Mind Hive

by Jake Berry Ellison Jr

  “They hoped and prayed the AI would build them a spaceship, a way off this planet, and they got armageddon instead.”

  “For themselves, at least,” Celestine added coldly.

  XIV

  “Oh, gah! Smells like toasted nanties in here!”

  Adam swirled. A young teen’s face glowed in the midst of a fuzzy white terrycloth rabbit hoodie/onesie with a little hologram of a man, of Robert Henderson, standing on her-his-probably-her shoulder. About a foot high. Tilting his head, as if that would clear things up, Adam stumbled sideways but caught his balance after a quick shuffle. Didn’t spill his drink.

  “Hey Natalie!” Adam yelled. He smiled and nodded at the rabbit.

  Natalie came in at an off angle to the floor, careening really around a wall separating her laboratory from the main lounge area of the observation deck, like she’d been caught in an eddy. She held a pile of blackened nanites in the palms of her joined hands. She squinted at the pile. “Jesus, I need to drink more.” She stopped just beside Adam, lifted her eyes and with effort focused them on Alexandrine. Don’t make me give up this drunk, she thought. I mean, this took some work. The rabbit just stared at her. Robert Henderson, oddly one-foot-high and perched on her shoulder, stared at her. Natalie looked down at the extra appendages hanging off her side. Snarled at Robert sarcastically. She absorbed the tendrils, made a table with a glass jar on top and poured the nanites from between her palms into the jar. “Well Hellooo.” She puckered. “Oh, damn it.” She made herself sober and focused her eyes on Adam, who scrambled without getting far, gesturing against her with his hands, all but making the sign of a crucifix at her. But, she got him sobered through the same mechanism that allowed her to talk with him brain-to-brain.

  “For god’s sake.” Adam wiped his face with an open hand. “You can leave me half drunk. Jesus. All or nothing with you.” Using the same connection, he gave himself and Natalie a pleasant buzz.

  “Uh-hem!” Robert cleared his throat. “Adam, Natalie. Alexandrine.” His voice normal-sized.

  “Can I call you Alex?” Natalie stepped toward the rabbit with a hand out to take her paw.

  “Can I call you Nat?”

  “Whoa.” Natalie said. “White Rabbit alert.” She brushed the burned nanites from her hand and held it out again. “Alexandrine.”

  The girl took Natalie’s hand in a paw. Shook it. Dropped it. Raised an eyebrow.

  “That’s okay. We’ll all just pretend we know what I meant.” Natalie combed her hair back from her face. “Half of one of your buzzes is not half of one of mine. I’ll just take it from here, Solo.”

  “Robert.” Adam ignored the struggling Natalie. They had boozed enough to test the limits of their nanite inhibitors.

  “Adam.” The little figure waved. “How do I sound?”

  “Like you’re ten feet tall.” Natalie laughed.

  “Fine. Fine.” Adam stepped up to the rabbit, on the opposite side of where Robert hovered and glistened. “So, Alexandrine. I take it that you are a Bug Person?”

  Alexandrine looked at him with bored repugnance.

  “Do you find it disoriented to come into the bio-world?” Adam hit a high note at the end of the sentence, both signifying a question as well as an encouragement to talk with someone in the know.

  “I don’t know.” She looked back at Adam with fake wide eyes. “Did you find it disorienting to wake up this morning?”

  “Natalie?”

  “Yes, Robert?” She folded her arms. Balancing on two legs made sense again.

  “Don’t you have anything to say in this matter?”

  “What matter is that?”

  “Your experience going from The Sim to the Real Earth.”

  “What did Alexandrine say?”

  “Something about waking up. I think she meant that asleep, you are essentially shut down, turned off. When I woke this morning, other than the arranged facts of the program that is me housed somewhere in The Sim Mind Hive circuitry, I come awake into a self-awareness wholly cut off from the previous self-awareness of yesterday. After all there can be no soul, no mysterious consciousness waves in here.”

  “Except for the soul part,” the rabbit said. She made a big red ball, sat on it and bounced lightly. “My mother says if our biological bodies can have a soul, then our computational bodies can too.”

  “Interesting.” Natalie made a chair out of the cartoon characters of a show staring colorful, child-like unicorns and ponies. She plopped into it and toyed with the edge of the glass jar sitting close to her on the round table.

  “Well, I was hoping you two would hit it off.” Robert stretched to look around the edge of the hoodie at Alexandrine’s face.

  “Oh, I think we get each other.” Natalie winked at the rabbit. “Where are you from, Alexandrine?”

  “Oh, just that way awhile.” Flicked a paw over Natalie’s shoulder, southwestward.

  “How do you operate so far from your home base? I can go a couple of weeks fast travel out and back, but that’s all the energy I’ve been able to store in myself.”

  “Have you ever struggle-snuggled an AI Persona …”

  “Wait a second …”

  “Don’t panic. Elders stand down. That’s what my mom calls it when I smother an AI-P until they pop out their little energy data pill. Ever seen one?”

  Adam stood still, quiet, a dog with its head in a potato-chip bag pretending he didn’t just hear someone come into the room. He had let himself become much drunker now that Natalie was out of his head.

  “I have.” Natalie tested the waters, but she judged by the girl’s expressions that she had not spent much time around sailors or journalists. “It shot high into the air and a drone swooped in for it.”

  “You have to be fast, but if you jump as soon as it pops you can catch it.”

  “Then what?”

  "Like in an old-school video game. You just absorb it into your chest.” She pulled her paws to her chest in a flowing motion. “I get a big boost as well as a lot of new information that my mother …” She quickly looked down at one of her paws, examined it.

  “Hold on.” Natalie made a chair for Adam. He sat. She made a face at the rabbit. “You have a mother?”

  “Everyone does.” She let the paw drop. Said at Natalie, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “You absorb the crystal thing and get energy from it and data? How many can you absorb?” Robert sat, crossed legs.

  “I have absorbed two at a time before, but that was Whooo! Crazy. I couldn’t stop talking for a couple of days and all alone! Just blab blab blab for like three days nonstop until I wanted to rip my own head off. Luckily it burned up, and I have not tried that again.”

  “Do you have one on you now?

  Alexandrine’s face stiffened into distrust. She pulled her rabbit ears back, released them, tucking her face back into the hoodie-pocket.

  “Whoa! Missy. I’m not going to touch it. Just wanted to look at it.”

  “That’s what they always say.”

  Pregnant silence.

  “I wouldn’t have told you about them but you’re Natalie. And cool.”

  “Thank you.” Natalie straighten. “I don’t need to see one.”

  “Here.” Alexandrine pulled a thin arm out of the rabbit sleeve and held out a glistening blue bud about the size of candelabra light bulb.

  “Interesting. I’ve seen a lot of creepy crawly stuff out there, like early Real Earth life, and some of them have quite a sting to them. No big deal?”

  “Yeah, once I figured out they either can’t or don’t want to hurt me …”

  “Just Bios.” Robert’s image flickered. He scowled at Alexandrine’s hoodie.

  “Yes.” The girl kept her eyes on Natalie. “They do hurt the Bios to get the tech out of them, but they leave them alone after that. Except that I’ve seen them carting frozen bodies toward the nanite cities, come to think of it.”

  “So,” Adam relaxed into the chair, “yo
u just wander around out there collecting those bulbs or data seeds or whatever?”

  “My mother calls it harvesting. It’s not like they’re people or anything.”

  “Uh, yeah, so you learned all of that out there and you’re only, what? 13 years old?” Adam kept the floor against Natalie practically leaping on Alexandrine’s mention of her mother again.

  “For years. I’ve been thirteen for years. I haven’t figured out how to change into an older version of myself, at least not in a way that isn’t ridiculous. So, I’ve just kept things they way they were when the nanties changed me.”

  “So, you’re actually, what seventeen? Eighteen?”

  “What does age mean when you can do what I can do? When you live here …” Her voice trailed off as she tucked her head inside the hoodie and slouched into herself perched on the ball. Her ebullient mood razed by the dark weight of teen angst.

  She’ll never know a biological life, not since her adolescence. That stark contrast hit Adam, triggered a response his mother called exoticising the mundane, like the moment years ago when Adam realized no one under thirty had experienced a life without cellphones, GPS and a social life dominated by the cold abstraction of online snark, anonymous hate, cat videos and snappy images mutated by early, commercial AI.

  “Why do you think the AI-Ps are moving frozen bodies around?” Adam hadn’t spent much time around teenagers but figured from all he’d heard from Beach about her own daughter that distraction would help the kid shift moods again.

  “Break down their DNA? Model their brains for some computing trick?” Natalie gave the matter some thought. “Maybe they plan to reanimate them. We’ve seen several partially replicated people down by the collector. Brought one of them up here. He didn’t make it.”

  “That what’s in the jar?” Robert motioned for Natalie to bring the jar over.

  “Come on over here, little fella.” She sent a tendril to Robert. He stepped on the flat end of it. She retrieved him and set him on the table by the jar. “It’s Mannerheim …”

  “Or what’s left of him.” Robert stepped off the tendril and walked to the jar.

  “True.”

  “My mother has been trying the same thing with some of the …” Alexandrine overtly searched for the right word.

  “Zombies?” Adam contributed.

  “Yeah.” Alexandrine brightened up. “Zombies.

  “So your mother is out here?” Robert left the jar and moved to the edge of the table.

  “Like us?” Natalie didn’t mind being called a Bug Person but a teen might.

  Alexandrine bounced hard twice. Stopped. Examined Natalie’s face for several long seconds. She visibly made her mind up. “My mother is not a Bugger.”

  “Interesting.” Adam sought chorus from the tiny Robert.

  “How does she evade the Personas?”

  More silent judging by Alexandrine, who held the floor against intrusion by keeping her eyes on Natalie’s. No one interrupted. The howls from the tempest outside the Space Needle’s windows filled the gaps.

  “When you’re not there, of course. Since she’s not a bug person herself.” Natalie kept her eyes, while projecting frankness over curiosity.

  The wind howled. Robert sat on the edge of the table, feet clad in black leather dangled down. Adam’s glass filled from within, but he didn’t sip. Afraid the spell would break horribly.

  “You’d have to see it.”

  “She wouldn’t mind?” Robert busied with his phone.

  “Could you keep it off the record?”

  “I thought I heard a journalist in you!” Natalie folded her legs under. “School paper?”

  “Dad.”

  “Didn’t make it?”

  Head-shake.

  “Sorry.”

  Head-tilt. “The paramilitary in Angola got him just before The Transition. He took pictures for Le Monde.”

  “But your mom made it.” Natalie turned her face to the big windows. “Don’t know about my dad, but my mother is out there.”

  “We have my dad’s body in a refrigerator. We’re trying to bring him back with nanties.”

  “Do you think your mom would like to talk with us?” Natalie nodded at Robert.

  “As long as we kept her location a secret?” Robert waved away that possibility. “In fact, we’d leave it up to her if she wanted to go on the record or not.”

  “It’s a long way.”

  Natalie stood up out of the pony-toy chair. “Good excuse to try your energy trick. Lot’s of Personas around here.”

  “She’ll be happy to have another Bug around.” Alexandrine pushed the hoodie off her black hair. “Mostly for the pods, but every now and then a Persona finds its way to us.”

  “Well, then, let’s go!” Robert stood and climbed onto Natalie’s tendril and up it to her shoulder.

  “Lettuce.” Alexandrine levitated out of the chair and floated toward the door opening out onto the exposed deck.

  “You?” Natalie motioned at Adam.

  “No.” He let the word slide out. “ I’ve got some other things to do.”

  Natalie stood with Robert on her shoulder. “Okay. See you when we see you.”

  “Oh, wait!” Robert pretended to pull Natalie’s hair like ringing a bell. “Almost forgot.” She followed the direction of his tugging motion. He said to Adam, “I’ve sent you a video I got from The Twins. Take it with a grain of salt, could lie fake, but it is interesting.”

  Adam nodded.

  Natalie followed Alexandrine into the ice-blowing hurricane.

  Robert had the best seat on the ride. Adam watched them leave. He filled his drink and waited for night, not much of a difference from day except that Seattle lost line-of-sight with the platform. At that point, the energy beam dissipated and the collector cooled. Why risk the heat, even though he might be able to take it? So he waited. He watched the video. Watched it again. No doubt about it, Celestine had made a newsworthy discovery. But just how powerful or what it might mean for him, if anything, was less clear. She seemed awfully pleased with the discovery. A discovery of what, though? A wormhole seemed, uh, technical or scifi, but so what? Not that it didn’t mean something and possibly something big, but what did it mean to her or to the AI? The only connection he could draw between Celestine and the wormhole that involved him was the tunnel, the cave under the collector. She asked him to check it out and he intended too in a couple of hours. Perhaps the cave leads to the wormhole at the center, somewhere below the big black box. He wouldn’t release the video until he knew more about what it meant and who the release of the video helped. The crazy-ass Twins wanted it released, so why didn’t they release it on their own? Possibly because no one would believe it. But but but but … Fishing around for theories in this fecund territory reminded him of a story his science reporter wrote about string theory: The math described possible solutions, different possible conditions of potential universes everywhere they looked. Thus the problem with conspiracies in old Real Earth and now inside and outside of The Sim: Every piece of information raised more conspiracy configurations not fewer. In the old Real Earth, the wildcard was the spiritual realm with God and Satan motivating human action or just wealthy families and associations who mysteriously remained untouchable over generations. These inscrutable forces bobbed and weaved to music of their own making, leaving mere folk, bound in place by ignorance, to ponder their distorted shadows thrown against the wall. This same dynamic rules information in the New Reality: The motivations and limits, if any, of the AI kept everyone guessing what the future might hold for them and what factors foreshadowed a variety (Infinite?) of potential future states. Celestine might have the best data, the clearest insights but her motives remained unknown (unless they are obvious? … but but but but …). The bright blue light of the energy beam flickered out. Adam guided his chair to the now-dark windows and watched the red glow of the collector below dim and then darken, indistinguishable from the night.

  He practiced
flying again. Feel the exchange of energy between nanites as a flow of gravity, he reminded himself. The chair lifted, swayed. Imagining the chair as a vehicle helped him move himself through the energy fields. The window backed by the black night reflected him floating in the rolled-armed leather chair. Coming to terms with himself as energy, as energy arranged as information, he figured he could just move through the window, since it too was made of nanites instead of silica. He floated himself on the chair to the window, closed his eyes and passed through it into the blowing ice crystals.

  Down on the ground, the wind, real air molecules, buffeted him around enough to make riding the chair too impractical. Imagining the chair as snow-cat tracks, his ride smoothed out across the hard ground. At the mouth of the cave, several zombies, imperfect echoes of dead people, milled about until they saw or felt him or whatever they did. The zombies cleared a path through the mouth of the black cave. Trundling along, the cave curved downward.

  After several hundred yards, a golden light shimmered among the swarming elements of the cave ceiling. He came to an opening, the golden light so bright he had to adjust his eyes to see through it. Like a kaleidoscope turning on a center ball of white-hot metal, a forge, a factory spun shapes and added them to the center structure. That white form in the center turned and looked like a kidney bean, a kidney bean the size of a building. As his eyes adjusted to the movement, it resolved into a structure that looked, to Adam anyway, like a spaceship.

  XV

  Marsel woke, startled. Attempted a sitting position, though she floated without gravity or any other reference for direction in her featureless cage. Relaxed again. What woke her? Felt like a shudder. An earthquake, which could, she admitted, be simulated but how would that resonate here? This space, as far as she could tell, remained disconnected from the more mundane aspects of The Simulation where an earthquake could be generated. The shudder ripped through her again, sparking fear now. The shudder became oscillations. She flopped around uncontrollably like a rag doll in crashing waves. The waves rebounded through the space, through her in short, sharp cycles until the vibration reached a fast and frenetic frequency, propagating stronger and tighter. Marsel’s body ached with a deep pain, a dull-to-intense cycle of pain. The tension between wave crest and cancelation trough pulled at her molecules or the representation of molecules in simulation. The vibration smoothed without losing intensity, like a very strong magnet working against itself.