Mind Hive

by Jake Berry Ellison Jr

  Approaching the base of the Needle at a fairly good clip, he saw Mannerheim, or what the Nanties had made of what was left of him, gazing upward with his partial face and black maw. His attitude that of a starving baby bird. The hurricane stripped layers of him away that did not get replaced. Little of his eroding body resembled the man he had been. Adam could relate. He wondered what Mannerheim’s replication would strip down to if left to the elements away from the easy power source of the collectors. A part of his brain? An arm and a leg? He didn’t see Natalie around. Then two cords corkscrewed down at Mannerheim. They attached to his narrowed shoulders and lifted him into the gale. On the way up, Mannerheim swung out, puffs of bugs scattering off his body. Adam peered up beyond him. She hung over the lip of the observation deck, hair flying, arms stretched down. Such an all-in kid, he admired privately. He had graduated from crabbing to centipeding, leg-over-leg like Roadrunner, so made the top door of the fire escape quickly. He plopped down at the doorway out of the maelstrom and thought: How am I going to get rid of these things? He pulled on the first leg he now regretted growing. He could no more pull it off than one of his original legs. He almost felt desperate about it, but the limiter kicked in and let him know objectively that his atavistic self was having a shit fit. He made a glass and filled it with ice and gin, lid and straw. Shook it. After several sucks, his meta-self acknowledge that his primal-self had calmed down a smidgen. He imagined the legs gone. Nothing happened. Finished the drink. Got to his feet and clambered up steps.

  Two flights from the top, he heard a buzz like a high voltage transformer snapped on. He stopped his labored effort to manage four legs while climbing steps evolutionarily designed for two. Over the loud background buzzing came a bang, a rustle as of stiff skirts, a grunt, a kind of popping-ratcheting … silence except for the buzzing sound. He made the final two flights with stumbling trepidation. It did not seem impossible that Mannerheim, or whatever you would call that bug mutation, could infect or take over the entire structure once properly charged up, which … He opened the door to the observation deck and smoked roiled out.

  “Everything okay in here?” He spoke with a bit of embarrassed fear and did not enter the room. At the threshold, he waved the smoke around. Bursts of orange. “Hello?”

  “Back here,” Natalie instructed.

  “Everything alright?”

  “Chickenshit. Get in here! Help me hold this bastard down.”

  “I don’t know how much help I can …”

  “For fuck sakes!”

  Adam step-stepped forward. The door jam barked one of his extra kneecaps. He yelped and deeply regretted letting Natalie into his home and then asking her for help. He turned and angled his extra legs through the door. Just inside, the acrid smell of smoke from an electrical fire somewhere in the observation deck stung his throat. He coughed several times. Eyes watered. Then he remembered he didn’t have to go through the discomfort. Several bursts of orange diffused through the smoke, distracting him for a second, but he concentrated on not reacting to the smoke. After all, not like he could get cancer or anything. With his throat calmed down, Adam four-legged it through the smoke stained by orange flairs from whatever Natalie was up to back there. He rounded the center walls into a horror scene. A screech burst out of him at the garish anomaly before him. He tripped over his two left feet trying to scramble backward and landed on his butt. Above him splayed over ceiling, windows and floor across much of the large room stretched an exploded-view of cellular networks. At the center of the network of tendrils, gooey clusters and white-light pulsing vines hung a central mass with the shape of a woman’s torso decked out with a head and outstretched arms. The face, he could see in profile, was Natalie. Her eyes open in concentration, jaws set tight, Natalie’s forehead and cheekbones strained. As much as those elements of the scene, what startled Adam had been the four-inch-diameter shaft of blinding hot plasma blasting out of her chest. On a gurney below her, lay the prone figure of a blackened Mannerheim zombie. The bolt of energy powered into Mannerheim’s chest bursting into a network of white veins that looked like a net made of molten metal. Within seconds, the creature’s body glowed bright ember red. The smoke poured down from the ceiling, off the windows and floor where the network of what looked like pulsating neurons had attached. The building material around the contact points billowed smoke laced with flames. He calmed himself down and crawled into the room. Orange filaments of snapping plasma jumped out from the Mannerheim figure, connecting and slipping along walls, table legs, everything in the room. One whipping rope of plasma snapped to Adam’s right leg, the original one, and roiled his skin as it snaked up and down his torso. He moved farther into the room, not knowing if his presence was helping or hurting or inconsequential. Before he could decide, the power ribbon bursting out of Natalie’s chest snapped off. She slumped, arms and hair fell. The barnacle like structure plastered on the ceiling and wall fell with her onto the floor and began to retreat back to her core. He watch with awe as her legs reformed and fast growing clothes kept her body from even a moment of indecency, to his relief.

  Meanwhile, Mannerheim had begun vibrating. Adam looked over at him, crouched and braced himself with his four legs. Mannerheim quaked in a jittery jangle involving his whole body. Head, elbows and heels banged against the stainless steel platform. The vibration increased rapidly and then smoothed out into a hum. The frequency of excited motion levitated his body, and in a few seconds disappeared deeper inside of him. The creature’s face morphed into Mannerheim’s, like a person floating up through murky water to the underside of a clear ice sheet. Adam relaxed his posture and leaned over the face. He dared not touch the body. The creature’s eyes did not change to a human’s. They remained black portals, ink-filled the cavities. The depth of those eyes. In their deep background, Adam saw bits of blue lights swarming, clumping and spinning away. Mannerheim’s brow furrowed, puzzling Adam. The creature’s arms shot up. Adam screeched again and scrambled over his legs. Mannerheim sat up, arms and hands straight out. Adam stepped on Natalie with two retreating feet and fell on her. She coughed but didn’t move. Mannerheim, naked, swung his legs off the gurney, turned, put his hands on the flat top. The surface ripped, broke, particulated and streamed into his hands. His form filled out, hair flowed out and clothes spread across his skin, a white shirt and khacki slacks like he wore before The Transition.

  Natalie struggled under Adam’s butt. “Get off!” She pushed him over.

  “Sorry. Sorry.” He rolled onto his hands and knees. “Are you seeing this?”

  “You’re on my fucking hair!”

  “For godsakes look at him!” Adam shuffled off Natalie’s hair. “You’ve created a monster, Dr. Frankenstein.” More troubling to Adam: She created a monster in his home. “I mean, I thought we’d plug him into a computer, scan his brain or something, not reanimate him. We have no idea …” His attention flicked back to Mannerheim.

  The creature straightened, flexed; its body rippled through the clothes. It turned to them, looked at Adam then Natalie, whose body had cohered. She gained her feet. Mannerheim stepped toward her.

  “Look out!” Adam yelled. He scampered into a corner. “Jesus. I wish I’d never let you in here.”

  Natalie shot a tether from her hand at Mannerheim’s chest. He caught it, squeezed and yanked her forward. She let the momentum carry her close to him and then placed her other hand on the side of his face, gently.

  “You’re okay,” she told him. “You’ll need help from me to stay here. Just let me help you.” Her fingers melted into the side of his head.

  “What’s happening?” The direction of his gaze indeterminate. “Can’t think correctly.”

  “Sorry, but I’m not sure how you can think at all. What do you remember?” She stepped back from him, leaving her hand attached but lengthening her arm. “Name?”

  “Remember?” The creature stiffened, as if calculating. “Name?”

  Adam, forgetting his panic and two extr
a legs for a moment, came forward with an idea. His mother’s scientific training kicking in, Adam noticed that The Creature (as he felt the thing should be called since it cannot be Mannerheim but only a chimera made from a bit of the former scientist) did pick out the essence, the two key words in what otherwise, to a non-language entity, would have been noise, just bleeps and squeaks of vibrations rendered out of the air. He crawled up next to Natalie.

  “There is structure in there. It picked out the key words.” Adam settled into a sitting position on two of his legs and crossed his other two, clasping his hands around a knee. Natalie acknowledged his presence with a side glance. “I suggest asking more complicated questions rather than rudimentary ones, otherwise we’ll be here forever trying to establish some basis of understanding that is already actually in there.”

  “Interesting.” Natalie turned to him slightly as if to acknowledge his insight but then stared at his two now-hind legs.

  He raised his eyebrows at her. “What I said or my current body configuration?”

  “Both. What’s up with the legs?”

  Embarrassed by his appearance and inability to make his body normal, Adam pointed at the creature, which had not moved except for facial ticks that suggested concentration. “Let’s figure out this freak and then you can help me figure out my own freak.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  “Pump a bunch of language at it and see if any of it gets a response.”

  “Okay.” She stepped closer to Mannerheim. “What is twelve times ten why did you create the AI what color is my hair …”

  “One-twenty advanced theoretical computing brown. What is Adam?” The Mannerheim zombie turned its head toward Adam.

  “An old friend,” Adam lied. “What is Mannerheim?”

  “Colossal mistake.” The creature tilted its head down, as if in shame.

  “What is the purpose of AI? When will the sun rise? How many fingers do I have up?” Natalie raised her hand with three fingers up.

  “I’m not sure you’ve got the technique down. I’d …”

  “To advance human civilization. Other questions irrelevant. Some clarity around first question … What am I?” Mannerheim raised his right hand before his eyes. Natalie and Adam saw that his fingers had dissolved down to half size. More particles drifted off. “Not much time left?”

  Natalie removed her hand from the side of his head, took his hand in it. “Not much time. How can we control the AI?”

  “Relieved.” His shoulders relaxed in the most human expressive motion so far. “This. Confusion is … terrifying.”

  Adam touched Mannerheim’s arm. He said to Natalie, “Can’t you, you know, give him some more juice?” A feeling of loneliness for the world in which they had all met each other the first time came over him. They had participated in such intrigue and drama. Remorse over so much lost that would never be and pity for this near-person and the so many destroyed by this new and unfathomable world built up in Adam’s throat.

  “No,” she said, pathos in her face as well. She kept her eyes on Mannerheim’s. “Not really. I’m not sure how much I can take, for one. And it will always be temporary.”

  “We can take him back to the …”

  “No,” Mannerheim interjected. “This is a terrifying experience. Not life. Starvation pain like a … Images with no reality.” His hand melted between Natalie’s fingers. Forearm fell in a clump to the floor and spread.

  “How do we stop the AI?” Natalie put her hands on his shoulders, her face right in front of his. “Can we stop it?”

  “How big is it?” He didn’t move his head. The form of the scientist sloughed both arms and most of his left shoulder.

  “What’s the first line of code? Why didn’t you tell anyone?” Adam jumped in. This thing wasn’t long for the world. He remembered what Celestine had wanted to know, and felt just a twinge of regret that he hadn’t invited her to this resurrection party: “What’s the algorithm that started it?”

  “It was meant to protect the species,” the creature said in Mannerheim’s voice. “We made it to find new ways to get us into space, to other planets, to secure our future. Tell you? We thought it would turn out differently.” He collapsed to stumps just above his knees. Natalie put her arm around Adam’s shoulders. “Tell Celestine she might be right. There is …” He sank in to a pool of blackened nanites up to his chest. Natalie and Adam, in a supportive embrace, looked on with a mix of sorrow for the creature and fear of what coming apart on the molecular level must feel like. “… no time …” Just his head now, remarkably more like Mannerheim, a last gasp of coherence. “… no beginning, like night to day. .” His face relaxed. He smiled. Dissolved.

  “Cryptic bastard.” Natalie toed the edge of the nanite puddle.

  “Yeah.” Adam took in a long, deep, satisfying breath. “I’m beginning to think Celestine was right.”

  XII

  Morning rose through the window in Robert’s one-room apartment. The mattress and boxspring still on the floor, clothes still pouring out of the black armoire in a heap, walls cluttered with art from friends in the Seattle gallery scene. Robert had not made improvements to his old living conditions as almost everyone else had in The Sim. He didn’t see the point, the same way he didn’t see the point of moving into a newer, bigger apartment in Real Seattle, even though he could have afforded it.

  He rolled to the edge of the bed and picked up his phone. One convenience of The Simulation he did enjoy was tech that did not need charging. Otherwise, he would still be picking up a dead phone first thing in the morning and searching for a cord to plug into it. He thumbed the thin device active and hundreds of messages rolled down-screen. Most Sims still carried communication devices, some just buzzers like old-school pagers and others nodes in their palms that projected images in 3D that only the owner could see. Having communications go directly into one’s brain was a definite hassle: Alerts popping up in one’s consciousness was bad enough but worse were the advertisements. Entrepreneurial groups seeking to exchange energy or concentration for whatever fantastical construction they envisioned used some of their collective energy to ping through mental defenses. The most prolific was a Russian-American consortium that called its product SimBeans: “Give us a moment of concentration and we’ll give you the time of your life!” And direct sales: “SimBeans! The pleasures you need imagined!” When a Sim ate one of their colored beans, the bean released a pleasure program designed by the company’s cadre of genius hedonists. So, the illusion of phones that separated all that from a Sim’s private mind remained popular.

  Robert rolled onto his back and threw an arm under his head. He scrolled the sender and “Re:” lines. He saw some that promised accolades. Some still challenged his overtly racially charged assertions in earlier pieces—the racists wanted all references to race matters expunged from The Simulation. “There are no races in the Sim!” was a familiar deflection. Many wrote petty complains about bad grammar or, heaven forbid, a word mistyped. About three minutes in, however, an Re: line jumped out at him: “Marsel and Perran Captured.”

  He touched the email open: “My name is Alexandrine. I am a friend of Marsel and Perran. The Twins have them. Please meet me now at the Palai de la Musica in Barcelona. You wrote about it. Center ticket pillar.”

  Last he heard from Marsel, Perran had volunteered to go undercover. She’d contacted Robert to get some sense of how worried she should be, for his health more than heart since his infidelities were never matters of the heart. He said The Twin’s went in for flakey religion, The Church of Universal Consciousness or something. That started their manic pursuit of enough power to meld with the AI, the first big step to joining their universe-sized god. They filtered the power through themselves, channeled it through their own focus and like cocaine it has left them hungry for more and more. How much of their fervor for power aligns with their religious goals and how much is simple addiction? Can one ever really tell with the religious? It did not seem
they would be a threat to the unwilling, but the willing might be another story, he told her. Why bother with them at all? Because they are secretive, for one, Marsel said. For another, we have no idea what we are capable of in here. Can we get out? Can the AI be contacted directly instead through Personas. We need information. What about what the Persona told Adam? What about the power of stories, wrapping the mind in a narrative that keeps it grounded, real and sane? Sure, that’s what the Persona said, but why? Why does it give a damn? Until we know that, we don’t know anything. Maybe it’s just like it said, Get intelligence off the planet, protect it. If this AI is just an all-powerful, all-stupid program that can’t experience, we must be even more aggressive for liberation. Apparently, Josh also had a cadre of spies working the Celestine beat. Spies always find something to spy about.

  He swung his feet over the edge of the mattress set and stood up through his legs. Pain free. Upside. He padded the ten feet to the burner on the shallow, red linoleum counter top, filled the aluminum sauce pan with water from the leaking tap. Kicked on the burner; put two teaspoons of instant coffee in an unwashed cup and went to the wood chair by the window. He watched the Columbia City neighborhood of Seattle come awake.

  With the coffee in hand, watching the city and the late/early drinkers strolling along alone and in twos and threes. The wildly elaborate car or two. He took his usual morning time, even though the strange email said Now. What could she have meant by Now? She, if she was a she, was interesting for sure. The Now had to be a clue or a warning or something he would understand in a specific way. Maybe the clue was the contradiction in the phrase: How could he meet her Now, when he could have run into the phrase at any time? The music palace he knew well enough. He spent several weeks around, in, under and on top of it witnessing as locals, historians (pro and amateur), artists and patrons recreated the original tile-by-tile, spec-by-spec; arguing over every flow of woodgrain, worn edge, chip and thread in the red and white polkadot seats.