The Hive Construct

by Alexander Maskill

  Zala’s eight-year-old code, her father’s final legacy, worked its way deep inside, and changed that last detail.

  The consolidation function began to prune back further and further. It was one change to one function within an emergent system made up of the relationships of its constituent parts. Zala didn’t need to destroy an emergent system. She just needed to change one of its constituent parts and let the effects ripple out across the rest, billions of times a second across billions of interactions.

  Nothing happened, for a moment.

  Her lung filled with a steady breath of air, and her right arm felt around beneath her.

  Zala took a great, victorious gasp, and rolled onto her back, sucking in the musty laboratory air, feeling her chest rise and fall as it should.

  She paused and let the feeling of victory wash over her. The Soucouyant was gone. Everyone was safe.

  The room shook violently with an ear-splitting blast.

  Chapter 32

  29:15.

  29:14.

  29:13.

  Alice stared in horror at the countdown on the INED interface. She twisted back to face Maalik. ‘What’s the passcode to override this thing?!’

  Maalik wiped blood from his face and glared up at her from the floor. ‘We don’t have one. It’s the failsafe. It gets used when there’s no other way to achieve our objectives.’

  Alice lurched forward towards him, but Juri and Anisa held her back. Shaking them off, she glanced back at the countdown on the screen. The elevators were up and running. Twenty-eight minutes.

  ‘You all have three minutes to gather your things,’ she said to the assembled NCLC members in the room. They were ready in one, rucksacks jammed with possessions, and most left as soon as they could. They were going to have to run for their lives.

  As the rest of the NCLC members emptied the building, Maalik regained enough strength to push himself up onto his knees. Nataliya Kaur and Anisa Yu noticed, marched back over to him and kicked him back down. ‘You stay here,’ hissed Anisa.

  She pulled a pistol from her waistband and fired into his leg. Maalik screamed and writhed on the ground, clutching at the shredded flesh around the wound. Those still in the room recoiled in horror.

  A small key fell from his pocket as he squirmed in pain on the floor. It was the key to the bunker that housed the INED terminal. Alice picked it up and pocketed it, unable to look at the wounded old man.

  ‘If you want to save yourself, all you have to do is find some clever way to stop this,’ said Nataliya, standing over Maalik. ‘A disarm code you’re not telling us about, a rerouting of the signal.’

  ‘There’s nothing!’ he yelled, terrified.

  Nataliya kicked at the wound, scowling darkly, and the three women left him behind, sobbing and attempting to crawl pathetically after them. They closed the front door and locked him inside. Outside, a loudspeaker was repeatedly blaring in an automated monotone voice, ‘Please remain calm and make your way to the nearest elevator station for evacuation. Take only small, personal items with you.’ Many people were still inside their homes, looking out apprehensively onto the street below for indication that the evacuation was in fact real, but a steady flow of citizens were beginning to move towards Elevator Station Eighteen.

  Nataliya and Anisa followed the crowd, but Alice stayed rooted to the spot, shaking. Nataliya noticed, ran back and tugged her arm. ‘Come on, we need to go now!’ she urged. Alice slowly shook her head. ‘You go. I’ve got to get to the bunker. There must be some way to stop this thing.’

  ‘Alice, snap out of it,’ Anisa Yu growled. ‘You heard what Maalik said. There’s no point throwing your life away, there’s still shit you need to do. You still have to find your children after all this.’

  ‘They’re with Ryan Granier, supposedly,’ Alice replied numbly, her eyes still wide with shock.

  ‘Then chances are they’re going to be okay. You’re coming with us, and you’re going to be able to reunite with them on the surface.’

  The section of the Naj-Pur district in which the safe house was located was comparatively high up the side of the massive bowl of New Cairo, near the outer limits of the city. Alice turned to look down the road towards the city centre, where, above the oncoming stream of refugees, she could see the distant skyscrapers of the Downtown area. The GeniSec Tower still gleamed under the intense glare of the locked Sol Lamp. It seemed so far away, and the safety of her children was in someone else’s hands. She suddenly dived across to a side-road and started running towards Elevator Station Sixteen. There had to be a way to stop the bombs. There just had to be.

  Before Jacob’s death at the hands of the Security Force, it had always been Alice’s intention to return to active service at some point and she had prided herself on keeping fit, but the force driving her forward, past other fleeing New Cairo citizens and through streets lined with abandoned houses and apartments, was fear. It overrode the ache of her muscles and the nausea in her stomach, and as each second passed, that fear increased. Fear, and a desperate desire to undo what she’d played a part in unleashing on the city. Alice glanced down at her portable terminal.

  4:04.

  4:03.

  4:02.

  She was close now. The buildings were taller, mostly ugly old concrete apartment blocks. The crowds here were fleeing with her, not against her. Vehicles congested the roads, and many had been abandoned in the streets. A solid mass of people jammed the area immediately surrounding the elevator station, with ever more piling up on the streets leading into it. The twelve elevators that Elevator Station Sixteen housed were firing like pistons. Each shuttle could carry three hundred or so passengers, taking maybe three minutes up to the top of the city bowl and back. Alice heard a sudden spike in the panicked screaming from the crowd which she supposed meant empty shuttles had returned and people were getting trampled or worse in the desperation to board. She elbowed her way sideways through the mass of bodies towards the dilapidated restaurant. The front door was ajar, and she raced through to the staircase.

  2:29.

  2:28.

  2:27.

  She pushed the key into the iron door and turned it. The lock gave with a sharp click and the door flew open.

  The INED terminal was flashing red, and evacuation warning transmissions filled the monitors. Scrolling her way through the software’s menus, Alice searched frantically for anything that might stop the explosions, or even delay them, a way to—

  Nothing.

  There was nothing.

  1:34.

  1:33.

  1:32.

  For all its complex sequencing of detonation times and its ability to penetrate and send signals through existing networks, it didn’t have an option for stopping or deferring the explosions once the sequence was activated.

  She tried to shut down the program.

  No luck.

  She tried isolating the terminal completely.

  It ignored her efforts.

  0:45.

  0.44.

  0.43.

  Then she saw it. There were bomb locations on this display which had been hidden from the client program she had been using back at the base. Twenty-one devices Maalik had hidden from her, each one placed in one of the maintenance platforms alongside the twenty-one sets of elevator shafts.

  Alice let out an involuntary whimper.

  Maalik had wanted to destroy all means of escaping the city. Nowhere was safe. The sole chance anyone had of surviving was to be on a shuttle and out before the detonation sequence reached that station’s elevators.

  Crying with terror and frustration, Alice ran out of the bunker and back up the stairs into the restaurant.

  Maalik had cued all three sequences. Anywhere could go up in flames, at any time.

  Alice was back out onto the street. She opened the portable version of the mission coordination program; the security camera network was still functioning, and Alice could see almost everywhere in the city. She needed
to know what was going on. A great blast of fire crashed through the side of the GeniSec Tower, the unearthly rumble reaching Alice right at the edge of the city. Through a grainy camera image, she could see huge panes of nonaglass raining down on the plaza below, and black columns of smoke billowing out. It looked for all the world like something had taken a colossal bite out of the tower; the upper floors tilted to one side as the remaining load-bearing elements of the building strained to hold up the parts now suspended over the gap.

  ‘No!’ she screamed and stared in horror as the building slowly began to warp and bend under its own weight. Whoever was looking after her children had had half an hour to get out of the tower, but the fear that they hadn’t made it in time overwhelmed her.

  Around her, the fleeing citizens screamed, the pushing turning violent and frenzied as they saw their chances lessen of getting onto a shuttle before the bombs detonated in this district. Someone shoved Alice aside and she scrambled to keep from falling. She knew, if she fell, the crowd would trample over her.

  On the other side of the city’s bowl, a second blast ripped through the commercial district of Alexandria.

  Downtown’s largest residential area was levelled by a string of successive explosions.

  The red-light district of Surja erupted in an almighty detonation.

  Alice gaped at the destruction, petrified.

  In the distance, the GeniSec Tower finally folded in on itself and collapsed, falling onto the New Cairo Democratic Council building and completely crushing it.

  The next explosion came from above. Alice looked up. Arrays of panels from the vast solar membrane above the city were plummeting towards the ground. They would land near by. The screaming around her intensified, the crush now to get away from the falling debris almost as much as to reach the elevators. Alice somehow managed to pull off her grimy jumper, held it over her nose and mouth, and crawled under an abandoned truck.

  The crash was of a volume Alice never imagined was possible. The panels must have landed a few streets over, yet the impact was such that she had felt the ground shake. Despite her having clamped her hands over her ears it was still deafening, and as the air filled with dust and rubble she felt herself becoming disorientated. Debris battered the street around her; the truck above protecting her from the full force of the flying wreckage.

  It’s like the end of the world.

  Alice huddled underneath the truck for some time, waiting for the wreckage around her to settle. More explosions reverberated across the city, punctuating the sounds of screams, sobs and cries for help around her. Eventually, the rate of nearby detonations tapered off into an uneasy lull. Alice summoned the resolution to pull herself out from under the now dented and battered truck. If she was going to get out alive, she had to get into Elevator Station Sixteen and up to the surface. It was time to move.

  As she steeled herself to dive into the mad rush for the elevator, her terminal let out a chirp. A new message had arrived.

  >Your children are with me. They’re safe. Get yourself out of the city.

  Ryan Granier.

  Alice felt the relief wash over her. In spite of everything, her children were okay.

  She closed the message window and ran towards the mob surrounding Elevator Station Sixteen. With all her momentum, she plunged into the crowd; almost immediately, she realized this wasn’t going to work. The few people she’d managed to displace began lashing out at her in anger. She reached back to try and block the blows, but more people joined the fray and started pushing, crushing her and her aggressors indiscriminately. She couldn’t move freely, couldn’t breathe. It was all she could do to stand upright. A shift in the pressure jammed her still tighter against her neighbour on the opposite side, and she recognized with horror that he was a corpse: wounded, dying and dead were still being pulled along by the manic, desperate flow of the crowd. The press of bodies was so forceful they couldn’t even fall to be trampled underfoot.

  She moved with the crowd, unable to do anything but stare up at the elevators as they shot up towards the surface at the top of the crater and back down into the station, audibly pounding into the rests at the bottom in a way she’d never heard before. With every passing moment, every new surge for arriving elevators, every scream from someone in the crowd, the red points on the INED map grew more and more pronounced in her mind. How long could it be before Maalik’s sequence worked through?

  Even as the thought crossed her mind, every sensory faculty Alice possessed was overwhelmed by an almighty explosion that ripped through the top of the shuttle elevator shafts in front of her. They crumpled and twisted, thrown away from their moorings, and began to fall towards the earth.

  All around her, she could feel the sudden decompression as those lucky enough to be on the outer fringes of the crowd began to flee away from the station; succeeded immediately by a violent shove as the inner mass of people followed suit. Alice ran with them, fighting her way through every gap in the press she could find, and came out the other side, moving as fast as she could, focused only on getting as far away as possible, away from the screams and the raining wreckage.

  The ground at last stopped shaking, and the crashes began to die down. Alice drew to an exhausted halt.

  Where there had once been a neighbourhood, there was now a glimpse into hell. Bodies were strewn everywhere, crushed by debris or trampled to death. Shocked survivors searched in desperation for those they’d just been standing with. Others attempted to shake life into their fallen loved ones, screaming for them to get up. The air was thick with stinging, choking dust, impossible to breathe without something to act as a makeshift mask. It scratched at Alice’s eyes as she looked up. The entire elevator was gone.

  This realization finally broke through her defences. The station had been destroyed. Her only remaining option was to try to make it to one of the other stations before they too vanished.

  She stumbled forward in a half-daze. Her muscles ached.

  Elevator Station Seventeen can’t be far.

  She remembered that she’d passed it on the way earlier. If only she’d stopped and escaped then, or even gone straight to Station Eighteen with the others. Now she might never see her children again. Tears streaked down her face, leaving tracks through the dust and dirt which now covered her.

  In her half-blind state, she almost walked right into a small figure trapped against a collapsed wall. It was a little girl, maybe a few years younger than Ria, struggling against a fallen steel pylon that had pinned her legs. Alice halted and knelt down beside her.

  ‘Sweetie, you’ve got to stay still, okay? If you move too much, you could hurt yourself even more. Lie still, I’m going to take a look at your legs.’

  The little girl stared up at Alice, confused. ‘Where’s my mum?’

  Alice glanced around. There was no one else there that she could see. Surely her mother wouldn’t have left her daughter behind?

  ‘I don’t know where she is, but right now we need to get you help,’ she soothed.

  Alice took her jumper and wrapped it tight around the girl’s legs. She knew that if her limbs were completely crushed it was as good a tourniquet as the girl was going to get. Looking closely, she realized that the girl’s legs appeared to be silver underneath their skin.

  ‘Are those bio-augs?’ she asked.

  The girl nodded. ‘They only just started working again, too.’

  It took a moment for Alice to understand what she meant. ‘You … had the Soucouyant virus?’

  ‘Yes, but then it went away.’

  Alice felt nauseous. After all that they’d gone through, if they’d just waited, the Soucouyant would have healed itself.

  ‘What’s your name?’ asked Alice.

  ‘Tinashe,’ said the little girl, her voice shaking. ‘What’s yours?’

  ‘Alice,’ she replied.

  Tentatively, Alice tested the weight of the pylon. It was far too heavy for her to lift. If she couldn’t move it, the girl
was going to die here, pinned down as the city exploded around her. And if Alice wanted to get out of the city alive, she would have to leave Tinashe to her fate.

  Off to her right, a street of houses erupted, flinging more debris into the air. The young girl cried out in fear, tears streaming down her face.

  Not so long ago, you called all this ‘power’, said a small voice in the back of her mind.

  From somewhere above came a great rumbling, like thunder. At the top of the wrecked elevator shaft, the wall of the crater in which the city sat had begun to crack, and the apparatus holding up a cluster of solar panel arrays was pulling away from its moorings. Alice looked down at Tinashe, trying not to show the panic she felt. The cluster started to collapse, sending a great ripple through the solar membrane. Huge groups of panels shuddered precariously.

  Alice watched in horror as an enormous block of panels just above their heads broke away and began to fall.

  Three months ago had been her thirty-fifth birthday. She had spent the day with her family. Her daughter had, for the first time, paid for a present for her mother herself – a big box of chocolates – and Jacob had taken her to a beautiful restaurant and then to a hotel, where they had spent the night making love. She had been happy. It was so long now since she’d been happy.

  The girl sobbed. Alice crouched down and held the small figure tight, shielding her from above. ‘Don’t look up, Tinashe. Just close your eyes and think of your mummy and daddy, and how much they love you.’

  Tinashe hugged her back tightly. ‘Where are they? I want to see them,’ she cried.

  ‘You’ll see them soon,’ said Alice, ‘everything’s going to be fine.’ She tried not to let the girl hear her choke back a sob.

  She thought of Ria and Zeno. She thought of Jacob. In the end, she let herself believe that this had all been for them.

  Chapter 33

  ‘FINE. HAVE YOUR desert. I hope it fucking swallows you.’

  Ryan ended the video call to NCLC leader Alice Amirmoez, disgusted. In the shadow of the GeniSec Tower, the rioting crowds below were already fleeing; the SecForce troops too, leaving arrested protestors bound and helpless on the street. Ryan wanted to scream at them.