Mind Hive

by Jake Berry Ellison Jr

“... Homeland Security, Department of Defense, FBI, CIA are here now and have the area completely sealed off. They’ve sequestered the workers on the drill team that first discovered the burial site. We’re not getting any new information here at least until a press conference scheduled for 1:30 central time ...”

  “Okay, folks. Let’s hit it. Let’s hit those phones, call your sources, our representatives, forensic experts, the pope, Jesus and Muhammad and let’s find out what the hell is going on. If there is a Seattle or Northwest connection, I want to hear about it immediately.”

  “I’ll call my sources at Hanford. They’d made a lot of plans to dump their nuclear waste there ...”

  “Great. Adam. I want you to set up the story budget. Everyone send your ideas, numbers and whatever information you get to Adam.”

  They broke from the television as if from a huddle, all except for Russell, who knew this moment in history would be drafted, written, photographed and edited by others. He put his hands in his pockets and continued staring at the television.

  XIII

  Back at his desk, Adam created a shared file and wrote the heading “Breaking News: Mass grave discovered at Yucca Mountain.” The phone on his desk went off and he grabbed it up.

  “Adam?”

  “Fuck me. Mannerheim?”

  “Are you watching the television?” Mannerheim talked in a low voice, just like he was trying not to be heard by others.

  “Nope. Just sitting here looking pretty.”

  Russell reached up and twisted the volume up high:

  “Local police have confirmed rumors that federal officers have been uncovering bodies from a massive burial site or mass grave in Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository here in Nevada ...”

  “Goddamn it, Russell! Turn that down!” Beach.

  “Mannerheim. I’m busy. What do you want?”

  “... They’ve been in those tunnels for a month and maybe more ... horrific stench ...”

  “Russell!”

  Russell flicked the set off. “Sorry! I thought this was a goddamn newsroom!” He stomped off toward the copy desks in the feature’s department.

  “This is the beginning of the end for us.”

  “Jesus Christ, Mannerheim.” Adam slammed the phone down in its cradle. His email cue already filling up. He quickly began organizing the information coming in.

  His phone rang again. Different number, so he answered it.

  “Adam?”

  “Natalie?”

  There was screaming in the background of the call. He jumped to his feet. The inconsolable rage and pain of a mother clutching a dead child, seemed to him, but it was not Natalie. He heard her asking what went wrong, why was she so upset? The line went dead, but Adam had automatically written down the number.

  “What the fuck?” Someone in the newsroom. “Anyone else able to get on the StreamNet?”

  Adam opened a browser and a second later the window reported to him that the gateway timed out and it could not connect to the server. He typed “Department of the Interior” in the search bar. Nothing.

  “Doesn’t that just figure.” He looked around to see if anyone else had luck. He spotted Brian, one of the new librarians, coming down the steps two at a time from the library office in the floor above. Beach, who busted out of her door, met Brian as he headed for the air-conditioned server room.

  Adam heard him tell her, “It’s not us,” as the door sucked shut.

  He followed after them, fearful of a reduced or delayed paper, entered the number code on the square punch pad and stepped in to the server room. Beach turned, surveyed the newsroom behind him, thought better of whatever she was going to say and went back out to her office. Adam nodded his approval of her, once more. She wasn’t a meddler and once she set the tone and put the wheels in motion, she let her professional staff take over. He followed her back out.

  On the way to his desk, a plan of attack came clear in his head. He called Natalie’s cell from his desk phone, a landline, but no answer. Methodical’s the word of the day, he cautioned himself. Step two: Send someone to check on her. He tried Carol’s cell phone, but couldn’t get through.

  “Can the cell towers be down?” he yelled. “Can anyone get through on their cell phones?”

  “I can’t”

  “Dead.”

  “What the fuck!”

  “Okay,” he stood up, hands on hips, “let’s find out what’s going on.” Dr. Calm. Mr. Professional. He spoke in his best now-down’t-anyone-panic voice. “Use the land lines. Bike messengers. Whatever. Someone call the cell companies. (Got it!) Someone call the FCC, the mayor (Will do!), the county executive, the goddamn U.S. Attorney’s office (Dialing now!). And someone get me some fucking answers!” He dropped into his seat and shoved his keyboard against the monitor riser. In limbo, he dialed Mannerheim’s number. What the fuck indeed. But of course it was a cell number.

  “Anyone have Beta Launch’s landline number? Tom, you’ve called them before. Can you please dig out their number?”

  “Yeah, yeah.” He called it out.

  Adam dialed the number.

  “Beta Launch,” cool, pleasantly oblivious auto-secretary voice.

  “This is Adam Howard of the Seattle Daily-Record. First, does your company have any StreamNet or cell connections?”

  “I’m not authorized to speak to the press.”

  “Well then please connect me with someone who can but don’t put me on hold or hang up this is very very important.”

  “Brian Pedersen is our director of communications. I can give you his direct line, but he’s not in right now. Want his cell?”

  “Will it do me any good?” He avoided an insult or temper tantrum because these auto-call bots were already involved in numerous class-action harassment suits.

  “You can try it.”

  Twitcher! The old insult. “Just let me talk to Mannerheim.”

  “He doesn’t work in our offices.”

  “Can I please have his landline? His home phone if he has one? I already have his cell number.” He read the number to her so she would get the point.

  “I don’t know ...”

  “How’s this. You call him and let him know I’m ready to talk. He’ll be happy you did. He tried to call me earlier.”

  “I’ll relay the message.”

  “It’s urgent and he’ll want to make this call, so the sooner you can the better.”

  “Okay.” The sophisticated auto-voice hung up, mechanically, politely.

  Eight minutes later the emergency broadcast signal beamed out of the television. A radio went on and it too was broadcasting the ringing-squelch-buzz. The rock-voiced announcer said an announcement would be made by the President of the United States at 2:30 Eastern Standard Time on shortwave radio.

  “Someone get a goddamned shortwave radio!”

  “What the fuck!”

  Now that was screaming! Adam laughed with a tinge of hysteria himself. If his mind hadn’t been busy problem solving, he too might have wondered in a loud, high-pitched voice why the President of the United States of America was going to address the nation on fucking shortwave radio. How could communications have come down to that so fast? The emergency broadcast system was up, why not use that? Was everything really so tied into the StreamNet already, again? Also, another question bubbling up was how did they know right off that they couldn’t and wouldn’t be able to address the nation in the usual way. Why were they waiting? Were we at war? Have we been at war? Would they even tell us …

  His phone rang. Mannerheim.

  “Where is she?”

  “Your reporter? I don’t know. With them. You have to understand that as of right now we are all fucked.” Calm-yet-hysteric squeaks among slowly pronounced words.

  Adam didn’t know what to say. He never heard Mannerheim use the F-word before. He stood and looked around the newsroom. Reporters with corded phones against their heads a common scene after The Crash that had given way once again to smar
t phones. Several copy editors had shown up early because of the crisis and were standing around the coffeemaker at the sink station. Three systems guys had crowded into the server room, two standing over one guy sitting in front of a computer terminal. All three shaking their heads.

  “They control the StreamNet. They control any system they can hack into and any system on the StreamNet can be hacked into …”

  “This can’t be that groupie bunch of kids.”

  “Somehow …”

  “No way. Well, whoever it is, they don’t control the presses. They don’t control us!” Adam was then thinking: Russia. China. Some evil bastard in the U.S. government?

  “I’d make sure your systems people sever your production system from the StreamNet before they get around to you and shut you down. They will keep the electricity running for awhile, since they also use our system of power distribution and everything needs energy.”

  Adam set the phone down and trotted over to the server room. Several reporters stood up. A reporter running across the newsroom was one thing, Adam running was another. The background panicky chatter kicked up a notch. He pounded on the door as he punched the key pad. Wrong number. One of the guys opened it from the inside. Cool air spilled out around his legs.

  “Can we disconnect our production from the StreamNet?”

  The tech on his left shrugged, and the one seated said to his screen, “We did it after The Crash. Why?”

  “I think we’re in the middle of a major cyber attack.”

  “Yes we are. We can’t even get a response from any cloud servers.”

  “Let’s get our system offline as fast as we can.”

  The tech on the right, pinching his chin with one hand. The other pinned a tablet to his chest. “We won’t be able to communicate with the presses,” he said.

  “We can set up external drives …”

  “But the operating system is in the cloud …”

  Adam left them to figure it out on their own. As he trotted back to his desk, Janet the business editor called out to him from her corner office, “What’d tech say?”

  “We’re going back to covered wagons!”

  “What about the …”

  He ignored her. At his desk, he picked up the phone.

  “We’re going to be able to print a paper.”

  “You can quote me all you want.”

  “How do you know what’s going on?”

  “Because, like I’ve been telling you, this isn’t just now happening. We—the U.S. government, the United Nations, the EU, China and Russia everyone who is anyone has been working on this problem for months.”

  “That’s impossible. How could you have kept that big of an act, whatever it is, secret? We would have heard about it by now.”

  “You really think China alone, as smart as they are, could produce the number and strength of cyber attacks we’ve been battling these past few months? The story has been under your noses for a long time, but no one believed it when they heard it. Frankly, I can’t blame you, but that doesn’t change the fact of it.”

  “I’m taking notes now. Can you give me the landline numbers for people you worked with on this problem?”

  “Sure.”

  Mannerheim worked through his contacts and listed the numbers for national and international agents and political offices around the world. Adam stopped him at fifteen. He put the phone down and walked the list to Beach, who was sitting in her office drumming a pencil against the papers stacked in front of her, face scrunched, puzzling though it all.

  “We need to switch it up. Mannerheim has given us numbers to call to confirm that this cyber attack involves members of that cult Natalie uncovered ...”

  “A pack of school girls is causing all of this?”

  “He said they were involved.”

  “I thought he was crazy.”

  “Let’s make calls and find out.”

  “Okay, do the assignments.”

  “I need you to do it since I’m interviewing Mannerheim.”

  “Why us?”

  “I’ll find that out.”

  Beach followed Adam out of her office. “Hey everyone!” she yelled. “First thing I need to know is how big is the blackout? Is it electricity or satellites or just us?”

  “Got it!” Robert yelled as he ran into the newsroom. He spotted Adam walking from Beach’s office and rushed up to them. “There was a grand jury! It was disbanded yesterday. I have a document, heavily redacted, that shows ...”

  “Mute point now, Robert. Beach will fill you in. I’ve got to get back to a call.”

  Adam rushed back to his desk, leaving Robert dumbfounded and holding papers in the air. Phone in hand, Adam determined to listen to Mannerheim’s fantastical stories and hopefully get some idea of how big the event was and where to go looking for the reality of what was going on. Patience!

  “Sorry about that,” he huffed, out of breath, “and sorry I didn’t listen more closely before ...”

  “Oh, now, that’s alright. It is a bit of a shocker.” Again, that calm. Just like when they met at the water tower.

  “Why are you even talking to us instead some other newspaper … or any newspaper at all?”

  “They chose you. They like Natalie for some reason. You’ll have to ask them, and we figured we’d better get our two-cents in, rough draft of history and all that. So, tag you’re it.”

  It hit Adam: Fatalism mixed with sorrow. Like when you give up hoping things will get better and recognize that at best you’ll just get to ride it out … like an election that goes against common sense. You panic. You shake your fist, and then you just have to accept it and hope the world survives until another election comes around, if it does.

  “How big is this StreamNet blackout, if that’s what it is?”

  “It’s not a blackout. The shutdowns are controlled. More like individual lines of connection are being switched off. Very sophisticated. We’re all in the dark a bit on that, but I’d say global is a good bet.”

  “Come on. Global? As in the entire fucking world?”

  “That’s a good bet. I’m just telling you what I think. I’m no longer tied in as much as I was. They’re pulling back behind closed doors.”

  “Is the blackout related to the mass grave or whatever it is on the TV news right now?”

  “We think so. They lost contact with our man inside.”

  “Josh Fines.”

  “That I can’t say.” He didn’t sound surprised that Adam had the name. His response was flat, still pumping out the party line when it suited him.

  “Are those bodies being dug up or some kind of prank or ploy?”

  “I’m not entirely sure. They don’t tell me everything …”

  Adam interrupted. “They who?”

  “NRO, CIA, NSA, DIA, NGA, US cyber com, the Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center, Navy, Air Force, you name it. THEY have been working hard to figure out who, what group, what country is behind so many recent breaches of security around the world. And all they keep coming up with is her, which can’t be. Not just because this is way too big for her, and it is, but they can’t even figure out from where she is hacking into all these systems … but she’s all we got.”

  “They got nothing else?”

  “Nada.”

  “What did she take from your lab? Could it be some sort of artificial intelligence? That’s what they told Natalie … well that and it could be Streamline to God.”

  “There’s your clue. I think not. No. All she took from me, I suspect, was a pretty basic algorithm I was using in an experiment. Whatever is going on, that can’t be the root of it. I can’t imagine why she took it. It’s pretty clever little learning program, but it’s not a nuclear weapon or anything. I mean, she indoctrinating them—hackers, spies or foreign government—and maybe my experiment helped her in some way, inspired them, but that's it. What she’s into is much more complicated and powerful than anything we’ve seen before. No one group can con
trol this much complexity. Whatever is behind this isn’t smashing systems. They’re managing them. The power is still on, for instance, and almost all of our infrastructure is susceptible to hacking. But,” he sighed, “like I’ve said. They don’t tell me everything. Maybe we’re winning.”

  It sounded like he yawned. Good drugs maybe. Horse-strength beta blockers? Adam had a few of those in his desk drawer, too. He made a mental note to dig one out as soon as he got off the phone.

  Listening to Mannerheim’s calm voice as he spelled out how the current trouble simply couldn't be caused by Celestine or her Clans after saying it was them, Adam was in fact starting to get a sinking, confusing feeling about it all. A Yeah-but-what-if? feeling.

  “Look. You said it’s her and now it’s not her, which is it?”

  “I said it’s something to do with her and her group, but not all of it.”

  “You said, We’re fucked! How did you know that?”

  “I …”

  “You’re lying.”

  “It could be some form of artificial intelligence, sure. We’ve all been building them and setting them loose on the world with no thought to how they might interact.”

  “Did you let one loose?” Adam thought, Shit. He did it.

  “An AI? Sure, we all did, like I said.”

  Adam had read so many sci-fi novels where artificial intelligence takes off and wreaks havoc; or a virus, biological or digital, springs to life and ruins the planet, destroying humanity or nearly so, that he let that little thrill of What if? run up his spine. He had to be wrong, of course. That’s just dumb, he instructed himself. The human world is too fractured and too big. Too complex. No group of people could be connected enough or ideologically aligned enough to pull off a world-wide conspiracy. Humans were just too messy. There were conspiracies for sure, but their paltriness and transparency proved his point. The zombie apocalypse gets going in every story because the zombie uses this fact of human messiness against them. The world doesn’t believe it’s happening and then it responds in exactly the way the virus needs it to in order to grow out of control. Because people are dumbasses.

  Mannerheim broke into Adam’s reverie.

  “We’re playing around with a whole new universe of powers in which a new threat can germinate and take root without us even knowing it, but no one wants to slow down and think about what the hell we’re actually doing. I have to go get my building ready for the end of the world.”