The Hive

by Barry Lyga

  “Girl,” Cassie hissed, “lay off.” It was nicer than fuck off but still got the point across.

  “That group isn’t going to do you any favors,” Sarah warned.

  A wave of anger crested inside Cassie, an unconscious backlash to the sympathy, the pity, that was blooming in her stomach at the sight of Sarah. Little, loud Sarah. At first she’d seemed so empathetic, but now Cassie saw the truth — she was just needy, thirsting for acceptance with a mania that bordered on tragic.

  Cassie had needed someone, once. Look at what it did to you. You got greedy in your need for connection, for love. And then you were screwed when that person was gone.

  Not her. Not anymore.

  “You need to be around peers,” Sarah was saying. “And I mean people who get you, who get what you’re going through. My group —”

  “I don’t know, Sarah,” Cassie snapped. And then she forced herself to take a deep breath. “I don’t know, Sarah,” she said again, this time in a calmer tone.

  It’s not her fault that she’s desperate, Cassie reminded herself. Neither of us asked for this today.

  The old Cassie would have been on Sarah’s side, without a doubt. Always protect the underdog. Always use the Harlon McKinney uppercut.

  But Rowan, Indira, Madison and Livvy had been right about one thing: this wasn’t the real world. This was just high school. More to the point, it was her last year in a place where she owed no one anything at all.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” she lied to Sarah, and as soon as Sarah made her way down the hall, Cassie tapped her earbud. “Text Rowan: I’m in.”

  10010400101

  How many times, Rachel mused, had she considered quitting today?

  She slammed her water bottle down on the table at the front of the empty lecture hall. She counted back: at least six distinct times, and she still had one more class to go before her day was done. “Ha!” She barked a laugh out loud. “Six times!”

  Soon, the room wouldn’t be empty, though it wouldn’t be full, either. It would likely never be full again. She had never wavered in her commitment to teaching classics, even when it had fallen out of favor as a course of study. But sometime in the past ten years, college administrations, wooed by fancy funders from the technology space, had begun to question the use of teaching the literature and languages and philosophies of ancient cultures; the students didn’t want it, and they were telling their parents, who footed the bills. So far, most of the parents disagreed, and fortunately Latin had seen something of a resurgence, thanks to Lorem, a popular technology that used the supposedly “dead” language to leverage a truly byzantine encryption scheme that was beyond her capacity to understand.

  She began every 101 class with the same statement: “History isn’t dead! It’s very much alive … and it is watching you. Leering at you. Every second, every minute of the day!” While the lecture room awaited its guests — about forty kids, as it turned out MS/BFU was one of the few remaining institutions that made classics mandatory for all students — she rehearsed it again, this time with feeling.

  Five minutes later, it looked like all forty students had arrived, and Rachel was waging an invisible war against the hornet’s nest that had landed in her stomach. Impulsively, she tossed aside the attendance list and the syllabus. They could wait.

  “I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking history is more or less bunk, in the words of Henry Ford, that pioneer of American innovation and disruption. But Ford actually meant that history was bunk to him. That he personally had little use for it. And I should also point out that Ford was tremendously undereducated, despite his successes.

  “History isn’t bunk. History is what we are doomed to repeat if we forget it, to paraphrase Santayana, and we do repeat it. Over and over. History is happening all around you, right now. Anytime someone is lambasted in the press without a trial, there are the Romans, feeding victims to the lions for sport. For fun. To remind everyone how strong they need to be under Caesar. There are enemies at the gates, and all members of society must come watch the games to become knowledgeable in the ways of war.” Rachel paused, taking a breath, and smiled wearily. “And there’s the rub. We like to look back smugly and think how foolish they were, killing each other for sport, but it wasn’t merely sport. It was education. Are they the barbarians or are we, who kill each other daily in the media and online, with no lesson taken away for all that violence?”

  Rachel shook her head in annoyance and continued her speech on autopilot as she thought about the circularity of it all. If only she could really teach the classics the way they deserved to be taught … maybe then her students would get it, and things in the world would go back to some semblance of normal. But it was too late, she feared. Academics and technology had fused together in ways no one had predicted.

  Except Harlon. “I applaud your commitment to the classics, hon,” he used to say. “But you’re writing yourself a death sentence.” How ironic, in retrospect.

  An unmistakable ding. Rachel paused in her speech again, adrenaline making her chest heave. Her mouth was dry. How long had she been talking? She blinked, squinted. With the way the lecture hall was set up, she couldn’t make out any faces in the crowd — it was too dark, and the light circling around her was too bright.

  Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding.

  Rachel stifled a groan. She could hear people shifting in their seats — how long had she been yapping away? she wondered — as they checked their devices. Even the ones who appeared to be sitting still were no doubt getting feeds through their earbuds. That many notifications at once meant something big was happening, and Rachel knew kids this age were practically powerless to refrain from reading them. She’d seen the behavior up close with Cassie. The Hive was an actual, physical addiction.

  She waited a full minute for things to settle down. “Is everyone done now? Let’s continue discussing the way —”

  A hand shot into the air, and a voice rang out before Rachel could call on the questioner. “But isn’t there historical evidence that many in ancient Roman times objected to the lack of concrete law at the time? And from that, can’t we deduce that there’s always been an undercurrent of rejection from a segment of the population, even if it wasn’t codified into law until millennia later?”

  Rachel cleared her throat. “You’re conflating the notion of jus non scriptum — unwritten law, common law — with the lack of codification. At the time —”

  “Should we really judge them by their standards and not ours?” he interrupted.

  Rachel tried to even her breathing. She grabbed the remote control from the desk and pushed a few buttons. The lights changed; suddenly, she could see her students.

  For a moment, she wished she couldn’t.

  “Well,” she began, eyes flicking over the crowd to determine the source. He was easy to find — he sat alone, surrounded by empty chairs, in the front row. And he was a total prep, Rachel noticed, wondering if they still called them preps these days. Or was there a new word for that, like there was for almost everything else? He had porcelain-white skin and piercing blue eyes and an eighties-movie-villain cable-knit sweater tied around his shoulders. Rachel knew exactly the kind of student he was: rich, for starters. Entitled. Probably too smart for his own good.

  But then he shifted forward in his seat, and the dim lights showed Rachel something that gave her pause: deep red hair, knotted into dreadlocks, tied back in a ponytail that hung past his shoulders.

  OK, she thought. Maybe not a prep.

  The sudden light seemed to hit Pause on their back-and-forth. She decided to forge ahead, pretending he wasn’t there. “As I was going to say, there are distinct parallels between the ancient Greeks and our current society. Take the law, for example. In Athens, justice was collectively enforced by society at large. There were no lawyers, no judges in the courts, to which any male cit
izen could bring a complaint. There were only speeches, and whoever told the most compelling story often won the case.”

  “Right,” the student said almost affably, Rachel realized, which made her more annoyed than it should have. “And as a result, the wealthy found themselves in near-constant danger. The more elite the offender, the more pleasure the courts got in rendering their punishment.”

  Rachel’s jaw dropped. She quickly closed it, covering her surprise with a cough. “That’s right. I was just getting to that, Mr. …”

  She picked up the attendance sheet, trying to pretend her fingers weren’t shaking. She’d never had a student try to take over her lecture like this. “What’s your name, please?”

  “Red Dread!” Someone guffawed from the side of the room. A few stray hoots followed.

  The interrupter shot an unhappy glance to the person who’d yelled “Red Dread,” then seemed to remember where he was and turned back to Rachel. “Muller. I’m Bryce Muller.”

  Rachel stiffened. “Well, Bryce, I’m glad to see you so informed. But perhaps you can allow me to —”

  “I just wanted to make sure everyone here gets all the nuances.”

  “Hashtag mansplaining!” someone shouted from the back row. A wave of laughter rippled down the tiers of seats.

  Rachel swallowed a chortle. Who did this guy think he was? “I appreciate your enthusiasm, Mr. Muller. But I promise I’ll get to all the necessary nuances in due time …” Her voice trailed off as a series of collective dings made everyone’s eyes, which had been on her, drop to their devices immediately.

  For the first time in her life, she was grateful for the culture of distraction.

  Whatever was BLINQing at everyone gave Rachel just enough time to reset herself. She got through the rest of class without incident, though also without much eye contact. Even Red Dread remained docile.

  “We’ll continue this next time,” Rachel announced when her watch told her that class was over. The sounds of her students packing up their things and leaving was the most noise they’d made since they arrived. Rachel, packing up her own things, felt a ribbon of nausea ride up her throat. Maybe she wasn’t as exciting and as smart a professor as she’d always thought, if students like Bryce thought they needed to deliver her lecture for her. This whole day was a disaster. Her whole life was, in fact.

  She was well on her way to a pity party when she gave one last look at the empty classroom to make sure the lights were all off.

  “Oh!” She jumped, her heart racing. A man — surely not a student, in a sleek black suit and with a graying hairline — was sitting in the back row, tucked into a darkened corner. He nodded at her.

  “Who are you?” she demanded. The man unfolded himself from the seat and stood up, moving like someone who knows his mere presence could intimidate the skin off a snake. A chill ran down Rachel’s back. No. Not this again.

  “I’m just auditing your class, Dr. McKinney.” His voice was honey smooth and just as sweet.

  “Professor,” she corrected, forgetting to wince at the slight. She was ABD — All But Dissertation. It was half written on a hard drive somewhere and she figured eventually she’d get back to it. “And no one told me there would be an auditor.” She’d had people auditing her classes all the time — other professors, administration members, special visitors. But standard protocol was to clear it with the professor first.

  He waved his hand around, taking a few steps down to the front of the room. The closer he got, the more Rachel felt a balloon of panic, of fear, inside her chest. He was physically far enough away that she was trying not to worry, but the energy in the room had shifted, and she felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise.

  “I don’t believe you,” she said firmly, almost in wonderment at how deeply she felt that truth. “Who are you, and what do you want?”

  He paused a few feet in front of her. Rachel gripped the remote control on the desk in her right hand. It wasn’t much, but if she needed to, she could hurl it at him. Inside her sensible shoes, she wiggled her toes, bracing her body to flee.

  “Rachel,” he said. His eyes drifted toward her hand, the one with the remote control. Shit. He was on to her.

  “Who. Are. You.” The words were fire on her breath.

  He looked at her for what felt like a long time, his gray eyes small and focused and unreadable. The room was so quiet that Rachel could hear the old-fashioned clock on the wall as it ticked away the seconds.

  “Just tell me,” she whispered, her words tightly coiled.

  A pause, and then a curt nod. “I’m Agent Hernandez with the NSA.”

  “The NSA?” Recognition dawned on Rachel. Fury, hot and sudden, pounded through her veins. “Again?”

  “Yes, I know my office has previously been in contact with you.” He nodded again and then settled himself into the closest seat.

  “Oh, is that what your records say?” Rachel, seething, clicked her tongue. “That the NSA has ‘previously been in contact’ with me?” She tried to remember the last visit she’d had from an NSA agent. There had been so many, in such a condensed time frame right after Harlon’s death, that now they all bled together — just flashes of men in suits, like in a movie, descending on their house time and again, ransacking Harlon’s office, their den, even their bedroom. Even Cassie’s bedroom!

  “I’m sure those aren’t pleasant memories, but I’d appreciate your continued cooperation,” Agent Hernandez said. He wasn’t, Rachel noticed, asking. He was demanding. “We’re looking for some more information about your late husband’s activities, and if we could —”

  “Look,” Rachel interrupted, heat rising in a scarlet flush along her neck, up past her ears. “You vultures came and took everything. Whatever you didn’t outright steal, you copied. I still don’t have the hard drive backup of pictures from my daughter’s birth. What possible use could the U.S. government have for those memories? Does someone at the NSA get his rocks off on my breastfeeding photos?”

  Rachel realized she’d probably gone too far, but she was trembling. Furious. And terrified, and outraged, and a million other things. “I’m a widow. You bastards keep poking around, sniffing around Harlon’s survivors like cadaver dogs with a scent. I’m going to say it one more time.”

  Rachel leaned forward, still gripping the remote control, close enough to Agent Hernandez now that he could feel her breath escaping in little pants. “Leave. Us. The. Hell. Alone.”

  It was a reaction full of the grief and fear and hatred and exhaustion she’d been facing for months. It came from deep inside her.

  Something went soft in his eyes.

  “Professor McKinney, I’m very, very sorry for your loss, and I’m … Well, I was going to tell you that I’m just doing my job, but that’s not much of a comfort for you, is it?” He shifted his weight. “Look, your husband’s work was important. And I’m not supposed to tell you this, but you deserve to know why we keep checking on you. Between us, we think there’s a chance that he left some uncommitted code on a personal device. Maybe we’re wrong. We’re just being thorough.” He sighed and shrugged and handed her a card.

  “Let me guess,” Rachel said sarcastically. “If I think of anything, I should call you?”

  “No, ma’am. That’s my personal number. I’ll be back in the office on Friday. Give me a call then, and I’ll see if we can expedite the return of that hard drive.” He paused. “I have kids, too.”

  Rachel froze, only her eyes moving as Agent Hernandez nodded at her and left.

  It was only once he was gone that she allowed herself to breathe. The wave of relief that rolled over her nearly made her collapse, and she doubled over, gulping air, wondering how on earth she’d managed to cope with another harrowing visit from the government entity that was intent on taking down her husband, his legacy and, she feared, his entire family.

  When her lu
ngs and heart and brain and every other organ that Agent Hernandez had affected finally relaxed, Rachel straightened and rearranged her things. She put back the remote control, smoothed her hair out of habit and then flicked off the lights. She stepped out of the room and into the blissfully empty hallway. Empty, that is, except for Bryce Muller. Red Dread. She froze. He was standing just next to the door, close enough, Rachel knew, to have heard and seen everything. He stared at her, a stunned expression on his face. For a long moment, Rachel stared back.

  Eventually, Bryce’s face settled into something new, and it looked like he wanted to speak. But Rachel held up her hand. She had heard enough from men today. From everyone, in fact. And he was her student. Whatever he’d just heard, whatever he thought he’d just seen, he’d need to forget it. Immediately.

  “My office hours are listed in the syllabus,” Rachel said tersely. As she elbowed her way around him, she added, “Don’t loiter outside my classroom again, Mr. Muller.”

  *

  Does Rowan Buckland make all of her friends color coordinate? They’re all wearing shades of purple today. #WhoWoreItWestfield

  Omg, are Skylar and Izzy back together? #WhatsUpWestfield

  Speaking of Rowan, who IS the new girl in her group? She stomps around looking like she wants to murder someone.

  She’s bringing Rowan down, if you ask me. #WhatsUpWestfield

  No one asked you, Marcy. — RB #RowanSpeaks

  It’s Mary. And sorry, Rowan, that was rude of me.

  #RowanSpeaksToMe

  Whatever, Marcy. — RB #RowanSpeaks

  Huerta is going DOWN this weekend! Let’s go Westfield! FOOTBALLLLLLLLL! #HowTheWestfieldWasWon

  If Izzy’s back with Skylar she deserves everything she gets. #WhatsUpWestfield

  Is it winter break yet? #WhatsUpWestfield

  10010500101

  Cassie ate lunch with Rowan and her friends again the next day. And the day after that, and the day after that. She was, inexplicably, a new member of Rowan’s girl gang.