The Hive Construct

by Alexander Maskill

  The remaining SecForce troops rallied and began to move towards the shop, weapons raised. Through the splintered wood and mist of shredded clothing, they saw nothing but an empty storefront. Had the glass remained, it would have shown the reflection of Maalik Moushian and his combat unit as they emerged from the road opposite and lined them up in their sights. Their Mark 72 machine guns unleashed a blaze of fire against the SecForce troops, and by the time their ammunition feeds ran dry, not a single one was still standing.

  Alice took a deep breath, and issued the order to start finding wounded to take hostage. She watched as the NCLC’s success emboldened others to stop running. The NCLC had picked just the right moment to strike; any longer and people would have yielded to the SecForce troops. As they inched forward, Alice sent a command to Maalik. He stepped away from the rest of his squad and yelled to the rioters. He shouted to them that the SecForce were there to kill them all, that they would be gunned down unless they fought back. He told them that the Alexandria-born maggots in the GeniSec Tower and the Council building wanted them obedient or dead. That they needed to fight back, they needed to protect each other from the demons who wanted to kill them. Every word he used was carefully crafted to project onto the blank SecForce helmets whatever image Maalik wanted the rioters to have in mind, anything but the recognition that the people behind those visors were flesh and blood and soul, just like them. Some part of Alice twisted with disgust, deep inside her, but she put it out of her mind and let his words wash over her. The NCLC had to win. The crowd had to be convinced that the SecForce troops wanted nothing more than to exterminate them all. Maalik would make them cockroaches one minute and ravenous demons the next, and the rioters listened. The man was very good at what he did, and seemed to take pleasure in its results.

  A call from Pratima popped up in the corner of the monitor. Alice opened it up.

  ‘Kahleed’s dying, Alice.’

  Alice sat very still for a moment, and then said, ‘Are you at the safe house?’

  ‘I’m outside it. They took Kahleed in. They refused at first, and they wouldn’t let any of the rest of us inside. They were watching on the TV, they said the riots are lost already and that the NCLC was done. Is that true?’

  The young woman’s trembling voice reminded her of Ria. Ria had been in the room during the news of the first riots. She’d been scared they were going to destroy her home, or hurt her family, though she’d pretended not to be. All at once Alice felt lost, like some part of her was missing. There were hundreds of NCLC operatives who needed her to keep a clear head and all she could think of was her children, the only family she had left that she loved. The knowledge left a bitter aftertaste.

  ‘It’s not over yet,’ she said. ‘They’ve got a perimeter up with most of the crowd still in the middle. There’s maybe forty thousand civilians still in there, and a further forty thousand or so rioting elsewhere in the city. A lot of them are armed. And we’ve still got our people working on getting into the Council building. It’s going to be fine.’

  Alice ended the call, hoping she was right. She called Maalik. ‘They’re saying on the news that we’re losing it.’

  ‘They would. They’ve already got the poor trying to flee the city, do you really think they want the rich going too?’ Gunfire spat harshly over the call, first distant and then closer. She heard the stutter of Maalik’s weapon as he returned fire, and then his breathless voice. ‘If we can keep this up, they’ll let us out just to be rid of us!’

  His jovial tone was disquieting to Alice. She had a creeping feeling she was enjoying the mayhem as much as he was, and that realization appalled her.

  ‘Maalik … we’re doing the right thing, aren’t we?’

  ‘Alice, when you’re on the side that’s kicking the asses that need to be kicked, I don’t see how you can be doing the wrong thing.’

  Alice digested his words, but her ill-ease persisted. Her hands shook in her lap. ‘Are we going to have to at least prepare the failsafe?’

  On the terminal monitor in front of her, she could see that Maalik was at this point leading a large group of shoddily armed civilians, maybe as many as a hundred, to survey the GeniSec Tower for weakness. To the credit of its architects, the GeniSec Tower was all but impregnable. The same could be said for the Council building. The brute force approach would have to rely on luck, if it were going to succeed. Someone, somewhere, in the Council building would know where her children were.

  She couldn’t stop thinking of how scared Ria had sounded before. The subtle trembles and undulations of her voice as she thought of her home and her family being taken from her. She had sounded the way Alice had felt when she’d first entered that NCLC base beneath the unused factory, since she’d first seen the body that had been Jacob. It felt like the ground was giving way beneath her, as if everything was irreparably falling apart.

  The NCLC had the failsafe. They could get their people back. They could get away from the city. Her family could have a normal life, together. Everything could be good again. That was all Alice wanted in the world.

  ‘Yeah, prepare the failsafe,’ interrupted Maalik. ‘If nothing else, a weapon you don’t want to have to use is much more potent when it’s ready to be used.’

  Alice looked up at the monitor, at the spreading mob. The crowd spiralled and sprang like wildfire from place to place. She felt strangely detached; yet the closer she looked, the more fascinated she became. The movements seemed to start with one person going in a particular direction. Others noticed, and followed. They fed off each other’s encouragement and trepidation, a mass which moved as one despite having no real codified leader. Even the NCLC operatives who weren’t executing formal orders found themselves lost in this mass of movement. It was working; a civilian population was holding trained soldiers at bay, working in unison without any formal or technological coordination, through a system of constant behavioural feedback. It reminded her of worker bees constructing a hive.

  ‘Juri, load up the failsafe interface,’ she said. ‘We’ve got them on the back foot. We might be able to end this today.’

  Juri sent a call through to the bunker Maalik had shown Alice, in the depths of Naj-Pur, where the massive console which controlled the network of bombs around the city was located. Tal Surdar picked up on the other end. ‘Is it time?’

  ‘Yep,’ she replied, ‘bring out the big guns.’

  ‘They need to pay, Juri.’ His voice sounded hoarse through Alice’s headset, his teeth audibly clenched.

  A control panel for the In-Network Explosive Devices popped up on a sidebar of Alice’s monitor. It was a three-dimensional wireframe image of the city, with the locations of the INEDs represented by little white dots. Maalik had already uploaded several detonation sequences, each related to a different contingency plan. Alice looked up and down the list before picking one.

  ‘Tal,’ said Alice, joining the call, ‘you can come back now. You’re done.’

  ‘I’m going to go help out in the city centre,’ he snapped.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, you’re on the wrong side of the blockade, you’ll get yourself killed.’

  ‘They might have killed the man I love and you’re telling me to come hide with you? I can’t do that, Alice! I need to—’

  ‘Shut up, Tal. For god’s sake, it wasn’t ten hours ago that you were chewing out Kahleed for hurting people simply because he was angry.’ Alice’s voice came out wearier and yet more forceful than she’d expected. ‘Do you want to be like Maalik, killing anyone in a uniform because he doesn’t know who shot his kid? Revenge on everyone and no one sounds good to you? Get back here, wait for Kahleed to get the all-clear, and thank me later.’

  ‘… I’ll start back now.’

  Alice closed down the call. She looked up to see Juri looking over at her, eyebrow raised.

  On the screens, the riot was still occupying the SecForce troops. The SecForce unit which had retaken the Rehabilitation Facility had been driven back,
and the imprisoned NCLC personnel freed. The Council building and GeniSec Tower were still being probed for weakness by a roving mob of rioters. Here, the SecForce troops had been pushed far back from the buildings themselves.

  Her children were still out there somewhere. She’d find someone who knew where they were, or she’d call up the Council and threaten them with the INEDs until they handed them over. They’d get away from this city, they’d make a new life. They’d gain some semblance of stability back. The NCLC would eventually be victorious, and Alice knew deep in the pit of her gut that violence might not be her end but, if it had to be, it would be her means.

  Chapter 27

  ZALA DOUBLED OVER, coughing and sucking in deep breaths. Around her stood the office workers, staring down at her in concern. One of the men walked over to her. ‘Who are you?’

  She looked up at him. Colour-altered skin, like the way Europeans used to look back in the Age of Nations, probably some superficial attempt at blending in around the politicians. Late thirties, slightly overweight, receding hairline. Probably a civil servant; he wasn’t dressed in the attire of a councillor. He didn’t seem like a threat even if he did figure out who she was, but a lie would save everyone time and energy.

  ‘I’m one of the IT team. I was just heading out on an errand and got caught in the crowd,’ gasped Zala, straining to push herself upright.

  ‘You look like—’

  ‘Are you saying I look like a rioter?’ she said, stepping towards him. ‘Is it because I’m not colour-altered like you? We’re all revolutionaries now, are we?’ She jabbed him in the chest with a finger, looking him straight in the eye. ‘If I’m good enough to sort your systems out so you can do your busywork, I’m good enough to not be accused of tearing the city apart, okay?’

  The man stammered out an apology and let her past.

  ‘So, where’s a way out of here?’

  A woman behind him in a dark blue dress stepped forward. ‘What did you say your name was?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ said Zala, ‘but it’s Nancy. So what’s the plan?’

  The others looked at one another. ‘We’ve just been trying to wait all this out,’ said the woman in blue, ‘but I have a family I need to get home to. So I thought maybe I could run for it.’

  Zala raised an eyebrow. ‘You think you can outrun a crowd of angry people with weapons—’ she looked down, ‘—in heels?’

  ‘I … I just thought—’

  ‘Put your plans on hold, ma’am, it’s horrible out there. We’re talking a big armed mob. And they all want to get in here. They won’t kill you, probably, but they will trample you to be the one to take the Council building. How secure is this place?’

  ‘It’s built to keep a continent’s worth of private and public records and intelligence. When it’s locked down, it’s impregnable,’ said the balding man.

  Zala had spent too long breaking into things to believe that. ‘Everything’s impregnable until someone gets in,’ she said. ‘Are there any places within the building that are more secure? We need a proper hiding place.’

  ‘We’ve got a full operational council building’s worth of people stuck in here, Nancy. Hiding places will be taken by now.’

  One of the other office workers, a nervous-looking young man, stepped forward. ‘There’s always the tunnel.’

  The balding man scoffed. ‘Do you have clearance for the tunnel, Navid?’

  Navid pointed at Zala. ‘IT watches over the locks. She can get us in.’

  Zala felt eyes on her. She could probably get in, yes, but it would be hard to make it look legitimate.

  The door behind them began to rattle and shake as people on the outside pounded on it heavily. The sound of a gunshot, and a bullet cracking against the metal followed soon after. Zala nodded to Navid. ‘Lead the way.’

  The young man led them further into the building. The power hadn’t been cut, but no lights were on, as workers cowering in locked offices tried their hardest to make it look like they weren’t in. Every so often, a burst of panicked whispers came from an adjacent room, startling the members of Zala’s party. They followed Navid along dark corridors until eventually they reached a stairwell. His portable terminal projected a beam of light to illuminate the way down.

  As they descended, Zala’s own terminal buzzed. It was a message from Polina. Zala couldn’t bring herself to open it. She didn’t want to read about how she’d lost the only person in this city who gave a damn about her.

  They reached the bottom of the stairs and in front of them was a large steel door marked ‘Maintenance’.

  ‘That’s it?’ remarked Zala.

  ‘No, trust me, it’s the tunnel! I once saw Tau Granier coming out of it when I was still an intern!’

  Zala shrugged and examined the lock. It wasn’t looking good. The lock itself consisted of a series of biometric scans. She hooked it up to her terminal and found that connecting to its registry of accepted scans involved a digital certificate she didn’t have. Cursing under her breath, she ran a number of programs to try to get around this, but the locking mechanism remained firmly shut. The people behind her began to grow restless. They’d guess, any moment now, Zala thought. They already suspected her. They’d proba—

  The door clunked open. Zala’s terminal vibrated.

  From: ANANSI (EIP: ----.-.------.-------.---.-----.----.-------)

  >Open sesame. Go on through to the GeniSec Tower.

  Zala’s first thought was that anywhere ANANSI wanted her to go was best avoided. ‘We need to go back,’ she said, turning around. The others looked at her as though she were mad.

  Somewhere above them there were crashing noises. Zala looked up, alarmed.

  Are they in?

  ‘Okay, forget that, in we go!’ she said. The office workers didn’t need telling twice. They piled in after her, and the door slammed shut behind them. Lights flickered on, illuminating a long hallway. Somewhere, dozens of feet above, the city was tearing itself apart, but down here it seemed they were safe.

  As they made their way down the tunnel Zala looked around her. It didn’t seem to simply be a tunnel going from one building to another – at what must be around the halfway point another route led off to the left. A sign glowed overhead, reading ‘To Elevator Station Seven’.

  ‘That’s not going to do us any good unless they turn the elevators back on for some reason,’ noted Navid as they hurried past.

  Zala shrugged. ‘We’ll do fine here. It won’t be easy but we can wait out the riots. Did everyone eat recently?’ The others nodded. Zala’s last meal had been prison cafeteria slop, but it would keep her going. The group stopped in the middle of the tunnel and tried to make themselves comfortable, then busied themselves on their terminals.

  They must all have families who’re worried about them, Zala thought. She considered opening Polina’s message, but was still too scared. Instead, she sat there, browsing news sites to find out what was going on above.

  Her terminal beeped again. A message had appeared.

  From: ANANSI (EIP: ----.-.------.-------.---.-----.----.-------)

  >Go through to the GeniSec Tower.

  >Oh fuck you, she wrote, why the hell would I want to help you?

  >I have access to all you could wish to know about this city. Maybe I can help you with what you’re looking for.

  >Fuck. You. The last time you promised you could help me I ended up in prison just so you could show me how creatively you could screw me over. I’m not playing your games. If you need me that bad, then I’m happy refusing to help you just out of spite. Oh, and if you’re responsible for the Soucouyant virus like you’re implying, then the death of one of my best friends and the thousands of people getting hurt or killed up there is also your fault, so fuck you for those too.

  Zala was aware that she was cursing out what was essentially a complex arrangement of ones and zeroes, but at that moment it was the most fulfilling thing in the world.

  >If those people mat
ter to you so much, then know that there are 1,833,798 people in New Cairo whose lives depend on bio-augs, and I have control over all of them. The only thing stopping me ending their lives is the fact that I have not yet deemed it pertinent to do so. These include your friend Matsuda Oba. I will give you ten minutes, and if you have not agreed to assist me, I will kill 1,000 of them every further minute.

  Zala was through the door into the GeniSec Tower before the office workers even knew she was gone.

  The difference between a government building and the centrepiece of a global corporate empire was immediate from the moment Zala entered GeniSec HQ. In contrast to the muted colour scheme of the Council building’s administrative wing, the GeniSec building was all stylish, minimalist design even to its lowest floor.

  From: ANANSI (EIP: ----.-.------.-------.---.-----.----.-------)

  >Up the stairs. And do it quickly. I’m intercepting what appears to be a connection from the NCLC to an In-Network Explosive Device terminal.

  >WHAT?

  Zala gawped at her screen. A properly coordinated INED network would destroy New Cairo. She thought back to newscast footage she had seen as a child, of colossal explosions obliterating entire cities. She could remember her father’s despairing observation that, with an INED, people had killed tens of thousands in the exact same way he compiled program code. If the NCLC were preparing to use such an arsenal of explosives, there would be no way that the GeniSec Tower would not be a target, and that put her – and all in the tower – in immediate danger. The faster she got this done, the faster she could get to safety. She sprinted up the steps.

  >I am impressed, came the message from ANANSI.

  >I’ve been climbing stairs for a little while now but I didn’t think I was noteworthy, she replied, fingers clumsily tapping against the holographic keyboard as she strode, still enjoying the admittedly pointless bitterness.