Mind Hive

by Jake Berry Ellison Jr

“Farewell Earth?”

  That’s the big headline they decided to run after the usual handwringing and debate about using a question mark for such a momentous front page. Shouldn’t we be more definitive? Adam thought so. Robert, Natalie and Grant, when he would weigh in, thought so. But what other two-word headline could they use on their eleven-by-seventeen-inch single sheet of paper?

  That’s the size they were stuck with, and one side only. Adam felt amazed they would have a paper at all. Grant said he knew a guy with several old hand-cranked mimeograph printers that used wax stencil paper. Apparently, the old communist had gotten ahold of a printer used in World War II by the Yugoslavian Partizans called the “The National Liberation Army” during Nazi occupation, which definitely made the journalists want to use that one. He said the guy, Abraham Rader, worked out of Pike Place Market, where he lived as well. A true ink-stained wretch. So, Grant and Robert got escorted first to the old Seattle Daily-Record office, which had been ransacked for god knows what or why, in order to develop Grant’s rolls of film. The old dark room had been turned into a closet that, while ransacked, retained its boxes of photo chemicals. He developed a few rolls of negatives, luckily he had thought to use black and white film for part of the night, since he could only enlarge the negatives in black and white. At the Market, they found a few thousand refugees and Rader, who said he would help them if they could get the feds to help him etc etc. All of which went down by 9 a.m., when they came back with the photos and size of paper the printer would use. After some mumbling about having to gut the stories down to just a few hundred words each and select just one photo … Adam and Natalie started on the design and headlines. She was proving to be very good at focussing stories down to a headline. Her own story done, focused and clear, explained Celestine’s claims and set the scene in the basement of the house and then the cave in succinct active phrases. He found only one sentence to unjumble and she’d been appreciative.

  Robert, on the other hand, had argued over every word change and cut. He even briefly argued against using a slammer headline at all.

  “Maybe we don’t even need a headline!” he exclaimed, as they drank coffee and sat around the folding table and chairs dug out of a storage room. “I mean, it’s not like we have to produce a paper the way we used to do it. We don’t have any bosses, that we know of. We don’t have ads or probably even an audience. I mean, we’re just doing this for the record in case there is a record, and I’d like to run more of my story. Not to mention that the cops have sent out a reconnaissance team up to Capitol Hill and promised to give me an update when they get back.”

  “An update?” Adam laughed incredulous. “We’re not getting into any updates. Once we get this designed, we’re sending in the photo and text so we can get the thing printed before the entire world shuts down. It’s amazing that old piece of shit commie printer still works, if it does.”

  “Jesus,” Natalie said, shooting her hands out at Robert and Adam. “Calm down.”

  Grant got up and took his film over to to a window to use as a light table, second guessing the choices he’d already made. “I’ll pick a couple more.”

  “Doesn’t anyone have any ears!” Adam bellowed. Lack of sleep, no booze, shitty coffee and, oh yeah, the end of the world were wringing the joy right out of his morning.

  “Jesus!” Natalie yelled at him. She was having another flash of emotion, this time jangled anger at Adam for yelling and cussing.

  “You have already invoked him!” Adam yelled back.

  “Your heart! Remember?” She laughed loudly, surprising herself as much as Adam.

  “Oh, fuck his heart,” Robert said, shoving himself away from the table.

  Then it hit Adam like a … like a nothing. His chest and arms didn’t hurt. The ringing in his ears was gone. He felt strong, light even. He didn’t want to say anything because he wondered if perhaps he wasn’t actually dying right then and this is what it felt like. He’d never died before so how would he know?

  “Robert,” Natalie laughed again, more controlled this time. “Robert. Come back. Come back.”

  Robert circled the table.

  Natalie took over the conversation and once again the confidence in her tone struck Adam. She spoke steady and strong, “Let’s not reinvent the newspaper today. Let’s do that tomorrow. Today, I want us to make a newspaper, the old kind, one with a big headline, a big photo, subheads and then analysis.”

  “Well,” Adam said, “I don’t know where you came from, but that’s exactly right. That’s what we’re going to do.”

  Natalie smiled brightly, her cheeks flushed with pleasure at having been declared correct in front of the other kids. For that brief moment, the old-young Natalie had returned.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Robert?”

  “Fine. Fuck it. I don’t know what I can possibly cut. I can’t cut any more. You’ll just have to do it. I’m done. I need to get out of here for awhile. See if I can’t tag along on a patrol or something just in case the world comes back. Jesus, I hate being cooped up!” He stood, swung his coat off the chair and over his shoulder. On the way out he stopped at his backpack, dug out a notebook and several pens. He shoved the notebook into his back pocket and started for the door.

  “Okay, Robert,” Adam said. “If we need you we’ll call you at your other office … oh wait!” But Robert had left. His other office was the Five Point, a dark and rowdy dive bar. Adam doubted he would find any booze available anywhere in town, but perhaps the tattooed, black-haired crew there had fought off the hoards of thirsty cops and survived the week intact. He certainly hoped so, for Robert’s sake. They were the closest thing he had to a family outside the newsroom.

  “Well sweetheart, looks like it’s just you and me now,” Adam blanched at his own words. He regretted saying that while he was saying it. He had no idea why he was saying it and felt a bit lost.

  “Okay,” she stretched the word. “I’ve never been called sweetheart by a boss before, but there’s a first time for everything!”

  “By the way,” Adam said. “How do you feel?”

  “I feel fine. I mean, you know, it’s the end of the world and all, but I feel fine.”

  “You’re not worried about your parents or siblings?”

  “Oddly, no. I just know they are okay and that I will see them again.”

  “Okie Dokie, then.” Adam remembered that she was not only young but Catholic as well. “Let’s just do the question headline. I can’t imagine anything else. End is Nigh … World Attacked … Death, Destruction is too long … WTF? is fun, I grant you, but …”

  “I was just kidding.”

  “This one!” Grant said.

  “Grant. I love you from the bottom of my heart.” Adam got to his feet and gently took the film from the photographer’s hands and set it down on top of the photos he had already enlarged. “I want you to go to your family now before it’s too late. I bet Josh will send an escort so you can get across the military barricade. I don’t know how you’ll get to Vashon. I know you are worried. So, go ahead.” Adam meant it, too. He really did want Grant to be with his family. He also really wanted him the hell out of his hair.

  “Yeah, you’re right. Just not sure …”

  “Please, Grant,” Adam interjected, his face growing hotter and hotter, “before my brain explodes all over the windows.”

  “Yeah.” Grant started toward the stairway door. “Besides,” he turned and smiled at Adam through his big beard, “I’m out of film, and it would haunt me forever if I finally saw your head explode and couldn’t capture the moment.”

  And then Grant walked out of their lives. For just about a half a heart beat, an emotion, a sorrow, a sadness, whatever you call it, one of those emotions Adam didn’t feel very often, tried to crawl up his throat. He quickly coughed it out as a polite little hack.

  Natalie and Adam finished the layout and cut the stories down to about the right number of words with several sentences marked that could c
ome out or go back in depending on the type. Natalie had graciously cut her story down to allow more of Robert’s. The only argument she and Adam had at the last minute, briefly, was over a sentence about the Clan sessions. She wanted to tell people about them and Adam said that would be propaganda. She started to argue her usual line about how the business had changed and then they both laughed, long and hard.

  Apparently, as Adam understood it, Rader would use an old manual typewriter on the stencil screen. Grant also said Rader was a genius artist when it came to representing a photo in stencil. That’s partly why Grant picked the photo he did. He certainly could shoot. In the photo, the red shirts had just thrown several molotov cocktails high in the air, flames boiling out as they spun and arched toward the foot of a building across the street. At the top of the building, several white shirts showed just above the crest of the rook, returning fire, bricks and a small television. In the distance, a single cop sprinted away from the melee. Adam doubted the cop would make it into the stencil, but the rest of the photo would be quite supreme in a garish, simple style. Rader said they could possibly get several hundred pages printed before the stencil crapped out.

  Natalie took the copy, photo and layout. She’d bring back the pages and they’d distribute them somewhere, somehow. Meanwhile, Adam agreed to sit with Josh at the shortwave radio, take notes on what their fellow radio jockeys reported and help him explain to all who would hear that the world had not yet stopped coming to an end.

  IV

  The consensus of the world’s leaders, or at least the people with access to a shortwave and as Adam gleaned it from the conversations, resembled the conclusions they also had arrived at: Whatever had killed so many and shut down civilization would likely continue its work, and no one knew what that meant or where it might end. Apparently, at least two other countries, France and Pakistan, had set off nuclear bombs. Adam could not get out of his interlocutors a clear reason the assholes in Nevada had set off a nuke in the air, because everyone who had anything to do with the detonation were killed by it or were under a building somewhere. Most guessed that the reasoning must have been similar to the French: If they could disrupt the nanites with a massive burst of radiation and energy, perhaps they could take over some electronic systems and fight back. This line of thinking had also explained why several of the biggest ships and an aircraft carrier in Puget Sound had been set on fire. That didn’t work either, but the nukes did kill a few million people outright and likely tens of millions more would die within months and certainly years from radiation poisoning.

  The Navy, Marines and Special Forces fighters had gained control of Puget Sound and other major docks and waterways along the coasts of the United States, their new officers reported on the shortwave conference.

  “If nothing else, those nukes gave tens of millions a reason to get to a Clan session and get uploaded into The Hive, ASAP.” Adam mused.

  The comment was met with silence. While some had reported hearing the rumors, even those leaders thought something so fantastically out of the considerable range of possibility was unlikely.

  “Look,” one commander out of the British Columbia enclave said, “we’re in circumstances that would have been called farfetched just a few days ago. True. But, a simulation of the complexity you’re talking about is another magnitude of sophistication above what we’re experiencing now.”

  “The reports coming from our teams out on the streets, however,” Josh took up the argument, “show the Clan message is resonating. Upload-hopefuls have swamped both professional sports venues south of downtown, the SODO neighborhood, and at the Seattle Center visible to us here in the Space Needle. Those are Key Arena and Memorial Stadium. The Clans must have taken control of these venues in the past couple of days.”

  “How are they holding them? There must be local forces trying to regain access to these important venues,” said the U.S. Secretary of State, Norman Pearce.

  A testimony to how vapid the federal position had become, Adam put in his notebook, Pearce’s was the only government leadership position spared during the Stage Two.

  “It’s not clear anyone is trying or has tried to take control,” Josh said. “We can see long lines but no disruptions. We suspect the people in line now are Clan members. How their message will be received by the average person who has had no connection with The Clans is unclear …”

  “I’m ordering you to take back those buildings,” said Pearce suddenly, as if he just then sat on a sharp stick of authority.

  “Uh,” Josh said. He waited but no one else cut in, everyone wondering if anything of the old order remained. “Well,” he stretched out the word, “I don’t have the manpower. I’m not sure we can sustain our position in the Space Needle. We’ve lost …”

  “Oh, goddamn it!” Pearce yelled. “Organize the local officers. Talk to the Navy. What do you say, boys, ready to help us take back those buildings?”

  “I tell you what,” said a rough voice with clear authority on the radio, “we get though this, whatever it is, you can put me in jail. But right now we’ve all lost a lot of friends to this thing, and we’re not going to go confronting tens of thousands of people with just … hell man, our weapons don’t even work.”

  “This is the United States of …”

  “Hey!” a woman’s voice cut through Pearce’s beginning rant. “We’re seeing the same thing here in Minneapolis, so either send us some real help or get the fuck off the air.”

  “How dare …” his voice cutoff just as a clump! sound filled the speaker.

  A second later, “This is Sean Read. I’ve relieved the Secretary of his duties.”

  Deep silence followed this announcement. Adam and Josh looked at each other and then back at the radio set.

  “Is the Secretary going to be okay,” a tentative voice seeped into the static.

  “Nope,” Sean said. “Over and out.”

  No one else cut in. In fact, it dawned on Adam that the murder of the Secretary of State would go unpunished and that the lack of outrage or threats of arrest spoke a chilling fact about the new normal: There is no central control anywhere, at least not of the human kind.

  Josh sat before the mic stand, finger resting on the push-to-talk button, nodding his head, lost in his own thoughts. Adam got out of his seat, lit a cigarette and started rummaging through boxes. He found a couple cans of beer in one and walked them over to the table where Josh sat staring at the radio.

  “Here.” He tapped Josh on the shoulder with the beer. “If you don’t like warm beer, don’t worry. I do.” He popped the top and took a long swig.

  “Thanks,” Josh said. He took the beer. “Every time I think we’ve reached the bottom, the stasis or basement or whatever, the floor gives out.” He opened the beer and strolled out of the observation deck, back and shoulders straight like a weight had been lifted off.

  Watching him walk out, Adam too felt an incongruous tingle of freedom mixed with bewilderment—they were truly on their own now. Looking out over downtown, his beer empty, he wondered when was the last time a human being lived in a world without massive, overpowering central governments controlling every aspect of human interaction? Maybe that was why all those people had lined up for something they almost certainly knew nothing about except the promise they would leave behind a world doomed to chaos, degradation and likely victimization. They were prepped for it. Adam poured a healthy portion of vodka into a glass. He took up the yellow notepad and began taking notes for an essay: The largest companies in the world, those handful of tech and StreamNet-based companies that resurged after The Crash already employed billions of well-educated people. They promised a utopia of excitement and fulfillment, in which machines performed all drudgery and new medicines cured all diseases. And we have all bought into it in bad faith, knowing it can’t really be true, while watching just the opposite happen all around us: Environmental degradation, crippling bouts of heat and droughts every summer, hot winters punctuated by rain bombs
that flood cites, military drone strikes against protestors, mass incarceration of political activists, food and water rioting, surrounded by thousands of homeless everywhere you go. So, when that promise of a tech-utopia came with the single caveat of “get uploaded,” millions lined up for it and millions more would. It was almost as if humans in the opening decades of the 21 Century were so baffled by what it meant to be human that they sighed a collective Fuck it. They went through the motions of giving a damn because they knew no other way. All they could divine of the future was a panoply of worst-case scenarios. Diurnal evidence mounted against our having an exceptional place in the cosmos. So they laughed and drank and pumped themselves and their kids full of powerful antidepressants.

  Robert returned. Adam nodded at him in puzzlement. He did not expect to ever see him again. Then Robert asked if it was too late to update his story and Adam thought about the murdered U.S. Secretary of State.

  “Robert,” he kept his eyes and pen on task taking notes for his essay, “get out and don’t come back.”

  “But the white shirts made it!” He stomped in front of Adam, pushing shirt sleeves up his arms. “They stopped all the fires! They said they lost only a few, a couple fell off the roof throwing a couch and one died of an apparent heart condition!” He brimmed with happiness, with enthusiasm, with light and love for the human potential.

  “So,” Adam punctuated, “the underdogs won? Well, there’s nothing that speaks to a reporter’s eager little bleeding heart like underdogs beating the odds.”

  “Fuck you, too. The red-shirts were routed in the first police raid. It’s fabulous, man.” He stomped around as if those redshirts were right under his feet.

  “How about some objectivity, please,” Adam said coldly, feeling for just a second as if the world of yesterday would come storming back into play at any moment. “Everyone of those redshirts is someone’s child.”

  Robert looked at Adam puzzled and then laughed. “Right. But …”

  “Come on, get the fuck out of here. Go find Natalie who is at the Market getting our newspaper printed.” But then Adam had a sudden premonition that Robert might try to mess with the paper, stop production, handwrite something in somewhere and fuck everything up. The reporter had started for the door, flying his middle finger. “But wait!” Adam yelled, catching Robert right at the door. “I want you to go down to KeyArena and Memorial Stadium and find out what’s going on first.”