The Hive Construct

by Alexander Maskill

  A light sputter of laughter came from the gaggle of reporters, before their conference began again. A broad, toad-like man stepped forward this time, and said, ‘Do you think it’ll stop the violence that’s been going on in Naj-Pur and the like?’

  This was easier, requiring only the recitation of a prepared response he’d thought of in the shower the day before. ‘I don’t pretend to understand the motivations of domestic terrorists, but I understand why so many people feel the need for the extreme measures that they advocate. This is a city of ten million, of vast social and economic inequality and of stubbornly entrenched power structures. In the face of those things, it’s understandable that extremist vitriol would sound rational. But the fact is that the violence isn’t senseless. I don’t believe the violence is an end in and of itself to them. I believe that they have a goal in mind. And I have a sneaking suspicion that when those big shuttle elevators start up again, and the cowardly, discriminatory legislation that was unfortunately passed last month is rescinded, there’ll be no more shots fired. All that remains is for the democratic process to achieve what their barbarism could not.’

  A stern-looking woman pushed her way through the group and asked the final question. ‘If this violence is a means to have the emigration restrictions lifted and that goal is met, doesn’t that vindicate their methods, or prove that terrorism can win out?’

  Ryan turned his body at a slight angle to the camera behind the reporter. His posture relaxed into a commanding stance. He raised his head, looking the reporter straight in the eye. This was going to be the video playing on every newscast. ‘The terrorists have already lost, because the votes that get cast tomorrow will be cast by a Council that will ignore those butchers. They want our attention; they’re not going to get any more of it from me. I’m not voting against the bill because of the violence. I’m voting against it because I believe it’s fundamentally wrong that a government should be able to confine an innocent, healthy person against their wishes. That’s enough. The best thing we can do is show the people of New Cairo that these goals are achievable without bloodshed. The courage of your convictions can change the world without a single bullet being fired. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.’

  He let his words ring out. They were a little overwrought, he thought, but they’d do. He strode off towards the main entrance to the council chamber.

  The chamber in which the New Cairo Democratic Council resided was vast. The seating only had to accommodate two hundred people: members of the executive; local and district councillors; representatives from the Waytowers up on the surface. The architects of the room had given each member their own considerable desk space, resulting in an isolated seating arrangement that, Ryan thought, had done much to lessen the efficacy of party politics in New Cairo. The ceiling soared far overhead, with the vertical space exploited as in a theatre – the speaker’s podium was at the lowest level, in the view of everyone, and the senior councillors sat high up at the back, in a balcony overlooking the body of the chamber. The decor was a regal blue and gold, paired with the sculpted grey marble of the room itself. This colour scheme informed every carpet, every piece of upholstery, even the custom-made portable terminal on each councillor’s wrist.

  Sitting in the main auditorium, as Ryan entered, was the High Councillor himself.

  Ryan approached him quietly and addressed him in a restrained, respectful tone. ‘Your honour.’

  The man looked him up and down, frowning. At sixty, he had more than twenty years over Ryan. Most of that time had been spent serving in this room. Even to councillors who hated him, his words carried weight.

  ‘You’ve done an excellent job of making me look bad on this one, Councillor Granier.’

  He got to his feet. He was not a tall man, but he did not require height to project his presence. He controlled the space around him utterly. In addition to leading the Council, he was also the current patriarch of the family that owned the GeniSec Corporation and was still both a major force on the board of directors and its majority shareholder. He had the power to turn the cogs that kept the city moving in a degree no other person could compete with. Ryan had always admired him, in an envious way, and at the same time had always appreciated the cost of earning his ire.

  ‘It’s all in place, Councillor. The votes will go my way and the quarantine will be put into force,’ the High Councillor said. ‘In the meantime, your very public display of defiance, as represented by your resilient vote against it, will give the people who hate the bill a lingering source of faith in the Council. But of course, all this will be for nothing if anyone finds out you’ve thrown the fight.’

  He shifted position slowly and heavily, in much the same way as tectonic plates might.

  ‘Which raises the question – did you let anyone know?’

  ‘I’m not doing this out of loyalty,’ Ryan replied. ‘I know that this is the best course of action. It’ll go ahead, lesser of two evils though it may be.’

  The High Councillor laughed a quiet, low chuckle. ‘You’ll feel less lousy when the Soucouyant virus is isolated and cured, and when your man-of-the-people shtick wins you a seat as a senior councillor.’

  ‘People might get a little more suspicious of a thirty-three-year-old senior councillor who just so happens to have a very similar skin shade to the High Councillor, your honour.’

  The two of them had, in fact, had their skin pigment changed to the same anomalously dark brown colour, though this was done before Ryan had gone into politics.

  Another chuckle. ‘Councillor Granier,’ the High Councillor said, ‘the people will be glad that their guy, their champion, is playing with the big boys.’

  Ryan grimaced. ‘I’m not their champion.’

  The High Councillor’s deep brown eyes settled on his. ‘You’re voting against the quarantine tomorrow. The newscasts are saying it’s because you think people shouldn’t be told what they can or cannot do without exceptional circumstances. The fact that you’ve ensured enough people will support the quarantine means you can vote along that moral line without repercussion. However else you’ve ensured other people will be voting, your own vote is going to be the one you’ve promised everyone. Regardless of the external arrangements, the political gamesmanship, the theatre of it all … what of that is not true?’

  ‘… none of it, your honour.’ He was right. Regardless of the political strategy in play, he was at least able to rationalize that his own vote was no one else’s, least of all the High Councillor’s. It hurt, but Ryan knew it was what needed to be done.

  ‘It is unfortunate. Go relieve your staff. You’ve got an important vote tomorrow.’

  Ryan turned away and walked back through the door of the chamber. Zareen was waiting outside, alone. The press, apparently satisfied with the sound-bites they had been given, were thankfully bothering other councillors now.

  ‘Did Daddy have a thing or two to say about the vote then?’

  ‘Apparently I’m getting nothing but socks for my birthday this year,’ Ryan replied.

  Zareen mock-winced as they wound their way into the crowded central lobby. ‘No offence, but he’s a fascist one step away from putting in martial law. I can’t say I envy your upbringing.’

  Suddenly, a loud crack went off somewhere ahead. A chunk of marble close to Ryan’s head shattered. The air was thick with screams and yells as people in the crowd ran in every direction. Before Ryan knew it, two huge security guards were next to him, flanking him. One of them yelled, ‘Councillor Granier! We need to get you out of here! Try and head to the side exit!’

  Ryan nodded and they sprinted, heads down, along the corridor away from the gunshot and the chaos of the central lobby. The crowd battered against them, afraid, confused and directionless, but they pushed through. Eventually, one of the security guards got to the side exit, slammed it open with his full weight, and pulled Ryan through. He vaguely thought to himself that he’d never seen these security guards before.

  At
that moment, he felt a tiny, sharp sensation at his neck. He fell, his vision blurry and fading, his limbs weak. He felt himself being lifted by his armpits and dragged into somewhere dark. There was yelling and the sound of something heavy being pulled along the ground.

  He felt a pang of worry that he might not be there for the vote tomorrow. He needed to be there.

  His father had told him to be there.

  Chapter 4

  ZALA LOOKED DOWN at the coffin, as it was lowered into the deep hole it would rest in. Tears streaming down her face from deep, gulping sobs, she realized that she had no idea what to do or how to behave in a situation like this.

  When her father died, it was simple. It had come out of nowhere: a harsh, colossal stroke while he was putting some salvaged machinery back together in the run-down shack in the garden of their house. A few hours later, after he didn’t respond to her calls, she went in to check on him, and found him lying there, cold and still. She’d tried to wake him; cried over his body. She’d called an ambulance, and then packed her things and ran. She couldn’t risk being caught by police, doctors or anyone else who might have a biometric scanner. She never returned. It was sudden, it was adrenalin-filled and it was over quickly.

  Chloe’s funeral was less a mourning ceremony than a high-society function. It was staged, calculated, crafted and posed, and drawn out for spectators, and Zala hated it. The crowd that gathered in the lush Alexandria cemetery was huge. It was composed largely of theatrically wailing culture buffs and news reporters, all come to see off the great dancer, Chloe Kim, laid to rest at much too young an age. The headline news, of course, would be the kidnapping of Councillor Ryan Granier, but this would be as juicy a B-story as the press was likely to get. Most enthusiastic of all was NCN, an upmarket-aspiring tabloid owned by the GeniSec Corporation, which held up Chloe’s death as headline-making proof that the Soucouyant virus was hitting the rich and poor alike. The gutter-press appeal of a celebrity death and the highbrow lilt of cultural news made the story no less salacious.

  Zala and Chloe’s other old friends stood somewhere near the back where they would be undisturbed by social opportunists squeezing their teary-eyed faces in front of every camera they could find, and mourned in near silence. The night before, even Polina’s seemingly good spirits had begun to give way after a few glasses of some foul eastern European liquor she’d improbably developed a taste for, and she and Zala ended up reminiscing until the early hours of the morning. They talked about how Polina had seen Chloe’s first ever public performance and cheered at the end of her segment so long and loud that she had been thrown out of the theatre. How the three of them as teenagers used to get drunk and bitch about their professors, often waking up in a hung-over pile in their living room. How Zala and Polina had visited hospital every day for hours when, aged sixteen, Chloe had a heart replacement installed following a massive heart attack. Zala talked about reading reviews of Chloe’s ballet company in Addis Ababa. How much it hurt to not be able to contact her, in case someone found out she was in communication with a fugitive alleged murderer. Now, Polina sat and wept into a handkerchief, unable to look at the coffin.

  At the funeral ceremony acquaintances had been reluctant to give Zala more than a distant nod. She trusted Polina’s insistence that most of them had no doubt she was innocent, and there was no chance of her still being actively pursued, but still her presence seemed to bring about a great awkwardness. Zala was impressed that they even recognized her. It had been eight years, she was taller, more athletic, and the long black dress and cardigan Polina had lent her was not even close to anything they would have seen her in before. However, as far as they were concerned, it seemed, she was maybe mad, maybe bad, but definitely dangerous to know. The guest most emphatic in avoiding her was an immigrant from Tokyo named Matsuda Oba.

  Matsuda had been a close and greatly beneficial friend to Zala before her exile. He was the one who had shown her how to take all the things her father had taught her about computers and use them to do whatever she wanted, be it legal or illegal. From him she had learned, in his words, ‘all the things that you don’t get taught in computer lessons’. According to Polina he had become a surgeon and devoted a great deal of his time to helping those afflicted by the Soucouyant virus. He now stood some distance from Zala, talking with others of their old friends.

  Zala opened up her portable terminal and sent him a message:

  >I need a word with you, when you’re free.

  He glanced up, looked her in the eye and scowled, shaking his head. Zala theatrically rolled her eyes, before messaging back.

  >What’s the matter?

  Matsuda, visibly angry at this point, wrote back:

  >Honestly? One, I’m at a friend’s funeral. Two, you’ve got a grade-A criminal record and that makes you a leper. People looking into my past too hard would ruin me. I mean, I have a family now.

  Zala frowned.

  >You’re right. It’s inappropriate. You’ve got a new life now. It’s probably an improvement, actually. The old Matsu would have been bugging me all night to find out how I got past the city’s security measures during what were basically quarantine conditions.

  The response was almost immediate.

  > … Fine. Tell me how you did that and we’re on. We’ll meet up after we’re done here. We’ll go for coffee or something. Just don’t come over now. We’re burying our friend, for god’s sake.

  ‘I wanted to talk about the Soucouyant virus,’ said Zala.

  She and Matsuda were sitting at a table in the nearest branch of a chain of coffee houses. The coffee was awful and the decor was apparently put together by someone who didn’t understand interior design, but had read a few magazines on the subject and presumed they knew what they were doing. It was, however, full, noisy and inconspicuous. At the very least, Matsuda assured her, no one he knew would happen upon them.

  ‘It’s a tricky subject,’ said Matsuda, pausing to take a wince-inducing sip of coffee. ‘The Soucouyant doesn’t leave many clues. Once the virus has fully manifested, the only real sign of its presence is a bio-augmentation that’s not working any more. The only thing that seems to stop the virus for certain is just not having any bio-augs whatsoever. For a while we assumed it was somehow destroying the read-only programming that the rest of the bio-augs’ code is built upon, breaking the whole system at its foundations. But we can’t find any proof of it.’ Matsuda shifted in his chair. ‘The read-only code is corrupted, but we can’t prove it’s the root cause. We’ve done some tests, put simulated bio-augs in contact with people who’ve almost certainly got the virus in them but haven’t had any shutdowns, and the simulated bio-augs caught it off those unmanifested infectees. It looks like it doesn’t destroy all the bio-augs that get exposed to it, but we can’t find criteria for those whose bio-augs malfunction and those whose don’t, except that there’s about a one-in-five chance of it taking all the tech in your body.’

  That was a lot of ‘don’t knows’, Zala thought to herself. ‘Do you know what it is or where it came from?’

  ‘It’s hard to pin down. There are really two possibilities, from what we can tell. One is that it’s a computer virus. If it’s transferring via the wireless LinkUp ports doctors use to get status reports from the bio-augs during check-ups, being in the same room would open you to potential exposure.’

  Zala shuddered and looked around. It was early afternoon, and the café was full of people in office wear chatting over a hot drink or eating the last of a late lunch. Smiling. Talking nonchalantly. No trace of strain or anxiety. Matsuda was speaking more quietly than he had been. Zala’s skin crawled as she leaned in closer to hear him.

  ‘What’s weird, though, is that LinkUp ports have been around for about forty years, and a lot of the older software versions are incompatible with the newer tech. The poorer folk often don’t shell out for the upgrades in the software or the relevant hardware, so I have to have about four different readers, one from each major
iteration of the software, in my check-up rooms. They’re completely unable to speak to each other. But we’ve got what we’re pretty sure are people with completely alien operating software who caught the virus off one another. Which means someone would have had to code something that works with total compatibility between these pretty incompatible devices.’ He paused, a slight frown developing. ‘This is feasible, if difficult, but I can’t think of why anyone would release the code as a virus rather than selling to LinkUp or one of the bio-augmentations companies and making a fortune.’

  ‘So what’s the other possibility?’

  ‘Well, one of the things that jumps out at me is that while I say there’s a one-in-five chance of probable Soucouyant infection leading to shutdown, that’s all the bio-augs for a person. If one goes, they all go, without fail. This is weird because bio-augs don’t really coordinate with each other if they’re not part of a larger system. An individual bio-aug is generally no more related to others within the same person than it is to bio-augs in other people. It’s a mechanism that allows for bio-augs of different generations and operating software to run without clashing. So, given that lack of specific relation, if this is genuinely regular malicious software, the one-in-five rule should apply to individual bio-augs not people. Instead, it’s all going. So it’s not the bio-augs. It seems like something that involves the person in the system. Like a regular biological virus. Like a cold or something. Maybe even being transmitted like a normal sickness, though only a normal proportion reported any typical sickness or immune-related symptoms.’

  Zala sat back in her chair and let out a slow breath. ‘If it’s biological, how’s it combining tech and biological traits to this extent?’

  A brief smile crossed Matsuda’s face. ‘You’ll love this. My theory is, in part, that we’ve honestly reached the point where that’ll start to happen. We’ve taken so many machine parts into ourselves that there really isn’t an “us and them” at this point. We’re becoming more and more computerized, and in the wake of the IntuitivAI system, computers are becoming eerily human. Maybe there’s no longer any reason why disease shouldn’t affect all our body parts just the same.’