The air was warm. Hot, even; tropical. I'd never been to the tropics myself, but this was hot and humid. Echoing music filled the air. Old-timey, busy. It sounded like a city.

There was an ocean, strangely pale and shallow, stretching to the horizon. Pretty much everything else was jungle. There were occasional buildings, just like the one I was on.

Streets went straight through the green. Traffic lights were functional, despite being overgrown by rain forest. Odd trees filled the area between the streets: leafy tops, but spherical trunks held over the ground by a multilegged root system. As I watched, one of them opened and a mom and daughter stepped out, slid the door closed. They strolled along a woody sidewalk with a twisty railing separating them from the street.

Cars, I think? Things on the road. Some had wheels, some were single big wheels, or many tiny ones. They were big vehicles and looked like cargo might have been involved.

Other things on the roads: big dinosaur-looking creatures that bore round shells like an armadillo, but with little buildings on the top.

Wiry bundles of limbs and joints, running and leaping along.

An interestingly bizarre being: three tentacular limbs in a radial pattern, and it rolled like a wheel, grabbing streetlamps to swing and hurl itself down the street like Spider-Man.

The place was full of strange alien beings. It was still mostly Humans here, but a lot of them looked a little different than expected. Skin color of all hues, including blue and purple and stripes of both.

Occasionally something briefly spectacular would happen: a little bolt of lightning, or calligraphy appearing in midair to float away into nothing. Art spontaneously forming midair.

Flying things I couldn't quite identify: pterodactyls or planes that looked like them.

A black and white missile zapped through the trees; it wasn't a missile, I saw. It was a flying orca, surrounded by glowing symbols. It flexed and twisted around one of the taller trees, headed out over that shallow ocean.

Okay. So things weren't what I was used to. But they sure were more interesting and weird than the neighborhood I'd grown up in.

Where was the music coming from? It boomed out:

"Hear the beat of dancin' feet

On the avenue I'm takin' you to

Forty-Second street."

A shadow fell across the lush jungle. A low hum. Something big was coming.

A massive airship blocked out the sun. It wasn't like the blimps I'd seen on television or the dirigibles that had filled the skies during the first world war. It was a flying island with an observatory the top. There wasn't a telescope poking from the black stone of that dome; it was just a dome. And it was looking at things. I could feel its regard pressing into my head.

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The flying island, small city, whatever, was covered with plants, a jungle on its own. Waterfalls spilled over its edges; roots and vines hung from beneath it. Multicolored balloons drifted around it. Or were they drones? They weren't fastened to the flying island any way I could see, and were equipped with little propellers.

A voice, speaking instead of singing, came from the thing: "YOU WERE WARNED, MR. PRESIDENT."

The music changed. A classical song, one I'd heard before. The Ride of the Valkyries.

That hum intensified over the music. It wasn't just a hum, it was the end of everything. The volume rose and rose. Black smoke was coming from the flying island, but it wasn't smoke. It was something…

Bees.

Coming in huge masses from the flying island, impossibly dense clouds of them. The bees glittered and shone with some kind of metal. They were headed right for me, here on this roof.

"Well that's hardly ever good," I muttered.

I turned to face the vent I'd crawled from. If I could get in there, put the grate back on–

Too late. I was surrounded by a cloud of the things. I curled up, trying to make myself small against the wall holding the vent. I'd never been stung; was I allergic? As if there was a way to survive this at all.

But the bees had no interest in killing me. They also didn't go for anyone on the street. They flooded directly into the vent I'd left open, a black-and-yellow flood of droning fury. On and on, into the building they went.

I'll helpfully inform you here that the damage I'd done to the HVAC system in there was allowing the swarm access to the entire building. My cell, the guards, the cafeteria. You mess with the VAV box and that's game.

I heard shouts of alarm and panic, somehow over the endless earthshaking drone. That sounded about right.

I fled and searched frantically for a way down from the roof, looking over the edge of the wall. The building wasn't tall; just an office box with shiny black windows. Standard issue, just like I was used to. But there were trees. Climb down? No. A fire escape. Stairs.

Down, and I didn't trip over my feet and get killed, and I want people to acknowledge that please. I was able to get out of there, off the building, and ran through the parking lot with its boxy vehicles.

I was being followed. With my back against a tree, I faced my pursuer.

A bee the size of my fist. It carried a little metal box, and was wearing, I swear to you, dear reader: a little set of plate armor.

It zipped up to me, froze in midair. Its eyes were level with mine. It raised its box. A flash of light, white and intense, left me blinking.

And it flew away, back up to the roof.

That voice from the floating island: "BE COOL EVERYONE, IT'S HANDLED. THANKS FOR FILLING US IN."

A familiar voice; where had I heard him before?

The mother and her daughter I'd seen earlier were watching. The little girl was clapping and jumping up and down with excitement. The other people-or-monsters either watched or went about their business. Nobody was alarmed, or if they were they must have been inside the building.

I remembered I was in the middle of a jailbreak. I briefly considered staying to help the poor prison guards, but they'd probably just toss me back in the pokey, assuming the bees hadn't gotten them.

That voice. Familiar; was it a celebrity? Why did it sound like someone I knew?

Who was in the flying island? Who had just aided my escape with his army of bees? Air force of bees, maybe. Semantics.

I needed to find out. Once I skipped town, of course.

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