Lisa knew the trap would only work once.
Bart didn't make the same mistake twice. He adjusted. He learned. He anticipated patterns before they were patterns. The only way to catch him was to write the next move before he did.
So she did what he would do.
She set a stage.
The bait was a fake journal.
Handwritten in Lisa's old planner. Scrawled notes. Faked confessions. Red herrings. Calculated weaknesses. One page read:
"Milhouse is cracking. I think I can weaponize his fear."
Another:
"If Bart tries to read this, I'll know. I wrote it in graphite laced with baking soda. Oils from his fingers will darken the margins."
(The chemical trick was real. Martin suggested it.)
They placed it in the girls' bathroom, stall three, taped under the tank—just outside Bart's usual vector, but inside his scanning range. Too well-hidden to be random. Just visible enough to be temptation.
Then they waited.
Milhouse was the delivery system.
He was jittery enough to sell panic. "Lisa and Martin are planning something, Bart. I don't know what, but there's notebooks. Charts. She even drew a mind map. With highlighters."
Bart smiled. "Mind maps are inefficient. Too spatially biased."
Milhouse laughed nervously. "Totally. Right?"
Bart nodded. "Thank you for your honesty, Milhouse."
That night, Milhouse found a single piece of candy on his pillow. A blue gumball. No note.
He didn't eat it.
The next day, Bart found the journal.
He didn't take it home. He read it in place, crouched in the empty bathroom, turning each page slowly.
He knew it was bait.
But he read every word.
Because information—even false information—was texture.
And he couldn't resist texture.
The real trap was in Milhouse's Game Boy.
Martin had gutted the inside, replacing it with a pressure-sensitive recorder. The moment someone touched the D-pad and A-button in sequence—Bart's signature idle habit—the system activated.
Audio captured.
Encrypted instantly.
Stored in an auxiliary drive disguised as a Tamagotchi.
Bart took the bait with grace.
He critiqued the fake entries aloud:
"Lisa wouldn't use passive voice here. And Milhouse isn't afraid—he's dependent. That's an entirely different strategic flaw."
Then he began talking to himself like no child should:
"They think they're pulling me toward exposure. But they're confirming my control model. The more desperate the rebellion, the more concrete the structure becomes."
He laughed, low and precise.
"This is the beauty of low-trust environments. They teach the opposition to sabotage itself."
"Fools make better case studies than pawns."
Lisa, listening later, whispered: "We have him."
Martin, beside her, whispered back: "Not yet."
They needed an audience.
Lisa chose the school talent show.
It was scheduled, public, and sacred—protected by Springfield's own narrative inertia. Every year, it followed the same script: Ralph does stand-up, Nelson plays the drums poorly, and Bart performs something flashy and unexpected.
He'd chosen piano this time.
Liszt.
Of course.
The night arrived.
The gym was packed with parents, students, and cameras.
The lights dimmed.
Lisa's heart raced. Milhouse clutched his armrest like it was keeping him from drowning. Martin sat two rows back, hunched over a remote-linked laptop.
Lisa waited in the wings.
Bart sat at the piano, face calm, posture perfect. His fingers hovered over the keys like a war machine awaiting activation.
Then he began.
It was transcendent.
Children weren't supposed to play like that. Notes spilled from him like liquid geometry. The crowd fell into stunned silence. Even Lisa faltered—because for a moment, it wasn't a tactic. It was art.
But she knew better.
It wasn't a performance.
It was a demonstration.
Her cue came thirty seconds before his final flourish.
She walked onstage.
No warning. No intro.
The lights shifted to her.
She turned to the audience and spoke, calmly:
"What you're hearing is not talent. It's a simulation."
Murmurs. Confusion.
Bart didn't stop playing.
She gestured to the screen behind them.
Martin activated the feed.
The projector came to life—blasting onto the gym's back wall: Bart's notes, his diagrams, his decoded language. A split-screen of overlapping files. Prank blueprints. Behavioral studies. Psychological autopsies.
Then: the audio.
"Fools make better case studies than pawns."
"They're confirming my control model."
"This is the beauty of low-trust environments."
Lisa's voice overlaid it live:
"This is not just about intelligence. It's about manipulation. It's about a person who is not a child, wearing a child's face, testing how far he can twist a narrative before it breaks."
Gasps. Silence.
Principal Skinner stood up.
Marge covered her mouth.
Homer blinked hard and muttered:
"That ain't the boy I raised."
Bart stopped playing.
He didn't look surprised.
He stood. Smoothed his shirt. Faced the crowd.
Then turned to Lisa.
"You exposed me," he said, quiet and even. "Good."
Lisa didn't move.
"Now," he continued, "they'll start to evolve."
Two security guards—hired by Superintendent Chalmers for "budget optics"—stepped forward.
Bart held out his wrists before they even reached him.
"I'm not resisting," he said. "Resistance is the slowest form of change."
As they led him away, Lisa locked eyes with him one last time.
He smiled.
"Stage One complete."
The room didn't erupt. It folded.
Like a cartoon between frames.
People whispered, but the confusion didn't last.
Marge was ushered out by Mrs. Krabappel. Homer wandered off, talking about baseball. Skinner muttered something about budgetary reviews.
Only Lisa stayed behind, staring at the piano.
Milhouse came up beside her.
"We won," he said.
She didn't answer.
Because she knew better.
This wasn't victory.
This was a signal.
[End of Chapter 6: The Queen's Gambit]