Natalie found him lost in reverie, looking over the crowded Sound. “Hey, Josh is ready for us,” she said, happy something, anything, was happening.
Ready for us? The phrase stung, like Josh was now the king of all. Fuck him. Power always acts like it knows what’s happening and what needs to be done, but it doesn’t. And then it typically screws things up a lot more with its full head of steam, ramming along like a truck through pedestrians, impoverishing those it doesn’t kill outright. “Yeah, well,” he said, blocking the litany of swear words racing toward his mouth. “Let’s just remember he wants something.”
“I know.” She patted his shoulder reassuringly.
Has she grow up? What a difference a week at the end of the world makes. He laughed a little and turned to her. “I know you do. Let’s go be journalists.”
“Hell yeah.” She smiled.
He hadn’t seen it in her before, but that smile and that joggle of head, even with the long brown hair back in a thick girlish ponytail, she was solid within herself and unafraid. That last bit, that unafraid bit, that came with the person. You can’t train that into a reporter. You can’t program it, not the way a living, caring, meaningful person can be unafraid to do what needs to be done against all resistance. He had seen it in all kinds of people. Just not everywhere. For instance, he did not see it in Josh though the agent had other survival attributes.
“Okay, here’s the deal,” Josh said after Natalie and Adam were ushered into a recess of the observation deck where it loomed over Lower Queen Anne. The neighborhood sprawled up the base of Queen Anne Hill in the last of dusk. He sat with his back to the window in a pool of light, a video camera on a tripod faced him with two banks of filtered lights by its sides. He motioned to the chairs on either side of himself. “If you’ll take a seat, we can get started.”
Adam stopped in front of the camera, expecting his bulk to gloriously block its full view. “What deal?”
Josh looked at Adam with a hard notch to his left eyebrow but then released it. “You know, I misspoke,” he said diffidently, quite possibly honestly. “It’s been a hell of a week … for all of us to be sure.” He pushed his hand through his short white hair and down the back of his neck. “How I meant to say that is, Here’s the deal I would like to present to you.”
Natalie crossed in front Adam and sat on the seat on Josh’s right.
“Deal my ass.” She slid the notebook out of her back pocket as she crossed her right leg over left. “You ask your questions and we’ll ask ours. Where are you going to show that video, by the way? In the boy’s room?”
Josh shot a look right at her, then at Adam and then at the people next to him. Then he sighed and motioned to the camera. “We’re keeping records.”
“Of the people you have tied up down there, no doubt. Names and …”
“That’s the city, Natalie.” He faced the camera. “We’re not involve with that.” Smile. “If you want to pop out there and spend the night with those crews, be my guest.” He settled his hands on thighs. “We’re keeping a record while we can.” He looked back at the camera. “At the end of this interview, we’ll seal the card in that camera into a graphite fiber case and put it into a tomb outside under a three meter concrete and steel lid. It is the record of everything that happened this week, starting with your rescue and …”
“I do thank you for that,” Natalie said.
“… and ending after this conversation.”
“That bad?” Adam queried, with a bit of twist to his neck and flick of eye glance back at the camera. The entire situation was just too absurd to take seriously.
“Worse than you know,” Josh said with a complete lack of pretension. “As you might have guessed, I’ve asked you here for a reason.”
Adam chimed in, “Because you need corroboration, support for what you’re about to say.”
“Indeed.”
“… which is …” Natalie not cutting him any slack.
“I do need your corroboration to convince my colleagues around the world that the machine they call The Hive is not finished with us. It’s not finished with the world. I need you to tell your stories, Natalie of the Clan and Adam on your conversations with Mannerheim, so that we stand a chance of responding to the next wave of disruption.”
“Next wave?” Natalie and Adam said in tandem, making eye contact.
Natalie said, “For just a second there I thought you called me ‘Natalie of The Clan,’ but I get it now.”
“That can be the name of your new band.” Adam snorted, sniffed.
Josh sat back and let his shoulders fall. “You’re right to laugh.” Hands up, stick-up style. “Almost no one will survive this and so laugh away. I mean it.”
“Okay, we give,” Adam struggled back a guffaw. He didn’t know why he felt like laughing, exhaustion he guessed. “How can there be a next wave? What will this next wave do?”
“Okay,” Josh dried the palms of his hands on his thighs. Natalie poised her notebook. “I have been with Celestine, Olivas and Gaines for more than a year. I’m going to try to lay out their plans as best I understand them, though I’ll miss a thing or two because they didn’t tell me everything and I’ve been out of contact with leadership since before the takeover. I was assigned to an undercover investigation of Olivas and Gaines once it became clear by their conversations at their respective jobs that they were involved in a possible, not sure what we called it … Adam,” he looked to his left but not right at him, “attempted to download my notes and files on this case but we were not able to retrieve them. They were called a coding cult or a cyber club or other things. Michelle Olivas and Betty Gaines were physics graduate students with significant programing algorithm talent who met at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. They were a part of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Graduate Fellowship Program designed to train students in Nuclear Security and Stockpile Stewardship. They met Celestine through Mannerheim’s lab that the Department of Energy funded to work on models for understanding the viability of our nuclear warheads without blowing them up. I don’t know exactly how they met, but they clearly have similar interests and talents. I joined the Clan, went through initiation and worked my way into their chief electrical engineer position, such as it was.
“I have traveled with them all over the world setting up Clan bases, session clubs. Natalie saw and wrote about an initiation ceremony. But before I can explain that, I have to go into some background and technical details, some of which come from my conversations with Celestine, Olivas and Gaines, whose recounting of events is only slightly less trustworthy than Mannerheim’s, whom I believe my two colleagues here have also met.”
“We’re not colleagues,” Adam interjected. “Just for the record.”
“And this is for the record, the final record. So fine.”
Adam breathed in to interject a question, but Josh barged on.
“First! We don’t know where Celestine and the other two have gone, so if anyone here knows it’d be great if you said so.”
He paused and looked at Natalie, who shrugged and turned down the corners of her mouth.
“Well, then, here’s the deal: We don’t have much time to convince everyone else in the world that it’s not over. The Mind Hive AI, which no one believes is real according to my preliminary conversations with my fellow surviving investigators across the country, and I don’t blame them because I didn’t believe it either—the machine is going to dismantle all of our electronics and then all of our infrastructure and then all of our cities. We have a very short window to set up lines of communication and security that do not rely on any form of technology. And, just for the record, I need you two to help me convince the world of this. I don’t know how long we have before our radios fail and then our guns. We’re going to be reduced to territories we can protect with our hands in just a matter of a few more days at the most.”
“How do you know that?” Adam jump
ed into the monologue.
“Like I said, I have been following them for more than a year and seen thousands of sessions. And …” he visibly shrank in his chair, “I may have triggered this aggressive response.”
“How could you have started all of this?” Natalie asked.
“Well,” he said into the palms of his hands, wiped his face, “there are two types of nanites currently wreaking havoc in our world. The one’s that Celestine says she reprogramed and the ones she says The Mind Hive created when it escaped confinement and set out to terraform our world for some form of us. We only have her claims for where they came from, however, and many people, my colleagues,” he said the word with a defensiveness that sounded to Adam plaintive, wounded even, “don’t believe they came from where Celestine claims they came from. Even Mannerheim, whose work Celestine says The Hive emerged from, doesn’t think there is an artificial intelligence running around out there somewhere. Some, including Mannerheim, think Celestine made at least some of them in one of his labs and then got a lab in China, Russia or Iran even, to take over the project and mass produce them and they got out of control. They say once we figure out how to stop replication and spread that agent around like bug spray, we’ll shut them down, reduce their numbers, and take back our world. Some people think the nanites come from aliens, from extraterrestrials bent on taking over the world and also terraform Earth to eliminate the dominant species and make the planet fit for habitation by them.”
“What do you think?” Natalie asked, knowing what his answer would be, it seemed to Adam.
“I think, I believe Celestine’s story,” he shifted his position from talking at the camera to just talking, not really to an audience, more like remembering something out loud. “During my initiation, an event just like the one Natalie reported, I experienced something I cannot explain without the proposition of the nanites she uses being what she said they are, a machine for replicating humans. I felt … plugged in …” he visibly picked over his words before saying them “… to a very large system. A system built on … computation. A system that represented itself as a hive, like a bee hive only without the outer skin. Just billions of … compartments … for replications of people to … plug in.”
Natalie and Adam shifted their chairs to face him as much as the camera. So, when Josh finished, he saw her face as it changed from amusement to personal connection. They had shared a history, however recent.
“That’s my subjective reason for believing what Celestine has said about the AI. But, I also have some objective reasons to believe it. I sent a memo back to Washington explaining the technical feat that she and the Clans had accomplished. I stated her claims and background story about the AI, but I added that we needed to do more tests on the nanites. The two kinds we were studying in our labs had different signatures.They can’t be observed directly except in the most powerful neutron microscopes and the only one in America that can do the job is at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which is public and of course we didn’t want to risk the information getting out to the public. So, we could only measure them indirectly. We didn’t know how the two seemingly simple signature differences controlled behavior. We needed more data and more time on a super computer to run models. The more we looked, the more we found. The nanites made by The Hive AI were everywhere, in every country where we had agents, in the dust on the table, inside phones and computer farms, just everywhere we got a sample and put it under laser-induced fluorescence spectroscopy, there they were. Those self-assembling bits were different than the ones in people, however. We had lots of samples but didn’t know what they were up to. Mannerheim explained it best in his classified paper that their presence everywhere was like an industrial accident or unexpected result of an industrial process. He said we only had to look at the worldwide presence of polyvinyl chloride to see how this could happen. He even argued that these nanites were the result of evolution and that Celestine had found a way to change them so they would bind to, replicate and replace human tissues. It’s possible, he said, that they do nothing. Or, those compounds could destroy human habitation. That paper got the attention of top officials in Washington, and they wanted to run more experiments particularly on the nanites that bonded with human tissues. They established a grand jury to …”
“HA!” Adam jumped up. “I fucking knew it!”
“Jesus, you scared the shit out of me.” Natalie panted with a hand against her chest.
“Shit. Sorry. Just …”
“Yes,” Josh said, “a grand jury had been convened to review our warrants and arrests. Not normal procedure, but the President’s Chief of Staff wanted some legal ass-covering. Anyway,” he motioned for Adam to hold off on another outburst, “the night Natalie crashed a session, Mannerheim was there because he wanted to watch an infection. Celestine wouldn’t let him unless he agreed to be infected, which he would not do.
“By that time I had told my commanders at the Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center about the eight Clan members roaming the country documenting their experiences with the hope of uploading it all into the Mind Hive. I said they could be detained without the majority of the group finding out, possibly for weeks, since they were not staying in regular contact. The grand jury agreed, and the eight were grabbed in Las Vegas and taken to The Nevada National Security Site. So, I caused them to become the Missing 8 or M8. I did not suggest and would have argued against the experiments run on them. That was also far outside of the actions allowed by the grand jury …”
“And you all wanted us to stay clear of Celestine?” Natalie said, while writing.
“And got that bullshit prior restraint order.” Adam sat back, not satisfied so much as relieved that he was not crazy, though he felt some satisfaction too. “You had Mannerheim’s lawyers deliver it to further muddy the waters.”
“The situation spun out of control once Mannerheim started meddling.”
“So, it isn’t his fault?” Natalie said.
“No. Or, yes. He didn’t help. Look, I volunteered for several experiments myself, but you can’t mess with the nanites once they are inside a person without, it became painfully clear to me, killing the person. They can be extracted in small amounts, but using MRIs or other X-ray and laser tools to mess with them will eventually kill the host. And that’s what they did. They killed those kids experimenting on them. When they were discovered by Clan members who had set out to find them and it became clear what had happened to them, The Hive AI activated those nanites that had not bonded with human tissues. The Disassemblers, I’ve heard them called, break down anything with an electronic or chemical charge. They consume that energy by breaking apart the compounds holding it.”
“Why didn’t everyone die?” Natalie.
“Statistics. We had every expert we could think of examining them, and it was the statistical physicists who appear to have gotten it right. They said these self-assembling machines were spreading in complex statistical patterns. My superiors rejected their forecasts. In the end, some people had more of them in them or better connected ones than others …”
“The people with power.” Adam said.
“That’s right. Once the nanites were activated, they destroyed those people first. We think The AI either turned them back off to keep the rest of us alive, and or set them to another purpose. Whatever they are up to, they are all still out there. We’ve done nothing to stop their spread or limit their actions. They just stopped.”
“What purpose?” Adam felt he was getting the picture then. Josh had said The Hive AI wasn’t done with the world and now he understood what he was getting at.
“For the dismantling of our industrial world,” Natalie jumped in. “Celestine said The Hive Mind was going to build machines from the things we’ve built to get itself off Earth. It eliminated the humans most capable of threatening its agenda and then switched back to that agenda.”
“Maybe it thought we were getting too close to understanding how the nanites wo
rked when it saw what we had done to the M8,” Josh said. “Maybe the experiments on the M8 were just bad timing and The AI triggered the nanites when it reached some statistical level of certainty of accomplishing its goals. We just don’t know what the relationship is, but the simple juxtaposition tells me they are related.”
“Maybe Celestine triggered it,” Adam said. “Maybe she has more control over what is going on than we’re giving her credit for.”
“We’re giving her credit for plenty,” Josh said.
“She thinks she’s saving the world,” Natalie said.
“When did she say that?” Adam looked at her surprised. “I thought she was working with The AI, The Hive, Hive Mind, whatthefuckever.”
Natalie blushed.
“Wait a second,” Adam said and stood up facing them. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“You do seem to stumble into everything,” Natalie said.
Adam flinched at her positioning herself outside of his efforts. “I stumble …”
“Let me explain,” she said.
“Are you working with him now?” Adam thrust a thumb at Josh, who seemed amused.
“No no. He just got me out of there after …”
“Her, uh, infection,” Josh hesitated. “I didn’t know what they would do. I’d called in backup officers to get myself out of there and took her with us. Then …”
“Then?”
“Then we had a conversation with Celestine under, um, unique circumstances,” Natalie said. “Basically, she contacted us through some others … The main thing, Adam, is that she says they are in a race to get as many people infected with her reprogramed nanites as they can and then upload everyone into a simulation inside The Mind Hive.”
Mind Hive Page 17