Game Over, page 14
Because Sammi and I were both wearing beekeeping suits. The suits were white and baggy, and they obscured everything from our forms to our faces with mesh nets just thick enough that we could see out of them but not, apparently, see into them. Even Laddu, I now noticed, was covered in a fine netting, much to his clear displeasure.
As one, Sammi and I turned out from each other to gaze at the open-air greenhouse in which we now stood. Late-afternoon sunlight slid over boxes of white pine, stacked on top of one another in towers, each one emanating a familiar buzz.
“Oh,” I breathed, putting it together.
“Yeah,” Jason said. “Trippy, right?”
We hadn’t entered a HIVE Simulator.
We’d entered a hive simulator.
In HIVE.
“Who put this here?” I asked as Sammi and I moved forward to walk among the hives. A few bees danced around the outside of each tower, but the moment I got close to one, a dozen more emerged in a defensive cloud, and the soft humming from inside the hive became a buzz-saw whine as countless unseen bees sent up a would-be battle cry. I pulled my hand back and stood stock-still as the bees calmed down and darted back into their box. Suit or no suit, I did not intend to get on any of their bad sides.
“I think it’s a private joke for the HIVE architects,” Jason said. “I found it by accident during one of my reading sessions. It’s amazingly realistic—like, weirdly so. It’s just straight-up beehives. Not much of a game—but I figured it’d be a good place to hide.”
I’d been relaying his words to Sammi as he spoke, and she nodded.
“Good thinking,” she said. “Whoever those guys are out there, I don’t think they know to look for us here, or we’d have seen them by—wait.” She frowned. “One of your reading sessions?”
I’d noticed that, too, and it had reminded me of the things Jason had mentioned back in the real world. The secrets he knew that other HIVE employees knew nothing about; the time he spent hanging around the top of the Honeycomb; gradually, a portrait of Jason’s past few years was beginning to come together.
“Jason,” I said, “how much of Terms and Conditions have you read?”
After a moment’s hesitation, Jason said, “Most.”
“Most,” I began, “or all?”
Another hesitation, and then:
“There were some parts I didn’t understand,” Jason admitted, his voice soft, as if this was a shameful secret.
Crack! Sammi and I whirled around, and the hives sent up an indignant buzz as a sharp sound rang out from the front of the wheelhouse. But it was just Laddu, squawking in distress as his attempts to remove his protective netting led him to knock over a bizarre device that looked like a metal fan.
“Okay, look,” Sammi said, heading over to clean up Laddu’s mess. “I would love to know more about whatever PhD in weirdness Jason has slowly been earning. But we still have to find a way out of here—past those Drones and past those guys in the library. And by ‘those guys’ I of course mean—because I feel we really have not stressed this enough—the British prime minister and the president.”
“Oh, was that the prime minister?” I asked.
“Honestly, Kara,” Sammi said, picking up the fan and turning to fix me with a look I could feel through two layers of mesh. “I’ve seen you read Jane Eyre three times. How do you never read the news.”
Jason snorted, and I tried to get things back on track.
“Well, you’re right,” I said, looking around the greenhouse. “We need an escape plan. Let’s think. What do we know? Is there something here that can help us?”
“Something in a beehive simulator?” Sammi asked skeptically.
“Sure, why not? You’re the puzzle-game queen, Sammi—solve this puzzle.”
“Maybe,” Jason said, still enjoying himself, “you could try jumping off a beehive.”
I ignored him.
“I’ve never heard of portals from one game to another,” I said. “Let’s start there. That’s not normal, right? Is that new?”
“It’s not normal, no,” Jason said while Sammi mulled it over. “Game developers want to keep you in their games once you’re there, not send you away. That way you keep making in-game purchases and they keep making profits.”
“Why would developers need our money for their games if we’re not real?” I muttered, softly enough that Sammi couldn’t hear over the buzzing of the bees. “Your theory is flawed. Checkmate.”
“Oh, please,” Jason said. “Companies use bots to drive up revenue all the time. Your friends are just the bots. Next question.”
“What about mini-games?” Sammi spoke up, unknowingly interrupting a biting retort from me (that I had not actually thought of yet). “Some games have those, like the bocce ball courts in Super Plumber’s Backyard Barbecue Enjoyment. Maybe this is one of those.”
“That makes sense,” I said. “Except Terms and Conditions isn’t really a game—it’s a library. So these breakout rooms must be like …”
“Mini-libraries.” Sammi snapped her fingers. “Those touchscreens—the Hive Simulator, the Back-End Archives—they’re not games, they’re holding cells for specific types of information. Like some sort of—”
“Reading room,” Jason and I said at the same time, and I was glad that my bulky beekeeping suit kept anyone from seeing the shiver that ran down my back.
“But I don’t see any books,” Jason said as I looked around.
“Well, there weren’t books in Terms and Conditions, either,” I said. “There were scrolls. Different information gets stored in different ways.”
“So the information in a hive simulator,” Sammi said excitedly, “would be stored in …”
Two pairs of eyes, and three people, turned to look at the greenhouse’s main attraction: stack after stack of pine boxes, each one literally overflowing with swarms of stinging insects, each insect ready to fight and die to protect their home.
“The hives,” I finished, and for a moment there was only buzzing in the greenhouse.
“You could always just go back and make a run for it,” Jason said at last.
“You’re just saying that because you want us to get caught.”
“Excuse me for thinking outside the box!”
“Look, this’ll be fine,” Sammi said, hoisting up the metal fan Laddu had knocked over. “I heard this story about beekeeping on that Digicast program Several Things Discussed. What I’m holding is a smoker. We’ll use it to blow smoke in the hives, and then the smoke puts all the bees to sleep, so we can open up the hive and look at whatever we want.”
“All the bees go to sleep?” I asked.
“Well, it was on the Digicast, so I couldn’t actually see how it happened,” Sammi admitted. “But the buzzing sounds definitely got softer. Look, do you have a better idea?”
I didn’t (Jason’s didn’t count). And Sammi was already creeping toward the first hive, arms outstretched to hold the smoker as far from herself as possible. When she was just out of arm’s reach, a handful of bees rose from the hive to dance inquisitively around the tip of the smoker. But Sammi was already pulling the handles of the fan apart—and then squeezing them tight together. With a creak and a wheeze, a plume of smoke enveloped the bees before rolling its way past them and into the hive. The effect was immediate: The bees we could see tumbled right out of the air, and the buzzing from inside the tower did, indeed, get notably softer.
“All right, Kara,” Sammi said. “Now’s your chance. Open the lid.”
Though I wasn’t exactly overjoyed to be leaving my safe position behind her, I couldn’t help but feel a small thrill of anticipation as I stepped forward and wrapped my gloved hands around the top of the hive.
And pulled.
The top of the structure came clean off in my hands, feeling remarkably light as I bent down to set it on the ground. When I straightened back up and looked into the hive, I saw what had been hiding underneath: row after row of thin wooden slats, lined up vertically next to one another, like those record collections you saw sometimes in old media museums. Except, you know, covered in bees. The bees clung to a sticky brown-and-yellow substance on the sides of each slat. A few of them rose up sluggishly, displeased by the intrusion, but after Sammi gave the smoker a second squeeze, even the biggest bees fell back down like someone had turned up their own personal gravity knobs.
“Those must be the frames,” Sammi said. “The sticky stuff is the honeycomb—like, actual honeycomb. That’s what bees make in hives, and what humans harvest.”
“Like I said,” Jason sighed. “It’s just regular beehives. No secret messages, just some weird inside joke.”
But something had caught my eye, even through the mesh and smoke and walls of sleeping bees. It was hard to get a good look at the honeycomb, but it almost seemed like …
“Give me more smoke,” I said, and Sammi obeyed. I reached out again and set to work loosening the first frame on the far left of the hive. This was much harder than just opening the hive; even half asleep, the bees clung and crawled grumpily across my gloves, and the honey was like glue, keeping the frame stuck to the box unless I pulled extra hard. But I wiggled the wood back and forth, and soon, with a sound somewhere between a squish and a smack, the frame finally came free, popping up into the air and shedding bees like fuzzy yellow glitter into the hive below.
Shedding so many bees, in fact, that for the first time, it was possible to fully see the patterns formed by the swirling brown and yellow of the honeycomb.
Not just the patterns—the words.
“No way,” Jason gasped.
“What?” Sammi breathed.
“Are you happy now?” I asked. And although Jason was too stunned to answer, I had to admit, I was sort of happy, even if I had no idea what came next. Sue me—I liked being right.
Because the first frame of the hive said, in huge letters spelled out of dried brown honey:
LET’S PLAY:
SAVE THE HEAD OF HIVE.
“This is why this is here,” I said. “This is how we find Eric Alanick.”
If you’ve ever played a particular kind of video game—the kind where you crawl around dungeons, say, or sneak onto pirate ships to steal back your treasure, or live on a pirate ship as a pirate who is going to steal someone else’s treasure—if you have played any of those, then you know exactly how great it feels to open up a chest and find that secret thing you were looking for. Sometimes it’s gems. Sometimes it’s a map. Sometimes it comes with a cute little trumpet fanfare as you raise your prize to the sky, pumping your cute little digital fist.
And sometimes, instead of trumpets, all you hear is bees, fighting against the special bee drugs you have coated them in so that they might not wake up and sting you, as you stare at a secret message either for or from the man who created the giant inescapable video game reality from which you are determined, somehow, to escape.
Truly, it felt great. Just a new joy every minute over here.
“He must have suspected ahead of time that he would need to be rescued,” Sammi said. “Or did he find a way to send this message from wherever he’s being held? Or did another architect do all that for him? And is it the same person who got all those Drones to block the exits in Terms and Conditions? Maybe they knew they’d be under siege. Maybe someone’s fighting back.”
I hadn’t even considered that, and beneath the beekeeping suit, my heart began to race. What was it Dad had said?
There’s a giant problem and you’ve decided it’s your job to fix it. It’s just what your mother would have done.
“Kara,” Jason said, “maybe this is—”
“I think I saw something on the back,” I said abruptly, and flipped the frame over to reveal more words, in coder jargon:
EMERGENCY PROTOCOLS
If(HIVEAttacked=true)
Run(“SaveMe”)
“There must be more on each of these things,” I said. “Come on, Sammi, help me out.”
With each of us wiggling a different side of the second frame, it came out in no time. But when we held it up to the light, I could only frown at the mysterious message.
THERE ARE NO CHEAT CODES IN HIVE.
“Well, I could have told you that,” Jason huffed.
“Look at the back,” Sammi said, and I turned it around.
BUT THIS HIVE HAS BUGS.
“I’ll say it does,” I grumbled as a half-dozen bees ambled irritably over my boots.
“Bees aren’t bugs,” Sammi said.
“I think,” Jason said, “they mean bugs like—”
“Computer bugs.” I slapped my forehead, accidentally squashing two bees. “Of course. Like the kind that cause the Updates—or that this Update caused.”
“This is incredible,” Sammi said. “Somehow, it’s all connected.”
“Sure,” I grunted as we worked a third frame loose. “But why do all these messages have to be so cryptic? It’s not the most helpful form of communication.”
The front of the next frame just said:
36 CHARACTER LIMIT.
“Oh,” I said, feeling sheepish. Then we turned it over:
ALSO, TALKING 2 U = SUPER DANGEROUS.
“Oh,” I repeated. Not for the first time that day, I felt a crawling sensation up my neck.
Then I felt the crawling sensation several other places, and realized we were in another kind of danger.
“Uh, Sammi? The bees are getting, uh, antsy.”
“Oh, shoot.” Sammi dropped her end of the frame and grabbed the smoker again, giving a rapid one-two squeeze to first my suit and then the hive. But the first puff of smoke came out weak and wispy, and the second puff was smaller still. A few bees fell to the floor, but not that many.
“We’re running out of smoke,” she said as a bee threw itself at my foot stinger-first. As we watched, the bee lodged its stinger into the suit before tumbling to the ground to die. I hadn’t felt the sting through the thick fabric, but I didn’t want to find out if that would hold for the third or fourth time I got stung—or the thirtieth or four hundredth.
“Let’s hurry,” I said, moving quickly to the next frame. In my haste, I yanked the frame right out of the hive, which was good, but woke up many more bees in the process, which was bad.
“What does it say?” Sammi asked as she squirted the smoker furiously, and I read aloud:
BUGS ARE SCATTERED ACROSS THE HIVE.
Sammi looked around the greenhouse, but I shook my head.
“I think they mean HIVE HIVE,” I said, and as three bees stung at my wrist, I turned to the back of the frame.
YOU MUST RACE TO FIND THEM.
“Well, obviously we’re going to hurry,” Jason said. “Why would he waste frames like this?”
“Talk about a slow frame rate,” Sammi said.
I stared at her. I had to believe Jason did, too.
“Sorry,” Sammi said. “Pull the next one.”
But I was still looking at RACE TO FIND THEM, even as the buzzing grew harsher around me.
“I don’t think he—I don’t think they did waste a frame,” I said. “I think it’s a clue. For where to find the next one. Race.”
“That could be any number of— Aah!” A bee had gone to sting Sammi right in the mesh of her mask, and instinctively she had tried to swat it away. This only served to anger it, and now she was just as much of a target for the bees as I was—and there were enough bees awake now to easily attack both of us. Laddu now looked very glad to still be in his netting as he waddled nervously away from where we stood.
There was just one frame left in the hive, and it was honeystuck but good. As I pulled and pried at it, I was swallowed up in a cloud of furious yellow and black, making me wince as the bees moved to defend the last of their home. I couldn’t blame them—we were stealing their life’s work, after all—but the collective effect of all of them throwing themselves against my suit was like being buffeted by a very small hailstorm with a grudge. The fear that one of them would break through my suit was growing stronger by the second—and, somehow, I suspected their stings would have a worse effect than some light swelling.
“Why would Eric do this?” Jason asked. “If he wanted anyone to find the messages, why would he guard it like this?”
“Because he didn’t want just anyone to find the messages,” I said. I spoke through gritted teeth, both because I was pulling as hard as I could and because I already regretted what I was about to say. “He only wanted it found by a true Hivehead—by someone—like—you!”
I had to yell the last word as the final frame came loose with an enormous crack and a roaring of enraged bees. They were so thick around me now that I could barely read the message, but I could still make it out:
NOW MOVE LIKE YOU STOLE IT.
And just like that, I knew where we had to go.
“Move!” I yelled. “Move, go, now!”
I tucked the frame under my arm and turned to run. Sammi brandished the smoker into the cloud of bees, but they just feinted and then re-formed, bearing down on us as we dashed back to the front of the greenhouse.
“How are we getting out of here?!” Sammi asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I just hoped we might leave the same way we—”
Flash.
“Came,” I said, and then the two of us were standing in Terms and Conditions.
Facing a bunch of guards.
“Hey!” said a guard. “Who are you?”
Which was strange because, from the claw marks on his forehead, I could definitely tell this was the same guard who’d been chasing us before. Why wouldn’t he recognize us?
Maybe because we were still wearing our beekeeping suits was why.
“What?” Sammi asked. “How did these come through with us? Things stay in the game they’re from.”
“Put the—put your things down!” said one of the guards. They were steadily advancing on us.
Which was how I found out I still had the final frame tucked under my arm, and Sammi still had her smoker.
