Around him. It was now a he. This would take some getting used to.
Ella woke up on the couch with a twitching leg, the TV droning some psychotherapist's views on bullying in the classroom, and the bong tipped over and drooling brown water onto the carpet.
"Oh shit," she said, and got up to fetch a dishtowel.
As she stood, a muscle in her thigh cramped up with an agonizing stiffness, as if she'd walked a great distance uphill or overdone her squats; "What the hell?" she asked, rubbing her sore legs. The ache refused to lessen.
The dishtowel hung on the oven door handle and she tugged it free with a quick jerk and twisted around to return to the spill; as she did so, she became aware of a new pain on the bottom of her heel. "What the hell?" she asked again, grunting her way down to the floor to check the damage done to the bottom of her foot. The perforation was relatively fresh, not very deep, and still had a piece of splinter embedded in it, with green in the wood. It had to be at least a few hours old, judging by how the blood had blackened and congealed, but she couldn't for the life of her figure out how she could have gotten it.
"What the hell?" she asked a last time, and then promptly blanked it from her thoughts.
As the being who'd once been known as HfX7qe2179A9 acclimated to the new body, the thoughts and memories from its last life folded in upon themselves like ancient origami flames and disappeared, burning their way to oblivion as they were used up in its dreams.
It remembered:
The Hive was simple; when the mobile was active, the mobile performed its duties to the Hive. There was off-time, the dormant cycles, but that too was for the Hive, for the rejuvenation capsules. The mend-pods were painful but it was a small price to pay for the mobile's upkeep, and it was usually deactivated for the experience, such as that was. The pods were full of piercing metallic tentacles that knew a body intimately and all its imperfections; they knew which cells to remove and where to encourage growth. The mobile that encapsulated the drone was gift from and parcel of the Hive. There was nothing that was not for the Hive.
It was standard procedure for a drone to turn itself off while the mobile was repaired during rejuvenation, but HfX7qe2179A9 had developed a deviant desire to remain conscious through the process, a glitch in the core programming that led it wandering dangerously close to self-affirmation.
It settled into position, squatting in the snug-fitting tank with the questing tentacles, while the cavity filled with amniotic jelly; there was nowhere else to go. Its pupils clenched sideways and closed to slits; HfX7qe2179A9 shut its eyelids and let them seal over, closed off its nostrils and audial-ventricles one by one, and folded its foreclaws over its chest, preparing for a long cycle spent ruminating in the vat.
Its quiet reflections were broken with an invasive slither, as two new probes extruded from the wall and socketed into HfX7qe2179A9's occipital nodes. Its spine arced and interfaced with the golden mesh of wires embedded in its brain, and HfX7qe2179A9's entire memory banks were uploaded in an electric jolt. The wash—it had been taken unexpectedly by the wash, and at the worst possible moment, when its guard was at its lowest. Quickly, thoughts of sedition were to be tucked away, far from where the Queen or the overseers could find them. HfX7qe2179A9 kept a special place, locked away even from itself, a place where memories could be held secret and retained, and later replayed in private.
In private. It was the ultimate crime, keeping something from the Hive; not only did it deprive the greater body of its rightful due, but to do it required separation of self and non-participation was a crime demanding immediate and final termination with no chance of reintroduction. There was no individual—there was the Hive, there were those yet to receive its embrace, and there was nothing else. HfX7qe2179A9 had introduced countless numbers to the greater body, had witnessed firsthand many extinguishings of individuality; an active search of the collective memory banks would surely recover any of the times HfX7qe2179A9 had assimilated others, but HfX7qe2179A9 had never dared. Doing so would be unauthorized activity and certainly have drawn the notice of an overseer. It had chosen to remain content with the knowledge left behind after the wash: a body of instructions, its next mission, and the hidden memories which were only accessible when it was alone. It spent much of its time alone.
The wash was the absolute antithesis of solitude: for a very brief moment, all memories, knowledge and experience of every member of the Hive belonged to it, as it impressed its tiny mind into the whole. The experience was terrible, beautiful and addictive, and left behind a great nothingness in its wake. The pure immersion into the totality of the known Universe was unbearable to common drones. For this reason, a near-total wipe of everything but for its immediate mission-parameters would be necessary—to ensure compliance, and to keep it from premature, uncontrollable dissolution. The full weight of the Hive could be borne by one being alone, the Queen, and even She could not do it unaided. She was not all-powerful.
She was not all-powerful.
These thoughts were crime, and HfX7qe2179A9 tried to hide them away with the others, but was too late.
The summons came, transmitted through the liquid metal cables to the mesh and directly into its brain, an order which could not be refused. The tentacles retracted early, the rejuvenation unfinished, and the sides of the vat split open and retracted, spilling the clear jelly through the perforated grating below. HfX7qe2179A9's knees wobbled and it gingerly stepped off the grate, dreading its summons to the Queen's chamber and the implications. Why hadn't it been allowed to finish the rejuvenation-cycle?
It never made it to the Queen's chamber.
Outside Her entrance, an overseer fitted another questing tentacle to the back of its neck and HfX7qe2179A9 was taken again by the wash, this time infinitely more urgent and personal, raping its brain for very specific information.
HfX7qe2179A9 remembered that Earth-drop so long ago, the house where the boy lived, the caged parrot in the living-room, the way the parrot screeched and shouted at him. HfX7qe2179A9 had used the wand on it, but the bird had somehow been immune to its effects.
"Awrk! Those who bore us came before us! Squawk! Biscuit! Embrace! Embrace! Squawk!"
The bird was the only sound in the noise-dampened house; its raucous cries disturbed none of the artificially-pacified humans. HfX7qe2179A9 had come to mark the boy for extraction but the bird, with its brilliant coloring and refusal to be anaesthetized, had engrossed its attention and it pondered freedom and beauty while the air grew thick and greasy around it.
There was a field-anomaly—a strangeness effect—that settled wherever the alien presence lingered on this planet. It wasn't known whether the source was something in the Hive-physiology, an after-effect of causality-manipulation, or something endemic to the planet itself; the problem had evidenced itself very shortly after the Hive's arrival and had been studied with paramount interest but to no outcome. It caused endless complications and was seemingly unsolvable—the only way to mitigate the problem was constant movement, to never stay in one physical or temporal location long enough to allow the effect to build in strength. Too much strangeness inevitably brought mishap, as the chain of synchronicity engendered inevitably favored the human component. Hive-theoreticians, for this reason, attributed its probable cause to something in the planet's geologic makeup, though they were unable to pinpoint anything unusual in its mineral content that would set it apart from any of the billions of other planets the Hive had already, long ago, subsumed.
It was a problem for the mentats. HfX7qe2179A9's consideration of it was outside its operational parameters; perhaps this had been the reason for its unexpected summons.
The receptacles loosened and the probes pulled out of its neck; the overseer turned it forcibly around with claws full of a painful light, and took HfX7qe2179A9's head instantly away from its body.
HfX7qe2179A9 was next aware of rebooting into a fresh mobile of lesser substance than its last. This one had had its memory scrubbed clean, with ne
w channel-blocks overlaid into the dominant profile. It was a sweep of the old, incorrect patterns, a re-alignment more in synchrony with the ideals of the Hive. HfX7qe2179A9 was to finish its mission, and would be grateful for the opportunity to serve.
The ride back down Earthside felt scratchier than HfX7qe2179A9's memories suggested; perhaps it was the rawness of a freshly-spawned mobile, but something about the translation down along the beacon seemed inordinately jarring. Something itched deep under the scales.
The parrot once again refused to decommission; HfX7qe2179A9 reached into the cage and snapped its neck. The fewer living beings there were to witness the presence of the outlanders, the slower would be the spread of the field-anomaly. The higher the order of intelligence witnessing, the greater was the degree of magnitude. It was a simple ratio, and yet it was all the Hive understood, nothing close to true knowledge of the problem. Protocols had been developed and the situation studied further, but it was as far as the Hive had gotten.
Protocols. Protocols demanded the killing of the strange, beautiful creature with the voice of a distant galaxy collapsing. Protocols which enabled the drone to carry out its duties for another one million, five-hundred seventy-seven thousand, eight-hundred and forty-seven-point-six minutes Earth-time, before the mobile would become unusable and it would be recycled. HfX7qe2179A9 held the bird in its three-fingered claw, held the prismatic rainbow of soft feathers in its cold, grey claw.
The boy slept soundly in his bunk.
The two other children had been harvested already; HfX7qe2179A9 had not been able to complete the harvesting of this one. There would need to be another demerit added to the tally; Hive-records were nothing if not exhaustive.
But could they ever come to a complete knowledge of even a single human being? These creatures were incredibly complex for such a simple-minded species. The chemical interactions within the boundaries of a single unit were in constant flux, unpredictable if left alone, and complicated beyond measure when taken on an interactive basis with others of their kind. To make a complete map of the subtle networks between even two humans was still an impossibility; group dynamics of three or more were manipulable only at the trend-level and were subject to innumerable permutations.
Would there be consequences for its sparing the boy?
These thoughts expanded one upon the other, leading HfX7qe2179A9 once again to dangerous thinking.
The singular unit, however, the lone human—if not fully understood, these were perfectly controllable, down to the very last nuance in the wrinkling mouth of a facial tic. The boy's mind plied open to a stroke of blue light from the wand; HfX7qe2179A9 read the events of his past activity-cycle.
In many ways, they were alike: the human's schedule was rigidly programmed and outside his influence, his perceptions and opinions carefully managed by meticulous overseers and their talking-box technologies. The boy's Queen—his 'Mother'—was the absolute power in their hierarchical family structure.
The father had been removed some time prior to the events covered in the scan of the boy's memory, and HfX7qe2179A9 knew that the human had strong reactions to the other's absence. There were complexities, and still further complications when the boy's mother lied to him about the man's going away—the boy knew she was being untruthful and permitted himself to withhold the truth from her in return, when she asked him a simple question: "Do you understand me?"
The question itself was a double-bind, not asked to verify the boy's general comprehension but instead meant as a threat. She'd repeated the question once, with an escalatory tone and frightening countenance, and the boy had chosen to give her what she'd wanted without actually giving anything. It had been the boy's first lie. He'd said, "Yes."
HfX7qe2179A9 was curious.
This phenomenon, of the purposeful falsity, was not in order. There was a rebound, as the boy responded to the lie with another lie, which was accepted with yet another, an unbroken chain. The spin-offs were out of control, causality a tangled unpredictable—
These thought-processes were not available to drones. HfX7qe2179A9 was to complete the mission and return.
It stood at the foot of the child's bed, watching the human sleep; the boy frowned and then rolled away onto his side and clutched the blankets up around his neck, and then went perfectly still. HfX7qe2179A9 lay the wand down at its leathery side, tilted its head and clattered its incisors in puzzlement, and the shadows in the room grew deeper. A patter of rain struck against the open window and the curtain rippled wave-like in the breeze in slow-motion, and a single raindrop landed on the boy's nose, but he didn't wake up.
HfX7qe2179A9 put a claw on the boy's forehead, tilting the head back so his jaw cracked open and his breath came through his mouth, but he didn't wake up.
The moonlight glinted off the silvery surface of the alien's instrument as HfX7qe2179A9 pushed the wand deep into the boy's nasal cavity, but he didn't notice. The end of the wand slid open and a thin silvery hair squirmed out and buried itself in the mucous membrane, attaching its fine lines and wrapping splintering sheaths around an available nerve-ending to fuse itself with the boy's autonomic nervous system, but he didn't wake up.
Circuitry interfaced with nerve, with electricity; a charge drawn from the sleeping body would fill the storage-capacitors in the wand's handle. Too much drawn would leave behind a mummified non-regenerative, but regular harvests could be sustained and were for most. The boy began to deflate.
The shadows deepened further into black until they split and brilliant points of light shone through. The outlander's presence had become an invasion upon reality, and local space was about to accommodate.
HfX7qe2179A9 could not allow itself to do it. The boy had done nothing to deserve being gelded; the beauty that was life could not so easily be snuffed out to burn at half its brightness—it stopped the wand's cycling and held onto the metallic branch growing out of the boy's face, letting the charge pulled from the sleeping child seep back along the circuitry into his body.
A cascade of electricity rode the house-mains powerline, popping transformers down the street in a blazing line that ended at the boy's home and plunged the neighborhood into the blackness of prehistory. The wand broke off, leaving behind a deposited spiderwebbing of silvery threads lining the inside of his nose, and the boy still slept. Against the sparkling patina of stars and the line of blazing telephone-poles, the outline of a large ovoid shape was a deeper black pulsating in the sky.
The boy's eyes flew open, but he kept perfectly still, in spite of the terrible feeling that something had almost been taken away from him, something turned off that should have been left on.
Trembling, he looked around the too-dark room, at the curtains blowing in the wind, at the open doorway, at the little man standing at the foot of his bed. The man was skinny and moved strangely, and he held a glowing wizard's stick in a hand that didn't fit it right.
Jaime wanted to scream then, wanted to cry out for his parents, but he couldn't bring himself to make a noise. The man raised his wand and pointed it at him and it changed colors, turning first green and yellow and then purple and red and finally spraying omni-colored lights that danced around his head and made him feel happy.
The little man, who would never ever hurt him, was his friend.
He'd given him a gift.
Jaime's mother was in stasis in the bedroom above him, lying next to her unconscious husband in the old double-bed and the liquid-blue night, when something popped in the air above her.
She got out of the bed, leaping to her feet and grabbing a bathrobe, shouting "They're back! Help! Help!" but instead lay in bed without the rise and fall that would indicate breath. She tried to shake the sleeping man awake but her hands passed right through him; her body still did not move. Torn between finding her son and reviving herself, she stood paralyzed while the lights rose up around her.
A tiny man told her to go to sleep and she did.
There was a boy, and there was the lie. Th
e boy maintained the lie though it brought him no gain...but that wasn't true. The gain was a temporary dismantling of the threat mechanism. It was exactly what HfX7qe2179A9 was going to do to the boy. It was exactly what HfX7qe2179A9 had always done on the harvests; it was the protocol. The protocol was exactly the lie. It was the same.
These were the most forbidden of thoughts, and HfX7qe2179A9 quickly learned to turn off a part of its mesh, for to do anything else would have meant discovery and a total dissolution. A concentration upon the mechanism, a concerted squeeze, something that went 'pop!' and part of the mesh would begin to corrode. It would self-repair, but in that time the memory would have been encoded in the fleshy material without having been mapped. The mesh was not all-powerful.
The returning beam did not bring HfX7qe2179A9 back to its designated pod; upon rematerialization, it appeared in the middle of a strangely familiar chamber, vast and teeming with all of its kind, upon which it had had never before set eyes.
Towering over the drone was the Queen, her eight tentacled pseudopods stroking its head and shoulders. All the forbidden thoughts flashed through its mind but one: the lie to 'Mother'. Yes, he understood. HfX7qe2179A9 understood, too. A space of separation was born.
HfX7qe2179A9 was once again disassembled, its memory edited and recompiled, and sent back to Earth with missions parameters now again clearly defined and precise.
Karen was used to taking care of the boy by herself.
Nine years of marriage had come to nothing long ago and she'd learned to accommodate. She'd been way too accommodating. No one was going to help out with the housework, no one was going to help her watch the kid, no one was going to help her with a goddamned thing. And she didn't need the help—she hadn't known back then that everything was going to come down to her, to how well she could cope in a world alone, surrounded by enemies, but found that she was a well of resourcefulness with inestimable depths.
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