The Hive Construct

by Alexander Maskill

  ‘All right, Dad it is. The police are currently investigating the Banach-Tarski Corporation under suspicion of funding the NCLC.’

  Tau Granier’s brow furrowed. ‘You can’t be serious … they were actually working together?’

  ‘The NCLC’s main money launderer is willing to testify, and give extensive and compelling evidence. He knows every dirty detail. Whether they’ll be convicted is another question entirely, but that’s something at least.’

  Ryan had expected relief, but instead his father shook his head and scowled. ‘Those bastards. The NCLC I can understand. They’re scared and they feel powerless. They’re just trying to protect themselves. But profiteering from the breakdown of this city, from the deaths of police officers and civilians?’

  ‘Apparently so.’

  Tau Granier grimaced. The information relayed, Ryan tried to change the subject. ‘Did you hear? They arrested that Zala Ulora woman.’

  Tau Granier nodded. ‘I did, yes. I heard an interesting new piece of information too.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  Tau Granier smiled. ‘Our anti-augmentation killer has bio-augs now.’

  ‘If she is the one who wrote the Soucouyant virus, she must be kicking herself.’

  Tau Granier’s smile slipped a little. ‘From what we can tell of the logs coming in and out of the city, the virus had taken hold long before she arrived here.’

  Ryan took this in slowly. ‘So she’s not the source of it? Why haven’t I heard this before now?’

  ‘The people in this city need reassurance right now, more than anything,’ said Tau Granier. ‘They’re scared and they’re killing one another. If people believe we’re close to a cure and that goes some way towards quelling the violence, it’s worth it.’

  Something clicked in Ryan’s mind.

  ‘Oh come on. People need to know that their lives are still at risk. You can’t just lie to them all and hope they do what you want them to; it’s only going to backfire. That kind of bullshit paternalism is half the reason the NCLC are fighting against us.’

  ‘I hated the Council. I hated the fact that people like me or my cousin, the most vulnerable kinds of people in this city, were considered necessary sacrifices, rather than people with a right to decide what to do for ourselves.’ That was what she said.

  Tau Granier snorted. ‘I’ve seen too many elections decided by fear and anger to be that optimistic, Ryan. When you’re making tough decisions, you can’t allow for everyone’s point of view to be equally valid. If no one gets hurt, nothing gets done. We shut off those elevators for a reason: to limit the damage that the myopia and fear in this city can do. If we leave them to their own devices, people will carry the virus out with them. The rest of the world will go the same way we’re going.’

  ‘Look, at the very least, if you’re going to allow people to think you’ve got the probable culprit, then book a press conference and announce that the curfew in the high-infection areas is being called off,’ said Ryan, as calmly as he could. ‘Throw them a bone and make it look like you did it because you’ve won a victory, not because they have.’

  Tau Granier thought for a moment. ‘There’s merit in that, yes. It vindicates the curfew if we say it was about stopping Ulora moving around, it’ll ease some of the tension. I’ll talk to some people about it.’

  Ryan let out a sigh of relief.

  ‘Did you recognize her name?’

  Ryan nodded. ‘Her father was the lead on the IntuitivAI project, wasn’t he?’

  Tau Granier sat back in his seat, seeming more relaxed now. His large frame settled into the chair as he spoke. ‘Kweku Ulora was the most gifted, intelligent man I ever met. An eccentric, sure, but once you saw how he worked you realized that he always had things the way he needed them to be.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘They found a hidden folder on his computer, with a single little piece of code in it. Whatever it was, it was in the same coding language that he invented for the IntuitivAI system. No one knew the whole of that system at the time but him, so we didn’t know what it was.’ The High Councillor stroked his greying beard, his eyes twinkling as he remembered. ‘The main concern we had was that it was a simplified version of the larger program, which he intended to hide from us. He was a secretive man and we’d sunk hundreds of millions into this technology. Someone expressed a fear that he was using our resources to make the program, and then keeping a better version to sell to someone else without the development costs. From there, our concerns escalated. Then, he stopped coming into work. He hid somewhere in the city, but we didn’t know where. So we tried to flush him out.’

  Ryan scowled, confused. ‘Where does his daughter come into this?’

  ‘She came up as the solution,’ Tau said. ‘Around that time, three people were found dead in an abandoned house in Naj-Pur. They were undoubtedly gang deaths – Naj-Pur was getting better and the territory and clientele for the gangs was shrinking, which ended up making them more vicious. We had notes from a therapist telling us that Zala Ulora had a substantial fear of bio-augs and it just so happened that these three bodies were heavily augmented. So we reached out to the police and—’

  ‘No. No way did you—’ Ryan struggled for words. ‘You framed an eighteen-year-old girl for murder?’

  ‘It was a poor case, there was no way she would have been convicted, not if she’d been arrested. It was a way to scare Kweku out of running or hiding.’

  Ryan felt an intense revulsion at the thought. He looked aghast at his father.

  ‘Anyway, Kweku must have known we’d found out. They fled – we still don’t know how they got out of the city – and we were left waiting for them to come back. Old Kweku ended up having a stroke in Addis Ababa and died. At some point Zala returned and it turns out that, if she wasn’t before, in the intervening years she’s become a thief and a high-level cybercriminal, so now she actually does need arresting. She’s the one that broke into the Five Prongs, the one that trashed one of our development houses over in Falkur. She pointed the NCLC towards GeniSec as being the source of the Soucouyant.’

  ‘Well, what do you expect?’ Ryan’s fists were clenched tight. ‘She couldn’t get a job or proper qualifications. You framed her for multiple murders over a piece of unidentified computer code!’

  ‘Our actions were—’ Tau began, but Ryan cut him off.

  ‘That girl is in prison because of you. You ruined her life and drove her to desperation. Now you’re going to imprison her and accuse her of mass murder?’

  ‘It’s just one girl!’ yelled Tau Granier, almost on his feet. ‘Of all the millions of people in this city, all the people who depended on us, who depend on us now, we deemed it necessary – yes, necessary! – to use this one girl. GeniSec poured everything into that project, everything we had! Everything we have came from it and that includes everything you have! You think you’d be sitting here, Councillor, in your mansion, enjoying the privilege you’ve been afforded if Kweku Ulora had sold our product to some other company, if our investment in his work had gained us nothing? GeniSec could have gone under entirely! You think you could have afforded to swan your way through life on the back of my reputation, going through an election campaign I paid for and taking your seat in the Council like it was yours all along, if I’d gone bankrupt? And the technology! The first technology that could genuinely be called artificial intelligence, and we made it. It powers surgical apparatus which has saved millions of lives, it runs entire cities! It sits in the canon of the most revolutionary technologies there have ever been! How could we risk that? Yes, for my family, for the families of everybody who works for our company and for everyone who has ever benefited from that program, I ruined things for one little girl. I had no idea it would go this far, but yes, I am responsible. But don’t you dare talk to me as though you, and everyone else in this city, haven’t reaped the benefits of those actions too.’

  Ryan glared at his father, unable to speak. High Counc
illor Tau Granier stood up and left without another word.

  Chapter 24

  ALICE FELT COLD as she lay inside a sleeping bag on the floor of an apartment in the building the NCLC had taken over. She felt cold and sick. Ria and Zeno’s faces drifted across her mental vision, then faded. Serhiy’s face, so full of guilt, followed after them.

  You need to be strong, said a voice in her head. It’s the only way to get them back.

  The voice, oddly, was her mentor from her days in the Security Force, Corporal Seyton Vinter. She could remember when she’d heard him say it. After years as one of the operators, she had become the lead coordinator for her district’s major operations. Her second mission was a personnel retrieval attempt – three Security Force officers had found themselves on the wrong side of one of the larger gangs in Naj-Pur and were pinned down inside a warehouse that was being used to manufacture the illegal narcotic Poly. Alice’s career depended on her being able to handle missions like this but she had never felt less able to do so.

  Her hands had shaken the keyboard. She knew her voice was trembling, but hadn’t been able to make it stop. Around her, the others sent in their information feeds, all there to inform her tactics. The Security Force troops on the ground were waiting for her guidance. Reinforcements were on their way, for her to lead as well. It had all waited on her. She knew what to do. And yet Alice had felt paralysed.

  A familiar voice said behind her, ‘Officer Amirmoez, is something wrong?’

  ‘I … I’m just preparing myself, sir.’

  ‘You’d better be on good form, Officer. Those personnel down there, getting shot at, they’re part of the family and they need to get home safe.’

  ‘I understand, sir.’

  His hand rested on her shoulder. ‘They’re trapped, and they’re scared. They have children waiting for them to come back home, and they can’t get there without you. You have the power, if you have the strength to use it. You need to be strong. It’s the only way to get them back.’

  Whenever she remembered those words, Ria and Zeno’s faces became most vivid in her mind.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Kahleed enter the room. He strode straight over to where she lay. ‘Something happened last night. You need to see this,’ he said.

  ‘What time is it?’

  Kahleed looked at his terminal. ‘Six a.m. Perfect time to start.’

  Alice slid out of her sleeping bag, got groggily to her feet and followed Kahleed into the next room. A newscast was up on a large holographic monitor, depicting an old man with deep bags under his eyes and a listless air, standing at a podium. It took Alice a moment to realize that this old man was High Councillor Tau Granier. She wondered if he was sick.

  Juri pressed Play. On the monitor, Tau Granier read out a prepared statement, his usual bombast entirely absent. ‘As many of you know, this morning we arrested Zala Ulora. We believe her to be the criminal mastermind behind the Soucouyant virus. Now we have her in custody. In view of this, the Council has decided to repeal some of the more recent security measures. Effective immediately, the curfew in high-infection areas is being rescinded.’

  The clip stopped. Alice looked at Kahleed. ‘Are they serious?’

  ‘Like I said, this was yesterday. There were police around in Naj-Pur last night but by all accounts the curfew wasn’t enforced at all, they were just keeping watch.’

  Tal, who was sitting next to Kahleed, looked excited. ‘This is great! Maybe we’re winning!’

  ‘It’s a pain in the arse,’ said Alice. ‘If people think things are going to go back to the way they were, we won’t get the riot numbers we were hoping for.’ The words sounded strange the moment she said them.

  Kahleed shook his head. ‘Closing down the elevators and putting the quarantine in place caused enough bad blood. This won’t cancel out the ill will towards the Council. People will still show up in their droves.’

  Tal looked at them, appalled. ‘But why do we need the riot if the things we’re rioting to achieve are happening anyway?’

  ‘We need to make noise—’ Alice began to explain.

  Tal shook his head, more and more disdain creeping into his expression with every passing syllable. ‘No, no, this is bullshit. You call it “making noise” but you’re killing police. I didn’t get into this to kill police.’

  ‘This isn’t about killing police,’ said Kahleed, resting a hand on Tal’s shoulder. He batted it away.

  ‘Isn’t it? I don’t know any more! You go on about how it’s a civil rights issue and then you take advice from fucking Maalik, where every authority figure in this city is the asshole cop who shot his son, and I don’t know what you want out of this any more! Hurting people you hate out of spite isn’t a fucking political position, Kahleed!’

  Alice got herself between the two of them before Kahleed made good on his glare and punched Tal in the face. ‘We need this riot because we’re going to get our people out of the prison and we need a diversion,’ she explained.

  Tal looked at her. He took a deep breath and, with an uneasy look on his face, said, ‘Okay, sure. I’ll fight for that.’ With that, he stood up and walked out of the room.

  Kahleed’s gaze followed him. ‘The violence is getting to him.’

  ‘So he doesn’t have the stomach for it. It’s still the best tool we’ve got for defending ourselves. He’s not wrong, there’s people working for us who just want to hurt anyone they have a problem with. But that gets them working for us.’

  ‘I know,’ said Kahleed. ‘I just … it needs to be our means and not our end.’

  ‘As long as you know that, it can only get so bad.’

  Kahleed nodded. ‘What about you? You’ve been acting differently. You sound more like one of us these days.’

  ‘That’s a bad thing?’ asked Alice.

  ‘It just seems like something’s not right.’ Kahleed turned towards her and looked her in the eyes. ‘You’ve gone through a lot, is all. Civilian to widowed refugee’s a scary move. I’m not surprised you’ve taken to fighting back. You went through in microcosm what some of us in the poor areas have learned about the powers that be in this city over the course of our entire lives. Hell, our entire situation has escalated so much. But we need you to keep your head on straight. We’re not just here to destroy things.’

  ‘I’m trying not to make this about the violence,’ said Alice. Neither of them made any mention of the In-Network Explosive Devices Maalik had shown her, all the way over by Elevator Station Sixteen.

  Alice’s terminal screen was lit up like a Christmas tree. The streets of Downtown were filled with tens of thousands of protestors, all yelling and chanting. It was lucky that the GeniSec Tower, the New Cairo Democratic Council building and the New Cairo Council Rehabilitation Facility were so close together that a protest against one could be a protest against all. The story was that when Tau Granier’s father had been planning the GeniSec Tower he had harboured unrealized political aspirations, and therefore had built them as near to each other as possible; his son had been able to take advantage of the convenience when he had been elected to office. This practicality had inevitably led to the plaza becoming the unwitting symbol of the city’s inextricably intertwined corporate and political worlds.

  The sheer numbers of demonstrators proved Alice’s earlier fears to be unfounded. A morning’s frantic public relations activity had allowed the NCLC to reframe the previous day’s concession by Councillor Granier as a cynical attempt to buy them off before the real oppression began. This was a tactic which the people of Naj-Pur and Surja were, of course, too smart to be convinced by. That the demonstration was at the very least supported by the NCLC was an open secret, but cracking down on the very public protest would only further their cause. SecForce and the police attempted to partition the crowd, and for the first few thousand, it worked, but within a half-hour the entire area surrounding the New Cairo Democratic Council building was blocked off, clogged by legions of the angry and th
e dispossessed. For another hour they chanted, and obstructed anyone not taking part. Politicians kept trying to give speeches from behind the barriers outside the Council building, but were yelled down by the crowd, determined not to let them co-opt their demonstration into a political rally.

  The demonstration was also the largest single assembly of active NCLC members the organization had ever seen. Most were scattered through the crowd. Each had a camera clipped somewhere on their person that kept Alice informed about what was happening on the ground. Juri had reassembled her security camera network, spreading it well beyond its original borders, and fed the video feeds in to Alice’s monitor as well. Frustratingly, the security systems inside the buildings weren’t linked to any outside network, hiding those within from the NCLC’s sight. Intelligence suggested that both Ryan and Tau Granier were trapped inside the buildings, unable or unwilling to come out and face the baying crowd, but no one knew for certain. Precisely which building each Granier might be in differed with each telling, but all the security footage Juri could get seemed to confirm that both were in the area. There had always been rumours suggesting that there were passageways under the road between the Council building and the corporate towers, though whether that was a credible factor to come into play here and not just a colourful metaphor was another question.

  ‘Is everyone about ready?’ said Alice, into her headset. One by one, each unit of operatives gave an affirmative response. She muted her headset and spun her chair round to face the rest of the room. ‘People are still filtering in. Some will leave when things kick off, but many more will join in once the crowd moves to the commercial district and the looting starts. I think we give it another ten minutes and then we begin.’

  Alice stood up and walked back into the kitchen to make herself something to eat. Once the operation began, she might be at that console for eight hours or more. As she piled slices of ration-grade meat onto bread for a sandwich, she heard Juri come up behind her. ‘Are you okay?’ she said, in an oddly quiet voice.