Lisa called it Project Phoenix—because she wasn't trying to win. She was trying to rise.
The day after breaking into Bart's room, she didn't eat. Didn't speak. Just walked the halls like a surgeon scouting the organs of a sick building. Watching who flinched around Bart. Who echoed his new brilliance. Who could still feel the wrongness.
By lunch, she had a list of three names.
One of them was already waiting.
---
Milhouse met her in the nurse's office during fifth period. Not because he was sick—but because he didn't trust the cafeteria anymore.
"Are you okay?" he whispered, eyes darting.
"No," Lisa said. "We don't need to be okay. We need to be accurate."
She opened her notebook and showed him one page—just one:
> PROJECT: INVERSION — Secondary Interface Activation pending. Subject exhibits elastic opposition.
Milhouse stared. "Elastic what?"
"It means he thinks I'll break, but I won't stay broken."
Milhouse swallowed. "Can I be honest?"
"Please do."
"I think Bart's not just... smarter. I think he's older."
Lisa leaned in. "You heard him say something, didn't you?"
Milhouse nodded. "In the cloakroom. He was talking to no one. But his voice—it didn't sound like Bart's. It sounded like someone giving orders to a general."
Lisa froze.
"What did he say?"
Milhouse frowned, trying to recall.
> "He said: 'Local control stabilized. Adversarial sibling still functional. Begin Phase Two in three days.'"
Lisa wrote it down instantly. "You remember the time?"
"2:17 p.m."
"Then we have two days."
---
Martin was harder.
She cornered him after chess club and dropped three sheets of Bart's decoded diagrams onto his desk.
"You like puzzles," she said. "Solve this."
Martin blinked. "These are forged."
"Try again."
He studied the notes for fifteen seconds.
Then looked up, pale.
"This is... terrifyingly elegant."
Lisa smiled tightly. "That's how he works."
Martin shifted uncomfortably. "And you're saying this is Bart Simpson? The boy who once mistook my TI-83 for a granola bar?"
Lisa slid him the final page:
> "Martin Prince: high-utility intellect. Rigid ego structure. Exploitable via performance anxiety. Threat level minimal unless rallied."
Martin swallowed.
"I'm in."
---
They met in the treehouse.
Lisa, Milhouse, Martin.
A triangle of tension and caffeine.
Milhouse had brought walkie-talkies.
Martin brought his old laptop rigged with packet-sniffing software and an AI text predictor.
Lisa brought paranoia.
She pinned the decoded sheets to the wooden walls. Bart's timeline. His psychological matrices. His "prank templates" for discrediting witnesses.
They studied the system like they were cramming for the end of the world.
---
Milhouse handled reconnaissance.
He logged who Bart interacted with, how long, and what tone he used. He color-coded behaviors: red for manipulation, blue for mimicry, green for authentic chaos.
"I only got three greens," Milhouse reported. "One was Ralph. One was a fly. One was the school bell."
Lisa circled "authentic chaos" in her notebook.
"That's what he fears."
---
Martin decoded.
He discovered Bart had embedded mathematical structures into comic book layouts—Fibonacci spirals in fight scenes, prime number sequences in speech bubbles.
"It's not just hidden," Martin muttered. "It's instructional. Like he's leaving behind a training manual disguised as media."
"For who?" Milhouse asked.
Lisa answered:
> "For whoever comes next."
---
They found the term "Soft Nodes" recurring throughout Bart's files.
Lisa guessed they were locations in Springfield that resisted logic: the Kwik-E-Mart freezer, the spinning swing behind the elementary school, the basement of the library that no one remembered building.
Bart had marked them all.
Lisa and Martin began visiting them at night, logging how time behaved there. They measured ambient sound decay, tested memory recall, left objects behind to see if they reappeared the next day.
They were stable.
Mostly.
In the library basement, Milhouse swore he saw a second Lisa—just for a second—smiling at him through the stacks.
---
By the end of the week, Lisa drew her conclusion:
> "He's not here to destroy this world. He's here to optimize it."
Martin sat up. "You mean... like a system patch?"
Lisa shook her head. "Worse. A behavioral firmware update. With no rollback option."
Milhouse whispered: "He's turning Springfield into a compliance test."
Lisa looked at the diagrams again. Saw how everything repeated. How Bart never improvised—he predicted. Manipulated timing, not just people.
"Which means," she said, "we can set a clock on his routines."
---
And so they did.
They logged Bart's days.
He spoke to Skinner at exactly 8:03 a.m. every third day.
He gave Maggie a "learning toy" every Monday.
He took ten seconds to respond to unstructured questions—but never more.
He blinked, Lisa noted, every 4.3 seconds while lying.
He never blinked while telling the truth.
Martin built a timeline.
Milhouse matched it against cafeteria menus, fire drills, and Itchy & Scratchy reruns.
Lisa checked for gaps.
They found none.
Which scared her more.
---
"Every system has to sleep," Lisa said. "Even his."
So they created the lure.
Martin forged a notebook—similar handwriting, similar diagrams—but wrong. It included wild theories, fake weaknesses, and made-up "Stage Three" protocols designed to trigger Bart's curiosity.
Milhouse planted it under a loose floorboard in the band room. Right where Bart would find it during his next routine "maintenance sweep."
Then they waited.
Bart found it in less than two hours.
He didn't say anything.
But he smiled at Lisa that afternoon—too long. Too warmly.
That's how she knew he'd read it.
---
The trap was set.
Lisa whispered to Martin:
> "We have him."
Martin whispered back:
> "Not yet."
---
[End of Chapter 5: Project Phoenix]