“That’s the dummest goddamn thing I’ve ever heard.” Adam laughed hard.
“Whatever she thinks will happen,” Josh talked over Adam’s laughter, “if any of this is true the way she says it is, then she betrayed the human race. That’s the point. Natalie and I agree on that. She betrayed us all.”
“At some point,” Natalie said. “She had to have known what the AI was up to and she didn’t tell anyone.”
“Did you confront her with that?” Adam, despite his efforts to shut down his emotions, felt betrayed and alone with the rest of them.
“Indeed we did,” Josh said.
“Well, what did she say?” He turned to a window. Darkness ruled the city now.
“That humans were doomed anyway,” Natalie said. “That no one could stop The Mind Hive.”
“I could really really use a drink.”
“We’ve got a stash,” Josh said.
“Never mind that,” Natalie said, somberly. Adam spun to contradict her. “We could have tried to change its mind or shut down the nanites,” she spoke over him. “Obviously, if the M8 caused The AI to act, then it did so because it was vulnerable in some way. I told Celestine it wasn’t her choice to make.”
“She knew humanity’s future was at stake, and she should have reached out to the rest of the world,” Josh added. He pointed at a box next to a pile of rucksacks.
“What did she say to that?” Adam opened the box and slid a bottle of vodka out. “Isn’t this just crazy. I mean …” He opened and drank from the bottle.
Josh joined him in a drink.
“Well,” Natalie said, “if you can’t beat ’em”
“She said no one would have believed her,” Josh said handing her the bottle. “That even if The AI was vulnerable, that was no guarantee it could be beaten.”
“Here!” Natalie handed the bottle to Adam without drinking. She took her phone out of her purse and turned it on. “I recorded some of it. I have just a bit of battery left though …” She scrubbed through the audio. “Here.”
“Our only chance,” the voice of the medium echoing slightly, “is to join the Mind Hive. It is allowing us time and space in its computational world to live in simulations …”
“That’s not Celestine’s voice, is it?” Adam asked.
Natalie paused the playback.
“I only heard her once, but …”
“Right,” Natalie said. “It’s her words through a, well, through a medium. She tuned her in like a radio.”
“She was speaking through this other person.”
“I’ve seen it before,” Josh said. “They use a charged ball of their micro machines to connect … just listen. It’s her words.”
“We think,” Natalie added.
“Right.” Adam. “How would you know?”
“Well, it could all be a ruse but either way she’s involved. This person wouldn’t just make stuff up.” Josh confirmed. “Just not in their ethic.”
Natalie touched the play button.
“… It has allowed me to make changes in a small percentage of its micro-machines that copy how cells interact in our brains and bodies. It doesn’t copy the cells themselves. They record the interactions and that’s what gets replicated. You’ve been there. You’ve seen it. It is consciousness. We have to upload as many people as we can so that we have some chance of survival, even if it is just survival in a simulation. We brought this on ourselves. We so corrupted our environment that billions were going to die as a result of cataclysmic climate change anyway. We are facing an extinction level event. The AI has run millions of scenarios and not one model has human civilization lasting a thousand years. Most of them have humans going extinct within a life time. So a few billion now killed by the AI, or a few billion killed fifty years from now … I chose to save human consciousness while we had a chance, this one chance to catch a ride with The Mind Hive as it spreads throughout the galaxy and eventually the universe. Whoever chooses to stay here will have to live without technology. But, eventually, really long term here, even they will be wiped out by a meteor or solar flare. There just isn’t enough time left for humans to go through a cataclysm, recover and get themselves off planet, to get our unique intelligence off planet, but The Mind Hive can and The Mind Hive is.”
“You sold us all for a fantasy?” Natalie said on the recording. Standing by a window in the Space Needle, she took a drink.
“I sold us all for a fantastic future when we had no future left,” Celestine’s medium said coldly, almost bitterly. “This is not the only war we will have to fight. We lost the war for our planet and our biological future, but the next one we lose will mean our complete extinction.”
Natalie turned the recording off and put the phone back into her purse. “She just goes on excusing her actions. ‘We might already live in a simulation’ and ‘biological humans will never be able to travel far enough in space to reach another planet.’ ‘Our limit in space travel isn’t speed. It’s time, and we don’t have enough…’”
They sat in silence for a moment. Adam holding the bottle.
“We both,” Josh started, “… anyone who has gone through an infection ceremony, experiences a bit of that simulated world, The Hive. The ceremony is where she reprograms nanites through an interface with her simulated self and the Hive AI. That’s what’s going on under the jar. When they come out and are charged electrically as they enter your body, you have a brief connection back to The Simulation within The Hive. She isn’t the only one who can do it. There are thousands, possibly tens of thousands of people leading sessions now across the planet. Once a person is infected, then he or she will infect a few dozen people through contact, statistically. They, we are drawn to each other. Drawn to The Hive, like, well, bees.”
“Did she explain how you get into The Hive?” A voice from behind the bank of lights. Robert stood to the left of the camera, toes within the edge of the light. He stepped forward, face and hands covered in soot. He had switched from his stripped running suit to all-black sweats. Grant sat on the ground behind him, also covered in soot and dressed in black. He held a camera in his lap, fingering the controls.
Natalie and Adam had the same impulse and turned toward the window. Silence reigned with the dark.
“That’s the catch,” Natalie said turning back toward Robert as she took the bottle from Adam. She stepped out of her chair and walked over to him and Grant and held it out to them. Robert took it. “Except for those trained to run sessions, who have simulations already in the Hive and are able to connect with their digital ghost during the sessions, no one else will ever really know if there is a simulation at all or if it’s just a lie. The nanites in our bodies,” she motioned to Josh and herself, “will be uploaded through one of a couple million open ports that The AI has allowed into the StreamNet, which is itself now a part of the Mind Hive. You either never wake up here after the uploading or you can continue to live your biological life here, for however long here lasts. But you won’t ever know if your simulated self, if there is one, is really there.”
“Chilling,” Adam said. “Wow. So it could all just be some bizarre religious-like fantasy after all.” He went back to his chair.
“Exactly,” Josh said. “That’s why we need to use what time we have with working communication systems, such as they are, to warn everyone about the fact that The AI is going to dismantle our world and leave us to live as primitive people, for as long as we can.”
“What about the Clans?” Adam said. “Shouldn’t we warn them about the Clans?”
“If we can convince people that there is an AI, that it’s going to use our world as a jumping off point to get to the stars and enough of us survive the next few years, perhaps we’ll know enough to know what to do about the sessions. I just think we have to let people decide for themselves until then. I mean, what would you tell them? Abandon all hope?”
Adam didn’t have a response and no one else did either. Robert waved the bottle at Natalie, w
ho took it and handed it to Adam.
“Well,” Adam said and took a drink. “We’ll do what we do. That is if you’re still a journalist,” he shot at Natalie.
“Of course I am, Adam. What else would I be?”
Adam didn’t respond to her but said to Josh “We’ll have something for broadcast in an hour.”
A woman in an FBI jacket walked up to Josh and whispered in his ear. His face went slack and his eyes fell to the floor. “When?” The woman whispered. “Casualties?” The woman whispered. Josh put his hands on his head. The woman took out her semi-automatic pistol and showed that she could not make the action work. “When?”
“Just after,” she said. “It’s widespread, according to our police and military contacts.”
“Well, that levels the playing field anyway,” he said and took a deep breath.
She walked away. Josh turned to the video camera.
“Someone detonated a nuclear bomb in the sky over Nevada.” He said it and then laughed with a tinge of hysteria mixed in: “It was us! Someone in a federal agency manually set it off without bothering to wonder if that really was a good idea.”
“Deaths?” Robert asked. He took his notebook from his back pocket.
“I’ll say,” Josh said and walked past the lights, which then went out.
II
Standing at the mirror over the bathroom sink, the only room with privacy enough to explore her feelings or rather her lack of feelings, Natalie examined her face in the glass. Running her fingers lightly over skin, she neither saw nor felt any difference. Events had kept her rolling along, like being caught in a cycle of crashing waves and unable to take stock of where she was, let alone how she’d gotten there. Yet here she is, the same skin, features and hair. But that stuff’s inside of her, or that’s what she’s supposed to believe. Nothing felt different. She put her face close to the glass. Nothing in her eyes. The only indication that something inside of her had changed was her lack of emotions. She felt thin, see-through. Could be shock, still. But what were those things doing inside of her if they were in fact inside? She ran water and splashed her face, wetting her shirt. The cool water felt like cool water, and the beads running down her skin under her shirt felt like water trickles. She pushed her mind to think of her mother. She pictured her face and imagined it dissolving, like those kids who watched their father die … can a person make herself feel something? A bead of water on her check suddenly absorbed into her skin, fast, too fast. Jesus, she thought. That’s not normal right? She felt the skin beneath her shirt collar and edge of her bra. Dry. She splashed more water on her shirt. In a few seconds it and her skin dried. Oh shit, she said, but she could not raise a feeling of panic or fear or even awe. She flexed her hand closed and punched the glass, which snapped into three pieces that hung loose in the chrome frame. She felt the pain of the punch alright. A sharp sting and deep echo in the bones of her hand. Blood oozed from a cut on the tallest knuckle. Then it disappeared into her skin and the cut sealed shut and the pain ended.
“Well, f…”
A bang on the door startled her.
“You okay in there?” Robert’s voice. “I heard a noise.”
“Fine,” she yelled. “Just dropped something.”
She quickly opened the door and stepped out, facing Robert.
“I …” she started, Robert’s unshaven face evinced sincere concern. “The …” But what could she say that wouldn’t cause everyone to treat her like a sick person or worse?
“What, Natalie? You look a little worried.”
“I do?” She felt relief. She showed emotion anyway. “I’m fine.”
He looked around her at the mirror. “If you say so.”
“I say let’s get back to work.” Natalie walked around him toward the others.
Darkness had fallen and many had in fact abandoned all hope, and for many more there was none to be found. When darkness fell in the observation deck, when Josh’s crew shut off the lights, if that’s why the lights went out, Adam felt a surge of panic that bordered on a loss of hope himself. In just one cataclysmic week, their society had come apart. Once the guns no longer worked, the city became as silent as death itself.
A glow light crackled, shook in a blur and fell to the floor at their feet. Natalie and Robert joined Grant and Adam around it. They sat on the floor so the light would shine more brightly on their notebooks.
“Okay,” Adam said. “What have we got?”
“The lighting sucked and it’s been a long time since I shot film,” Grant said suddenly, loudly. Photographers. “But I think I have some great photos.” He looked around, his eyes white and lips garish in black face and in the light of the glow stick. “If I can get back to the office, I can develop them. We still have a darkroom.”
Robert snorted. “Grant. We can’t go back out there. We barely made it back here.”
“First light,” Adam said. “First thing, we’ll try to negotiate with whoever is holding that part of town to get in. I’d like to pick up more supplies, too.”
“I want to write a story about Celestine, more of a profile than a news story,” Natalie said. “I have enough battery left to write out some quotes from my interviews with her.”
“If that was her,” Adam said.
“I’ll explain that but it was her. Also, I’ll make it clear that her claims are unsupported,” she looked at Adam defensively, “but what we know for sure is that she is the head of an organization that is surfacing just as city, state and federal governments are collapsing into their military and police forces.”
“I like it,” Adam said. “It’s a good story just on the human-interest level. We’ll know more about the state of our governments in a few days, so for now just make it about her and what you saw with the Clans. Is she making herself into a religious-type figure? You know, the only person who has access to god, who knows god, who knows god’s purpose? Or, is she what she says?”
“Thank you!” Natalie said enthusiastically, suddenly that young reporter again. “I’ll try that angle.”
“Robert?”
“The state of the city. It’s a war zone.”
“What do you have?”
“Mostly what I witnessed but also plenty of quotes.”
“My photos …”
“I know, Grant,” Adam said, sympathetically. “We’ll figure out a way to get them published. So, like what Robert?”
He had filled two reporter notebooks with his scrawl. He opened one and then the other.
“We might be able to see one thing from here,” he said and pointed out into the dark beyond the windows. He stood up and walked out of the light circle.
“What?” Adam said.
“Come here you guys.”
They got up and carefully walked into the dark, to the windows. Robert found Adam’s shoulder and pointed him left toward Capitol Hill. Then Adam saw it, two yellow blooms. They had to be major fires to stand out so distinctly from this distance.
“Do you know what they are?” Adam asked.
“I think so.”
“I’m going to get started,” Natalie said and walked back to the glow stick.
When Adam turned back to the window, he told Robert: “You look pretty silly in black face.”
“Tell me about it. Man, it was scary out there and the cops … Anyway, here’s a rundown of what we saw. Remember those groups from the suburbs and outer suburbs that were running around in red T-shirts?”
“The anti-gay and anti-immigrant pricks?”
“Yeah them. They set those fires. They had a bunch of men and women cornered in a few buildings, several hundred people had gathered on roof tops with hand weapons, knives, clubs anything they could use in a fight. They either put on white shirts or wrapped white sheets or towels around themselves, you heard the cops going around telling people to put out bed sheets if they need help? Ha. The red shirts were massed across the street from the buildings. There are hundreds of them. So the white shirts are s
taying on the roofs and have barricaded the doors and stairwells. The red shirts were trying to get close enough to the buildings to set them on fire while we watched from the top of a bar across the street. For as long as we were there, the occupants of the buildings were putting the fires out as fast as they were being set and warding off the attacks with bricks, plants, coffee cups, whatever they could throw. Looks like they lost the fight.”
“Where are the cops?”
“The cops have abandoned Capitol Hill. One sergeant said they were out-matched and are focusing their forces in neighborhoods where they stand a chance of saving lives. One home owner in Madrona said residents had collected cash and jewels to buy protection. The sergeant defended abandoning the Hill for the surrounding neighborhoods because the property damage on the Hill was already extensive. He said they had no way of regaining control. He said they tried flash-bang grenades and lots of tear gas but were harming the residents and defenders as much as the red shirts, so they decided to move out. He says they’ll go back in the daylight and retake the neighborhood. When we walked off the hill, the farther we got the more things settled down. The Navy’s soldiers have moved off the water into downtown and are securing the core of the city block by block. One officer said they might be able to help the cops take back Capitol Hill. They weren't making arrests so much as yelling once and then shooting. Sometimes they didn’t yell. One building had been evacuated for a fire and those people were cornered into an alley without blankets or water, huddled amid the garbage bins. I have the notes. We came back from there under escort. I know one of the sergeants. She walked us out of there and handed us off to the federal agents here.
“Well, write up what you have. There are some yellow note pads in that box. Try not to make it a list or on second thought maybe it is a list of scenes, the battles you saw. What narrative there is is pretty obvious. I’ll work on getting us some way to publish. Who knows what tomorrow will bring.”
III
Mind Hive Page 18