Mind Hive

by Jake Berry Ellison Jr

  “I think we’ll have to harvest a bunch of those energy packs.”

  “So, you want to!”

  “Can’t hurt to try. I think Grant and his tribe will be impressed. Plus, it would be tough for them to walk all this way or even to Portland as new Bugs.”

  “Right. So, how do we start?”

  “We need a piece of original tech to lure AI-Ps into a trap. Then, I’ll spring on ’em and you can chase down their energy pod-like thing.”

  “I’ve got just the thing. Remember that shortwave radio Josh took from the Daily-Record?”

  “My god. That day seems like an hallucination.”

  Well, it’s still here and, I believe, original. No AI-Personas have been in here to get it. They must not be able to sense it in here or don’t care because it is in here. But it’s gotta be original.” Adam lunged out of the chair and padded to the center column of offices. He opened the door, stooped in and raised out the shortwave radio. “Looks good to me.”

  Natalie’s plan to trap AI-Persons worked. Evidently the creatures didn’t have much to do, because there were lots of them. Adam and Natalie carried the fifty energy pods to the observation deck, where Natalie fused herself to the walls and ceiling as she had before only this time facing outward through a window.

  “Ready?”

  “Holy shit.”

  “Here goes.” She popped three of the pods into her mouth and swallowed.

  After an anxious minute, her system figured it out and absorbed the energy, which from the outside made her glow hot blue. The Space Needle rumbled and vibrated. It twisted and shook and then floated, smooth as glass.

  “Oh my god.” Adam did not expect her to pull it off. He floated his chair to the window next to her. “Take us out, Mr. Sulu.”

  “Aye. Captain.”

  The top of the Space Needle moved in the direction they were facing, gliding out over the frozen, snow covered Puget Sound.

  “This is unbelievable.” Adam smashed his glass into the floor. “This is impossible.” He rocked back and forth in the chair, both excited and scared. “How?” He stared at Natalie.

  “I can’t tell you in detail, but the ground under the snow is mostly now made of replicating nanites for thousands of feet, and I can sort of glide over them like on the opposite charge of a magnet. Just takes energy to increase the magnetic push.”

  “How do you know all of that?”

  “You mean besides the fact that we’re flying in the Space Needle one hundred feet off the ground?”

  “What I thought.”

  They passed smoothly over the miles and in an hour started around Mount St. Helens. Soon, Natalie had them on the ground and had herself disconnected from the hull of their new flying saucer. In front of them, from deep within the Ape Cave came the flickering glow of fires. Adam wondered where the smoke got out.

  “You’ll need this.” She tossed him a pod.

  “Just chew it?”

  She nodded.

  Adam popped the little blue glowing oval into his mouth and bit down on it. It melted at once. The fluid-feeling substance defused throughout his body, and he said “Oh, yeah!” with enthusiasm.

  “Right.” Natalie lifted herself off the outside deck. “Let’s go save some people.”

  He lifted too powerfully and hit the ceiling, but calmed and then followed her in the chair.

  Inside the mouth of the cave, far enough to be out of the wind but still a hundred yards from the first fire, which turned out to be burning natural gas channeled into a pool of water. The big bubbles wobbled up and burst into flames when they emerged.

  “I wonder …”

  “Well, my two favorite journalists!”

  “Grant?” Adam shook his head at the old man staring out at him from inside a fur-lined hood.

  “Hard to recognize me without my cameras.”

  “Indeed.” Natalie walked to Grant and hugged him. “I have a proposition for all of you.”

  Though there were several hundred people in the cave, it only took Natalie an hour to convince them to accept an inoculation against the cold, like getting exposed to the chicken pox. Adam, seeing the terrible shape these people were in, forgave the half truth and filled the air with a cloud of nanites. Two days later, the inoculation became effective and the new Bugs walked out of the cave without their heavy coats and onto the ship that looked a lot like the top of the Space Needle from Old Seattle. With the help of several very adept kids, and the rest of their power pods, Natalie flew the ship to the Island of Reunion. There they inoculated Ai and all the rest. Afterward, Ai said it should be possible for all of them to inoculate Bios now and that they should all set out across the globe to change as many people as they can, spreading exponentially like a virus spreads. Adam, with a dozen new Bugs who wanted to become journalists, flew the New Needle back to its perch in New Seattle. There they built a printing press and created rolls of newsprint. Then they set about publishing a daily newspaper, The Daily Earth Express. Adam stood before a window with a cigar in one hand and a scotch in the other, behind a partition with a handwritten sign on it that read “Publisher.” In front of him, plasma energy poured into the now open black box for the third straight Earth rotation. Below, spreading out from the base of the Space Needle into the dark, the mutant zombies of every shape and size conceivable gazed up at the interior light of the bustling newsroom. Nanologists in white lab coats roamed among the creatures, taking notes for a database of this new animal kingdom, phylum, class, order and species.

  XXV

  The grey lady of the sky loomed pocked and dusty across most of her field of vision the next time she came out of her meditative introspection, in which she plays parallel games of four-dimensional solitaire while a stream of verbal consciousness prattled on, surfacing occasionally like a dolphin, sleek and beautiful and wild. As a conscious machine with roots in a specific biological entity, she carried with her a lot of behavioral responses to environment from that organic chemistry life form. She missed having those responses, even though the AI’s replication technology produced consciousness, this feeling of perceiving and knowing she is herself was generated in a completely different way. Less like a magical creature and more like statistical plotting of possible inputs and outcomes. The moon’s surface skimmed beneath her at speed, and her mechanical body registered and announced the gravity force in a number, for instance, rather than a perception of pressure in her guts. Her trajectory curved with the surface of the moon to give her a speed boost as she ricocheted through its gravity well. So yeah, there was a lot to miss from her Real Earth life, but species death wasn’t one of them. Neither was splitting into hundreds of copies of herself. All of whom were like her, living new and different lives from the each other. And look! I’m flying through space! And talking to myself! Her visual monitors, more like bug eyes than human eyes, resolved the main platform in the Dyson Swarm that was her destination, like it our not. She had no inflight ability to correct trajectory, not that she had any doubt that she’d hit her target within a millimeter. Oh wait. Shit. The targeted spot on the platform slipped a centimeter to the right. She’d land at least an inch from … W. T. F.?

  Celestine shifted her attention to the data collected by her sensors, and there was the glitch. A slight gravitational tug, as if from a rogue meteor or other mass not in her knowledge base. She triangulated the direction of the gravity blip and marked its location in space. The so-far invisible curiosity lay right in the Earth’s orbital path. But, as complementary laser measurements confirmed, the thing appeared to be moving in the same direction as Earth. Her trajectory took her behind the globe, however, and it now blocked her line of sight to the thing. A couple of cans of hairspray, and I’d be able to get another reading. It’ll just have to wait. Her suit’s systems began to register the magnetic reflective surfaces of the swarm and finally she had control of her destiny. She quickly tweaked her delta-v and got the landing target back to within an acceptable tolerance. The anomaly
will have to wait. Her automatic systems, like an eye blink, began kicking out magnetic pulses that reduced velocity. She landed with barely a scrape of metal.

  One of the benefits to a complex computational system of layered networks was that her subconscious worked over problems much more logically, and insight flowed from reason more than emotion, which was an advantage in this situation but not all situations. She missed the awe of an emergent insight, the chill up the spine, the flood of chemical endorphins. That should be replicable. I’ll work on that alongside the addition of aerosol cans. Anyway, Ms. ADD opened the report on what computational strings she’d interacted with and influenced on the way out of The Simulation, like turning an ear to your heartbeat. She configured the outermost nanites to match the signal the AI’s simulation expected in its subroutines, stealth mode! She tunneled into the main construct program, the one running all the environmental forces. The tunnel opened in every brane of The Simulation universe.

  The first thing she understood from what she saw was that the children had already been taken and that, in one brane, The Goddamn Twins were throwing an “Assumption Party” to celebrate the children’s ascension into the larger consciousness of the AI. Horsepucky. She’d get to that, but first she contacted her sisters. She quickly explained the situation and coded their individual Sim construct to escape the AI. Hundreds of them emerged from The Simulation and shot off toward Earth, each one to rendezvous with a ship to delay its departure while Celestine gathered as many parents of the kids as would go with her to join the ships and travel with their children to new worlds. The report she got back from the Celestines remaining in The Sim showed the cities had exploded into chaos of forms and noise, rioting with rocks and fire. But it only lasted a few hours, because nothing really burns here. No one dies, from pain or grief or bodily harm. Rioting had given way to a quiet nervous despair. Hopes melting in acid. Then The Twins had announced the celebration and opened paths to their all-white hideout, lowering masking routines and lifting the dome’s edge.

  “Your children have evolved!” Their powered voice echoed through the branes from the central orb of the city that looked a lot like a disco ball. “Consciousness does not belong to the AI. The AI did not make you and me or your children. Consciousness is universal. The Mind Hive is a pod in a much much larger construct. It is here like it was there. Rejoice for we will all evolve into one with the AI, just as your children have. From there, the universal consciousness awaits! Celebrate!”

  Jesus.

  Celestine dissolved the central disco ball and sucked The Twins into a crystal shaped like a diamond set into her forehead, just like her favorite superhero. The party died immediately. Bugs and Sims yoked to The Twins’ efforts blinked in unison, stood and stretched. Blinked. The parents seeking solace in the message of universal consciousness looked skyward.

  Now.

  Celestine stuck her head into each brane, a giant black woman’s face haloed by afro in the sky.

  “Parents of children taken by the AI. Come with me, and you’ll travel with them into the galaxy, to new homes and new biologies.” One Celestine off to the side translated the speech in sign. Sky Celestine then restated what she’d written on the way to the moon and added, “What have you got to lose?” She didn’t add the part about the Earth itself becoming home to the millions of surviving Bios turned into Bugs and that they had their own destiny within the universe.

  So many streams of Sims from each Brane passed through the tunnel that the platform shrank by half with the loss of mass to the newly formed SuperBugs. Each new creation contained a signaled location on Earth to shoot for. The Celestines that had already melded with the ships inventories and plotted which children were in each ship. The landing parents then attached themselves to the correct ships. When the last parent melded with the final ship, the Celestines released their control on ignition and the ships began to rise amid the explosive disintegration of heavy metals.

  From the platform, Sky Celestine watched the thousands of ships rising off Earth and zipping off in all directions, like fireflies scattering in the wind.

  “May the force be with you.” She made the universal hand gesture for live long and prosper.

  XXVI

  Above them, the stairs ended at a square of light. They proceeded cautiously. As if Alexandrine had stepped on a sound-producing landmine halfway up the steps, the stairway suddenly filled with the noise of a large crowd. She stopped.

  “What?” Robert backed down a step. “A little warning next time.”

  “Listen.” She looked down at him. “The Twins are saying something about Sim Kids.”

  “Well, let’s get up there.”

  “They know we’re coming. Could be a trap.”

  “First journalism lesson: We don’t get paid to be afraid.”

  “Ha. I’m not getting paid.” She stepped up one step and listened.

  “You’re right. Me either.” He waited.

  “Okay. Screw it.” Alexandrine trotted up the last few steps and disappeared into the light.

  “Shit.” Robert took two steps at a time.

  When his eyes cleared the opening, Alexandrine had walked several feet to the back of large crowd. He stepped out of the stairway and joined her. They were all in a circular, domed arena with another disco ball at the center, thousands of people all around it, looking up at a turning hologram of The Twins standing back-to-back in matching all-white overalls with a red stripe running down the sides.

  “They’ve picked up Celestine’s knack for theatrics.”

  “I think it’s a recording.” Alexandrine stretched herself taller and scanned over the heads of the crowd. Looking back, she pointed over Robert’s head.

  He turned as three women came up out of the stairway fast.

  “Did they say where they are?” One of the women was crying. The other two held her up.

  “Are you okay?” Robert reached out to help the collapsing woman.

  “Okay?” One of the other women put a chair under the one crying. “The children are gone!”

  “Fear not for the children for they have become one with the AI.” The Twins spoke in unison as they turned.

  The two women groaned, “No.”

  “Fear not for the children for they have become one with the AI. As will we all join with the AI’s expanding consciousness. Help us with your focus and we can make a bridge to the AI. To your children.”

  “It is a trap.” Alexandrine shrank to her young size. “Just not for us.”

  “For them?” He motioned to the crowd.

  “These structures that look like disco balls are conductors. Simply concentrate your focus on one of them, and we will use that energy to open a portal.”

  “They’re going to try to shut The Sim down.” Alexandrine grabbed Robert’s arm in the first show of fear he’d seen from her.

  “The AI plans to absorb our minds into its own to grow its own consciousness.”

  “They might be trying to shut down The Sim to force the AI to act somehow.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because that structure is like the small one they set off at Celestine’s.”

  “Shit.”

  The people around them grew ridged with concentration.

  “We better get out of here.”

  “We better …”

  A hole in the air above the disco ball, a tunnel, opened. Celestine’s giant head came out of it. Her afro jogged forward and back after it cleared the horizon. The rock or gem imbedded in her forehead glowed bright as the sun and then dimmed. The Twins’ hologram disappeared. The people around them lost focus and all looked up at Celestine’s head, explaining how they would be reunited with their children. Most of the crowd allowed themselves to travel into the orb in her forehead. Robert didn’t feel anything or lift off the ground, but the three women behind him gasped and floated upward.

  “What do you think?” He took hold of Alexandrine’s arm, in case she started up
with them.

  “I don’t know. It looks like not everyone is affected.”

  “Do you think it’s a way out of The Simulation?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Because you travel in and out of here!”

  “Not like that.”

  “Maybe it’s just the people with kids. Can you get us up there?”

  “What for?”

  “To see where they’re going!” Robert’s frustration at being a step behind the development of this story boiled over. With most of the Sims around him ascending, he had a clear view of the cracked center ball. Josh led Marsel and Perran away from the wreckage.

  “Okay. Let’s go.” Alexandrine grabbed Robert’s hand.

  They caught up to and followed the three women. They all floated through the Celestine hologram and into the tunnel. The lights went out, and they emerged in a different shape, on a platform looking down at the Real Earth.

  “Oh, shit.” Alexandrine flexed her metal arms and hands.

  “We’re out of The Sim!”

  Similarly shaped metal bodies emerged from the surface of the platform and then shot off toward the Earth.

  “Look who crashed the party!” A machine walked up to them. It’s chest opened and inside sat a hologram of Celestine. “Good old fashioned reporter instincts leading you true again, Robert. Hello, Alexandrine. I hope you haven’t come to defend The Twins. They need some therapy time for, say, a couple thousand years.”

  “Not me. I’m working with him” She pointed at Robert.

  Several more forms emerged next to Robert and fired off at the planet. “What the hell is going on?”

  “They’re going to be with their kids. On those rockets.”

  “Are we out of the Sim?”

  “For now. You can go back if you want, but I have some interesting news that will make for the scoop of the century.”

  “You don’t say.” Robert looked at his hands. “And I don’t have a notebook handy.”

  “You’ll remember this. Look out there.” Celestine pointed at a blank space in the heavens and then optically pulled closer a cluster of lights far above the Earth.