“Why?” Ringostarr asked. “Who would benefit from us breathing fire and pooping up the place?”
“That’s a good question,” Bubbles said, pecking the scan to zoom in. “This nanotech is designed to be injected in the crop at the cellular level. Once it’s in core cells, it reprograms them to replicate with the specific coding the machinery set it to. It looks like these machines were set to make the peppers super spicy.”
“I still don’t see where this would benefit anybody,” Andrea said. “Do you think it was a test to see if the nanotech works?”
“Most likely,” Chloe said. “It didn’t spread past the pepper field, so the rest of the crops are ok.”
“I set the yarn bird perimeter to scan for these bots,” Bubbles said, “so whoever did this won’t get it past us again.”
“Bubbles, how do you know all of this?” Jinx asked. “You’re three, and your last owner was a middle school teacher. There’s no way you learned this from school.”
“She didn’t,” Zack said. “She learned it from mommy, and from watching scifi on TV and the Internet.”
“You learned a lot in your young age,” ConureChick said. “And it looks like you’re right. That nanotech is rewriting the DNA for the crops. It’s a good thing they got it in our plants, and not in an anipal. Or worse, a human.”
“It’s not advanced enough for humans, but anipals aren’t out of the question,” Bubbles said. “I found traces of avian DNA in the machinery code, specifically budgie.”
“Budgie!” Ringostarr exclaimed. “What does that mean?”
“It means somebody or something is experimenting with integrating machines with biology,” ConureChick said. “We know humans didn’t do this. There’s no way they’re advanced enough. Heck, they haven’t been to the moon since the early 70’s. All they care about is poking at their phones.”
“Are we talking about aliens then?” Jinx asked. “Again?”
“Uglek said a strange pod went past them while studying Uranus,” Sunny said. “They said they didn’t read any life signs on it, so they ignored it.”
“A pod went speeding by them and they let it go?” Zack said. “What are they doing out there?”
“Exploring gas giants,” Sunny said, “and since there were no life signs, they didn’t worry about it.”
“Thanks a lot for that, Uglek,” Jinx said. “Did they learn anything about it?”
“Only that it was running on a lot of power from a source other than the sun,” Bubbles said. “The energy signatures on the nanotech match residual energy from Uglek’s ship when he visited a few years ago. It also matches that probe that passed them while they studied planets full of farts.”
“What about the puppets?” Marianna asked.
“Andrea and I studied them,” Emperor Felix said. “The puppets are just that – puppets. Except it looks like they’ve been exposed to interstellar radiation and had some machinery installed to make them live. It looks like they dismantled some weather drones to cobble together what they needed to remotely control the puppets.”
“So that’s what happened to some of the drones!” Morty said. “Several crashed a week ago, and when I went looking for them, they were gone. Only a few spare parts were left.”
“The energy signatures in the puppets were the same as the strange energy from the nanotech and the strange ship,” Andrea said, “but I couldn’t trace the source it was being controlled from. Whoever controlled those puppets was routing the signal through Earth’s satellites.”
“So whoever heated up our crops dismantled weather drones to create a puppet army,” Zack said. “That’s super creepy. What would they want with anipal land?”
“Us,” Bubbles said.
“What?” Morty asked.
Bubbles tapped the screen, zooming in on the nanotech. “I think that plants were the first part of the experiment. I think we’re the next stage. They want to test this on anipals.”
“Who does?” Sunny asked. “And why?”
“Because humans are too big and dumb to try it on,” Jinx said, “yet.”
“There’s some truth in that, Jinx,” Bubbles said. “Human DNA is complex. DNA in plants and animals are simpler. And look at the effect that heating those peppers had on me and Queenie when we ate them. It changed us. Temporarily, but still, it worked to a degree.” Bubbles looked dreamy. “ I was a dragon for a while.”
“Thanks goodness that ended,” Morty said.
Quarkybirdy tapped at the computer. “I’ve done some digging. Those puppets were taken from random attics where humans had them stored. A few people reported them missing about a week ago, which is around the time that Uglek reported seeing that probe pass while they passed gas.”
Chloe stared at the screen. “That’s when Morty’s weather drones went missing and were found dismantled, too.”
“Logs from the machinery in the puppet here show that it was loaded with the nanotech yesterday and delivered it last night,” Andrea said. “It shows no other movement, so the puppets must have been deactivated in the woods outside our perimeter until we discovered that the peppers had been meddled with.”
“It looks like the yarnbird permiter was hacked as well,” Quarkybirdy said. “It was on a feedback look for fifteen minutes around three o’clock this morning, while we were all roosting. The glitch on the loop was so slight that I nearly missed it.”
“I see how the signal is being rerouted through our satellites,” Emperor Felix said. “It’s the weather monitoring satellites! Those missing drones created a gap in the system that’s being piggybacked by this strange energy.” Emperor Felix tapped furiously at the computer.
“I see it!” Quarkybirdy pecked at her computer too, trying to break the code looping the signal through the satellites. The anipals sat for a tense minute before both triumphantly pecked “Enter.”
“Got it!” Emperor Felix said. “Now we’ll see where you’re hiding,” he said as the signal broke free from the loop and ran in a straight line behind the moon. He zoomed in to show the small silver pod. “What’s that?”
The lights flickered. When they came back on, the interior of a ship showed on the screen, filled with slots connecting up mechanical budgies to the ship.
WE ARE THE BUDGIE BOTS. YOUR PLANET IS OURS. PERPARE TO ASSIMILATE YOUR ANIPALS.
“Oh sh**!” Morty screamed.
“We all just did that!” Zack said.
The Toko MaidBot rolled in the room to mop up the poop stains as the anipals fretted over the ominous message.
“What are we doing to do?” Chloe asked. “I can’t Kung-fu artificial intelligence in outer space!”
“I don’t wanna be a bot!” Marianna said.
“Can you hack into their systems?” Zack asked.
Quarkybirdy shook her head. “No, they’re shielded. In fact, they’re in our systems!” She backed up as sparks flew from the screen. “Those alien budgie bots are in every computer system on the planet. What are we going to do?”
“We have to take the fight to them,” Bubbles said.
“How?” Andrea asked. “Anipals can’t go into space.”
“You can if you have a ship,” Bubbles said. “And I do.”
Everybody stared at Bubbles.
“You can’t be serious,” Morty said.
Bubbles motioned for everybody to follow her to the nearby storage bay. They gasped as she raised the door to reveal a gleaming spaceship.
“I built it myself from parts in daddy’s shop,” Bubbles said.
“You built a spaceship?” Morty asked. “That will fly? Into space?”
“That’s right!” Bubbles said cheerfully.
“Bubbles, you’re awesome,” Jinx said. “Can I come?”
“Yep, you, Zack, Chloe, and Morty are with me.” She stared at Toko MaidBot. “You come too, MaidBot. We have some cleaning up to do up there.”
“Oribital cleaning is not an approved cleaning method.”
“Neither are parrots flying a spaceship, but we’re doing it,” Bubble said. “Now roll on board.”
“What about the rest of us?” Ringostarr bird asked.
“You monitor us from here,” Bubbles said. “I can patch you in once I get the neural link set.”
“Neural link?” Morty shuddered. “Pray for us, folks. I have no idea how this is going to go.”
“In usual Anipal Land fashion,” ConureChick said. “Which is, completely crazy!”