This story is part of our special telepathy issue, Diabolical Thoughts, edited by Ziv Wities.
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The figure seated on the other side of the plain metal table has a blank look on its face, like its creator gave up halfway through forming its features. It is dressed in an orange jumpsuit, white socks, black slippers. The handcuff that secures it to the table cuts deeply into the waxy pale skin of its wrist.
You’ve handled plenty of robots and AIs, even species whose very existence Deep Thought has classified Top Secret, but a wax man is a first. Still, that’s why you’ve got protocol. You flip open the file. “We have you at the scene of the crime, we found the murder weapon. All we need from you is the names of your co-conspirators.”
The suspect lifts its hands, every movement deliberate and fluid, blood slower than honey. Its left hand jerks to a stop on the end of the handcuff chain and more waxy skin flakes drift onto the table. “You saw somebody who looked like us, perhaps. You have a murder weapon that certainly doesn’t have our fingerprints on it. And we have never conspired with anyone.” When it speaks, a breath of hot air washes over you. You start to sweat. “Also, no one is dead.”
It takes some gall to say that right when you’re laying out the autopsy pictures. The cross-section of the skull is mesmerizing—it’s filled with hexagonal honeycomb cells, some of which are the same pale empty color as its skin, others darkened with the husks of bees that had crawled in and died. With a red pen, you circle the darkest spot on the honeycomb.
“This was the point of death. It’s a hive, isn’t it? And here, at this point, a killer bee got inside, and caused a catastrophic cascade failure of the mind.”
The figure leans forward slightly and looks at the photo with polite interest. It leans back and looks at you. Something with very small, quick wings buzzes past behind its eyes.
Continuing, you say, “That killer bee was fired from this weapon.” Photo of a fat-barrelled pistol. “Just tell me why you did it. Who ordered you? Who hired you?” This is what you need to get out of it. It’s the first time Deep Thought has one of the wax men in custody. They have almost no identifying marks, no fingerprints, and they’ve been linked to four different contract killings. “And why have you murdered one of your own kind?”
“We are not murderers. We are messengers.” A honeybee crawls out of its ear, flits around the room, and lands on its cheek. Crawls back in through its nose. “Our brains are biological cellular automata. Our thoughts are encoded in a three-dimensional binary lattice according to whether or not the honeycomb cell is filled. Thoughts fly from our minds into the heads of our hive-siblings where they dance out their message and affect the inner workings of the recipient’s brain.”
You pause for a minute to absorb the implication. “All right, messengers. So you’ve got to have some kind of a dispatcher. Who is your leader? Who is the queen of the hivemind?”
“There is no leader. We are decentralized. Information spreads equally between us, though at different rates of speed, so we are not always entirely in sync. When one of us acts… out of character… correction is needed. If that one does not respond to the dances—” It indicates the picture of the gun.
“You kill it.”
“We merely destroy the container. We each contribute drones and other thoughts to the restructure. They eat the old waxwork and create a new one. Only the original queen survives, starts to build a new hive within it. That is how we reproduce. In fact,” its eyes defocus, “I’ve just had a new thought. It is almost ready to break free and find its own place to nest.” The persistent sound of buzzing that this whole time you’d thought was the noise of the overhead light increases sharply, and only now can you tell that it’s coming from the creature sitting in front of you.
“But then why kill species that aren’t part of your hive? What happens when….” Suddenly, you have a new thought. A frightening one. “…when you share your thoughts with a human?”
Bees fly from all its orifices and cover your face. You feel them poking at your nostrils and ears. You freeze in your seat, afraid of provoking them to sting you, but that’s not the real threat. They probe deeper and deeper until one of them breaks through the earwax barrier and fills your head with royal jelly dreams.
You have a fat-barrelled gun—the Deep Thought police gave it to you with your badge. The bullet inside it buzzes. You’re standing in the commissioner’s office, and he’s looking up at you from behind his desk with a puzzled look. He chairs the board that drafts all laws governing semi-sentients. He says, “Was there something you wanted?”
You want to share with him the new thought you’d had. All you have to do is release it from its six-chambered cell, and you can change his mind.
© 2023 by Josh Pearce
860 words
Author’s Note: This flash piece came from a combination of: the Biblical story of Samson finding a beehive in a lion’s corpse; the bee-firing rifle from Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles; adipocere (also known as corpse wax, or grave wax); cellular automata; and the idea that if there are laws of robotics, then there must also be law enforcers. This story ties in loosely with another of my flash fictions, “Further Laws of Robotics” in Nature, which introduced the Deep Thought Police.
Josh Pearce has stories and poetry in Analog, Asimov’s, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Cast of Wonders, Clarkesworld, IGMS, and Nature, and he frequently reviews films for Locus Magazine. Find more of his writing at fictionaljosh.com. One time, Ken Jennings signed his chest.
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