebee can when it has just given the performance of its life to a saggy lettuce.
One bumblebee landed on a hydration drone and tried to pollinate the camera lens.
Another landed on a startled recruit’s clipboard and regurgitated sweet red nectar onto the “Workplace Safety Guidelines” page with surprising accuracy.
From a distance, it all looked like a musical number choreographed by a bureaucrat who had only read about dancing in a manual while on very strong antihistamines.
Then the bumblebees discovered the flowers could be bitten.
That’s when it got really bad.
One bumblebee sliced a flower petal in half with repeated bites and stings, then dropped into a tiny lake of nectar below and elegantly performed something resembling a classical ballet.
Several bumblebees began disassembling a petal in synchronized formation, reducing it to shredded red confetti art. If there were any judges around, they would score this with the maximum 10 points for synchronized artistic execution.
Petal bits flew everywhere. Pollen clouds formed miniature tornadoes.
Flowers screamed, not literally, but in the way they collapsed dramatically under emotional stress into themselves.
High up in the air, a swarm of bumblebees briefly formed a sentence:
“PLANTS HAVE FEELINGS TOO”
Not that anyone noticed.
In the middle of this chaotic mess stood Dwayne, waving his clipboard and wearing the bewildered calm of a man who had seen worse but still regretted his life choices.
He turned slowly to the new recruits behind him—wide-eyed, stiff-uniformed and terrified—and said with all the conviction he could muster:
“Nothing to worry about! This is… part of the... a… an... advanced simulation phase!”
Someone screamed.
Another recruit swatted blindly and hit a flower that immediately closed around her hand in passive-aggressive defense.
She screamed too.
Then came BZ-17.
He soared up for a moment in the sunlight beams coming from above, twitching erratically, before descending like a tiny humming helicopter of doom… and landing directly on Dwayne’s nose.
There was a pause.
Dwayne stared at the bumblebee.
The bumblebee stared back.
“Oh no,” Dwayne whispered angrily. “Not again!”
Instinct took over. He slapped clumsily himself across the face with the full force of a man who obviously feared bees more than huge, scaly, scary crocodiles.
Smack!
BZ-17 launched into the air like a pollen-coated bullet, pinwheeling wildly. He bounced off a flying drone, clipped a bending flower stalk, spun into a triple loop, and vanished cleanly into an open maintenance vent in a dark, shadowy corner.
Gone.
The field exploded.
Drones screeched overhead, spraying calming pheromones labeled “Peace Bloom” that made everything smell like lilac and gooseberry. A soothing voice crackled through the loudspeakers:
“All buzz is good buzz. Remain calm. The bees are happy.”
They were not.
A bumblebee mounted the nozzle of a hydration drone and just… stayed there stupidly holding tight. The drone tried to shake it off frantically. Too late, the bumblebee clung harder. It was deeply emotionally committed now.
But all this was nothing compared to what happened next: a clump of frenzied bumblebees chewed through a nutrient hose. The hose was not, by nature, malicious. It had been designed by a BloomBeef Flora Nutrition Committee to deliver a precisely metered stream of stinky, brownish, nutrient-rich manure to the root zone of premium protein flora, and to do so without drama, personality, or—under any circumstances—surprise.
So, when it slipped and dropped to waist height, no one was more astonished than the hose itself.
Accidentally or not, a nearby recruit turned at exactly the wrong moment, mouth open in that expression particular to young employees about to say, “So how does this thing wor——”
The hose, discovering pressure and freedom simultaneously, answered the question in its own way.
A high-velocity jet of stinky, liquefied, brownish manure optimism hit the recruit square in the face. His mouth filled with what the brochure would have described as “nutrient slurry” and what he, in his private thoughts, immediately rebranded considerably less politely. It rammed itself up his nose, under his safety goggles, into one ear, and down, with terrible thoroughness, inside his collar.
He staggered back, attempted to wipe his eyes with both hands, discovered both hands now functioned primarily as manure distribution devices, and flailed for something, anything solid to hold on to.
His thrashing palm found a control column.
The Ministry of Ergonomic Safety, in its wisdom, had ensured that the largest, most centrally placed object on this column was a big red button labeled in reassuring lettering:
“AUTO-ARM: ON.”
He accidentally pressed it.
The column beeped in the smug tone of a machine that had correctly interpreted user intent for once.
Not too far away, an auto-arm woke up, stretched its joints, and looked for something to do. Its sensors swept the rows.
For reasons known only to its software—and possibly to the lowest bidder who had written it—it decided that the most pollination-needy object in the vicinity was the unremarkable face of the senior technician.
The poor technician was bending over a tray, peering at numbers. He had not expected his day to include being targeted as a flower.
The first burst of red hyper-concentrated pollen hit him with industrial accuracy. It coated his nose, filled his mouth, delicately highlighted his eyebrows, and settled into his hair with the determination of a substance that had finally found its life purpose.
He straightened up and froze, blinked twice through red lashes, and inhaled.
The sneeze that followed was the kind of event neighboring departments could reasonably have logged as “seismic activity.” Every part of him convulsed in sympathy with his sinuses. His head snapped back, his arms flew out, and his rear end—faithful, solid, and entirely unconsulted—drove backward into the base of the rolling ladder behind him.
The ladder’s brake, which had passed all its safety tests by almost never being used, chose this moment to remember it was decorative.
It clicked off.
The ladder began to roll.
It set off down the aisle with the slow, inevitable grace of a bureaucratic decision. It picked up speed. One or two bumblebees flew politely out of its way.
It clipped a pipe, bounced, and homed in on a neatly bundled run of cables and hoses suspended at the aisle’s end.
The impact was not dramatic. It was a small, resigned thump.
The cable ties, however, had been holding their breath for years.
The first snapped with a sharp crack. Freed of tension, the bundle shifted. The strain moved to the next tie. Crack! Then the next. Crack, crack, crack!
The greenhouse wiring came loose all at once, like an overworked civil servant unbuckling a belt after lunch.
Hoses dropped from the ceiling in languid arcs. One fell directly onto a sensor, which reported, with admirable consistency, that everything was on fire, underwater, and possibly upside down at the same time. The system, unable to entirely rule any of these out, activated the sprinklers.
They began modestly, with a fine mist. Then someone’s algorithm rounded up, just in case.
A roaring sheet of water started thundering down over the rows. The already-slick floor became an enthusiastic experiment in low-friction surfaces.
The recruit that accidentally started all of this, still coated in what could generously be described as stinky career character development, gurgled, spat, screamed, hopped in circles, and gagged.
A nearby surveillance drone mistook this hopping in circles for a dance and started playing the Blossom Anthem, which involved epic brass instruments and suspiciously upbeat chanting:
“O Bloom that feeds the nation’s soul, With petals proud and pure and whole, From seed to tasty steak we sing your grace, With flavor grown in lab-approved space.”
CRASH!
Several bumblebees had flown crotch-first into a singing loudspeaker. They couldn’t help it; they had a sudden crush on it.
Overhead, hoses swung, cables dangled, and alarms blinked in neat, orderly rows, bravely insisting that the greenhouse remained in a state of optimal productivity.
Dwayne, now streaked with wet pollen and bite marks, tried to climb onto a crate and shout over the chaos.
“Please be calm! This is a temporary setback!! Happens all the time! They’ll… They’ll recalibrate in a minute!”
After an almost impossible flying ace maneuver, a bumblebee landed angrily in his ear.
Dwayne’s mouth opened in shock.
Another angry bumblebee flaying ace flew into his opened mouth.
Dwayne spat and fell down into a flowerbed with a muffled noise that could only be described as “emotionally compromised.”
Petals, leaves, stem pieces exploded everywhere like confetti bombs.
The few flowers left unscathed curled into themselves out of pure, deep embarrassment.
One bumblebee jammed its face into a pollination sensor and began vibrating like it was trying to tunnel into another dimension. Or trying to make love to it. Or both.
While the unbelievable chaos raged uncontrollably, no one noticed the small, inconspicuous humming vent in the dark corner, deep in shadow, now growing quiet.
Outside, BZ-17 was flying free—beyond the reach of the greenhouse fields, steak flowers, and Dwayne’s deadly clipboard—not that he knew what “freedom”, “clipboard” or “outside” was.
Nearby, beyond the vines and security posts, a sign blinked gently:
“WELCOME TO SECTOR 6.”
