Mind Hive

by Jake Berry Ellison Jr

  “They’re just waiting to go inside.” He gave Adam a look that said It’s obvious and a waste of time.

  “Would you please just go ask around. See if you can get inside?” Adam cajoled, hoping he wouldn’t have to stab Robert to death to keep him from messing up the paper.

  The reporter grimaced and nodded.

  “Thanks.”

  Robert lumbered out, deflated, perhaps just realizing there might never be another newspaper job on Earth. He walked as heavy on his feet as Adam. As Robert opened the door, Josh came in past him and trotted at Adam, obviously drunk..

  “Someone in D.C. has to know something about my parents. Fuck protocol! My sister.” He twisted the dial on the shortwave.

  “Shit, Josh. We’ve been so far behind on this story for so long we actually think we’re in front of it. How long do you figure the Clans have been spreading?”

  He studied Adam, a glimmer of eagerness born out of a sudden hope that this line of questioning or some other would reveal a path to understanding. “I know of at least a year and a half. We first got wind of them through our observations of Olivas and Gaines. We watched them for about six months before I infiltrated.”

  “You know it’s just quite possible that we’re missing the boat here by about ten to fifteen years.”

  “Huh.” Squelch overrode him. He pushed the talk button, “This is Josh Fines seeking any information about my parents or sister living in Silver Spring …”

  “Get off the air, you dumb ass,” came the response. “People start crying over these channels for their families we’ll never get a moment to regroup if this thing ever lets up.”

  Adam tapped Josh’s arm. He lifted his finger off the button and sat back.

  “Look, Mannerheim’s story never added up. His story puts Celestine in his labs before he even moved to Bellevue. She says The Hive AI came to be in Bellevue after the move and that’s at least a decade ago. She might have been working on this little project before then. He said she had run into some noise in his experiments on old Web data that he couldn’t explain. He said she found them or made them and it wasn’t his fault.”

  Josh sat forward and worked the dial, again. Just as Adam reached for his arm, he said “Let’s talk to him about it.”

  Adam was surprised. “He’s on there? I’d have thought we would’ve heard from him.”

  “Yeah, he’s on here. He monologues about ten hours a day so everyone knows to avoid the frequency he’s on.”

  “Well, let’s dial that asshole up, not like we got anything else to do.”

  Josh leaned into the mic. “Mannerheim!”

  “Ha ha. Here,” Mannerheim said amid a screech. “Hold on. Here we go.” His voice cleared.

  “Josh and Adam here.”

  “Ha ha! Well. Well. It’s my old friends, the undercover agent and the newspaper man. How are you, Adam?”

  “Fine. Fine. Tell me again what you think is going on,” Adam said. “If you can keep from going nutso long enough. Remember, we hold the power of the dial here.”

  “Ha ha, yeah. But do tell me, how are things going over there at the Space Needle? I’ve been watching you lot. Quite a list of civil rights violations, from what I’ve seen. We’re like two kings in the Middle Ages hiding out from the Black Plague, scourging the masses to keep them at bay.”

  “Yeah. Yeah. It’s non-stop torture and laughter over here. You?”

  “A bit lonely, I have to admit.” Mannerheim like many of the super-wealthy tech class thought he could ride out whatever social chaos or environmental storm came their way if they protected themselves and hoarded enough food and water. Some bought old mines, nuke-hardened bunkers or missile silos and spent hundreds of millions isolating, hardening and supplying them. Others like Mannerheim decided they wanted to live as lords of the sky.

  “Well, shit,” Adam said. “I thought you techies had electronic blowup dolls and stuff to keep you company …” His little story of cornering Celestine into sex had made Adam angry when he heard it and that anger came back. They’d never know how much his abuse of her led them to this mess.

  “Anyway,” Josh jumped in. “What do you think is going on? Is there an Artificial Intelligence behind this?”

  “I thought you were convinced there was.”

  “We want to know what you think.”

  “Well, I was wrong. There is definitely a major intelligence behind this. I can’t see how it could be a human-made artificial intelligence, however. We just weren’t that close.”

  “Celestine told Natalie,” Adam leaned into the mic, “that it came out of a secret project you had isolated in a locked up room in your lab. She said it sprang to life after you moved it and found its way out of the room and reached, she called it, The Singularity when it touched the resources of the StreamNet.”

  “I have heard them talking about that from time to time, but that black box computer is still there. It hasn’t changed since I put it in there nearly ten years ago.”

  Adam nodded at Josh. He pushed the button. “She said there were light-pulsing filaments and all kinds of weird shit floating around. That it came through a crack in the wall and plugged itself in to the StreamNet.”

  Silence.

  “Mannerheim,” Josh.

  “Yeah, just thinking. I never witnessed anything like that, but that doesn’t mean a machine that can do all of this can’t clean up after itself once it realized there could be thinking agents working against it.”

  “She said something about that,” Josh said. “She said when it interfaced with her, it developed a theory of mind …”

  “Interesting.” Silence.

  They let the silence go on.

  “I just don’t think so,” Mannerheim said after a couple long minutes. “I mean, it’s possible an actual AI could learn all of that, could have those responses, after all it would be smarter than the smartest person in every field of knowledge. But, you have to get to The AI stage first, and I just don’t see how that would happen with the programing and hardware I put in that room. We tried, like I told you, Adam. Josh, we all tried. Everyone set their AI loose in the world. But, I would have been absolutely floored if that algorithm had taught itself how to play chess or any other brute force game, let alone this.”

  “However,” Josh said, “what if this is a brute-force game. After all, no one has really interacted with the AI. All we have is Celestine’s story. I experienced something, but I can only tell you that it was vast and yes hive-like. It didn’t have a name or anything like an identity, but what if it’s just working through a problem with computational power.”

  “Right. An intelligence working toward its own goals would not necessarily have a single identity. It could have a million or a billion identities working all at once, like cells in a body. It certainly wouldn’t have to be conscious in the way that we are in order to outgun us.”

  Adam leaned in and Josh pressed the button. “So you think it could be an AI, like Celestine told Natalie.”

  “It could be, but it could also be an extraterrestrial invasion or precursor to an invasion.”

  “What about The Simulation and all that?” Adam asked.

  “The people who think they are being simulated are probably being disposed of, just in a very orderly fashion. Whatever this thing is, it is interested in our resources. Now, let me reminded you what a human is made of, all nine billion of us: Obviously water, which would boil off and make rain over South America somewhere; and then … oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, potassium, sulfur, sodium, chlorine, and magnesium. On an average day, you’ll find iron, iodine, zinc, selenium, copper, manganese, chromium, molybdenum and chloride. If you were a rap star and had a big cold-plated grill, you can add gold and silver to the mix. Or, what if you could get garbage to take itself to the trash can? Their brains, or the brains of the people it intends to let go and proselytize, infused with very pleasant feelings of a vast, all-powerful being that loves them. What
did Celestine always say? ‘If you believe in God, you already believe you are living in a simulation.’ Hell, she could be an alien, which would explain a lot … or just a tool of the invaders, like Jesus or Mohammad. Why else would she have such an anthropomorphic experience? Maybe the worse-case scenario is that they are replicating human consciousness and storing them in a dreamlike state for a dark reason, some later torment for entertainment.”

  “The Matrix scenario,” Josh keyed in.

  “Sort of. For that matter,” he crackled a bit, some solar noise in the system, “this AI, we still know nothing directly from it other than it wants everything we’ve made for its own purposes, including us, and kills anyone who gets in its way or could get in its way.”

  “Jesus,” Adam said. “Key the mic … How long has Celestine been involved, setting up Clans? Your earlier timeline didn’t add up.”

  “That’s a mystery. She started running into anomalies on the StreamNet at least 15 years ago when she first started working with me …”

  “You mean working on you,” Adam snarked, though the mic wasn’t on. Josh scowled at him, apparently still hoping for answers from Mannerheim.

  “… but, as you say, she didn’t find this AI until at most say eight years ago. If the two things are related, then whatever caused the noise in the system, the ‘them’ she ran into, could be what sparked The AI or taught her how to kick The AI into existence. In either case, she could have been working on this plan for nearly two decades. If she’s human at all, she’s a trader to her species. If she is an alien, then we’ve been played.”

  “What can we do?” Josh asked, batting Adam’s hand away from the mic.

  Adam wanted to include Mr. Mannerheim into this betrayal scenario. Super Geek knew there was something wrong and didn’t say anything until the last minute, either out of arrogance or greed, hoping Celestine would develop a technology he could steal from her, or complicity or all three.

  “I wouldn’t get infected, first thing. And, Josh, if I was infected, I wouldn’t go get uploaded.”

  “Well professor,” Adam nodded at Josh, who keyed the mic, red-faced from embarrassment, anger at himself, or fear, conflicted emotions for sure. “Well professor, good luck in your ivory fucking tower.”

  Josh switch channels away from Mannerheim.

  V

  Before Natalie returned with copies of their newspaper or Robert trotted back from the sports venues giddy with dire news, the world took another critical turn in the supremacy of the force that controlled the nanites. Adam walked away from the shortwave to look out over the city, feeling dialed in, like he had a pretty good bead on things now that he knew for sure he was all alone in the world. There was no greater power in the world that stood up for him now. Basically, he joked with himself, we’re fucked no matter what.

  Adam marveled to himself that within the new normal a fifty-foot tall hologram, a shining full-color bust of Celestine turned in the air over KeyArena, as if on a record turntable, rotating just above the roof. After a few minutes, another flickered to life over Memorial Stadium. Her heads turned at the same rate. In sync with her mouth movements, Celestine’s voice boomed a series of declaratives:

  “True freedom awaits you in The Mind Hive.”

  Turn.

  “Don’t be left behind.”

  Turn.

  “Be uploaded into the new Earth and travel to the stars.”

  Turn.

  “True freedom …” etc.

  Here beamed hope or damnation. Either answered the new human dilemma: What to do in the face of an insurmountable force? Take a chance! Get uploaded!

  He screamed incoherence at the glass.

  He noticed a swarm of black sand heaving wave-like over the ships on the Sound. Scanning to his right, across the hundreds of ships, boats and submarines crowding the water, the black dots dissipated on the heels of thousands of people who scrambled from rail to deck to gangplank to rail to deck in full sprint. The thousands aboard those ships and other watercraft were abandoning them as fast as they could while carrying whatever they could. Most carried nothing at all.

  Josh had been banging on the shortwave, rattling it, turning the knobs. Seemed half-hearted to Adam. “The nanites have strung electrical wires between the ships and the power lines feeding the city,” he said, panting, “killing all who interfere. We had been wondering why, but appears they are electrifying the ships. And judging by the reaction down there, I’d say they are electrifying the surface directly to more broadly charge the nanites. The Navy has had a hankering for our tower. We’ve been holding them off with talk and barricades. But, I suspect the talking is over. You may have to leave.”

  “Where to?” Adam snorted. “There’s no where to go.”

  “Get uploaded,” Josh laughed.

  Had he laughed at the absurdity of the phrase or the concept or something more ridiculous? Adam crossed his arms and looked down at the line of the barricade.

  “But don’t worry. I don’t think they have the forces or equipment to overrun our barricades.” Josh’s tone didn’t sound convincing. “That doesn’t mean my crew will hold the line. We’re seeing a lot of defection. They are too, so … I don’t know.”

  “I don’t think I can get uploaded,” Adam said sincerely.

  “I have to tell you that I feel quite strongly drawn to it.” Josh did not look at Adam. His face reddening, embarrassment now.

  Josh, as far as Adam could tell, did not often expressed his internal state of mind, hiding as he did behind that tall trim frame and angular, manly face. Still clean shaven every time he saw him. So, he was acting just a little funny to Adam’s thinking.

  “Feels like the right thing to do, though I can only tell you what others have said about it.” He turned and looked at the box on the table. “Besides, the shortwave has stopped working. I think all communication at a distance is over. So, why not find out? It’s a risk no matter what: Get eaten by the AI’s nanites for some offense you didn’t know you were committing, killed by some roving band of high school boys from the suburbs, captured and enslaved by a rogue band of Navy Seals … I mean, look around at how fast the entire global system went down. You really think we’re going to rebound from this?”

  “Well, it may be none of this is what it seems, even if we could say what it actually seems … What if it does just all go away the same way it came? Or, what if Mannerheim is right? I mean, why not at least wait?”

  “Look!” He pointed down. “The street.”

  Below them, cars crumbled, collapsing amid the mass of swarming people pouring out of the city core and out of the Navy’s Zone of Protection. They could see that people were leaving their homes or wherever they had been holed up without any provisions or supplies. Only a few here and there even had backpacks on. The crowd quickly washed over the barricade. The steel doors to the stairwell were kept locked with dead bolts and steel bars, so until someone broke them down …

  “What can we do? There are millions of people within King County alone. What are they going to eat?”

  Josh faced Adam and shrugged. “I need to go, Adam.”

  “Going to get uploaded?” Adam scowled at him. He had a notion to grab his arm. They’d been through so much together. Sure it was just a few days, but what a few days!

  “Something tells me that’s the only way out of this mess. Remember, I’ve seen some of it already. It wasn’t a dream. Anyway, I hope to see you on the other side, Adam.” He slapped him on the shoulder and walked away.

  Like so many others, Adam said to himself. He walked back to his table, picked up the notebook and wrote:

  So, why didn’t I join Josh? Or, get uploaded to possibly exist in a dream state, a fugue state, from what all the descriptions of The Simulation sounded like to me. Or, run to the hills and struggle to exist like primitive peoples.

  Maybe it’s why I love zombie stories. I abhor the impulse, seemingly irresistible in most humans, to belong. When you get on board, when you
decide to join up, sign on, when “Take action!” means take your place in the collective, then you give up some part of your identity to the mass, the group, the horde … yes, you become a zombie—a walking, talking human being whose consciousness and identity has been compromised by the virus of the masses.

  Not only did growing up a subject in a science experiment teach me that betrayal is always just around the corner, but I also have a deep and abiding hatred of belonging, to joining. Besides, journalists don’t belong. They don’t even belong to a country, to a species. They swear allegiance to just one thing: The truth as best they can figure it in the moment, on deadline. Fuck all else.

  Somewhere in his musings about how alienation is actually rugged individualism, Natalie showed up with a stack of the newspaper. She came in harried and sweating and wild-eyed. The stack of papers draped over her arms, clutched to her chest.

  “Holy shit,” she said, stumbling though the stairway door. “I truly didn’t think I was going to make it!” She fell to her knees, fanning papers across the floor, and let out a cry of the hunted. “Jesus.” Panting. “Imagine an algorithm trying to figure out emotions by running response experiments.” She laughed too loudly.

  Adam rushed to her, more or less, afraid of someone actually needing him in this their darkest hour, especially after he had just so eloquently declared his independence from the human race. He folded down to his knees and hugged her. He did not cry. She did not need much. After less than a second she pulled back. He sat back.

  “How did you get in here. I saw them …” Adam started.

  “Ran my ass off and got lucky at the door. They’re leaving, you know. All the federal people. Josh. They are all getting out.” She pushed papers together, cried, pushed papers together, laughed. “I don't even know why I’m upset!”