A Mastodon writing prompt story. These are science fiction short stories (usually 480 characters or less), based on an image generated by EW Doc Parris using MidJourney.

The stories are originally posted on Mastodon via my personal account.

Originally published June 8, 2023.

They thought the idea of an ‘artificial bee’, the NewBees, might help deal with bee die-off. And for a time, it worked. We didn’t get honey, honeycomb, or bee’s wax, but pollination continued, easily the primary goal.

But then, people noticed the NewBees were getting bigger. And more sophisticated. Apparently, the designers hadn’t noticed they included some of the replication code from another project. The NewBees decided to ‘upgrade’, and grow the population. Uh oh.