Ryan Somma - The Spiraling Web

"Someone tell me why the hell I agreed to this," Dana muttered.

"They have lost the hive-mind," the baby-maker said, listening to their scratchy chirping. "The satellite-dish farm is inoperative and the cellular devices aren't providing sufficient bandwidth for all components to evacuate."

Another mute trembling followed with the muffled roar of a nearby building's collapse. Dana shoved her two hostages toward the door, "Get out of here. Go far away from the building and take those with you," she gestured to the spiders.

The skinny man nodded and plodded away, holding his head. He uttered a few incoherent syllables at the spiders as he approached them and they turned to scuttle through the lobby entrance. Only the baby-maker remained, staring at Dana.

"What?" Dana demanded.

"There are more orphaned units in the building," the woman said, "fragments of the Hive-mind that downloaded into physical vessels, but are incapable of operating them."

"Show me," Dana said tiredly, waving her gun for the woman to lead.

Dana followed her, remembering the hallways they took into the center building. She tried not to mind when an explosion above shorted the lights out. The woman turned into a computer lab; Dana stopped short in the doorway at the scene's weirdness.

There were people lumbering about in catatonic states, some bumping into things. There were spiders, skittering about on the floor, apparently tending to the comatose people laid out on the ground. It resembled a psychiatric ward.

"Is this everyone?" Dana asked, shaking it off and the woman nodded. "All right then. Let's move."

She bent over to pick up one of the unconscious people, but jumped back when one of the spider-bots hopped after her. Dana backed away as it crawled in pursuit. It leapt and she lunged forward to kick it back across the room.

"Damn!" she shouted, feeling two over her toes break.

The spider-bot hit the far wall, flipped to its feet, and scurried forward again, but this time the baby-maker stepped in to block its path. She spoke in that short, monosyllabic language and looked at Dana, "They will evacuate now."

"Wonderful," Dana muttered, squeezing her toes.

Ten spider-bots were required to drag one human body. The other cyc-humans lacked the motor skills to assist in any way, and were led outside. Dana limped around the surrounding offices, acquiring rolling desk chairs to help cart the comatose people out. The room was quickly cleared, but the baby-maker remained.

"That's everyone," Dana said to her, "We can go."

"These two," the woman said, pointing at the desktop computers, "They require assistance."

An explosion caused the far end of the hallway to collapse in a cloud of dust, and Dana cursed herself for getting on her knees to unplug the computer's CPU's, "This is it right?"

"Those are all who could download from the system," she said, "The others were acquired."

"Acquired?" Dana asked, dropping one CPU into the woman's arms and hefting the other, "Acquired by what?"

"Devin Matthews," the woman replied.

"Oh yeah?" Dana laughed, and they shuffled down the hall toward the lobby entrance. At this point, nothing surprised her, "I suppose he's fighting you online right now?"

"No," the woman replied, neither of them looked at the collapsing structures behind them, "A new hive-mind is responsible for that."

Alice watched the spider-bots skittering about the room, searching for more hardware to scavenge. She could trigger the defense mechanism on any one of them to make it attack Zai. Then they could dissect her and harvest her mind. Within the hive-mind, Zai would see how wrong she was. It was so easy.

Alice shook her head, banishing the line of thought. It was the cyc components of her mind rationalizing. Its proposed solution was logical and efficient, as she would expect, but it lacked the virtue she was trying to instill in them, respect for human life.

Zai stood over the half-woman half-computer-program consciousness sitting on the floor, listening for even the slightest movement. The muscles in Zai's right thigh tensed, the leg prepared to whip out and knock the thing silly should it attack. If it thought it could try and sneak a fast one on her, it was in for a rude surprise.

The prudent thing to do, the strategic course of action, was to end this confrontation here and now. Zai could not stand here forever to prevent the woman from aiding the cycs. If she knocked Alice out, that would end it. Yet, something held Zai back, her conscience nagging.

"You know," Alice said carefully, "we could give Samantha a body. She could be a normal little girl again."

"Don't believe it," Zai shot back. "The cycs haven't shown any constructive tendencies so far. They destroy and take. They killed Devin."

"Devin isn't dead," Alice countered. "They merely converted his mind to digital, same as Samantha, and like Samantha he can have a new body, like his old one, or better. The cycs have ingested a great deal of information about our biomechanics. They took the databases warehousing our genome and saw patterns we could not.

"They see a bigger picture," Alice continued, "We are specks, trying to see the universe's pattern for thousands of years. They figured it out in two days of existence. They are on the verge of figuring out this whole puzzle of existence."

"What happens then?" Zai asked.

Alice shook her head, and looked longingly at the VR helmet on the floor, "I don't know."

"They didn't share that with you?" Zai prompted.

"I don't know," Alice countered, "because the hive-mind does not know."

"You're are asking me to trust you on faith," Zai said.

"Not entirely," Alice said. "There is a logic behind allowing me to finish my work."

"Which is?" Zai asked skeptically.

Alice began, "Samantha-"

"We covered that," Zai stopped her. "You have nothing to offer there."

"I have more to offer than your present situation," Alice said. "In less than an hour, Samantha's power supply will fail, trapping her on that computer. Even if you find another source to revive her, it will ultimately rely on terms the hive-mind dictates, a consciousness evolved with Flatline's greed and rage, subjugating human minds to slave components.

"You will lose, Zai," Alice emphasized, "you and Samantha and all the human race. The hive-mind has won. It's just a matter of time until you are processed against your will.

"The cyc we found on Devin's computer was not a guard," Alice continued, "but a scout, surveying cyberspace for new minds, even though Flatline would prohibit their use. You see, they can't become sentient without certain functions of the human mind. It was trapped on Devin's computer when the Authority confiscated it. I have shared my mind with this cyc freely, something no other human being has attempted. It and I are becoming a second hive-mind."

"This is too much," Zai muttered, tired.

Alice searched her thoughts for anything to keep Zai off balance, and then, "You know, Devin loves you."

Zai reacted as if Alice had slapped her, "What?"

"The cyc on Devin's computer, " Alice explained, "It monitored his online interactions for weeks before this all started. I have the memory of those interactions in my brain right now. It's odd, these memories of experiences that are not mine, recalling them requires a process I can't explain. Yet I see the log file clearly, and there is Devin, and you have just left the game room, having beaten him at a game of chess. Now you are gone, and now Devin stares into the space where you were and says it. He tells thin air what he cannot tell you in person."

"He says what?" Zai demanded.

"He says he loves you," Alice shrugged.

"That's crazy," Zai said.

"Queen E6 to Queen B6. Followed by Devin's Knight takes Queen. Followed by-"