The Hive

by Barry Lyga

  Bryce said, “Do you want to see her ID or something? Birth certificate? Jesus, just Google up a picture of McKinney’s kid.”

  “Won’t work,” Cassie said. “Dad was super protective of me. There aren’t any pictures of me online until I was old enough to make that decision myself. And even then, he doesn’t show up in any of them. He was worried some hacker asshole might decide to prove what a big shot he was by taking down Black Moses’s daughter.”

  “Oh,” said Bryce, abashed. He stroked his dreads. “Then …”

  “Like I said, mighty convenient.” TonyStark turned his attention back to his laptop. “Now, I need to get back to it.”

  “I can prove it,” Cassie said.

  TonyStark sighed heavily and Cassie thought she’d lost him. He’d made up his mind. He was done with her. The only person in the world who might be able to fix her life.

  Bryce held his hands up in a helpless gesture, his expression screaming, I don’t know.

  She couldn’t just give up.

  “You know Cloakr?” she blurted out.

  Of course TonyStark did. Anyone who claimed to know their way around source code did. Cloakr was her dad’s first big app, the one that put him on the map. It autodetected attempts by rogue Wi-Fi routers to plant malware on someone’s phone, then employed a series of firewalls to make that phone appear invisible to those routers. The trick was filtering out the legit Wi-Fi signals and letting them through. Harlon’s app made him famous among white-hat hackers, infamous among black hats.

  “Duh,” TonyStark said. He dug into his pocket and flashed his phone at her. Right there on the home screen was the Cloakr icon.

  “Cool,” she said. “Go to GitTown and check the commits on the app.”

  GitTown was an online repository where coders uploaded their source code for others to see and contribute to. Harlon liked it because it had ironclad security and because, in his words, “the XML and CSS are written like poetry.”

  Code is poetry, she thought, and thought of Carson, his shirt, his eyes. The potency of the memory shocked her. She’d only seen him twice, had barely connected with him, and yet … And yet she’d imagined some possibility there. Hard to believe that mere hours ago, he had been at the forefront of her mind. She’d cast him out of her thoughts. That was another life. A life that was no longer hers and probably never had been possible to begin with.

  TonyStark grunted and shrugged as if to say, OK, I’ll play along. For now. He loaded up GitTown in his browser.

  Cassie skimmed the screen quickly. “Go to Cloakr and check the commit on September 30,” she told him.

  “Which year?” Clearly still skeptical.

  “Doesn’t matter. There’s only the one.”

  Sure enough, Harlon had committed a source code update on only a single September 30.

  “It’s my birthday,” Cassie said offhandedly. “That’s what you want. Open it up.”

  TonyStark opened the source code to the September 30 version of Cloakr. The screen scrolled with code.

  “You’re looking for ‘var CTMspecial,’ ” she told TonyStark.

  He paused, fingers hovering over the keyboard. “I’ve practically memorized this app. There’s no such variable.”

  “There is in this version.”

  He found the variable. It had been declared, but there was no value for it, and it was commented out so it wouldn’t run when compiled.

  “Define CTMspecial as an integer,” she said. “The value is 1349. The time of my birth.”

  TonyStark’s fingers flew over the keyboard, doing as she’d bidden. She cast a glance at Bryce, who looked baffled. Not a coder. Even at his height, out of his depth.

  “Now uncomment that line and commit the code under your own name,” she said. “Then run a diff on the current version.”

  “Diff” was programming speak for letting the computer go through two similar files and produce a report showing the differences between them. It was a lot more convenient and a lot more accurate than letting frail, imperfect human eyes do the job.

  TonyStark had GitTown run the diff. A new window popped up, filled with two columns of code, one for each version of the source code being compared. Differences were highlighted in red.

  Scrolling down, TonyStark stopped, blinked.

  Roughly halfway down the second column was this: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, CASSIE.

  “Oh, holy shit!” TonyStark spun around in his chair and gazed up at her. “You’re her! You’re you!”

  Cassie sniffed, affecting icy calm on the outside. “Cool story, bro,” she told him.

  He winced. “Just tell me one thing. Answer one question, OK? Do you think your joke was funny?”

  There was a right answer and a wrong answer, and she figured one meant help and the other meant she was on her own.

  But she didn’t waste any time trying to suss out what answer TonyStark wanted to hear. “Hell, yeah, it was funny,” she said.

  TonyStark’s face split into a wide toothy grin.

  *

  Bryce stuck with them, even though he didn’t have to anymore. Cassie had been accepted by TonyStark — at least temporarily — which meant that she now had a fighting chance at staying with OHM and at having them help figure out what the hell had happened with her BLINQ scores.

  “We have rules,” TonyStark told her. “You break them, you’re out. Even Black Moses’s daughter only gets one strike in this game.”

  “Oh, good,” Cassie said with a voice dripping sarcasm. “Sports metaphors. I was wondering when we would get to the sports metaphors.”

  “Holy Christ …” Bryce moaned.

  But TonyStark just smiled. “Keep your attitude, Cassie. It’s gonna help you stay alive. But seriously — we’re going way out on a limb for you. Remember that.”

  He took her on a quick “tour” of the OHM floor, showing her a series of cots and a frightening-looking bathroom. The place was like some warped version of an orphanage, like the photos Cassie had seen in old news stories, and she squeezed her eyes closed and reminded herself to breathe. She couldn’t get back to real life soon enough. How long was she supposed to stay here?

  How long could she stay here? Right now, all she had was TonyStark’s promise and Bryce’s assurances that these people could and would help, that they wouldn’t toss her out on the street or bring a Hive Mob down on her. Promises from two men she’d just met.

  Sadly, that was better than any of her other options.

  “I can’t promise you results,” TonyStark said as he introduced her to some of the others. “We’ll do what we can. We’ve had some success in the past, but only with Levels 1 and 2. Level 5 is a whole ’nother ball game. The sheer number of votes makes things exponentially more complicated.”

  “I understand.” And she did, she truly did. But understanding the complexity of it didn’t lessen her urgency to reverse her Hive Level and get the hell back to her life.

  “Let’s see what we’re dealing with.” TonyStark steered her toward a cubicle where a woman with a half-shaved head and enough metal in her left ear to build a drive train stared at three enormous monitors. “Hey, Tish, check out Cassie McKinney, local area, can you?”

  Tish glanced over her shoulder. She wore black lip gloss and had dramatic green eye shadow over her right eye only. It made her look vaguely cyborgish. Cassie figured that was the point.

  Her fingers flew over the keyboard. In a moment, the center screen lit up with Cassie’s BLINQ profile, the aggregate of her social media footprint, with feeds from Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Yardio and Guessom. Her avatar had gone black and white, with a red bar through it, indicating her Level 5 status.

  Tish’s eyebrow arched significantly.

  The flanking screens on the right and left filled up. On the right, an endless scroll of numbers. On the left, a graph in
the classic “hockey stick” mode, showing a slow build, followed by a sudden and dramatic spike.

  “This is where you went viral,” Tish said, pointing to the spot where the gentle up slope became a leap into the stratosphere. “Looks like, uh, a retweet from a retweet got the attention of @BlitzenBot202, who has something like twenty thousand followers. Once he/she/they retweeted, you were on a rocket ride to Hive Justice.”

  “I have no idea who that person is,” Cassie confessed, peering at the profile.

  Tish shrugged. “I’d wonder if they even were a person, but check out the history. Volume levels are normal. It seems to be a news aggregator account. But anything’s possible. Could be a busy bot.”

  Everyone on BLINQ was a real, verified person — that was the whole point of BLINQ — but bots still crawled the other sites, like Instagram and Twitter. And they could gin up dissatisfaction and discontent among real people that then got fed back into BLINQ, into the system that had Condemned Cassie. BLINQ was both a platform and an aggregator. The most important aggregator in the country.

  “What’s her velocity like?” TonyStark asked.

  “Most of the pass-along virality seems to have abated,” Tish told him. “Still getting like bounces and shares, but the major push has — whoa.”

  They all swiveled to look at what had caught her attention. On the center screen, Cassie’s black-and-white avatar had gone to full color, and the red Level 5 bar through it had vanished.

  “What happened?” Cassie asked. “What just happened?” Her heart raced and her words couldn’t keep up. “What did you do? Oh, my God, am I cleared? Did you fix the Condemns?”

  “Shut down, girl!” Tish said. “I didn’t do anything. I’ve never seen this before —”

  “Wait, look!” Bryce leaned over, clearly aggravating Tish. She turned from her monitors long enough to shoot him a death glare. “Look at this.”

  His finger hovered on the center screen, just below Cassie’s avatar. They’d missed it in the shock of seeing the Level 5 bar disappear. The small, almost innocuous, Hold Action icon had appeared there.

  Cassie could barely breathe. It was happening. Somehow, it was happening. The trend was reversing. Everything was going to be fine! In a few hours — well, maybe a few days — she’d be laughing about this with her mom.

  “Going back down to Level 4,” Cassie said hopefully, “and they’re making sure no one tries to kill me in the meantime.”

  “I’ve seriously never seen anything like this,” Tish repeated. “It doesn’t usually work like … Oh, shit!”

  No one had to ask what had prompted the curse from her. They all saw it.

  In the blink of an eye, Cassie’s avatar returned to black and white, only this time there was something deeper and more sinister about it. The gray-scale effect had harsher shadows, more contrast. Cassie looked like something out of a horror movie.

  And the red bar was back, too.

  The only thing that didn’t return was the legend Level 5.

  That had been replaced by something none of them had ever seen before:

  LEVEL 6

  And beneath that

  #InfiniteRange

  #KillOnSight

  *

  Livestream from the White House Press Briefing Room

  Dean Hythe, President of the United States:

  “I’m not going to get into details. I’m just not going to do it.

  “Look, what this girl said was vile. OK? Vile. Absolutely disgusting. I don’t even want to repeat it and I can’t believe the media has been plastering it all over every TV screen and every phone and computer and what have you. Just disgusting. Really an embarrassment for the media, the way they treat these things, and we’re going to do something about that soon, believe me.

  “But this isn’t about me. Or about my family. Even though we’ve been treated horribly — just horribly — in this whole thing. This is about the will of the people, OK? The will. Of. The people. The whole point of Hive Justice is to put some power into the hands of the people. I ran for this office and won — twice — with some of the biggest margins in history. Some say the biggest margins. I don’t say that. I just say some of the biggest because maybe there are some that are bigger. I don’t know of any, but maybe there are.

  “Anyway, this is the whole reason for Hive in the first place. This isn’t me saying this girl should die, though she should pay a serious price for what she did, I think you know. It isn’t me. Don’t write that in your papers and on your blogs or whatever. This is the will of the people. I ran and won twice to give power back to the people, and they have that power now. It’s up to them to use it.

  “And I know you all have a lot of questions about this Level 6 and so on, so I’m going to turn it over to — where is she? Where’s … Ah, there. There. Here she is, everyone. Alexandra Pastor. You know her, right? Doing great work, such great work, at my Justice Department. Really fantastic work, and no one knows Hive like she knows Hive. So I’m gonna bring her up here and let her talk to you about it all.”

  *

  Bitch ran. Ditch that bitch. #InfiniteRange #KillOnSight #CassieMcKinney

  READ THIS THREAD! According to local PD, there have been NO PINGS from #CassieMcKinney’s phone in FOUR HOURS. SHE BROKE HER PHONE! READ THE THREAD, PEOPLE!

  While you’re all distracted by #CassieMcKinney and #Level6, @POTUS just signed a bill allowing gov’t hacking of cell phones w/o #4A procedures. Wake up, sheeple! #4Amatters

  Local PD claims #CassieMcKinney has “gone underground.” Where is she? #HasCassieSurfacedYet?

  Check out photos from city near MS/BFU, last known sighting of #CassieMcKinney. BIGGEST #HIVEMOB EVER! #HasCassieSurfacedYet?

  I’m no fan of @POTUS, but her joke was disgusting and she deserves punishment. #HasCassieSurfacedYet?

  Doxxers reveal she’s the daughter of notorious hacker Black Moses. The same Black Moses who hacked Super Bowl halftime show to play “Fuck Tha Police” while children were watching. Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, does it? #HasCassieSurfacedYet?

  Two injured when #HiveMob seeking #CassieMcKinney collided with #HiveMob in pursuit of #OldManFlasher. LOL. #KillOnSight? I have only two words for you: Fuck yeah. #HasCassieSurfacedYet?

  I have never been happier to live in this country! #HasCassieSurfacedYet? #KillOnSight #InfiniteRange

  No one can hide 4ever, she has to come up at some point. #HasCassieSurfacedYet?

  *

  Livestream continues

  Alexandra Pastor, Special Deputy Attorney General, Justice Department Division of Heuristic Internet Vetting Engine:

  “Thank you for the podium, Mr. President. It’s been such an honor to work under such a visionary. I’m happy to discuss Level 6 and Infinite Range. Let me give you a little background first, and then I’m happy to take some questions.

  “First of all, Level 6 is not new. Level 6 was built into Hive from the outset. It was part of the initial spec and it’s been there from the beginning. It was designed and developed by the same programmers who assembled the rest of the Hive experience. I’ve heard some scattered rumors on the internet that this was some kind of secret black-box protocol bolted onto the system after the fact, or put into place at the order of the president after Ms. McKinney’s comment trended. This is not true.

  “Level 6 was part of the system from the start but never set to public-facing because honestly we never thought it would be necessary. Now, take a look at this chart, please. As you can see, the incidence of online harassment and bullying dropped dramatically with the announcement of the Hive system. This was before it was even activated. At that time, we realized that we had a very potent weapon on our hands in the war for decency and good behavior. So we made the decision to mask Level 6, thinking it would end up being unnecessary. And when Hive launched later that year, the chart shows us on
line harassment dropped even further. Ninety-two percent of all Hive matters are Level 1. Only 1 percent have risen to Level 5.

  “In short, the system works. People are behaving themselves.

  “But then came Cassie McKinney. Now, we’re still processing the votes, but her virality blew away all of our models. We held her at Levels 1 and 2 for as long as we reasonably could while we made certain that there were no glitches in the system. Everything was legit. And more and more votes kept coming in, to the point that she rapidly ascended to Level 5. At that point, signals stopped coming from her phone, indicating that she’d destroyed it, in contravention of Hive Law. Such an act algorithmically pushed her over the edge into Level 6. We planned to reveal this in a press conference, but the system’s machine learning engine decided to proceed on its own. And so here we are today. Now I’d like to introduce Erich Gorfinkle. As you’ll recall, he was handpicked by President Hythe’s predecessor for this role, and he is the ultimate expert on day-to-day Hive operations.”

  *

  LOL. Facebook just served me an ad for spelunking gear. Because I posted that #CassieMcKinney has “gone underground.” Stupid algorithms.

  I’ve written a post on the necessary brutality of Hive Justice and why, whether you agree with #HasCassieSurfacedYet? or not, she has to die. Please read and share it! sh.ort/Cassie

  2 days and #HasCassieSurfacedYet? WTF??? She should be EXTRA killed for BREAKING THE LAW. Should have been found by now.

  Just curious, but are there restrictions on HOW she’s supposed to be killed? I can’t find any relevant info online. #HasCassieSurfacedYet?

  #HasCassieSurfacedYet? I hope whoever finds her RAPES HER FIRST. Teach that bitch to open her mouth.

  New doxx dump up at hivecommunity.justice! Includes elem school grades, FB history, PICS!!! #HasCassieSurfacedYet?

  Dam, that booty tho! #HasCassieSurfacedYet?

  Don’t usually like black chix, but id hit dat before hitting dat, if u get me! #HasCassieSurfacedYet?

  Not saying id do it, but … do u have to kill her right away or can u make it slow? Again: JUST ASKING. #HasCassieSurfacedYet?