A Trick of Light

by Stan Lee

  * * *

  “Nia!” Cameron screams, as the last line of code holding the world in place breaks and they plummet toward the black hole of the Lobotomizer. “Don’t—”

  * * *

  “—leave me.”

  Cameron opens his eyes. His outstretched hand clutches the air. He is no longer high on the scaffold, but lying crumpled on the stage, his head pounding and his mouth dry. His joints feel loose and painful, and his stomach lurches as an image comes to him of his body being passed roughly down the structure, swinging like a rag doll from the hands of Xal’s swarm of eager soldiers. They surround him—and as he turns his head to the side, he sees that he is not alone. The Inventor lies beside him in a pool of blood, his eyes closed, his breath ragged. An eerie silence hangs in the air. High above them, the massive screen is ablaze with glaring light that seems to pulse with energy as he looks at it. Its circuitry is overloaded. Cameron’s brain feels the same way.

  He looks up at the circle of faces above him, who stare back at him with glassy eyes, their bodies silent and rigid, their lips stretched in identical grins. From farther away, he can hear screaming, the sound of tables being overturned, glass shattering, and horror creeps over him as he realizes the truth.

  What happens to Xal’s hive, he had asked the Inventor, if the reset happens and the network connecting them evaporates?

  But that was the wrong question. What he should have asked, he realizes, is:

  What happens if the connection holds?

  37

  The Hive

  Inside virtual reality, Cameron clutched Nia’s hand as the world collapsed.

  And outside, the gathering storm seemed to pause, to draw breath—and then exploded outward as the light washed over the city in a massive, soundless wave.

  The pulse ripples through the crowd below and races like wildfire through the city, flooding every network with energy designed for only one purpose:

  Connection.

  Everywhere, people freeze in place as their pupils dilate and their minds go blank. The screens in front of them, phones and televisions and tablets and laptops, blaze with shocking brightness.

  Then, in unison, a hundred thousand eyelids blink—and open to a brand-new world.

  So many minds, suspended, united, in the blast of fiery energy that Nia unleashed as she fell.

  So many brains riding the high of pure, euphoric connection.

  They spill into the streets, swarming toward their destiny.

  Together, as one, they rise.

  * * *

  Miles from the I-X Center, at the Shadyside old folks’ home, Wallace Johnson drops his tablet as though he’s been shocked, his eyes widening with surprise and then delight as the invisible network embeds itself snugly in his brain. Another boring evening has just gotten a lot more interesting; for the first time in more than a decade, Wallace has a party to attend. A real party, not like the disco- or luau-themed bingo that passes for entertainment around here—a bunch of octogenarians wearing dollar-store leis, jowls all aquiver as they fill their little cards with tiddlywinks. On another night, Wallace would have spent hours glued to the tablet, watching an endless succession of videos on that YouTube website. He’s especially partial to the ones uploaded by random couples on holiday, where young folks slurp piña coladas and nap on white sand beaches, in the kind of tropical paradise he would have loved to visit. Just once, instead of spending every damn vacation strapping the kids into the station wagon to go visit Karen’s parents in Poughkeepsie.

  “When the children are grown,” she’d always say when he suggested they take a trip just the two of them. But Karen had died just a week shy of their youngest’s high school graduation, and that was the end of that. No white sand beaches for her, and not for him, either. Sometimes, when he’d watched enough tropical honeymoons to get good and marinated in his bitterness, he’d fire off a spiteful email to his daughter about how the least she could’ve done, if she was going to stick him in a place like this, would be to make it in a state where winter didn’t last eight months out of every year.

  But tonight, well, tonight was wonderfully different. One second he’d been watching a video—and the next, he’d jumped up out of nowhere, realizing he had somewhere important to be.

  “A party,” he mutters, his lips widening in a grin. “Hot damn—yep, better get moving.”

  Hurriedly, he shoves his feet into moccasins and tips his coat off the hanger. Ordinarily he’d dress for an event like this, but when he pauses to wonder if he ought to wear a tie, he’s hit with a fresh wave of impulse that nearly propels him out of the room. No tie. No time. Better go.

  He walks purposefully down the hall, stepping lightly down the carpeted stairs, following the illuminated Exit signs. He slows briefly at the realization that his wallet is still in the room upstairs, that he doesn’t have money for a cab or even bus fare—and then resumes walking without looking back, grinning. Of course, he doesn’t need bus fare. One of his new friends will give him a lift.

  “No sweat,” he mutters. “No problem at all.”

  He passes the nurses’ station at a trot, turning down toward the kitchen and the service corridor beyond. No need to make up a story for security; he’ll just scoot out the employee exit and be on his way. He finds the door easily and is about to shove it open when a hand falls on his shoulder.

  “Mr. Johnson, you can’t be here,” says the nurse, her lips pressed together in a disapproving line. The nametag pinned to her cardigan says JENNA, but Wallace doesn’t recognize her, and it makes him irrationally angry that she knows his name, that this stranger has arrested his momentum when he clearly has somewhere to be.

  “Let go of me,” he snaps. “I have to go.”

  “You have to go upstairs,” she says, and Wallace feels a surge of anger—only not the ordinary, old man’s rage that grips him on a day-to-day basis. This anger is sprawling, and potent. It gathers inside him like a hundred clenched fists. He wrenches away from her, the space between himself and the door closing by half a foot.

  “I have to go this direction,” he says. “You don’t get it. You’re not part of it.”

  The nurse squares her shoulders, reaching out to take his arm.

  His hand flies out like a striking snake to slap her across the face.

  She yelps, bringing her hands to her cheeks, and Wallace doesn’t waste the opportunity. He claps his hands on top of hers, his fingertips curling around her ears, and yanks as hard as he can, bringing up one knee to meet her face as he wrenches her head toward the floor. There’s a sickening crunch as it collides with her nose; she collapses to the floor, whimpering.

  “Can’t be late,” he says pleasantly, and strolls briskly into the night. He’s never hit a woman before, but he’s amused to find that it doesn’t bother him, at least not in this case—not when it was so necessary. After all, he has somewhere to be.

  Fifty years ago, Wallace had been part of a bench-clearing brawl at a high school baseball game, bolting out of the dugout with ten other guys like a wolf joining the pack—not even knowing what caused the fight, just knowing he needed to be part of it. It’s been a long time since he thought about that night, about the scuff and crack and slap of feet in the dirt and fists on flesh, but he’s thinking about it now. Even in this old man’s body, even without the smell of sweat and blood in the air. He’ll be damned if he doesn’t feel like a soldier joining his unit, ready for the attack.

  He’ll be damned if it doesn’t feel terrific.

  * * *

  “We’re going the wrong way.”

  Six glances toward Olivia with surprise, then shifts his gaze to the rearview mirror, confirming that the massive low-hanging cloud above the I-X Center is still there. Cameron Ackerson and the old man are inside—infuriatingly close, and Six wants to snatch them both, strap them down, and spend the next three days leisurely probing their innards—but even he agreed with Olivia’s call to draw back to the rendezvous point and wait f
or the rest of the team to arrive before moving in. And it was her call—she’s the boss—which is why it’s a little unnerving to look over now and see her sitting rigid in her seat, her pupils dilated, urgently declaring that her own directions were wrong.

  “I thought you said—”

  “I don’t care what I said!” Olivia cries, her voice creeping up to a petulant pitch that he didn’t imagine she was capable of. “I have to go back there! I’m invited!”

  Six studies her, the hairs on the back of his neck rising to stand on end. The dots on Olivia’s temple that map to the software inside her body, usually so subtle that they could be mistaken for freckles, are lit up like a holiday light display underneath her skin. Something—someone—is messing with her bio-network. Damn it. He told her that she should sit this one out, that her tech made her vulnerable to the Ackerson kid . . .

  But the Ackerson kid is at least a mile away, and this doesn’t feel like his handiwork. The expression on Olivia’s face is one Six has never seen. She looks utterly unlike herself; she looks bewildered, stoned, a woman who’s completely lost her grip on reality. Whatever’s happening to her isn’t just happening to the software that regulates her body. Something is messing with her brain.

  “Park,” he says sharply, pressing down on the accelerator and returning his eyes to the road. “I’m sorry. I’m afraid you’ve been compromised. Do you understand? For your own safety, I can’t—”

  “NO!” Olivia shrieks, her mouth inches from Six’s ear, and he nearly slams on the brakes before realizing he can’t, that she’s unbuckled her safety belt, that a sudden stop will send her flying forward and straight through the windshield.

  “Park!” he shouts, and then, abandoning protocol entirely, “Olivia! Put your fucking seat belt back on!” But Olivia isn’t listening. She rears back and squats in the passenger seat, eyes glittering, her teeth bared, like a cornered animal. The car drifts as he lifts a hand to ward her off—she looks like she’s going to pounce, he thinks, for God’s sake, please, no pouncing—and he yanks it back into the right lane just as a giant SUV blows past on his left, the driver honking angrily.

  “TURN AROUND TURN AROUND TURN AROUND!” Olivia screams, beating her fists against the window. There’s a sharp report, a spider-web pattern of cracks suddenly spreading through the glass as her titanium-reinforced fingers make contact.

  He has to get off the freeway, find some way to restrain her. There’s a sign overhead for the next exit—one quarter mile ahead—and he pulls the wheel hard, slowing as he hits the ramp to thirty-five, thirty, twenty-five. He takes a deep breath and looks toward Olivia, hoping she might have somehow regained control of herself—

  But Olivia isn’t looking at him. She’s scrabbling at the door, and Six shouts, “No!” as her fingers find the handle and pull. The door disengages with a thud, swinging wide, and then the seat is empty, the door is wide open, and Olivia Park, the smartest and toughest woman he’s ever known, a woman who keeps her shit together and never under any circumstances loses control, is rolling away in the rearview, a dark tangle of limbs on the side of the road. He comes to a stop, slamming the car into park, disengaging his seat belt as headlights loom bright in his rearview mirror and the car behind him squeals to a halt. He leaps out, ignoring the confused and angry shouts of the driver behind him, and sprints back toward the place where Olivia jumped. But there is no crumpled body in the road, and when he looks up, he sees her—silhouetted against the bright lights of the oncoming traffic, running like mad, vaulting the median onto the other side. Running, her hair loose, her mouth stretched in a madwoman’s grin, toward the distant blaze of the storm.

  * * *

  Marjorie pushes her short graying hair out of her eyes and looks out across the sea of spectators, all of them standing at silent attention in the hushed aftermath of the pulse. A moment ago, she was telling her twin sons, for what felt like the hundredth time, that she would never take them to another Con ever again, that she would in fact drag them both out of this event by their ears, right now, if they didn’t stop hitting each other in the face with their inflatable smart balloons. But the noisy hitting has stopped, as has the feeling of teetering right on the brink of her last frayed nerve, as she looked at her children and thought bitterly that none of this would have happened if they’d just gotten cats. There’s no bitterness now. Her whole being feels positively awash in contentment as she gazes around the space, wondering when they flipped on the rose-colored switch that makes it all look so nice. And her children—it’s funny, but she suddenly seems to have many, many more children than just the ones she came with. Thousands of them, girls and boys, young and old, all of them waiting to embrace her and be embraced by her. Isn’t that lovely? she thinks. In a way, we are all each other’s children, and parents, and brothers, and sisters. All of us, one family. There’s a humming in the crowd, and she turns with the rest to watch the spectacle unfolding on stage. The excitement is palpable, the tension in the air electric.

  “Well, isn’t this exciting,” she says, resting a hand on her son’s shoulder. “What an honor that we should be here!”

  The boy blinks, and looks at her curiously. He thinks he knows what his mother means—he can feel the truth taking shape inside his mind even before he asks what it is—but the habit of looking to her for guidance is ingrained and not easily broken.

  “What is it?” he says. “What’s going to happen?”

  His mother beams.

  “Why, we’re going to kill the old man, of course.”

  * * *

  Outside the I-X Center, a crowd is gathering, the lightning glinting off their empty eyes as the sky boils and breaks overhead. They crash against each other, a sea of humanity—but with all the humanity stripped away. Their own lives are a distant memory, their will overcome by love for their queen. They feel what she feels; they want what she wants. They are her workers, her army, her servants. Nothing feels better than cooperating, coming together for her cause.

  And while Xal has big plans for her hive, things to build and cities to conquer, right now she wants only one thing. Nia, it seems, is gone; she no longer senses the girl’s intelligence hovering in the background as it had before, like the landscape flashing by outside the windows of a fast-moving train. But the train itself, a sleek and endless caravan made from hundreds of thousands of interconnected cars, is still here. The network holds, with Xal now at its center, the electricity of her flexible brain crackling inside the minds of the humans—minds opened by Nia, now captive to her influence. It takes all her strength, but she holds them. Not just holds them: draws them close. Letting them share in this moment of triumph, a death before the dawn.

  They can smell the blood in the air.

  The crowd screams and laughs, rushing to cram themselves inside, crawling over each other’s bodies as they fill every doorway, drawn by Xal’s bloodlust. Trampling the ones unlucky enough to fall. Broken hands, feet, faces grind and crunch against the concrete as the ground grows wet with blood, but the cheering doesn’t stop. The waves of joy pass through the crowd inside and ripple out into the parking lot, the streets, where people clutch each other, laughing wildly. The mood is jubilant.

  Then the balance shifts. The laughter rises in pitch, higher, out of control, as the human minds that just aren’t built for so much connection begin to tip over into insanity. Some drop to their knees as their brains overload, clawing at their own faces, pulling their hair out by the roots—until the others, sensing the disruption in the hive, descend upon them to eliminate the outliers. The mad grins of the connected stretch wider, their mouths twisting into sneers as they kick and club the limp bodies of the ones who didn’t belong.

  The hive has become a mob.

  The celebration has become a riot.

  The shrieks of laughter become howls, as the night fills with the sound of sirens and shattering glass. The roiling cloud overhead unleashes arc after arc of lightning. A bus explodes in flame, the air growin
g thick with acrid smoke. The mob begins to move as one, pouring through the streets in search of something to destroy.

  And inside, Xal straddles the Inventor’s body and screeches with laughter.

  * * *

  Cameron shudders as Xal breaches the circle, grinning from ear to ear in the harsh white light. Her features are thrown into hideous sharp relief; the skin of Nadia Kapur hangs off her body like a shredded cloak, gray and decaying, barely recognizable as human. The queen of the hive has come prepared, enhanced with stolen gifts from every creature she could lay her hands on. Her body is well over six feet tall, corded with muscle that strains against her skin. Her fingers come to a point where a set of smooth, faintly translucent claws curves out from her nail beds; her lips peel open in four directions to reveal a set of clicking mandibles, the mouth behind crammed with needlelike teeth. Her eyes fall on him, then roll away in two different directions as she blinks with lids that close from side to side. The network of branchlike scars on her face stands out more prominently than ever.

  Cameron struggles to his feet and feels himself immediately forced back down by heavy hands. He looks up to see Juaquo, who gazes down at him emotionlessly, his eyes blank. He’s still wearing the same empty, pleasant smile, and Cameron wonders if his friend is lost forever. He can still feel the echo of Nia’s hand in his, but when he tries to close his eyes, to cross over the threshold of the system to the place he last saw her, he finds no system left to connect to. The internet network that ran through the I-X Center lies in ruins, burned through from the force of Nia’s pulse. But where is she?

  I didn’t let go, Cameron thinks. He’s sure of it.

  The Inventor’s eyelids flutter, and Xal steps forward, grinding her foot against his face as he coughs through blood-spattered lips.

  “Cameron?” he says, weakly. “What—”

  “You pathetic old fool,” Xal spits, leaning in to gaze at him with cold eyes. “Did you think I would make the same mistake as the Elders, putting our future in the hands of your creation? I only needed Nia to open the door, to open their minds to me. I am the tie that binds them, old man. I am the architect of this new world. You destroyed your beloved Nia for nothing.”