The Nobody People

by Proehl, Bob

  “Lys, we can talk about this later.” Alyssa gives her a look that indicates that this will not be happening. Fahima sighs. “Get dressed quick,” she says. “I’ll explain as much as I can.”

  Alyssa hurries into the bedroom, and Fahima opens the door. The room is stark, walls hospital white, floors harsh tile. It looks like an apartment someone’s moved out of. Kimani stands behind Avi, who holds Emmeline cradled in his arms, a pietà in reverse.

  “She won’t wake up,” he says. “She’s breathing, but she won’t wake up.”

  Emmeline looks peaceful except for the way her head, arms, and legs dangle like those of an unstrung marionette. Fahima takes the back of the girl’s head in one hand and jabs at her neck with two fingers, looking for a pulse.

  “Let me,” says Alyssa, shouldering Fahima aside. She’s in her scrubs, her face set in the way she gets at work or doing the crossword. She has things under control, and the best thing to do is to stay out of her way. Fahima steps aside, taking a moment to marvel at this woman who may very well be out of her life by tomorrow.

  “Pulse rate and temp feel normal,” Alyssa says. She peels the girl’s eyelid back. “She’s in REM sleep.”

  “She’s resonating,” Fahima says to Kimani.

  “What does that mean?” Alyssa asks.

  “How is this her fucking ability?” Avi shouts. His eyes are full of tears, and Fahima thinks it’s possible they’ve broken him before he could finish his job. “Is she…doing something in her sleep? Is it safe? Why won’t she wake up?” Alyssa looks at Fahima, wondering the same thing.

  “Someone’s holding her in the Hive,” Fahima says, speaking to Kimani, using code words and jargon that leave Avi and Alyssa in the dark. “Someone’s got her trapped.”

  * * *

  —

  Kimani collects Patrick and Sarah, closing the door and then opening into each of their apartments in turn. Patrick is wearing his teaching clothes: a pair of pleated khaki pants and a pale blue polo shirt. Sarah is in a thick flannel nightgown, Cortex at her heel. The dog positions himself between Sarah and Patrick the way he always does when the three of them are together.

  Alyssa focuses on Emmeline and on keeping Avi calm. She’s a better person than I am, Fahima thinks. She’s having trouble keeping her mind from straying away from the girl and into the implications of Emmeline’s current condition. What it means about the Hive.

  The Hive bothers the shit out of Fahima. If she’d never been there herself, she’d say it couldn’t exist. She never properly found her way to the Hive on her own, although it was later explained to her that the dreams of the crowded room she had as a kid were early fumblings at its edges. She had to be guided to it once she was at Bishop. She doesn’t have the sense of wonder about it that other Resonants do. They call it things like the Shiny Place and the Shimmering Room, like it’s something from a fairy tale. For Fahima, it’s one more odd-shaped piece in the ongoing puzzle of what she is. What they all are.

  Avi grabs her wrist. “Tell me what’s going on.” He and Fahima both look at his hand clamped around her arm, and the anger goes out of him. He lets her go, leaving pale ghosts of his fingers behind. “Please, tell me anything.”

  “Someone attacked Emmeline through the Hive,” she says. “It shouldn’t be possible, but I think they’re holding her hostage.”

  “She’s not a hostage; she’s right here,” he shouts.

  “That’s just her body,” Fahima says. “I think Emmeline is somewhere else.”

  “Why would anyone—”

  “I don’t know,” Fahima says, cutting him off. It’s because we dragged you into this shit, she thinks.

  “Let me check her,” says Sarah.

  “Are you a doctor?” Alyssa asks, holding her ground in front of the girl.

  “No.” She puts her hand on Alyssa’s arm, and Alyssa steps aside. Sarah kneels and places her palm on the girl’s forehead. A beat passes, two. “She’s not in her head,” she says. “You’re right; her consciousness must be in the Hive.” Fahima turns away, concealing a smile. Impossible things are happening. You can always learn something new when impossible things start happening.

  “We’ll have to go in and get her,” says Kimani.

  “What do we do?” Avi asks.

  “We should all go in,” says Kimani.

  “We should call Bishop,” Fahima says. “You should have gone to him first.”

  “He doesn’t like it when I show up unannounced,” Kimani says.

  “Yeah, and I fucking love it,” Fahima says, glancing at Alyssa, who’s taken back her spot at Emmeline’s side.

  “We can call him from in the Hive,” Patrick says.

  “We need to drop them off first,” Kimani says. She looks at Avi. “You need to go home.”

  “I can’t go home.”

  “Take us to my apartment,” Alyssa says. Kimani nods and opens the door back into their bathroom, steam lingering in the corners, fog on the mirror. As Avi wedges himself and Emmeline through, Sarah touches him on the shoulder. “Take care of her,” she says. Fahima sees him relax a little, as if there is no one here but him and his daughter, clutched in his arms. Sarah must have pushed into his mind enough to calm him. The ethics are questionable, but Fahima can’t fault the result.

  * * *

  —

  So much of the Hive has to do with attention. The things you’re not looking at fuzz out of focus and into nonexistence. The things you’re attending to become clear and crisp, regardless of distance. You can hide yourself, create a bubble of privacy. It’s not difficult; most people aren’t singling you out anyway. Fahima went through a phase of wild sexual experimentation in the Hive when she first got to Bishop. The Hive offered the freedom and anonymity that Internet chat rooms once promised, but with sensation rather than words. Hivebodies made of pure consciousness pressed up against one another without the mediation of language. Psychic ghosts fucking psychic ghosts. You didn’t have to be yourself, which, for a girl still in the closet, was like salvation. Fahima could be with women in the Hive without admitting to herself that she liked women. Selves were not necessarily involved. Hivebodies were ideas about selves, fiction suits you could try on and discard, although the Hivebodies calcified over years until they appeared in the Hive as approximations of their owners’ physical selves. Fahima ultimately found her trysts in the Hive insufficient, recipes without food. But they led her to a truth about herself, and they helped her understand something about how the Hive works. It responds to what you want. It’s shaped by desire. If Emmeline wants to be found, she should be findable. If the Hive is fluid and responsive to personal desire, there should be no way to hold someone against her will.

  “Is it possible she’s hiding from us?” Fahima asks.

  “Us maybe,” says Sarah. “But why would she hide from her father?”

  “There’s lots of reasons to hide from your father,” Patrick says. His Hivebody is smaller than his real one. It flickers like a bad television signal.

  Bishop materializes next to Patrick. Most people blip into existence in the Hive, but Bishop crafts his Hivebody. It’s shapeless, then expands, as if it’s being birthed through a plastic bag. A puff of smoke becomes a man. A white beard forms on his chin like frost on a window, and two lines trace themselves around his eyes, wire-rimmed National Health glasses. In the Hive, he looks exactly like he does in person, if a decade younger, less careworn.

  “What’s this about?” he asks.

  “It’s Emmeline Hirsch,” says Kimani. “Someone has her trapped.”

  “That’s not possible,” Bishop says.

  “A cage,” says Fahima. “Someone built a cage.”

  “That’s not the way this place works,” Bishop says. “No one can build here. This place resists permanence. Anything structural would have to be pushed through from the
Source.”

  “Or pulled through?” Fahima says. Bishop glances at her, and she knows she’s guessed right.

  “Can that happen?” asks Patrick.

  “It can’t just happen,” Bishop snaps.

  Fahima hangs on Bishop’s every word. He knows more about the Hive than he’s told her, but the idea that it exists in a liminal space between the physical world and wherever Resonants draw their abilities from, the Source, is something he’s confirmed. That the Source can physically intrude into the Hive is news to Fahima and will require some reconsideration of certain theories.

  Bishop’s Hivebody becomes translucent. It diffuses. He calls this casting, and it’s nearly impossible. Sarah, on a good day, can cast her Hivebody into a sphere about ten feet across. Fahima can barely puff out her cheeks. Even in the psychic space of the Hive, an individual consciousness stays focused at one point. Bishop now exists spread out like a net across the Hive, searching. After a few seconds, he coalesces back into a solid, becoming opaque again.

  “It’s like a cancer on the skin of this place,” he says. In his face, Fahima sees the righteous anger of the man who plucked her from the garden of a mental asylum. “Come with me.”

  In the all-at-once way travel happens within the Hive, Fahima and the others follow.

  * * *

  —

  As they approach the thing, Fahima thinks of the words Bishop used: a cancer on the skin of this place. It’s a mass of black stone, shifting in shape, alternating between presence and absence. Abscess, she thinks. Not a building: a hole. The more she looks at it, the more frequently it changes. It’s a box, then a wound. Its edges are geometric, angles sharp, and then it’s fractal, a Mandelbrotian mess, a biomass of jet-black bubble and tendril.

  “This can’t be here,” says Bishop.

  “How do we get her out?” Kimani asks.

  Fahima can’t stop looking at it. She steps forward, past Bishop, and lays her hand on it.

  “Don’t,” says Bishop, too late. The black surface is cold to the touch. Fahima has never had a perception of temperature in the Hive. It’s one of the things lacking from sexual encounters here: no heat. But the abscess sends a numbing chill across her palm and up her arm. The surface seethes and roils under her hand. It doesn’t feel organic, she thinks. But it feels alive.

  As she’s tallying these observations, a feeling washes over her, a memory boiled down into its emotional content. Her father dragged away by the feds. Her mother holding her back, shoving Fahima’s confession back into her mouth. Fahima feels angry and ashamed, the outsized emotions of a panicked child. They threaten to pull her down into them, the boundless dark space of them where logic and rationality are easily drowned. A small, ugly piece of the emotional complex expands, blotting out the others. It’s a feeling of relief and escape. It’s the sense she’s gotten away with something. Better him than me, she thinks. What good would he have done the world, the kebab-selling nothing he was? How much good have I done already?

  Bishop grabs her wrist and pulls her hand off the surface.

  “It wasn’t like that,” she says. “I never felt like that. I never thought that.” Maybe she had that feeling, so inchoate it couldn’t rise to the level of thought, to be seen and named and spoken. She stares at the spot on the surface where her reflection ought to be. It’s nothing but flat black.

  “What did you see?” Bishop asks.

  “I didn’t see anything,” she says. “I felt something. I felt bad.”

  “This shouldn’t be here,” he says.

  “Kevin?” Kimani shouts. She’s the only person on staff who calls him by his first name. She points at the crest of the hill behind them. Shapes emerge out of the ground, a dozen, more. They look like fingers on a corpse, black and bloated. In seconds, they become roughly human-shaped, lumbering golems made of the same shifting black substance as the abscess. Like it, they flicker, as if they’re trying to exist in two places at once. They encircle Fahima and her friends, trapping them with their backs to the abscess. They move in slowly, unspeaking.

  “Back the fuck off, people,” Fahima says.

  “They can’t hurt us here,” says Patrick. “We can’t be hurt here.”

  “Ten minutes ago you couldn’t trap anyone here,” Fahima says.

  “They’re not people,” says Bishop. “We push into this space from our side. These are pushed into this space from the other.”

  “Why do they look like people?” Fahima asks.

  “Someone’s doing it,” Bishop says.

  One of the golems puts the bloated slab of its hand on Patrick’s shoulder. It’s a gentle motion, brotherly, but Patrick shoves the golem away with both arms. Undaunted, it starts toward him again.

  Kimani is up against the abscess. Two golems come at her slowly, almost patient. Their hands are extended as if to calm her, but she steps away from them, looking back into the shifting hole, terrified.

  Sarah is trying to read the one coming at her like a panhandler on the street. It would be less scary if they charged, Fahima thinks. Their slowness makes them feel inevitable. Before the golem gets near her, Sarah blips out, her Hivebody ceasing to exist for a second before she reappears, outside the narrowing circle, staring helplessly as the shapes close in on her friends.

  “What do we do?” Fahima asks. One of the golems lumbers toward her, a child’s drawing of a movie zombie.

  “Keep them back,” Bishop says. Fahima turns so that she can face the oncoming golems but keep Bishop in the corner of her vision. He lays both of his hands on the abscess. His face contorts in pain and concentration. Fahima feels energy pouring off him. He’s pushing something into the abscess or drawing something up from the ground of the Hive into it. White lines rise up along its base like vines. They expand, webbing its entire surface. The abscess stops fluctuating. It takes a solid shape, a dark cube shot through with veins of bright white. It becomes fully real, and in the next moment it shatters. Shards of black glass fly in every direction, forced away from the explosion of the abscess. Others move of their own accord, fluttering off with the erratic flight paths of bats.

  Emmeline stands where the abscess was, her Hivebody bigger than her actual body. It looks as if echoes of her older self are laid over the image of her as a little girl. The effect is holographic, producing a sensation of depth, like seeing her reflected in a hall of mirrors, an infinite regression of images on a flat surface. Emmeline’s hair is a dark corona around her head. Her eyes blaze pale blue. A little girl surging with power. Even Bishop stands back, in awe of her.

  The golems continue their approach, and Emmeline’s Hivebody disappears in a liquid flash. Fahima can feel her with them, everywhere now. She’s casting the way Bishop did but more strongly. Emmeline infuses the Hive with herself, becoming a thunderstorm. Bright lines of energy blaze toward the golems from the spot where she was. The lines spiral around them and constrict, squeezing them into the ground, shrinking them like the Wicked Witch melting into smoke, into nothing. They go soundlessly, without protest. Never alive, they’re not dying, only returning to wherever they came from, like a glass of seawater poured back into an ocean.

  Emmeline’s Hivebody reconfigures in the air. She looks at what she’s done, a goddess surveying her work. Her hands go up to her face, pressing through the future echoes, condensing her Hivebody into one opaque thing, and then her face goes slack and she falls. Patrick stretches out his arms in time to save her from crashing onto a pile of black shards. He reels her in, clutching the girl to his chest. She mutters something about the stove being on. “I can smell it,” she says. “The blue flame’s not there yet, and I can smell it.”

  “What the fuck just happened?” Patrick says.

  “We saved the girl,” Bishop says. “That’s what matters.”

  “Seems like she saved us,” says Fahima.

  Bishop shoot
s her a look she’s never seen from him. He’s never tried to shut her up. This is the look that does it. Then his Hivebody dissolves, aspect by aspect, until there’s nothing of him left.

  * * *

  —

  Fahima can hear Avi crying in the next room. Emmeline says, “It’s all right, Daddy. I’m okay.” Bishop once told Fahima that the Source wasn’t sentient but responded to sentience.

  Whatever the fuck the Source is, it’s a big fan of you, kid, Fahima thinks.

  She looks at the others. Bishop isn’t with them. Sarah and Kimani look exhausted. Fahima must look just as bad. Patrick looks like Patrick: smug, bored. But Fahima saw it the moment the shape had its hand on him. The horror and repulsion on his face.

  “Go talk to her,” Kimani says, interrupting Fahima’s thoughts.

  Fahima stands in the doorway, looking on as Alyssa checks the girl’s vitals, Avi cradling her, rocking her back and forth.

  “She seems fine,” says Alyssa. “But she seemed fine before, except for being—”

  “Brain dead,” Fahima says. Avi winces, and Fahima regrets saying it.

  “Emmeline,” Sarah says, “did you see who took you?”

  “No,” says Emmeline. “I was there in the shiny place, like you taught me to. I heard someone call me. It sounded like when the radio in the van is between channels. I didn’t like it, but it knew me. I went toward where I heard it. I went down. Then the ground went all black and reached up and grabbed me.”

  Sarah gets down on her haunches and holds her hands out. “I’m going to try something,” she says. “I’m going to look around in your head—”

  “Get away from her,” Avi says, pulling Emmeline closer to him.

  “Sarah, no,” Patrick says. His arm shoots across the space between them and pushes Sarah’s hands down before she can lay them on the girl.

  “We need to know,” Sarah says, shaking free of his grip.

  “You can’t go into her head right now,” Patrick says. He’s spent more time with Sarah rattling around in his head than anyone else. He knows the disorienting underwater feeling of having her go into your mind. “Let her rest.”