Mind Hive

by Jake Berry Ellison Jr

  Adam stood up from the absurdity and padded over to the stainless steel sink surrounded by marble and teak-wood counters. He’d made out alright in the divorce. Out of the top drawer, he took up another cigarette pack and lighter. A half-bottle of red wine cooed at him from the counter top, so he drank all of it. He dropped the cigarette butt into the bottle, walked to the bathroom.

  Dallying under the powerful shower spray, he told the radio to turn on. The All News Digest auto-host spoke his name, declared the news of human origins and began. After the usual opening stories about weather and people being nice to each other, the auto-host veered to its series on I-I security: “Members of Congress will hold hearings later this week with the CEOs of the four American corporations controlling the country’s Info-Infra. Hackers have made Swiss cheese of I-I security …” All news orgs were doing deep dives into the weekly, often daily, hacking of major I-I servers. He barely listened, thinking again about the photos and his rookie reporter.

  After twenty minutes of rocking under the hot water to maximize coverage, he caved in and padded wet across the heated tile floor to the kitchen, where the next bottle of wine waiting to be uncorked vibrated a pleasant tune. He felt a shallow spike of pride that he had not already opened it, and suddenly, instead of going for it, he heavily pushed the button on his ten-thousand-dollar, fully automatic espresso maker. It was Seattle’s turn for reduced electricity usage, so he’d be without lights the rest of the day. Fine. He wasn’t home until after midnight anyway. He took the perfectly foamed latte back into the shower. An hour later he was on the crowded Number Eight auto-bus, rolling down steep Denny Way though the high-rise density of South Lake Union, his daily ride from Capitol Hill to the Puget Sound waterfront where he’d worked for 30 years as an assistant city editor for the Seattle Daily-Record.

  II

  Natalie Rodriguez tossed and turned until six, too excited by her story and Adam’s high regard of it, the way she saw it, to sleep. A lawyer call! Screw it. She jumped out of bed and set to performing cardio to a Stream in her living/dining room that shared space with the kitchen and then began working her way through a dozen quiet yoga poses. A light in the apartment that faced her window across a few feet clipped on. The couple who lived there were polite but certainly not dull. With Stream security jobs, they could afford a view. They were among the first wave of her age-peers who hit Seattle just as the StreamNet, a sub network within the Info-Infa, created out of the crippled mess the old Internet after The Crash. They were among the elders of the first generation to get jobs and had driven all the apartments with views out of the range of her first-year journalist budget. Natalie moved on to relaxation poses. Even a hint of direct sunlight would have put this tiny cold-water apartment out of reach. Her neighbors understand this. When they left their apartment for the day, they raised curtains so Natalie could have a passthrough view of the Space Needle. After relaxation poses, she rolled up the mat and stashed it between the spindly legs of the only piece of furniture in the living area. The blue, worn-crush-velvet loveseat with rounded arms was perfect for napping in front of the Stream panel. When she was little, Stream panels were called televisions and very few people had one that worked. She twisted the burner on under the teapot, then laid out a range of clothes for the day. She’d make that decision after a second cup of coffee. Water heated to just about boiling, she poured it over the grounds in a funnel. Black. No sugar, of course.

  On the bed, blankets over her legs, she opened the laptop and pointed the browser to the Daily-Record’s online story budget. She had an idea for a series of blog posts that could be combined into a story for print in the Sunday paper centered on her discovery of Mannerheim and the party. That’s how she saw the story playing out, more about the young people than the old guy, even though she had little hope of getting permission for the series from her current editor. For him, blog posts were throw-away briefs that wouldn’t make the print edition. But she would not give up. One day she would win the right to write with freedom, just as they had in her grandmother’s days in journalism. Until then, she kept on fighting to improve how the Daily-Record told stories, fearlessly going over her editor when she felt she had any especially good idea. She was determined to make that future a reality sooner than later.

  She couldn’t be careless or flippant, however. Adam will grill her about her proposal, and if she had nothing to go on but a hunch, he’d harangue her mercilessly. She did want to figure him out. He’s old but does not lech or act fatherly, mansplaining every obvious thing. Frankly, she had to admit, he treated her like he treated everyone: Emotionally dismissive. If he thought an idea was bad, he said so. If he thought a story important, he’d fight for it impersonally, even against the managing editor. He edits hard, though, scoffing whenever she argues for a sentence because it gave voice to her story. “If your story needs verbal pizzazz to interest the reader, then either you haven’t done enough reporting or the story sucks.” He is a jerk with a short temper, she concluded, especially after lunch.

  Natalie edited the story proposal down to a long sentence, sent a copy directly to the managing editor, picked her clothes, brushed out her hair and launched headlong into the city.

  III

  The geography of the Daily-Record’s newsroom clung to the pattern of the editorial fiefdoms established in the 1950s, long before the Electric Disasters and The Crash. The newsroom took up one large floor with desks spread out in clumps. Only the fictions of newsprint sections divided them: Features, Sports, Photography, Copy Editors, Layout Editors, Metro and the Investigation Team. Adam’s pressed-pulp desk had been part of a wave of upgrades to the newsroom performed some twenty-five years before. It came with two big drawers, which he had stuffed full of papers, bags and old promotional tchotchkes and celebratory company T-shirts from the reinstitution of press freedoms. Instead of using drawers, which he hated bending over to dig in, he stacked all of his important papers, research, books and printouts of marked-up stories on the top of his desk. He had a pathway through the stacks for reaching the old landline and a cleared rectangle just the size of his keyboard. His blue coffee cup, only occasionally rinsed, balanced precariously on one stack of papers or other as he used it throughout the day. Since he was the chief assistant metro editor, his desk was also closer to the city editor’s office than the other three assistant metro editors so he could grunt back at Beach when she made demands or ridiculing jokes about city officials.

  First thing he did after throwing the power switch on his terminal was cruise national, regional and local news sites. He made a list of the stories they should have had but didn’t. In the big national news of the day, the White House said it would order the National Guard to clear the tens of thousands of climate refugees camped around and throughout the Capital grounds. Pretty bad idea. If they didn’t fight back and die there, they’d likely just wander off and die somewhere else just as visibly. The resurgent use of fossil fuels had ended the Electric Emergencies, and now the fighting was on again about climate change. The Guard, fearing a countrywide revolt, said it would not march on the camps. Ass-covering maneuver. As far as Constitutional crises went, the Guard’s refusal hardly registered against the efforts of the current power-hungry administration. He assigned that story and others to the reporters who should have had them already.

  The national desk was running wire stories on the daily violent protests around the White House, but he wanted at least his own photographer on the scene. He also added a note for the Daily-Record’s government reporter in D.C. to delve a bit more into the Congressional hearings over hacking, since two of the companies controlling the StreamNet were headquartered in Seattle. The best reporting on the hackers so far only revealed that whoever it was had not taken control of or damaged any infrastructure. They just get in, apparently wherever they want, look around and get out. Sometimes data was copied and sometimes not. The national desk ran the D.C. reporter, so Adam had not been able to pull the national story into his ba
iliwick. He would, however, get the desk to add a context piece from his team to their story budget. After all, the StreamNet didn’t used to be run by just a few corporations.

  Next, he combed through each of his reporter’s proposed stories When he got to Natalie’s, he had only fifteen minutes before the editors’ meeting. She filed that morning, according to the time stamp:

  “EDM is growing and has spawned a new subculture that is fast becoming mainstream—Who are they? How will they change the world? Why are old-school StreamNet companies gaming for their attention? A series of blog posts would build a community and lead to a Sunday feature.”

  “Child,” he thought. He quickly typed back: “I hate to break it to you, but that’s not the story we’re pursuing right now. And, electronic dance music is nothing new. A million stories about kids taking drugs and thinking they’ve discovered some uniquely beautiful way to live have already been published, even in our dinosaur of a newspaper. In fact, I remember something like this taking over my university in ’72. Check in with me after the editors’ meeting.”

  A second later, not after the meeting as he had ordered, Natalie marched over to his desk and spoke at the back of his head.

  “Not everything important in the world happened before I was born.”

  He assumed she wanted him to crane his neck, look around to acknowledge her, chronic neck pain and all. He did not. Throwing together the city budget for the meeting while ignoring her, he couldn’t help hearing her tap her notebook against her thigh or hand or whatever. She huffed in a way she should have been embarrassed by. Young and inexperienced. Standing there with blazing cheeks, no doubt. Her professors never treated her like this! She clicked her pen at the back of his head.

  “Goddamnit, Natalie.” He didn’t look up from his computer screen. He sighed to signal that he did not have unlimited patience. He swiveled to face her. Her eyes wide with adrenaline belied her cool. He lifted his eyebrows. “Go to library and let’s find out what the hell Mannerheim is worried about. Let’s not get distracted by blogging.”

  “Blogging is journalism.” She crossed her arms and tapped her middle finger against her bicep, catlike.

  “Not around here it ain’t.”

  “Bloggers used to run newspapers. Why are you even my editor?”

  Adam snorted and swiveled back to face the computer screen. Her hopes of being rescued from him were dashed daily. She insisted on going through the routine over and over, however. Like a teenager coming home late from a dance with boozy breath and declaiming the injustice of being grounded. He didn't want to demean her. Just that she was so unconscious. She’d been on staff only a few months, long enough to recognize in her behavior what all the researchers said: After decades of generational poverty, these kids were impatient for advancement and reward. They entered every relationship with an eager fearlessness. He assumed, defensively he had to admit, that Natalie didn’t yet recognize that though he was old, overweight and bald, he was still among the best editors in the country and she should be grateful to work with him. He also had the allegiance of other editors and most of the reporters, as well. So, she was unlikely to get much sympathy. Besides, he really was trying to teach her something. He didn’t want to break her spirit, either. To have a reporter stand toe-to-toe with some powerful person who spends more on toilet paper at his summer chalet than the reporter makes in a year, asking hard questions in dogged pursuit, that was more important than strict obedience. Natalie had the spirit and talent. She just needed the experience and discipline.

  He turned his attention back to the screen and noticed that the lead sentence on the judge story bugged him so he erased it. He forgot about her as soon as he had turned back around. The whole story needed a write-through. It had all the right details, but didn’t have a clear focus. Natalie noisily fumed, unwilling to be dismissed. Adam looked up at Elena Bell, the city-county government editor sitting directly across from him. She registered his plea. She and Adam had worked seamlessly with each other for nearly three years, a professional lifetime, like dog years. She also assigned the daily news briefs.

  “Hey, Natalie,” Bell said. She looked around her monitor to make eye contact with the upstart. Natalie suddenly remembered what Bell did for a living and flinched. “Will you take these four press releases and make briefs out of them?” She smiled and raised the sheets of paper. Natalie dropped her arms and stepped from behind Adam with an “Ugh!”

  “Don’t forget the links in the Web versions.”

  Adam smiled at Bell. Nice touch. Kids. There’s so many of them. They’re into everything and one of these days they’ll change into something terrible, their parents … like a zombie infestation. He wrote that sentence down on a sticky note at the base of his monitor’s riser and went back to the city budget document.

  IV

  After a bruising editors’ meeting in which all of the metro stories got kicked off the front page by two stories from sports about the divorce of a star quarterback, and its potential impact on his upcoming playoff performance; another mass murder in America, front-page worthy because the gunman had been shooting into a school playground from the top window of the business he owned several hundred yards away (with mass shootings every couple of weeks, it took unique circumstances to get one on the front page); and, a soft-lead story about the latest technology-sector employment report (another “Staggering increase! Tech-sector employment nearly fully recovered!”) to package with the national desk’s StreamNet hacking story. How would the city survive? What does it mean that nearly eighty percent of people under 35 worked for a global company based on or that created new digital and quantum-based technology? Two bright spots for Adam’s afternoon came out of it. He got to assign Natalie to help with the business tech story. And since the front page was spoken for, he got another day to work on Robert Henderson’s judge story, which was too good to bury inside.

  Natalie filed her Voices From the Street sidebar to the tech story early and then, showing initiative, got Robert out of the building to help her dig through the dance-scene story. Adam agreed to let them disappear for a couple of hours before the big meeting with Mannerheim’s layers, mostly because it would get his best court reporter, Robert, out of the building and help him forget, however briefly, the trauma and insults Adam was delivering to his masterful story about the corrupt judge.

  V

  After pleasantries, Mannerheim's lawyers displayed a great feat of human evolution, such as when an early member of the species moved from learning what was useful in the moment only, such as using a stick to poke away a snake or a sharp stone to scrape meat from the bones of a giant sloth, to learning an idea or technique without immediate use of it splayed before them, such as how to file a cease-and-desist order against a newspaper. What’s more, Adam mused as Mannerheim’s head lawyer explained the details of the order, these humans got a federal court to approve the order in one morning's private session. Then they presented the paper, without preamble or private discussion of what photos the Daily-Record might even have in possession, with the first prior-restraint order said newspaper had ever received.

  "By God, Mr. Robbins," Adam snapped the single sheet of paper out of the heavyset lawyer’s hand. He plunged down into a chair across the large table from the lawyer and next to Beach.

  "I'm going to get this framed and put it right next to my Pulitzer. In fact, I'm going to put it over my Pulitzer!"

  Beach put her bejeweled hand on Adam’s forearm.

  "I think you just made us famous," she said with fake admiration at her copy of the order.

  Kristi’s daughters had so tortured the poor woman that though she was just over fifty, it took something as outrageous as a prior restraint order to get color into her cheeks.

  Tina Ejlali introduced herself as Mannerheim's head of communications. "You can't tell anyone anything without violating that order." Thick black hair in a tight ponytail, blue tweed jacket, crisp white shirt. "You will also have to show up
in court to defend your editor and reporter's actions."

  "It's just a photo.” Natalie rustled at the head of the table, the hot seat, her arms folded, looking embarrassed at confusion.

  “Exactly." Adam felt such pride! "A photo we will print alongside a copy of this order.” The court order filled him with pleasure, not unlike alcohol which he had steered clear of so far that morning.

  "If we even have a photo," Kristi said.

  "Look, Adam ..." David Robbins, Mannerheim's personal attorney, leaned back in a chair.

  "Are you nuts? It's Mr. Howard ..."

  Robbins laughed, opened his hands and raised them and folded them together. "I think you're not understanding the gravity of the situation here. That's a goddamned federal court order.” He jabbed his finger at the paper as he said so.

  "We're on the record here, I'd like to remind you," Kristi said.

  "There's never been a prior restraint issued outside of national security during wartime and The Crisis that has ever stood," Adam said. "This will be published along with the thirty-six photos we have and the order and every thing I can find to print about Mr. Mannerheim."

  "I thought we were on the record," Tina scoffed.

  "You're on the record. We are the record.” Adam’s voice grew harsh with adrenaline. He coughed.