Mind Hive

by Jake Berry Ellison Jr

  “The longest one so far, that we know of. I wonder how long we can be shutoff before something bad happens.”

  “Like what, I wonder?” Marsel worked Josh as much as he worked her. Like a bolt carries information about the nut that fits it, Josh’s paranoias gave her some indication what else he was learning from his other spies. She had no information or indication that being shutdown degrades the system, and it would be hard to tell. Perhaps if something didn’t come back on quite right, you’d feel hungover or discombobulated. That happened enough in Real Life, but so far not here, not for her.

  “Like …” he raised his glass and tipped it at the female host for a refill and she shot the chilled wine into the glass from standing position, hips slightly forward. “Thank you.” She receded but did not respond. “Like maybe the AI is an alien artifact, and we’re actually experiencing an alien invasion.”

  “Oh, that still? Wasn’t that Mannerheim’s favorite canard?”

  “Did Celestine happen to mention that something is sending information back through the wormhole?”

  Marsel motioned curious surprise with her head: “No she did not.”

  “For that matter,” he downed his drink and motioned for a refill, “does she have any idea where the AI is sending information? Across the universe or just to Mars? I mean, look at this!” He motioned upwards, suddenly intoxicated. “We have no idea what’s going on!” His voice tripped upon shrill and then balanced out. “I’m thinking simulation is a worse deal than staying planet side.” He put the glass to his nose and peered into the liquid.

  “You do know what’s happening planet side though right? The Bios are dying of cold, thirst. There’s one for you, freeze all the water in the world and then go looking for a drink. They are dying of hunger and predation by human gangs and animals also looking to survive. They are being killed or just keeling over faster than we can count them. The AI Personas are ripping people’s spines, hips, knees, anything metal out of their bodies. We don’t know how to start the replication process again. It’s a rock-solid shit show out there.”

  “It always surprises me to hear you cuss! You’re such a clean-cut a spy-mom.” The hostess pushed two more people into the tight space along the sushi bar beside Josh. The one touching him was a comically, obviously contrived enormous woman. She weighed on him and coated his jacket with powder out of her bouffant hair.

  “We no longer live in a land where appearances matter. In fact, I’ve become very good at disguises.”

  “Ooooh! Show me one.”

  Josh pushed against the big woman at his back. His face became pinkish-red, splotchy and then settled down into an old white man’s alcohol-ravaged face.

  “I can do many colors. Here’s bluish.”

  “Gross.”

  “Yeah, well.” He put his face back to its long mid-thirties white Real-Earth version. Her strange response told him how drunk he was. “You get the point. I better get out of here.” He released his resistance to the big woman pressing at his back. The space between him and Marsel closed. He looked into her eyes with a fleeting affection.

  “I can make you sober, lots of practice with Perran.”

  “No.” He popped himself out from between the two. “No thanks. I like it.” He reached back between them, acquired his glass just as the continental plates pushed together. He swilled the last of his wine and tossed the glass at the female sommelier, who blithely caught it. “I guess we just walk out of here?”

  Marsel followed him toward the black doorway. The maitre d’ had changed into a loose-fitting tank-top. She stepped in front of them.

  “Do y’all want to make an energy donation? Priority seating for ten minutes concentration on our menu.”

  “What if we never want to come back?” Josh slurred at her, getting more drunk the closer he got to the door. “What kind of voodoo horse shit …”

  “You would be a rarity. One we can live without.”

  But before he could answer her eyes and words, Marsel had his arm in a firm grip and pulled him through the door into the hue-besmirched night, whereupon he sobered.

  “Cheap trick!” He turned and yelled at the door. “See if I ever come back here more than twenty or thirty times!”

  “We’ve devolved, even in this place where no one really needs anything. Bug People have drifted into what Robert has been calling vampires in his stories. Energy merchants. Not to be outdone in stupidity, the regular Sims have started selling their energy in concentration time for credits to whatever.” She looked up a, and one of a million PTCs descended from the crowded sky. “Sober?”

  “Sober.”

  “How do you know or what makes you think information is coming back through the wormhole? No one has said anything like that to me.”

  They climbed in the front of the vehicle.

  “It’s one of a million details in files I made copies of and got Adam to download to his computer. He forgot to print them, but then there was a lot of shooting down on the water.”

  The vehicle lifted.

  “I mean, what would you have done with printed copies?”

  “True. I only had a chance to glance at a few pages and skim a few more is all I’m saying.”

  “Where exactly were they downloaded to?”

  “I assume Adam’s work computer at the Seattle Daily-Record.”

  “And on what day?”

  “First day of The Transition.”

  “We’ve recently discovered that The Simulation has an archive of Real Earth data. Could be all the data we stored or data about the world like factoids or who knows what.The only way we’ll know is by running searches, so we might as well run one for you. I’ll let you know what we find.”

  “Would make a lot of sense,” Josh veered hard back to his original point. “I mean, why wasn’t it the case that she was talking with aliens in those ceremonies with the glass jar and all that? What was all of that about anyway? Mannerheim always thought so.” He slurred.

  “You’re drunk again.”

  “Intentionally.” That came out with difficulty. “Just get me to the airport.”

  “Such a clean-cut boy. I’ll send you what we find. And when you decide to sober up enough to read the files, I’d like to hear more about your theories. But, yeah, right now I better go see if I can rescue my husband from his assignment.”

  He had the files on his phone before he woke the next morning in San Francisco.

  IX

  With all buildings except for the Space Needle razed and the collectors the only erect structures in what use to be the densely populated, high-rise forest of downtown Seattle, the wind has been blowing North in gusts of several hundred miles an hour. Hurricane gusts tore at his clothes, bursts of the nanites scattered in the wind. He leaned into the leeward of Natalie, holding his thumb on the lid of his drink. He put the straw to his mouth and sucked. He noticed that instead of legs, Natalie had widespread tracks, like tank tracks with spikes, clinging to the bare ground. The wind had scraped miles clear of snow. His imitation of the felt-lined packs he had worn as a kid, slipped enough that he had to adjust his stance constantly, making it difficult to sip his drink. He tried to imagine a harness with rope tied to Natalie’s waist, but couldn’t see it clearly. So, what he got was an umbilical cord attached to his stomach from her lower back. It worked, however. So, he shrugged and let his weight rest against the pull of the cord. He stiffened his drink, sipped and waited for her to move.

  “Hey,” Adam aspirated as loud as he could right at Natalie’s ear. “Don’t suppose …”

  “One thing at a time, Cowboy,” Natalie spoke in Adam’s head.

  Her voice in his head startled him. Then he remembered she had done that before. So mostly, he worried, Can she hear inside my head, too?

  “Not unless you say shit loudly to yourself.”

  “What about if I talk this low?”

  “Look, don’t imagine I’m spending time in your head. Pretty much one of the last places
on Earth or Simulation I want to ease drop.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  “Let’s just get to the collectors and see if we can find those things.” She twisted on her caterpillar platform, noticed the umbilical and rolled her eyes at him. She started trundling toward the circular sea of silver bugs surrounding the black box. In the dark, the sea shimmered with a blue hue of electric static. Snow blown into the circle dissolved, rising as steam. The wind churned and blew it away. The reaction gave the several-miles-in-diameter zone a halcyon beauty, like misty mountain valleys. Adam, shuffling just fast enough to stay leeward and keep the umbilical taut, sucked his drink dry and let the glass with lid and straw blow away in a puff.

  Fifty feet from the base of a collector tower, steam and snow swirling between the explorers and the curved black structure, Adam spotted dark figures just at the mouth of an opening at the base. He counted nine of the figures just inside the cave. The figures looked like eroded pillars of a flexible material that rocked back and forth as if in underwater tidal currents. A faded gothic fresco of grim saints before the tomb of Jesus. The figures didn’t seem to notice him and Natalie, but he could not make out any facial details.

  “You must see them.” He spoke to Natalie.

  “I do.” Contemplation in her voice.

  “What do you make of them?”

  “First off,” she extended several instruments from her face and eyes, “they are a different strain of bug, and they are leaking energy.” She trundled closer. Adam in tow. At twenty yards, she stopped.

  With less blowing ice and steam between them, Adam could make out details of the figures. They had arms and faces, of a sort, but their legs were together or they didn’t have legs. Natalie dragged him a little closer. He stood now just a few yards from the figures at the mouth of the cave. Hot air infused with steam washed over them within the gale-force winds. Still, the figures did not react to their presence. Adam saw then that their motion wasn’t weaving in the waves of air so much as reaction to parts of their bodies sloughing off, dissolving. Their outer layer, skin maybe, and the bones under it would suddenly drain off; a hand or arm pouring off, causing the figure to list to one side.

  “Well?” He said. “That’s nightmarish. What do your sensors tell you?”

  “Until we can get one of them back to the Needle, I won’t be able to say for sure. But, when they lose energy, their cells or nanites come unbound from each other and they collapse.”

  The figure closest to them lost an arm and then its entire shoulder and half the upper torso. The particles came apart like sand too dry to hold together.

  “I guess we know now why they hang out here and drink from the energy stream.”

  “I think you’re right. I wonder how we’ll get one back to the needle without it coming completely apart. I doubt it can hold up under the …”

  The figures turned, as if responding to a call inside the cave. Several developed legs and began shuffling farther into the dark. Natalie sent a light beam after them. The figures turned back to them, black orbs for eyes searched for the light source. They crowded each other to get into the center of the beam. Natalie turned it off, just as Adam’s original hunch about one of them was confirmed.

  “That one on the left is Mannerheim or some part of him,” he said. “I’d bet on it.”

  “Interesting.” Natalie retracted all of the gear back into her face and chest. “I bet we can get several of them to follow us back with beams of light, but we better not try it right now. Their energy reserves are too low. They wouldn’t make it.”

  “Can’t you give them some?”

  “Sure and so could you, but we don’t have enough for all of them. We could, somewhat safely for us both, possibly power one of them enough to make the Needle. I’d have to rig up a power feed, an extension of my own power.”

  “Obviously,” Adam said, “we take Mannerheim.”

  “Obviously. It will be interesting to see what’s left of him.” She pulled the cord out of Adam’s gut.

  “Oh shit. That was weird. How will I get back?” He yelled in the air and in his mind.

  “You can make it.” She started toward the figure they decided was Mannerheim. “Just make your shoes into cleats.” She tossed the cord at the Mannerheim zombie and it latched onto its shoulder. The figure tensed and jerked back to get free. It looked more like an automatic reaction, a fish on a line movement, more than a conscious thought to free itself. “Start back. If you can’t make it, hunker down and I’ll come back for you.” She shot juice down the cord and tractored backwards a few feet. The Mannerheim figure perked up. Its trunk split into legs. She moved back again and sent more energy down the line. The figure seemed to understand and followed her.

  Adam examined Mannerheim as he shuffled by. Close up, the ghost of the image that was Mannerheim dissolved into a blackened face like a burned doll’s face.

  X

  As she approached the shimmering glass dome The Twins had constructed, hundreds of feet tall at its center and surrounded by a wide field of granite blocks, Marsel constructed two six-foot-long harpoons with tips infested by reverse spikes. She carried one in each hand. The Twins had used their energy slaves, which now included Perran, to build the dome and a labyrinth of marble blocks surrounding it. The stones of the labyrinth shifted and smashed together in great throngs of concussion. But Marsel, given an energy boost by a thirteen-year-old Bug Girl whose mother she had been close friends with since grade school, kept a step ahead of everything going on around her. Her ease of passage was also due to the edifice being run by slave concentration. Some of those slaves had allowed themselves to be enslaved like Perran (male and sex addicted), but some had been captured and plugged in by Bug People slavers.

  At the wall of the dome, no doorways in evidence anywhere around the base, Marsel requested a boost to smash through the wall. Nothing happened physically in The Simulation, it all being illusion, but whatever happened in the construct between programs got represented as physical in The Simulation. So, Marsel requested a boost from Alexandrine, who then programed a five-percent increase in the impact of Marsel’s physical acts (a ten-percent increase might have destroyed the construct entirely).

  Marsel pressed her hand against the cold stone. With a slight increase in pressure, the stones slid in and fell to the floor inside. She hopped in, while drawing back her right arm and leveling the harpoon. Her plan was simple: She would harpoon The Twins to something, grab Perran and run out. As she cleared the fallen blocks of granite, Marsel saw how well timed Alexandrine’s plan was. The Twins stood stunned in front of a large lecture-hall blackboard. Marsel threw the harpoon at The Twin on her right. The harpoon caught The Twin square in the chest, carried her off her feet and stabbed her against the blackboard several feet above the lecture stage. Marsel threw the harpoon in her left hand not a second later, but the first throw gave The Twin on the left time to assess the situation and dodge the missile. Before Marsel could make and throw a third harpoon, The Twin scrambled through a door, stage left at the edge of the blackboard. The Twin pinned to the blackboard screamed in a pain-rage.

  Marsel jumped to the front of the stage and hunted for Perran among the hundred or so slaves stacked in auditorium seating. They sat in various forms of collapse. Far more men than women had been ensnared; and with their heads down on the desktop or lolled off to one side or other, Marsel had a difficult time finding him. Alexandrine found him first, through Marsel’s sensors, seated at the middle of the top row, almost as if they had feared a rescue attempt. Whatever the slaves were concentrating on, it wasn’t on The Twins because they weren’t fairing so well. Many of them appeared to be unconscious and the others weren’t looking too good. Marsel got to Perran and lifted him out of his seat. She threw him over her shoulder and took off down the aisle in long strides. The Twin still on her feet burst out of the door she’d disappeared behind. Half polar bear (top half) and half hairball with skinny legs, she hit Marsel and Perra
n broadside. Perran flew into the second row of seats. Marsel slammed against the railing of the first row. The Twin set on Marsel and began mauling her with claws and teeth. She cut, pulled and crushed mercilessly until Marsel checked out, her energy stream nearly used up by the extremity of the attack.

  When Marsel woke, she was alone in a blank holding construct. Alexandrine was no longer there. Thinking back on the raid, Marsel decided The Twin had at least two maybe three Bug People who supercharged her attack. More than one connection by a Bugger made you strong and fast, nearly invincible for sure. But, too much sauce and your noodle got goofy. And yet here she was in unconstructed space, undoubtedly what the slaves had been concentrating into existence. Perran had been bait. Shit.

  XI

  The larger ice crystals smacked into Adam’s bald head with sting amid the deafening roar of the gray maelstrom. He could sense a theory of extreme cold gathering in his body, but intense sensations like excruciating pain or overwhelming emotions were registered objectively and not lived. In this situation, that was an upside. However, he was occasionally disquieted by the thought. The full human range of sensation and emotion probably relied on some aspect of being a biological entity that did not get translated by the replicating nanites. Was he then less than human? He would say he felt pleasure, pain, cold, heat and importantly intoxication but would add that he did not experience those things the way he had before. He watched Natalie and the Mannerheim zombie trundle away into the whiteout and felt some small concern over the intensity of the storm. When she disconnected from him and attached the umbilical to the creature, the wind nearly blew him over and now he was stuck there just barely holding his own. If he blew away, he could get lost and run into an aggressive AI Persona or some other of the boogeys mutating out there. Leaning hard into wind, he concentrated on making wide caterpillar tracks like Natalie’s but fouled it up. A cartoon image of a third leg won out and grew out of his hip on the leeward. He stepped forward, awkwardly, using the leg as a cane, and nearly toppled over it. So he grew another leg, this time to windward. With four legs, he stabilized and crabbed toward the Space Needle, the top visible in the near distance above the layer of blowing ice crystals.