Security Chief Chambers was not herself. Technically, she was , but according to the Identify-Friend-Or-Foe signal from her employee ID badge, she was not Christie Chambers and could not be trusted.

It had started with the earnest, innocent mistake of leaving her badge on her nightstand. She was the chief of the Grainer Park laboratories - top-secret labs, unethical and fearsome, and run by the always-dangerous Dr. Angela Wolf. They were a black stain on Grainer National Park, tainting the wildlife and plants and trees with a dark patina from Dr. Wolf’s experiments.

Chief among them was the MPP - the mutant pathogen project - which had resulted in wondrous, symbiotic living latex-like beings. The most successful were the bees - the apis extremis - the network of hives that grew and dwelt deep within the forests of the park.

The bees were Dr. Wolf’s children, metaphorically, and they each had a protective nature. The result was that forgetting her badge had her labeled as a foreigner, a visitor - a tourist. And tourists, as far as the bees understood, were just visitors who hadn’t yet proven their use to the hive.

As Christie was taken through corridors and hallways - a mixture of prefab buildings built for the bees, and their own construction - she realized just how deep the facility went. She couldn’t bother calling for help - though she had at the start, when the bees first grabbed her. If she went missing down here, they’d probably never find her. She’d simply disappear. Chambers had already seen other women and men, turned into the Hive’s newest recruits - or encased in the walls, providing the raw materials to manufacture honey and nectar, milked and trapped and squirming in sybaritic factory-bliss.

The bee wasn’t interested in conversation. Christie was starting to think this was something of a “human resource” issue - and she was the resource…

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