“Mr. President, this is highly irregular! Are you sure about this?!” Vice President Margaret Smith had chalked up the changes in behavior over the past several weeks to stress and the situation developing in Europe.
In the past six weeks, President McKinny had essentially reversed direction of foreign policy which had been established for decades. Military installations in and around Europe had been ordered closed and most of the service members slated for early retirement. The US was dramatically reducing it’s military capacity and capabilities around the world.
“I’m sure Margaret. The UK, Germany, and everyone else in the EU with a military worth speaking of is doing the same thing. I think we’ve all just had enough” The President replied in that tone of finality covered in confidence which always signaled an end to the topic of conversation.
Uncharacteristically, she pursued it further, “sir, we don’t have any indications that Russia, or anyone in the Middle East is also doing this. We’ve not had any coordinated meetings to make any of this happen! It’s just crazy to make such vast assumptions about this situation!”
“Margaret, pull it back a bit, okay? I know what it looks like, but I can assure you, they might be a little slower at this, but everyone else is going to follow suit. Drop it for now, you’ll see. Besides, we have other work to get done, and a lot of defense and military spending surplus that’ll need reallocating, and those morons in Congress are bound to fuck it up if we don’t make some public pledges first.”
Margaret sat back in her chair, a little defeated. She knew it wasn’t a bad thing for what was now apparently supposed to be a global military stand-down. The problem was that the President has essentially been down in the situation room by himself for the past six weeks orchestrating things. That was until last night when he’d call her down along with this Press Secretary to begin drafting the announcement speech. Her eyes wandered around the room, one of the most secure in the entire nation, and she processed the events of the past six weeks.
That’s when it caught her eye. A lone honey bee just landing on top of the large wall-mounted display panel at one end of the room. Had it accidentally come into the White House in the many bouquets of flowers the First Lady loved to have around the place? Margaret looked around, and didn’t see any down there. That made sense, no way the Secret Service or military would let that happen. She pictured a comically large vintage microphone poorly disguised as a lily and smiled to her self.
Using the laptop in front of her, she pull up the latest imagery of North Korea and Israel. She scrolled through the pictures, taken within the past two hours, and couldn’t see any of the activity she’d hoped would tell her that they were also standing down. She rubbed her eyes. She was tired. The President had called her in almost eighteen hours ago to tell her about this whole thing. She was getting a headache, and it was going to be a doozy. It was already so bad that there was a mild ringing in her left ear. Well, not a ringing, but she was too tired to put another word to it. “Okay, Jeff, you’re right, if this is happening, we’ll need to make some public priority statements soon. This isn’t going to stay quiet for much longer now that orders have been issued by all of the Americas and the EU. I just wish we had some concrete intel on what they’re doing, “ she pointed at the big screen which mirrored the satellite images she’d been looking at at her station.
As she finished her sentence, the bee flew away from the screen and she lost it in the details of the room. Her eyes shifted back to the screen, which turned blue with a text notification about incoming updated imagery. By the time she finished reading it, it was gone and replaced with the new imagery. She noticed the change straight away. “Jeff, look at that.”
The President looked up from his speech draft and smiled, “you see, Margaret? I told you it just took them a bit longer.” The images clearly showed the Israeli’s had stopped demolishing homes in the past two hours, but that all the equipment had been pulled back, and every single locked down check point with Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt had been opened to allow unfettered traffic through. It looked like they might have even started breaking down the walls and other barriers with the Palestinians, too. On the North Korean portion, it was clear from the electro-magnetic data overlay that they’d deactivated the facilities the US had long suspected of housing their Uranium refineries. She looked back at her station screen to examine it more closely and saw the bee sitting on her monitor.
“How did you get in here?”
Jeff looked over, a bit of worry on his face, “leave the bee alone, Margaret, we’ve got work to do.”
“I’m going to trap it and put it outside, this is no place for a bee, there aren’t any flowers down here, little one.” Without warning, her headache painfully increased in intensity. She scrunched her eyes shut and pressed her temples. This was bad. It was one of the worst headaches she’d ever experienced in her life!
“Leave her alone, “ Jeff called out, “she can’t understand you yet and raising your voice is hurting her. Even those of us that can understand you experience some pain still.” The pain in Margaret’s head was gone immediately, including that noise in her ear.
“Who are you talking to and how did you know I had a headac-“
“It’s the bees, Margaret. The bees are the ones calling the shots now, well, they’ve got help from a whole host of others, including the ants, but it’s mainly the bees. Without putting too fine a point on it, they’re tired of our shit.”
“Tired of our shit? What does that mean?”
“We keep destroying natural habitats, and are closer than ever before to crossing a line from which the entire ecosystem of Earth cannot return. As explained to me by Sniffs Yellow Flowers here, they took a vote to interfere in a way that let humans live.”
“They took a vote to let us live? I can’t even begin to comprehend this bullshit, Jeff. It’s not funn-“
“Margaret, just listen. Please. The vote was close, but in the end, the bees decided we were probably worth the trouble of saving. The thing is, this whole thing is orchestrated through their networks, but because we built all this destructive power, we’ve got to be the ones to tear it down and build something for a much better world. We’ve been put on notice, as it were. ‘Continue down this destructive path at your own peril’ was the exact phrase, I believe.”
“So, what do we do now, live in subjugation to our benevolent bee overlords?”
“They’re going to accomplish world peace in less than twelve weeks. Is it such a bad thing to take some life advice from a bee?”
