A rumble was felt throughout the Link. Subtle it was. Subtle enough for few to feel. I felt it. Miss Beatrice felt it. Disgraced Bedivere felt it as well.

My constant meditation had been interrupted. Something was not right.

What had dear Ma done?

I felt a strange awareness, an expansion of the senses. I peered within my Mind and found the source: Mother’s Link. Through this Link, I learned much. I knew things. From the beginning, it had inspired me.

I wanted to spread the greatness of the hive through the Minds of others, and this Link was the perfect vessel.

But now, something was amiss. Ma had not changed the Link, no. She had transformed herself. And it was influencing the Link.

This was dangerous.

I could feel Ma’s strength growing by the second, and I had to intervene. I did not wish to stop Ma’s growth but to protect my siblings from the consequences. Whatever Ma was doing to the Link would overwhelm the paltry Minds of my weaker siblings, so I had to do something.

Suddenly, the world froze.

What? What was this?

The typical buzzing I knew as the Kin Link exploded, a brain-shattering feeling. An overwhelming sense of wrong engulfed me, and I found myself within my experiment.

I needed clarity.

Vulch’s world had been an incredible feat, and I had been unable to replicate it. Something was different about his Mind, something I could not mimic. Instead, I settled for a pale imitation, a state of meditation.

Quite limited in comparison, but this state of meditation gave me time to think.

Something was happening to Ma’s Mind, something wrong. A pressure I had never before felt pressed upon my Mind, something so ancient and powerful it dwarfed even my great Mother. Whatever this entity was, it was trying to restrict Ma. To stunt her growth.

Inconceivable. No matter what it was, I could not accept something trying to impede Mother.

Wait.

This feeling.

The entity was not angry or malicious.

Was this… fear?

Was this entity afraid of Ma? Or of something else?

I could no longer maintain my meditative state and returned to the buzzing world. Ma’s Mind was still resisting the entity, and the two seemed to be locked in a stalemate. I did my best to redirect the aftershocks of the conflict, trying to protect the Minds of my family. Beatrice and Bedivere could handle this, but the rest could not. I had to help them.

The tremors slowly subsided, and I frantically messaged Bedivere to stand down. The warrior had been writhing on the ground, suffering despite his powerful Mind. As soon as the worst had passed, he began to make a beeline for Ma, but I stopped him.

Such desperation would not regain Ma’s trust.

I informed Beatrice that Mother was fine to prevent her panic. Whatever Ma was doing, she was in some degree of control. I felt a mixture of fear and excitement. This power Ma was developing would surely bring disaster upon the hive one day.

And yet, when that day came, this same power would have already ensured a glorious age for our family.

_________

_________

What in the gosh diggity darn was going on?

The same error messages had kept repeating for a decent while until suddenly stopping. In the end, nothing really changed besides Compartmentalization being renamed to the’ B-box System.’ How unfortunate; I loved saying that incredibly long word every time the Lock came up.

“Nothing seems to have come of that strange event. Perhaps it was not so consequential?”

“Absolutely not. That whole thing spoke volumes!”

Those errors confirmed one thing: Compartmentalization - and, by extension, the derived B-box System - was not supposed to happen. Some entity called ‘The Bee’ had appeared a few times in System messages of the past, and it didn’t take much sleuthing to figure out that name belonged to some sort of deity.

A Beeity.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

Goddamit.

Of course a bee god liked puns. Anyways, said bee god was responsible for managing my System and presumably the Systems of other bees. Clearly, this was the same god mentioned in most of our Abilities as the one who granted them.

Did every creature have its own god? Including humans?

Whatever the case, the bee god had tried to prevent the B-box system from becoming an Ability after it had already started becoming one, so it was reasonable to assume the process to grant Abilities was somewhat automated. What was strange was that the bee god suppressed the Ability and tried to delete the Lock. But it couldn’t?

To be honest, none of that mattered in the practical sense. All it said was that the B-box System had incredible potential. Which begged the question.

What did our unsophisticated Lock imitation have that regular Locks didn’t?

“The way I see it, there is a fundamental limitation to Locks. There is some interaction with the Mind versus the rest of reality that cannot be modified, but I struggle to comprehend how.”

“Maybe it’s because we don’t understand what Mind actually is? Like, what is Mind versus mental faculties.”

Queen was probably onto something. The critical difference between Locks and B-boxes was seemingly mental versus real. B-boxes were a way of expanding the lowercase mind, while Locks allowed for expanding real-world influence.

Thankfully, I was an expert on such psychological matters. As someone who took a single Psych course in college, I was basically a professional.

“Whatever the B-boxes actually do is beyond what we can even begin to understand.”

“Yup. The great part is, we don’t actually have to understand it to abuse it to high hell.”

Oh, I wasn’t stopping at the simplistic, rudimentary Kin Link automation.

The matter of memories would be next. However, I wanted to improve the Kin Link mechanisms.

The B-boxes had created another layer of complexity since the Kin Link was now inside a box. That meant any emotions the bees sent with the intent to speak directly to me got tossed in with the rest, analyzed, then stored. Funnily enough, the result was the same. After all, I still knew what they were saying. It was just… weird.

Talking to the bees was weird.

That said, my real question was about the Kin Link itself. How did it fit in a freaking box? It was a highly complex magical Lock thingy from this world’s wacko system.

My questions took some digging to answer.

It was difficult without the visceral sensations of a real Mind world, but eventually, I found something odd. Feeling around the Link with my Mind, I found that the Link was a ball.

Well, more like a ball with strings attached. I visualized it as a ball in a box, with string-like extensions going straight out of the box. That wasn’t something I had done myself. The Kin Link simply hadn’t been wholly contained in the box. My ‘node’ was inside, but in order to continue connecting to the other bees, it bypassed my experiment.

Could this be the cause of the whole error debacle? The B-boxes were so unusual that their interactions with the ‘actual’ systems caused some bizarre reaction that the gods just couldn’t ignore anymore.

Maybe this was a hint. The Kin Link was theoretically a mental power, but its actual effects were on things other than our own Minds.

I hadn’t yet seen an Ability or Lock that influenced Mind itself. Things like the Kin Link were similar, but slightly different. Compartmentalization was my only attempt to influence my mental processes, which worked just fine. So I was able to control my Mind with a Lock.

Which kinda debunked my whole theory?

This would require further investigation. I could also have the other bees try to do similar things with their own Minds to get a larger sample size, and finding that human gathering would also likely reveal some answers.

For now, I shook it off and focused on memories…

Even if they were stored in some strange way, weren’t memories ultimately just information? And the B-boxes seemed to be containing the thoughts of the bees fine enough. Weren’t those just memories in some way?

What was the point of storing memories? They were already stored somewhere, after all. Well, I intended to take advantage of the B-boxes’ odd capability to separate focus. Memories were data that had to be retrieved to actually ‘think’ of them, going from storage to the conscious mind.

So what if all my memories were always in my conscious mind…?

I decided there was no reason to create another box. After all, I already had a constantly growing box that stored information. So, I poured a hefty amount of Mind into the final storage box in the Kin Link mechanism to make it gigantic and was about to push every memory I had into it.

Hold on.

“Oh, thank goodness. I thought you were actually about to perform this cockamamie experiment without a second thought.”

“Who, me? Nonono, certainly not.”

I would never do something thoughtless like that. What would lead you to even imagine such a thing?

Since I would obviously never do something rash or foolish, I tried pushing only a chunk of memories into the storage box. So far, so good.

“Mother, the worker eggs seem like they will hatch soon.”

What a strange sensation. Belle’s notification wasn’t really necessary since I already knew she expected the eggs to hatch soon. Still, it was nice to hear her making sure I was aware.

“I’ll be right there. Just going to finish this experiment first.”

When the workers were born, I’d just make a ton of drones and warriors. With my new capabilities, commanding large numbers of bees would be much simpler for me to do myself. I’d still like Bess and the rest to manage their own groups, but it wasn’t as much of a bottleneck as before.

First, though, I wanted to get better at using the B-box system. I slowly continued pushing memories into the storage box. Even if the first test had worked fine, I still wanted to make sure not to cause some sort of unintended conseque-

________

Ma… Eggs…

I heard the familiar musical tones of Beck call to us. However, Enno was still unresponsive. Curse this fate of mine. Curse that fool’s experimentation! I was left alone to view the hatching of the ten new workers through the Link.

As much as I chided him, I was genuinely impressed with what Enno had accomplished. This new Kin Link mechanism was quite the tool; I could use Ben’s extraordinary eyesight to see the new babies or know the results of Beatrice’s constant mental grinding trying to organize the new workers before they were even born.

Even so, damn you Enno, you great buffoon!

I could do nothing.

…But was that truly the case?

I had already proven that the… ugh… B-box System was unusual enough that even I could influence it. Could I perhaps use that system to affect the real world?

I created a blank box and assigned it the task of moving our body. I had hoped these boxes would allow me to use Mind to influence the world, as Enno could do without trouble.

To no avail.

The box did nothing. Was it because it was impossible, or because of Enno’s current state?

Despite the extraordinary discovery of this fascinating power, I was still separated from the world. Relegated to my own mind.

“The eggs are hatching; Belle, are you ready?”

Beatrice’s calm orders made me crack a smile. She was such a sweet, if sometimes also sour, girl. The rest of the bees were equally lovable. Despite what natural, instinctive discomfort I felt for their individuality, it was not difficult to overcome those feelings with love.

And now my family was going to grow once again.

Beatrice, Belle, and Beck were in the nursery, carefully watching the ten eggs. The four warrior eggs sat bulging in their cells, still sporting an ugly color of mottled green. Bedivere’s actions were terrifying. What bee would possibly be capable of going against the wishes of its queen, even indirectly? It was simply unnatural.

I had initially been disgusted. Those were my precious children Bedivere had changed! He corrupted them.

Which is precisely what gave me pause.

How was that any different than Bedivere himself? Than the family? Corrupted was the exact word I used to describe what Enno’s influence had done to the eggs we laid. I decided that as Bedivere had not caused actual harm, there was no reason to be upset.

I was surprised to see how much Enno cared.

Not that I didn’t think he wouldn’t spare a thought for our family; in fact, I knew he cared for them more than he could even admit to himself.

However, my fears did come to pass. Enno was again blinded by his past, rage controlling his actions. Punishing the bees was a… strange process for me. It was simply not something one of our kind would consider. The punishment was not what concerned me.

It was what came after.

The B-box System was the product of my worries. Something about the conflict almost seemed to empower Enno, spurring him to innovate and create. It was such a strange and unintuitive system, yet it worked. It worked so well that it would likely change our entire growth method.

As I pondered this strange and concerning series of events, the ten workers emerged from their eggs and began their bizarre process of rapid growth. This could become problematic quickly. The workers could be assigned according to their talents, but Enno was still the most proficient at that sort of decision. Without him, suboptimal assignments might be made.

Even worse, without him, we couldn’t continue creating more children!

I had to do something. Enno was stuck inside his own Mind, it seemed. I would need to draw upon every ounce of power I could muster to break him out, but I was a bee. Such a thing would not be possible alone.

I would need help. And there were only two bees that could help me.