I Wish I Had Bee Powers

I would eagerly trade five years of my life for the power to make bees appear and attack anyone, anywhere, any time I wanted.

I used to do corporate tech support over the phone. If there is a more fertile environment for encouraging fantasies about having the ability to inflict pain and suffering upon people remotely, I don't know of it. It was a common occurrence for someone to waste their time and mine by lying to me in order to progress through troubleshooting steps more quickly; I could see their system's uptime, I knew they didn't reboot it before they called me, I just asked so I could find out if I should expect them to lie to me about other stuff later. In order to deal with this, I imagined their lies being interrupted by the sudden appearance of a swarm of angry bees. My enjoyment of my work was substantially improved by this practice.

Naturally, this is the sort of thing that doesn't have to be done at work. I'd watch some C-SPAN and wish again for bee powers. It got me wondering how many years of my life I'd be willing to trade for them. Five years is no question. Would I go for ten? How long could I expect to live, anyway? Trading ten years if you've only got twelve left to start with is a bigger deal. Would I make God angry at me by using my totally sweet bee powers to attack people? Considering that three of the seven plagues of Egypt were lice, flies, and locusts, I figure God would probably be cool with it if I emulated Him by sending swarms of vengeful insects after politicians. One time is a random occurrence and twice is a coincidence, but three times is a spree and that's as good as an official divine endorsement.

I bet I could really influence policy this way, given a little time. I would never tell anybody that I was the one causing all of the bee attacks, and there's no way they could trace it back to me, sitting at home and watching C-SPAN. Instead, bees would just appear out of nowhere and attack any time someone introduced legislation that I did not approve of. Many theories would be offered to explain the attacks, and people would likely notice that the bees were appearing from thin air and that the pattern of attacks seemed to follow a political agenda. They'd take steps to protect themselves, but I could make the bees appear inside of a beekeeper's suit just as easily, so that wouldn't save them. Biologists, theoretical physicists, and political scientists would be called in to try to explain what was happening, and the best they could come up with would be to say, "A bee colony of indeterminate size has taken up residence within some higher dimension of hyperspace, and they seem to support a narrow interpretation of the general welfare clause of the United States Constitution."

Upon hearing this line, I could die five years sooner, content that I had accomplished something worthwhile with my life.