The Hive

by Barry Lyga

  PLEASE READ: “Why Cassie McKinney’s Biraciality Speaks Volumes about Justice in America.” http://short.link/7 #HasCassieSurfacedYet?

  Interesting stat: 82% of whites consider Cassie McKinney to be black. #HasCassieSurfacedYet?

  BLINQ Alert! BLINQ Alert! Woman spotted in Dallas shopping mall is NOT @CassieMcK39. Hive Mobs in Dallas, desist from further action. Police and EMTs en route.

  Like, what im saying is technically is it legal 2 do stuff 2 her BEFORE u kill her or in the PROCESS of killing her? Thats all, so please stop saying im a musoginist. I’m just ASKING QUESTIONS, OK? #HasCassieSurfacedYet?

  *

  Livestream continues

  Erich Gorfinkle, Protocol Manager, Justice Department Division of Heuristic Internet Vetting Engine:

  “Everyone seems to be up in arms today about one thing or another, but can we just take a moment and remember what things were like before Hive went live? Online harassment and bullying were at an all-time high and had spilled out into the streets. Vigilante groups were stalking and doxxing with impunity.

  “Now there’s a structure to it. Gone are the days when someone could hashtag their neighbor and get a mob together to beat him up. There’s a system now, and it works, thanks to the vision and genius of this president. Now the mobs aren’t just random expressions of anger; they reflect our own outrage in a measured, approved fashion. As they should.

  “Do you really want to go back to the way things were? Lawless and out of control? Now we have Hive Justice — legal, potent and above all, effective. It works.

  “And no, I won’t be taking any questions.”

  100101000101

  When she dared pull back the bedroom curtain to look outside that morning, Rachel saw nothing but a yellow-and-white smear. Eggs.

  In the three days since Cassie had hit Level 6, the apartment had been egged close to a dozen times. After the third time, she’d stopped bothering to call the landlord to hose off the windows. There was no point.

  No sunlight coming through and no point.

  Jesus, she thought. Jesus. What the hell is happening?

  The four college kids who’d assaulted her and Cassie that first night had, fortunately, been drunk, stoned or high as kites at the time. They all told the police and the media that they’d seen Cassie, but none of them could identify the woman with her. Rachel tried to ignore what that said about her own memorability and focused on the positive: it meant she was safe. For now.

  Safe except for the eggs. Safe except for the throngs of angry Hive Mobbers gathered outside her building twenty-four hours a day. The chanting ebbed and flowed, but it was always there:

  “Give! Us! Cass! Ie!”

  “Give! Us! Cass! Ie!”

  They wanted her daughter. They wanted blood. The two were the same. Cassie wasn’t a person to them; she was just a vector, an angle for their own pent-up rage and impotence.

  Usually, when Rachel was stressed or upset, she retreated to the past. Horace. Homer. Tacitus. But there was no relief in her beloved classics now. Nothing in the past could change the present or guarantee the future, as she and Cassie found themselves doxxed, their private lives spilled out into the open.

  A very special, very unexpected secondary pain came from the reminders of Harlon that the internet now spat in her face every time she made the mistake of glancing at a screen. There was video of the time he’d hacked the Super Bowl livestream, back when he was not much older than Cassie. The prank that had put him on the map and put the world on notice that Black Moses had the goods. A cyber firm in the Valley had been impressed enough to snap him up and pay his legal fees. And the legend was born.

  Now, the legend’s daughter was claiming her own notoriety. Family vacation photos. Personal snapshots of Cassie as a baby, a toddler, a preteen. Emails she’d written, BLINQs she’d posted, then deleted. All of it and more dredged up by the unending fury and diligence of the Hive Mob.

  Her hand trembled as she raised her cup of coffee to her lips. She had to go to work. She had to pretend everything was OK and normal.

  She had no other choice.

  Three days ago, her daughter had slipped through her fingers. Since then, Rachel hadn’t slept, other than the occasional twenty-minute burst; it was an anguished sleep that she fought every time, filled with lights and screams that intermingled with the real world. She didn’t know what was true anymore, and what was just a nightmare.

  She knew this, though: no one could know what she knew. After Cassie disappeared with Bryce, Rachel had also fled. She’d escaped to her office to do what she did best: research. Research on Hive history and processes; anecdata from the tens of thousands of people convicted. She knew she’d be brought in for questioning, surveilled. But until then, she needed to act like she had no idea where her daughter was. She would take her secrets, her last moments with Cassie, to her grave if that’s what was required. If that’s what would help keep Cassie alive and safe.

  *

  She drew in a shaky breath. She was, somehow, standing in front of a full classroom — even fuller than her class list indicated. She should have known gawkers would try to crash her class; she would have known a lot of things if she’d been thinking clearly.

  If she’d been thinking clearly she might also have been able to remember the last three days. Instead, all she could see was Cassie’s face, the fear in her daughter’s eyes. The blood from her head injury spattered on the cement. The pain of missing her, of regret over the angry cloud that had been hovering over the two of them for so long now … It was physical, visceral. What a waste of so much time.

  But she had to get it together.

  The Hive demanded it.

  *

  He finally appeared, moments before she was ready to collapse. The door opened, and Red Dread slipped in. He didn’t meet Rachel’s eyes.

  Somehow she made it through the rest of the class, her hands shaking so badly that she had to tuck them into her jacket pockets. Words came out of her mouth but she couldn’t swear they were even English, let alone that they made any sense. Every face looking back at her was a blur, a wet watercolor painting someone had run fingers across. Pings pinged. BLINQs blinqed. Rachel felt the target on her back weigh more heavily with each passing second. She knew she was being watched … she just wasn’t sure when they would strike.

  Which meant she had to make her move, now.

  “Your next reading assignment is in your email already,” Rachel said as the clock ran out, her voice thick. She cleared her throat, blinked a few times so that the watercolor became something more realistic than impressionistic. “And I’ve extended the deadline for your first assignment.” She’d had to; she hadn’t even created the damn thing yet.

  Students began packing up their things, uncrossing legs, closing laptops, screwing the caps on water bottles. Rachel cleared her throat again. She was running out of time.

  “Mr. Muller,” she announced. “Can you stay and see me, please?” Her voice cracked on the last word.

  “I guess,” he said coolly. He hung back while the class emptied.

  “You can’t do this,” he hissed as soon as the last student was gone. The door closed on the two of them.

  “Please,” Rachel begged, the tears coming before she could stop them. She found herself gripping Bryce’s wrists, shaking them. “Where is she? Is she all right?”

  Bryce’s eyes got round. He ripped his arms from Rachel’s grasp and grabbed her phone from the table, jabbing at it for a few minutes before dropping it angrily on the table.

  “Are you trying to get us all killed?”

  “Please,” she repeated. “Just tell me where she is.”

  “You’re being watched all the time,” he whispered. He took a step back. “Including right now. Every room in this place has surveillance. And your phone! Jesus. I just crashed it deliberately
so it’ll reboot and give us a minute or two. For now, though, you have to get. It. Together.”

  He, too, was blurry through Rachel’s tears. She’d always hated watercolors. “I’m trying.”

  He sighed. “Take a deep breath.”

  “Shut up!” Rachel lunged at him, to what end she wasn’t entirely sure other than to try to shake the answers out of him. He didn’t know what it was like to have a daughter, a husband, disappear. He was barely a man and yet he had the gall to tell her to calm down? To take a goddamn breath?

  “Rachel!” Bryce yelped, then cursed. “Professor McKinney. I swear, I will tell you all I can tell you.” He dropped his voice. “Right now, she’s OK.”

  The room spun. Rachel exhaled and braced herself against the desk, her knees buckling. Bryce caught her, his hand gripping her waist, until he gently led her to the chair and placed her in it. He offered her a water from his backpack and she gulped it, grateful, unable to remember the last time she’d had anything but coffee.

  “OK?” Bryce prompted. Rachel nodded. She started to ask questions but Bryce shook his head sharply and widened his eyes again, letting them tick up to the EXIT sign over the door. Likely place for the surveillance cameras.

  “She’s fine,” he repeated, his voice so low that Rachel struggled to hear him, then worried she’d misheard him.

  “I can’t tell you much more than that. It’s too dangerous.” Bryce hesitated. “For all of us, including you.”

  “How’s her head? Is she eating enough? Does she need clothes? I can —”

  “No, you cannot,” Bryce’s eyes went soft as Rachel’s face fell. “I’m sorry. I wish …”

  “No, it’s all right,” Rachel said, surprised at how much she meant it in that moment. Cassie was alive. She could manage everything else — the not knowing, the fear of the future — as long as that one potential horror was removed.

  “We’re working on a plan,” Bryce continued, his voice even lower, his words garbled. He was trying to throw off the video feed, or any audio that was possibly capturing their forbidden moments.

  “But meanwhile you, Professor, remember nothing. You know nothing. You woke up and Cassie was gone. We’ve erased the record of your ride share; we’ve hacked into every security camera on the route you took and replicated old feeds. We think you’re untraceable at this point, though of course we can’t be totally sure.”

  She nodded slowly. The only other possible connection to her wasn’t digital — it was depressingly analog. Her exploding purse had strewn her belongings on the sidewalk at the quad. After Bryce had spirited Cassie away, she’d retraced her steps. The kids were gone, scattered around campus, looking for Cassie. She’d gathered up what she could find. She thought she’d found everything that could identify her, but what if she’d missed something?

  Rachel drained the rest of the water bottle. “I know nothing.”

  “Nothing.” Bryce nodded.

  “The easy part is that it all feels like a dream anyway,” Rachel said so quietly that Bryce had to lean in closer. She met his eyes and remembered what she needed to ask him, what had been humming underneath the current of the past three days. “Why are you helping me?”

  Bryce, so still and so close, breathed unevenly a few times.

  Then the door burst open, thwacking against the wall. Rachel jumped to her feet, bumping into Bryce’s shoulder. It felt like running into concrete.

  “Rachel McKinney. You’re needed for questioning,” a no-nonsense voice announced, but with five agents swarming into the room, Rachel couldn’t be sure which one it came from. She glared at each of them. One was Agent Hernandez, who looked nothing at all like the relatively kind — or at least neutral — man who’d given her the business card that even now lay on her desk in her office, propped up near the phone.

  She’d been expecting trouble because of Cassie and had forgotten all about the other trouble she was in, the Harlon sort of trouble. “I already told you Harlon didn’t leave anything —”

  “We’re not here about that,” Hernandez told her, eyes flicking around the room as he watched his men search the place. “This is about your daughter.”

  “Wait, what?” The NSA was under the Department of Defense; Hive was a function of the Department of Justice. “I think you have your jurisdictions mixed up, gentlemen.” She said it a little more brightly than she felt it.

  Hernandez regarded her from the doorway. Something in his stance told her that he would prefer her to come to him, but that he would be perfectly happy to come drag her away, if need be.

  “We can, uh, talk later …” Bryce said into the silence.

  “Of course,” Rachel mumbled. Her tongue grew thick, her neck sweaty, at the prospect of what was about to happen.

  “Vos nescitis quidquam,” Bryce breathed into her ear as he slipped past her and the agents approached.

  You know nothing.

  She went to the door and let the agents lead her through the history building, across campus and into a waiting unmarked SUV.

  In the back of the car, sirens wailing, Rachel felt a fraction of the heat she imagined her daughter felt. She closed her eyes and tried to will a message to Cassie, sending out all the energy she could muster, imagining that a mother could reach her child telepathically if only she believed in it enough.

  Stay strong, Cassie, Rachel repeated to herself over and over again. And then:

  Keep running, Cassie.

  100101100101

  Three days wasn’t that long. It was a holiday weekend, really. Nothing more. Just long enough for the mondo huge scab on Cassie’s head to peel off, for the swelling to go down. Three days was a nice vacation.

  If.

  If you weren’t holed up in what used to be a hotel but was now the nerve center of a weird hackathon/resistance movement.

  If you weren’t isolated from everyone and anyone who knew you and cared for you.

  If you weren’t wanted by pretty much every living, breathing, connected human being in the country.

  She tried not to pay attention to the stream of digital sludge her life had become, but it was impossible. The OHMers were obsessed with her case, and even if she hadn’t been sneaking peeks at their screens, she would have heard them calling out the most egregious examples to each other anyway.

  People were saying the most horrible things about her online. It was OK to do that with someone who was Level 5. Well, or 6, she guessed. Bullying, harassing cyber-taunts that would have had people bumped to Level 2 or 3 in a heartbeat were now fair game when directed at a Level 6 criminal.

  There were comments about her appearance, her body, her sexuality. Her race. She was grateful that she’d never had any reason or desire to take pictures of herself naked — it was bad enough that the world was now ogling bikini shots from last summer on the Jersey shore. She’d been threatened with stoning, being rolled in broken glass and dumped into a bath of saltwater, multiple varieties of rape and one particularly imaginative removal of her eyes. One man (it had to be a man, right?) had gone on at length on a BLINQ thread, explicating how his plan to kidnap Cassie and keep her bound in his basement for several years was not a violation of the Level 6 mandated death penalty since he would, eventually, kill her. (The description of her death was another thread all its own.) The vitriol was constant — was this what the internet was like before the Hive?

  All of this distraction made her work suffer. And right now, her work was all that mattered.

  Bryce had had to leave OHM in order to throw off any suspicions that he was involved in Cassie’s disappearance. He had to go live his life as normally as possible. The Hive Mob didn’t and couldn’t know that Bryce knew Cassie, but it was only a matter of time before someone connected him to Rachel. As time passed and the mob became more desperate for its promised allotment of flesh and blood, they would look for any path that
could conceivably lead to Cassie. Rachel’s life would be turned upside down and soon the lives of her students would become new avenues of attack.

  So Bryce was gone and while she’d only known him for a few hours, at least he had a connection to her mother. Now she was lost in a nameless building with people she didn’t know, and they were supposed to … save her?

  Right.

  Day and night had no meaning here. With the windows blacked out and a roomful of hackers who slept and ate on their own messed-up schedules, she might as well have been living in a world without time. Except that she knew time was passing out there in the real world and that the mob grew angrier and larger with each passing minute.

  The world had become accustomed to immediate gratification. Instant delivery. Instant response. Now, instant justice. Cassie was denying them, and they would not forgive.

  She spent time working on her project, the one Tish and TonyStark had told her she would need to complete in order to prove her value to them.

  “We’re not a charity,” Tish said to her early on. They were sitting together in one of the little kitchenettes scattered throughout the floor. It stank of burned coffee and stale chips.

  “We don’t do this for the lulz,” Tish went on, stirring a sludge of coffee in a chipped mug that said, BLINQ AND YOU WON’T MISS IT! “And we’re not interested in making friends. We’re here to burn the system to the ground. You grok?”

  “I grok.”

  “Everyone here has been burned by the Hive. We all have the stink of its shit on us. We lost jobs and friends. Families and respect. We lost our lives.”

  “What did you do?” Cassie asked, and immediately regretted it. Tish’s expression, already hard, went to stone.

  “No,” she said. “It’s like prison. You don’t ask that.”

  Cassie realized pretty quickly that it didn’t matter what any of them had done; what mattered was that they’d been cut off from their lives. For a few moments, she’d allowed herself to think of OHM as though it were the sleepaway computer camp she’d gone to as a kid. But this wasn’t fun time in the sun time. This wasn’t voluntary.