Mind Hive

by Jake Berry Ellison Jr

  A scan. What it would feel like to be a machine in an MRI, maybe? Marsel watched her arms and hands spread like a pixelated photo or a low-resolution image spread over too large a file size. Her molecules spread out equidistant, filling the space around her which revealed itself to be a rectangular cuboid.

  Her mind became fog like, unable to focus but still feeling clear to herself, as if on psychedelic drugs. She did not see nor feel anything specific. The cacophony of wave motion collapsed and she fell to a floor, a surface. She heard the wet thud of a body hit. Next to her sprawled a copy of her body image. She reached to touch it, but it fell through the floor, which closed around it. Weightlessness returned.

  A goddamn clone. She focused on her apartment. She had to get out of here to warn everyone that The Twins had figured out how to make clones, to copy avatars. Robert jumped all the time, but Marsel had not mastered the art. She preferred traveling by pseudo-conventional means. But she tried. The room or construct bounced her back. The Twins had also somehow pinned her identity to this space. Every time she shot out, she bounded back. She lost the feeling, the sense of pulling the trigger to jump. They had also rigged a conceptual dampener. It felt like the dampeners that kept a Sim’s emotions and intoxications limited.

  XVI

  Celestine hung, ballet-like if the ballerina wore waffle-soled boots and copper-laced overalls, in the air above the mist of a bullseye where her statistician team calculated and modeled the next shutdown vortex to bloom. Her technical engineers had constructed a staging auditorium around the projected locus; ringed around her floating, standing and sitting, was a cadre of several dozen spies rallied by Josh and another hundred of her tribal forces dedicating their energy to holding the access port open long enough for her to get out and get back in. Her objective experimental: Could she get one of her own persona-iterations through the breach? The collective Celestine agreed to try. What could it hurt? Excuse me. You know what we mean. Yes, but still some respect please for my sacrifice. Of course, but our research suggests you will get over there and back just fine. Well, on with it then. Ready?

  The Celestine hanging above the projected vortex noticed Marsel and Perran stepping through the scanning veil at the back of the auditorium. They smiled and nodded at others who turned to see who had entered. The last thing Celestines had heard from Josh, those two were captives of The Twins. Yet here they were, and they had passed through the identification check, which looked at a lot more than just appearance, teeth, retinas and palm prints. So they’d escaped. The vortex shimmered below her feet, signifying the approaching moment when the AI would pump its version of sleeping gas into The Simulation. She opened her mind to the stream of attention focused on the growing breach. Her support crew also turned attention to the vortex and the flow of time around them, slowing their perception of movement and extending duration of change. The center of the vortex spun open to the size of a black hole she could fit through. Celestine gave herself motion toward the center. In the retarded time flow, more of an increase in processing speed that spread attention out over highly particularized details, Celestine caught the first instance of a flashed disruptor virus represented in The Sim as an explosion. She shot through the hole into the construct space on the other side, but instead of remaining open for the duration of the shutdown, the hole flashed closed behind her.

  She looked at where the hole had been, sort of where her feet should be, not that space or location made any sense in this total darkness … total absence … not to mention she didn’t actually have eyes or any other sensory perceptions. She could be surrounded by flashing lights and dancers clanging on marimbas and wouldn’t know it. Nevertheless, she looked, because how the hell would she ever get out of there, get back to The Simulation, without it? She had no idea how she became whatever and wherever she was, let alone how to find another breach. “But you're out, Cypher, you can't go back.” Don’t panic! You’re still you, somehow, a single objective algorithm that normally runs as part of a complex system of identity plus sensations. The AI has solved the hard problem of consciousness, clearly, but the program is opaque to itself, just as her old biological brain created identity with unperceived operations. The Twins would be impressed. She was experiencing consciousness without sensations. Emotions without chemistry. Cool, but how the hell could she get out of it, back into a body of some sort? Don’t panic! A sensation wrapped around her, a pulling feeling as if being drawn through a viscous fluid. Light speckles spun far away. Turning and zigzagging in the black. The speckles raced at her and gathered around her, her point of view, sticking in the heavy fluid at the outlines of what her body would be. She saw into one of the speckles: It was made of strings of short codes, like strings of amino acids that made up proteins. However, the protein-like structures were not made of simple programs linked up in curling lines like amino acids that had handedness or chirality, the left-handedness typical of molecules that make up the foundation of life. These programs could be superimposed on themselves. That inspired an understanding: At the heart of The Simulation was equality, all life equal. There was no competition and so no evolution, no imbalances to get evolution going. This uniformity could also be why strong, complex emotions, the messy stuff of biological life, were absent, too. These were the basic building blocks of The Simulation, she realized, reacting to her active consciousness and building up a simulation around her. The speckles spun around her, sticking to her in greater numbers. The tiny balls of code-strings connected to her and each other giving her sensations, weight and body. She moved an arm, legs. Looked at the luminescence shaped as her hands. Flexed them. As the sensation of seeing increased, globes of blurred colored light filled in the background of the darkness until she floated among the orbs, which undulated around her like a swarm of jelly fish, pumping in all directions.

  The globes melted together into a shimmering panel, itself mottled with out-of-focus figures moving around. She popped into the scene looking right at herself the moment she first encounter the AI and touched nanites. The clone of her older self had come into this timeframe from within the AI itself, which meant that she was in a simulation of that moment or had gone back in time, which seemed very unlikely. What would the mechanism of this time travel be? Time travel inside The Simulation would be possible, she saw now, since there was no entropy in it. The flow of time in The Simulation was an illusion, unlike the flow of time on Real Earth, which was an artifact of the physics of that world. The physics of The Simulation are a sketch, the minimum system that can run without burning the AI’s full energy budget. Here, Sims make time. We bring time with us and statistical normalization smoothes it out. The past, a temporal illusion, was a recording and could be replayed and changed without those changes propagating forward in time. They would just be changes in that moment, in the past. Thus not real time travel, just moving around in time the way we move around in three-dimensional space. Could make for interesting events in The Simulation, but what about this moment? This is the moment of her first encounter as it was recorded by the AI’s simulation program. A world in a grain of sand, indeed. Perhaps like a reboot puts a system back at the beginning formation of the program, she emerged into this moment when she first reprogramed nanites to replicate humans. Could she go back farther? If she could figure out the mechanism of getting from time to time or scene to scene … Like everything else Sim related, she found concentration the answer. She popped around a few Clan sessions she remembered vividly, seeing into them from within the bell jar. Then she thought hard about the morning she first moved into her office and told Mannerheim their affair was over and he was going to treat her as if it never happened. That poignant moment occurred before she met the AI and possibly before the AI got going. The light shifted, like a jolt to the left, and she floated in raw data, an ocean made of particles and each particle a bit of data. It didn’t make sense. Was this the data that made up the world? Then she recognized that some of the bits streamed in a direction. Other streams of
bits in other directions. It looked a lot like what she imagined the StreamNet would look like from the point of view of a graphic novel character. That made sense. She could go back in time in the StreamNet the same as in The Simulation because time has no one preferred direction in here and in fact can go in any direction in data. As she swam through the ocean, graceful and fluid like a dolphin, she thought of the anomaly in the data of her research project. It had to be her, now, doing what she was doing in the flow of the StreamNet. She froze and imagined herself back to her first nanite encounter. What panicked her was the realization that she had affected the Real Earth. If she could travel back and be noticed in Real Earth, could she change the Real Past? Dare she? There were moments she certainly would love to go back to and change, but how would that play out in the future?

  No. Too great a risk to try. Only someone truly arrogant, truly self-centered would even try it. A psychopath. One change could save the day but devastate the future. Nope. She’ll just have to suffer the indignities of her misguided affair with Mannerheim. The Missing 8 will be tortured and killed. The past must be left alone. This little secret she decided to keep to herself. Someone else—The Twins, say—would almost certainly try to change something. Meanwhile … she imagined herself back into unconstructed space, back to the moment before the proteins showed up. Where could she go now? Could she move around like a Bug Person now? Almost certainly, something on Real Earth called out for her to go there. One possibility … The glowing protein-sized nanite clusters swarmed her again, picked her up like a tornado and carried her with an upward sensation. Her eyes opened. She stretched out and long arms and big hands, her long metal arms and hands, flexed before her. Gaining height as her legs extended, she stepped out onto the surface of a platform. The smooth, fluid-like convex surface stretched out to a very distant horizon. The surface, the darkened shade-side of the platform flowed with threads of blue plasma. Hanging above her, pierced by a white beam shooting from the highest region of the curvature, floated the bright blue orb of the Real Earth.

  XVII

  Natalie followed Alexandrine over the railing of the Space Needle’s observation deck into the blizzard of ice crystals. Sober now, eyes pelted with sharp shards, she kept the kid in view because she had no idea where to go. Alexandrine struck her as quite the feral little Bug. The kid, being a kid, didn’t bother to plan ahead. Just took off. Robert ghosted in and out on her shoulder, sputtering in the wind. His voice in her head. We should meet in the … His voice cut off and his image snapped out. Unless he got cold feet and signed off without preamble, the AI had diverted energy from The Simulation, again. Could be back on in a couple hours or a couple of days and no one on the other side of The Simulation barrier would be any the wiser, except for Robert and any other Sims hitching a ride around Real Earth on Bugs. They’ll come back into animation and their Bugs will have lived full and varied adventures in what would have seemed like the blink of an eye to them. She and Robert have experienced these shutdowns before. He’ll pop back to her shoulder, since that spot has an address, like a physical address or an IP address, specific to his last location, and know instantly that he’d been shut off. So, he’ll be back. Just unclear when. The first time he noticed it, they’d been hanging out with Adam. That first outage lasted only an hour and when he snapped back, finishing the word he started just as the power went out. Robert laughed it off, pointing out how the same thing happened in Bio Life without the resurrection part. Natalie felt relief that it didn’t happen to her, which Adam immediately pointed out she had no reference for. It could be happening, since they didn’t know where Bug identities were run from. If not within The Simulation construct, then surely somewhere nevertheless controlled by The AI. Robert laughed at that too. What’s the difference between living in a universe we have no idea where it came from or how it got going and this system? People died all the time, every minute of every day and many of them incredibly violent deaths back in Real Earth days. He had a point. Still, she was glad to be a Bug. The kid Bug he’d introduced her to, Alexandrine, zipped along the ground, less like a tractor and more like a hovercraft, heading for what used to be the center of the city where the black box now sat. The little ragamuffin must have a trick up her sleeve since no Bios live anywhere near those black boxes or within miles of the former city limits. The kid had already shown her a pretty handy trick about AI-Ps, so she let it play out. She guessed Alexandrine knew all kinds of street-urchin tricks. Natalie felt a little embarrassed that this child knew so much more than she did about free ranging Bug life, but she’d learned a lot more about the world than her mother by her early teens too. Just the way it goes.

  The kid stopped. The black box rose up before them in the blizzard. A mile away still. Natalie closed the distance on Alexandrine shooting up to her, skidding. They’d been traveling fast. Without acknowledging Natalie, Alexandrine, still in her silly rabbit suit, scooped nanites with plastic sandbox shovels for hands.

  “It pools up,” she said.

  At the bottom of the hole, the silvery plasma filled in.

  “Scoop, Natalie.”

  Natalie scooped her own hole, with more professional shovels for hands.

  “Get in.”

  “Maybe you could tell me what you’re up to?”

  “Get in. Charge up and go here.”

  Alexandrine shared with her mind a white wall with black lines converging at a point in the middle. “See you there.” She stepped into the hole, stood straight, vibrated violently for a moment and poofed away. The particles that made her body in the Seattle zone collapsed into the ground, filling in the hole. The ground smoothed out.

  Natalie bared her feet and stepped into the puddle she made, focused on the concentric lines and popped into a large cavern, standing before a white wall facing the black-line design.

  “You are full of tricks. How did you …”

  “Research, my dear.” A woman drawled out a raspy explainer behind her. “Science. The AI hasn’t eliminated science.”

  The woman, Alexandrine’s mother presumably, puffed a cigarette. Shaggy, short black hair framed a round, brown face. Pug nose. Big black eyes. Five-two, maybe. She wore a white lab coat, big pockets full and sagging from the weight. Frayed cutoff jeans. Flip-flops. That struck Natalie. Flip-flops in this weather? She looked around for Alexandrine, a little worried she’d jumped into this place on top of the kid and smashed her somehow. The large open space around her was literally cavernous. Smooth calcified rocks, stalagmites and stalactites punctuating the floor and ceiling. Blinking lights on computer panels, bundles of cables running across the cavern floor. On her right, ten feet away, next to the smoking mother, another wall of white with a different black-line design. No kid in a rabbit suit. The mother smoked, waiting for Natalie to take in all she wanted. Standing in a sandbox, Natalie sensed hot air circulate about her upper body with cool air gliding over her feet. She stepped out of the box and approached the scientist.

  “Alexandrine’s mother?”

  “That’s right.” Cough.

  “Can you tell me where I am?”

  “Sure.” Smile. Pause.

  “So, uh, where are we?”

  “My secret James Bond lair.”

  “Simulation?” She used her hands to express doubt. “Must be, right?”

  “Do I look Sim to you?” Cigarette flicked at a garbage can.

  “I …” Motion caught Natalie’s eye.

  “Mom. Play nice.” Alexandrine stepped in front of the other wall design wearing a white spaghetti-string tank top and pink shorts. Her black hair and round face echoed her mother. “She doesn’t like Bugs.” The girl stepped out of the sand box. Shook black particles off a bare foot.

  “Nanites?”

  “Yeah.” She shuffle-skipped toward her mother. “Mom’s deign.” Gave her mother a bear hug. “They work for any Bug. I’m starving!” She skipped around a partition.

  Natalie looked around again, right hand out. “So we’re not in
The Simulation? How?”

  “The heat shields us.”

  “But where? How?”

  “That’s my daughter for you. I take it she didn’t explain anything to you?”

  “Just that you’re running experiments on nanites, trying to turn Bios into Bugs? Her father?” Nervous about not knowing where she was or how these nanites worked, she remained standing in the sandbox. “And what’s your name?”

  “Ai.” Taking her dismissiveness down a notch. “Ai Van-dunem. There hasn’t been any new Bugs since the AI-Ps’ early conversions. Why?”

  “I …” Natalie turned her head and asked herself the question. “Don’t know.”

  “Why not all Bios made into bugs?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Just call me Alex’s Mom.” She lit a smoke, dragged it. “Everybody else does.” Waved the cigarette at Natalie. “And, you can step out of that sandbox. The energy’s drained, so it’s not going to do you any good now anyway.” She turned and walked to a computer bank. “Come here, and I’ll show you some things.”

  “On the record.”

  “You can tell the world.”