The Hive

by Barry Lyga

  Everyone here was the walking wounded. Everyone had a sad story, and none of them wanted to tell it. They kept their burdens and their pains deep.

  Leaks always sprang, though. There were tears at odd moments. Wistful sighs. She noticed photographs of chubby babies, of elderly parents, taped up in reverent spots directly in the owner’s sightline. The opposite of memento mori, artifacts that reminded the owner that death came for all. These were something different. The opposite. Reminders to live. She racked her brain for the scraps of Latin her mom had taught her …

  Memento vivere. That was it. Remember to live.

  It was good advice for OHM. Good advice for her, too.

  All she had were the pajamas she’d worn the night she and Rachel had fled the apartment, as well as whatever Rachel had thrown into her backpack. So a toothbrush (thank God for that!) and some clothes, including the jeans she’d been wearing the day she and Carson font-flirted. That was a million years and another lifetime ago. A file deleted from the drive, the sectors zeroed and then re-zeroed. Her old life had been erased. She could never go back. There was one moment, on day two or three — it was hard to tell — when one of the OHMers, a scrappy guy who looked about fourteen but was actually in his twenties, according to Tish, had come into the kitchen when Cassie was scrounging for more caffeine. His backpack had brushed against her, and she’d seen his collection of pins decorating the flap. CODE IS POETRY, read the big one in the middle. And right there in the kitchen, after he’d left her alone, she’d closed her eyes and replayed the two times she’d seen Carson. All the things that might’ve been, could’ve been, in a different life.

  It was weird to say, since she barely knew him, but she missed him. Or, more accurately, the possibility of him.

  In a weird way, she missed Rowan and the rest of the gaggle, too. Missed them in the sense of wanting them right here, right now, so that she could throttle them with her bare hands. Rowan’s egging her on had led to all of this, and Cassie missed the opportunity for revenge.

  She missed things she wouldn’t have expected, too. Like the moon. The stars. A decent night’s sleep.

  The gravity of Level 6 was beginning to weigh on Cassie. Her shoulders ached; her mouth felt perpetually dry; her stomach roiled. She lay awake at night, the steady hum of OHM’s machinery her only company. Once, she dreamed she was sitting at Rowan’s lunch table, eating an apple. Apples were hard to come by at OHM, and in her dream Cassie’s mouth watered. Outside it was autumn, the season of apple picking and leaves turning and her birthday. But inside, behind the hidden windows, it just felt like a season of panic.

  Cassie spent whatever time she could manage hanging over Tish’s shoulder, studying her every move and offering suggestions, until Tish snapped at her. “Kid! You need to stop hovering! TonyStark,” she called, “can we please get her a system already? She is seriously cramping my style.”

  TonyStark swept in to get her off Tish’s back. He took her on a brief tour of the floor, pointing out the kitchenettes, the cramped and mildewy bathrooms. The bathrooms were all unisex. “We code binary, but gender isn’t,” TonyStark told her with utmost sincerity. It was the most human thing he’d said to her yet.

  Especially considering what he’d said to her shortly before Bryce left: “So tell me something, for real: Is your pops really dead?”

  Cassie had clenched her jaw and her fists. Bryce put a hand on her shoulder, holding her back. “Come on, man,” he said to TonyStark. “Don’t be an asshole.”

  “Just wondering. Legend has it the man went underground. Deep, deep underground. Like, beyond OHM, you know?”

  “He’s dead,” Cassie had said bitterly. “I saw him in his coffin. Is that good enough for you?”

  TonyStark had nodded thoughtfully. “It is.”

  And now he was regaling her with the finer points of OHM’s invisible oasis in the midst of the city: “We took the whole building off the grid. Literally cut the power lines, the water lines, everything. Solar panels bring us power. We have a rain collection system on the roof, sort of a modified solar still. Because they can track you with infrared, we keep the heat variable. Fogs the IR sensors and makes it harder to read human bodies.”

  “They?” she asked.

  He fixed her with a serious look, adjusting his glasses. “The government. NSA. CIA. FBI.”

  “The CIA isn’t allowed to spy on American citizens.”

  He smiled tightly. “Go on thinking that. We use a mesh network and a custom social network that only pings to our LAN in order to keep in touch without getting our fingerprints all over the ’net.”

  “The Dark Web?” Cassie ventured.

  TonyStark snorted. “Yo momma knows about the Dark Web.” He considered. “Actually, yeah, your mom probably does. Anyway, the Dark Web is so last decade. We piggyback off innocent Bluetooth signals to mesh across the city and to other OHM outposts. It’s slow and laggy, but it keeps us hidden and untraceable.”

  Other OHM outposts … “How big is this?” she asked. “How many of you —”

  He held up a hand. “Nope.”

  “What’s the deal with the graffiti?” she asked. Many of the walls were festooned with strange, abstract patterns of black paint. She occasionally saw someone snap a picture of one of them with a smartphone.

  “Not yet,” he told her. “Enough for now. You’re not a stray we took in. You gotta earn your way. GIGO.”

  GIGO. The closest thing there was to a programmer’s religion. Four simple words: Garbage in, garbage out. Harlon had her saying it when she was two years old; there was video of her — old, shitty 4K video — running around one of their many apartments, babbling, “Gabbage in, gabbage out!” before she’d figured out the letter R.

  It was simple: until the AI revolution, machine learning and neural nets, computers couldn’t think for themselves. They were just dumb brains, waiting for instructions. Their power lay not in independent thought or creativity, but in speed — they couldn’t think, but they could execute instructions much faster and more accurately than a human.

  Which meant that you had to be very, very precise about what you told a computer to do. It couldn’t make judgments on the veracity of data or the integrity of a set of commands. It didn’t ask questions; it just ran.

  If you fed garbage data to the computer, you’d get garbage back out. GIGO.

  OHM needed to be sure she wasn’t garbage. And so she’d been given a project. In the time-honored ways of Silicon Valley and tech start-ups everywhere, she’d been given precious little in the way of instruction or direction.

  “Impress us,” TonyStark told her with a grin. “Show us exactly what Black Moses passed down to you. And then, yeah, we’ll see if we can help you.”

  *

  Impress us. Nothing like a vague command to jump-start the creative juices, right?

  She definitely wanted to impress everyone at OHM. Let them see that she was the real deal, like her dad. Not just some idiot teenage girl who had posted something dumb — but funny, she reminded herself — and was now paying the ultimate price.

  Even though decent computers could be hard to come by, soon two guys Cassie had learned were ostensibly bodyguards (“we can’t hack for shit, but we played rugby in college,” one of them told her) returned from their daily expedition with food, water and, amazingly, a computer that was in decent-enough shape for Cassie to mess around with. As she familiarized herself with the available tech, which was laggy and slow as promised, she had time to think.

  When the Hive became the law, there were pockets of resistance throughout the country. Protests, editorials, that sort of thing. Cassie had even had an entire social studies unit on the proposed law, back in elementary school, led by a teacher who was passionately anti-Hive. But the technology that underpinned the concept of the Hive had always been Cassie’s main argument for believing in its mission:
because technology, in and of itself, was neutral. Code was built by people, sure, but the elements of it were impartial. Pristine.

  She took her cues from her dad. If he’d been upset by the Hive, she probably would have been, too. Harlon, usually in the frontline of any kind of protest, had surprisingly been pretty low-key as the Hive was being debated and ultimately enacted. It was just the sort of tech disruption that usually inspired some passion in him one way or the other, but he’d been placid about it, almost disconnected. Rachel, meanwhile, flew into a fury at every mention of the Hive on the news.

  That changed right after the press conference after the president signed the bill into law. Rachel had been ranting about the inherent problems (of course, adding in something relevant about the Romans) when Harlon stood up from the dinner table, threw his fork onto his plate and snapped, “Enough, Rachel,” in a tone so final and so constrained that Cassie had been shocked, and Mom had actually stopped talking. Harlon never lost his temper. Just that once …

  The Hive had brought that out in him. She’d thought it was because he was pro-Hive and was tired of Mom cutting it down. But …

  Cassie blinked at her cursor circling around and around as some data took its sweet time downloading and allowed a new thought to worm its way up to the surface. What if, she realized, the Hive wasn’t delivering on its promises? What if it was actively causing problems, wreaking havoc, instead of making things more civilized? No one could see that more clearly than Cassie.

  What if … it was up to her, to everyone in OHM, to fix it?

  Cassie hadn’t paid much attention to the protests or the counter-movements back when they were everywhere, and especially when they filtered down to being only somewhere, some of the time. She hadn’t needed to.

  It was different now.

  *

  Impress us. She mainlined the vile coffee that percolated constantly in the kitchenettes and scarfed down a frightening quantity of donuts and potato chips. She hadn’t been so wired and so carb loaded since her first hackathon. Harlon had warned her at the time not to overdo it.

  “I’ve been where you are, baby. You get so high you think you can’t come down, but gravity’s a bear, and she’ll hug the life right out of you. Be smart.”

  She’d won three categories at that first hackathon, taking home a new laptop and a bunch of other sweet gear. The price she paid for it was a headache that didn’t go away for two days and the most vicious diarrhea imaginable. Totally worth it.

  But thinking of her dad made her think of her smashed phone, her line to him. She wondered what his AI would say if she texted him now. Dad, I’m on the run. Had they built that possibility into their code? If she could get her hands on another phone …

  She brushed her hair out of her eyes. On day two, she figured out how she would prove her worth to OHM. If she could pull it off.

  It was a thorny problem, especially with the slow tech at her disposal. But she had a roomful of genius hackers on hand, and what they lacked in social niceties they made up for in wisdom. She had learned a long time ago how to breach a hacker’s shell of impenetrable apathy by approaching with a problem that promised a unique solution. It had worked on her dad when he was neck-deep in code and blocking out the rest of the world to the point that he’d developed two cavities from forgetting to brush his teeth.

  Thinking of her dad made her wonder: Was this about her race? Her comment had gone viral. But had it been all on its own? Maybe if a white girl had said the same thing …

  She shook her head. She had to focus on what she could change. Right now.

  Mom had tossed a hoodie into the backpack, so Cassie threw that on and found an isolated corner. With her borrowed laptop and a gigantic mug of sludge that had aspirations to be liquid coffee someday, she settled in and started working.

  Time flew. Her hands cramped from typing, but the rest of her body just … relaxed. For the first time since her dad’s death, really. She hadn’t realized it, but the anger had clenched her body like a fist, and now the metaphorical fingers of that fist were falling open, even as her literal fingers were flying on the keyboard.

  All that rage. All that pent-up anger. Dissolved by immersing herself in her element. She hadn’t coded — not really coded — since her dad died. It had felt sacrilegious. Profane. Somehow disrespectful. And yet it had been the cure she’d needed. The balm for her pain. Code was the cure. She never should have given it up.

  TonyStark occasionally stopped by, not interrupting, just watching her fingers fly on the keyboard, nodding in approval. Almost despite herself, she’d come to like him. When he was coding, he was a fucking statue, nothing moving but the tips of his fingers on the keys. When not coding, he was like a hyper-active kindergartner, his entire body constantly in motion. They’d had a rough start. He hadn’t trusted her and she hadn’t entirely trusted him. But now …

  Now, she looked up momentarily from her screen. TonyStark stared at her, his legs jiggling slightly as he danced to some tune only he could hear. After a second or two, his face exploded into a smile and he gave her a thumbs-up before disappearing around a corner, whistling some tuneless ditty.

  Look at you, Cassie, she thought. Winning over people. Who knew you had it in you?

  She yawned, cracked her knuckles and bore down on the keyboard again.

  *

  Twenty-four hours later, interrupted only by two hour-long catnaps, she thought she had her answer. And the timing was just perfect.

  She remembered telling Rowan to punch up, not down. She couldn’t fix the system or change her fate, but she could make sure the world knew in no uncertain terms how fucked up everything was. The Hive was designed to be a hunt, to send the offender scurrying for cover and to satisfy the bloodlust of the crowd with a chase.

  She didn’t know much about boxing, but she knew this: she could retreat into her corner or she could deliver a massive uppercut. Punch up.

  The president was giving a live interview on one of the business channels, the boring ones that only talked about money and stock prices and bond yields and who knew what-the-hell-else all day long. Those were the only channels he sat down for, she noticed. Big business loved him, so the people who loved big business loved him, too.

  There was a stock ticker running endlessly at the bottom of the screen on that channel, 24-7. Even during commercials. God forbid Stock Bros miss a quarter percent change in Douche International, right?

  It took her all day to do it. Most of that time was spent probing gently for holes in the firewall, looking for the best way in that wouldn’t alert the network’s cybersecurity monkeys until it was far too late. She spent a little more time figuring out how to lock out said cyber-monkeys from the control panel. The only way to shut her up would be to shut the network itself down.

  Her dad would approve, she figured. Hoped.

  By the time she’d done all of that, the president was already on the air. She had been so busy trying to get into the system that she’d run out of time to figure out what exactly to do with that access. She’d have to wing it. Cassie pursed her lips, clicked her tongue; whatever she could find to distract her from the waxing and waning emotions inside her: Be vengeful, one voice said. Be kind, another ordered. Be approachable, be contrite; be haughty, be bitchy, be really pissed off. Be terrified. Be pawing your way out of a rage so thick that you can’t even breathe. She closed her eyes, aware of the ticking clock. Surprisingly, an image of her mother flashed before her.

  Cassie opened her eyes. All the voices were now in agreement: just be real.

  Impress us, TonyStark had said.

  Impress this, she thought, and executed her code.

  She cleared her throat and spoke up. Not shouting, but projecting pretty well. “Anyone watching the president on TV?” she asked innocently.

  There was a pause, then a fervid moment of mouse clicks and finger
taps on glass.

  Laptop lids slammed shut and people started shouting. It was the first time in three days that Cassie heard raised voices at OHM.

  Everyone was watching. Everyone could see what she had done.

  Hacked into the network’s stock ticker. And now, running in an endless loop under the president as he fulminated and gesticulated and bombinated, was this:

  HEY, @POTUS: KILL ME ALL YOU WANT — THAT BABY’S STILL AS UGLY AS YOU ARE. LOVE, @CASSIEMCK39. #HasCassieSurfacedYet? #COMEANDGETME #INFINITERANGEISNTLONGENOUGHASSHOLE

  100101200101

  TonyStark couldn’t stop laughing. He would pause for an instant but then catch a glimpse of Cassie and begin howling all over again. If nothing else, she figured she’d impressed him, which was nice. Meanwhile, others had gathered around, some yelling recriminations, others defending Cassie.

  There were no leaders at OHM, just a collection of like-minded people finding common ground where they could and otherwise leaving each other alone. OK, it reminded Cassie of the classical democracy her mom always talked about, but Cassie couldn’t even think about her mom. Too painful.

  If there’d been a leader, maybe someone would have punished Cassie or singled her out for praise. Instead, she was treated to a good half hour of people yelling at one another. Where there had once been only the sound of keystrokes, there was now nothing but fervor and rage.

  The broadcast network had to take its feed down for a full fifteen minutes, showing only a static rainbow grid while the in-house cyber-squad located Cassie’s worm and throttled it. She hadn’t had time to give it any sort of replication vectors, but she had enough time to make it look like it had reproduced itself multiple times once in the network’s systems. So the cyber-jackals had to spend additional time scrubbing their system, looking for more iterations of the worm. When they didn’t find any, they would probably spend a couple of days panicking, reinstalling packages “just in case” and generally living in hell for a little while.