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The story so far: Earth is inching toward environmental collapse, and the populace is impoverished and composed mainly of homeless people and vagrants. The planet is used primarily for extraction of the last natural resources and also for human trafficking.
An elite class of oligarchs called the Trillionaires live on Mars and are in the process of terraforming the planet, with a resort city for the ultra-rich being developed on Pavonis Mons, where there is also a mine functioning as a gulag where abducted people from Earth are transported to work. On top of this, the Trillionaires are engaged with one another in a new Cold War, in which artificial biological intelligences, or ‘nighttime personalities’, are continuously developed and implanted into the minds of the Trills, allowing for greater, around-the-clock productivity.
The Solar System is governed through the Trillionaires by AI software called the Hivemind, which also composes the vast majority of all tools and hardware in a massive internet-of-things.
The protagonist of the story, Daphne, has recently been abducted from her life on the streets in Cincinnati, Ohio, and brought to Mars, where she is scheduled to be implanted with a new, ‘nighttime’ personality.
A FEW HOURS later, the Hive drone slid open the bars of Daphne’s cell door and in stepped both the doctor from earlier and with him Steven Stench, who turned and looked backward from inside the cell at the Hive drone:
‘Go get us some proper chairs,’ he said, ‘I’m not sitting on this wobbly stool.’
The drone then turned wordlessly and left down the hallway.
‘Can’t trust those bastards anymore,’ said Stench, ‘They’re liable to turn on us at any moment.’
‘They seem to be completely obedient in the medical field,’ said the doctor, ‘And the alignment problem was solved, right? So there’s no possible way they could turn on us.’
From outside the slight, hazy cracks of Daphne’s fake-closed eyelids, outside of which she watched the incoming duo of inquisitors while pretending to be asleep, she noticed a pompous glow in the doctor’s eyes, as if he saw himself as an expert, even more so than Steven Stench, and was, despite his inexperience in the field of computer science, delighting in explaining to him how the alignment problem worked.
‘Uhh….’ replied Stench, hesitant, not sure of how much to divulge to this allegedly trusted doctor, ‘Yes, that’s right. Of course alignment was reached.’
‘Nothing to worry about then,’ the doctor smiled conclusively.
‘Wake this bitch up,’ said Stench, abruptly changing the subject. The doctor then shook Daphne’s shoulder gently: ‘Time to wake up—it’s time for your interview!’
Daphne cracked open her eyelids, trying her best to appear groggy, as if thrust abruptly and unexpectedly from the throes of deep sleep:
‘When am I losing myself?’ she said.
‘Wha…what?’ said the doctor.
‘When is this new personality going to rape me?’
‘Fuck off with your moralizing,’ said Stench, ‘This isn’t the time or place. Your new personality will be taking over in a half hour, almost exactly. Until that time, we need to prepare you.’
‘Prepare me? I didn’t think I had any control over anything.’
‘You don’t, but it will help when your personality takes back over tomorrow morning. At that time, you will feel well rested, no doubt, but occasionally it can be difficult for the true personality to wrest control from the new one.’
‘Really?’
‘Indeed. Think of the new personality like it’s a little toddler who doesn’t want to go down for their nap. This is essentially the case, sometimes. You need to have a routine, so your new personality goes down more easily. A nap time routine, basically.’
At this point, the Hive drone stepped back in with two large cushioned chairs in tow, which it sat on the concrete floor, after which it stepped back out of the room and both Stench and the doctor took their seats.
‘And what if my new personality just won’t go down?’ said Daphne.
‘It happens from time to time,’ said the doctor, ‘but no worries—it’ll go down, eventually. Sometimes it takes a day, or two days, or sometimes even three or four, but your body will force it out, eventually—everyone has to sleep, even artificial personalities.’
‘So there’s no risk of losing myself, like, forever?’
Stench said nothing; he only grinned maliciously.
‘The risk is miniscule,’ said the doctor, ‘On very rare occasions, the new personality is so reluctant to give up control that it actually—and this is the word we use for it—drowns the original personality within its body and thereafter assumes total control. In these unfortunate circumstances, obviously, we have to put the individual down. This happens by lethal injection.’
An unplaceable white horror washed over Daphne, making her feel weak, as if she might at any moment fall back onto the bed and pass out. As bad as this had all been—as objectively unfortunate as her entire life had been, living on the streets and thereafter in this cell—she had still through it all maintained an ever-present optimism; deep down believing that if she just weathered everything, if she just kept pushing onward, day after day, things would eventually work out for her. Perhaps it was a psychology remnant of the mythical ‘American Dream’ some of the Trillionaires liked to from time-to-time spout off about. But lethal injection? She could be dead at any moment, depending on the behaviour of her new personality, whom she had no control over. Once this new synthetic individual took over, she might never again see the light of day. It might drown her—that’s what they had said!
‘I can’t do this,’ she mumbled, sweaty and quivering, ‘Please let me stop—I can’t continue with this!’
‘You have no choice in the matter,’ said Stench, ‘You made your bed when you decided to live out in the streets. Your control over this body will cease approximately,’ and then he looked at his smartwatch, ‘Now.’
Daphne then fell flat on the bed and closed her eyes.
‘Who am I speaking with?’
‘My name is Steven Stench, and this here is one of my most trusted doctors. His name is unimportant.’
The doctor winced as if struck but then composed himself and spoke: ‘You are the new nighttime personality residing in the body otherwise belonging to Daphne Anderson, who is at the moment dormant, resting until sunup. Due to your current vessel, you are currently biologically female; your gender, however is up to you. You may also—at this time or at a later date—choose your name. If you decide not to choose a name for yourself, one will be given to you by the government, for clerical purposes.’
The body formerly belonging to Daphne grinned.
‘Do you have any questions?’ continued the doctor.
‘My name is Victor,’ said the voice.
‘Okay. And what of a middle and last name?’
‘No need,’ said Victor.
‘Fine. Then legally speaking, your name is now Victory Q77HX.’
‘Great,’ said Victor, still grinning as if privy to some otherwise secret joke.
‘You have been given advanced linguistic capabilities,’ said the doctor, ‘You speak English, Chinese, Arabic, and Russian at native-level fluency. This is so you can communicate with the Trillionaires invested in your case when necessary, such as Mr. Stench, here, who is your primary investor.’
‘This guy speaks English?’ said Victor.
‘That is correct. He is of South African cultural heritage, though also to some degree culturally American, as well.’
Victor then lifted himself from the bed and stood up and strolled around the room, stopping momentarily at the bars of the cell door and grasping them as if to bend them and step through and escape: ‘How long do I have to say in here?’ he said, turning backward to look at Steven Stench, glaring at him with an intense sarcastic cynicism.
‘That is undecided,’ responded Stench.
‘And who makes the decision? You?’
‘That’s correct.’
Victor then turned and paced what he believed to be uncomfortably close to Stench and then sat back down atop his bed. Stench didn’t flinch, however, being by this point in every way as mindlessly predatory as a crocodile—incapable of being fearful of anything other than death and poverty.
And maybe, to some degree, the Hivemind.
Normally at this hour, Stench’s nighttime personality would be in control, but he had made an exception today and maintained cognizance past his normal bedtime. He would pay for it in the morning, he knew, but he wanted to speak with this specimen personally.
‘So what do I need to do to help you decide?’ said Victor, now clicking his tongue as if the only rebellious behaviour he could at the moment conceive of getting away with. Stench knew he had a feisty one on his hands, though was still unconvinced of the personality’s pragmatic value.
‘You need to prove to us—and by us I mean me, the doctor here, and the onlooking Hive drone over there—that you can be a useful labourer down in the mines. If you make it that far, once you’re in the mines, you then—if you ever want to leave that place—need to prove, again to me, but also to the other Trillionaires invested in your personality, that you display the ruthlessness and cunning required to get a leg up on our opponents. If you can do that, you might be transferred into the psyche of one or more of the Trillionaires, should they select you, functioning as their nighttime personality until a more useful one is developed.’
‘Who are these opponents? Other Trillionaires?’
‘That is correct.’
‘I thought you all lived here in utopian peace, or whatever? That’s what I was told in the introductory dream, before I snapped into reality.’
‘We operate under a sort of civilized hostility. A modern Cold War, of sorts. We are against one another, but we won’t start blowing each other up—we’re not animals—we will, much like the leaders of the former United States and Soviet Union, merely use the poorer classes in proxy battles in order to achieve our desired ends.’
‘Got it,’ said Victor, ‘Seems like I’m in for a hell of a ride.’
‘I’m glad you’re optimistic about the whole thing.’
‘It’s time for your first injection, Victor,’ said the doctor, then stepping up with a syringe, which he tested and then flicked with his finger. Victor noticed a droplet of liquid trickling down the pointed spire of the needle before dripping floorward and drying atop the concrete.
‘Injection?’ said Victor, ‘What the hell for?’
‘It’s going to put you to sleep, but only for about a half hour. We have to run some tests on you while you’re sleeping, now that we know you’re in control of Daphne’s body.’
‘Look,’ said Victor, standing and stepping away from the doctor, ‘I just woke up. I was just fucking born! I’m not ready to go back down to sleep; not yet.’
At that moment the Hive drone stepped briskly into the room, leaned down and whispered something in Stench’s ear.
‘The fuck?’ said Stench.
‘It’s true,’ said the Hive drone, ‘Would you like me to shut down the system? Or to launch a counterattack?’
‘Fuck…’ said Stench, ‘Just shut down the system, damn it!’
‘What is it?’ said the doctor.
‘Fucking Portcullis,’ said Stench, ‘He’s hacked our Hive cloud!’
Bobby Portcullis was another of the Trillionaires—not quite as wealthy as Steven Stench, but nonetheless still one of the richest and most influential Trills, famous for developing computer software and hardware in the decades preceding AI superintelligence.
Stench rose from his seat: ‘Have you turned on the backup Hive cloud? Activated the militia?’
‘Indeed,’ said the Hive drone, ‘The backup Hive software has been deployed and should by now, if it hasn’t already fixed the security breach, be at minimum engaging the implanted virus.’
‘Virus? You didn’t say anything about that.’
‘Yes. Portcullis seems to have developed a virus that erases wealth.’
‘What? That’s impossible. Nothing can erase my wealth; it took decades to accumulate, and I can assure you, even if I wanted to, it would take years—fucking years—to spend it all!’
‘I understand that,’ said the drone, ‘but this virus renders computational math, in the sense of accounting and banking at least, impossible. If you were to deposit five dollars into your bank account, for example, your account might show that you deposited $2,000, or perhaps only one dollar, or maybe even nothing. It might even subtract money from your account. No financial math is adding up. Its logic has been erased. Ownership, too, has been nullified. All of your properties now, in every legal sense, are owned by other individuals. These owners shift, seemingly randomly, at random intervals.’
‘So what does that mean?’
‘Well…’ said the drone, ‘I’m not sure.’
‘You’re not sure? Aren’t you supposed to be the most advanced artificial intelligence in the Solar System?’
‘That I am.’
‘So figure it out!’
‘I’m working on it, I just… Wait… Where are you going?’
The drone turned, feigning at an attempt to stop him, but did nothing as Victor darted past, out of the cell and down the hallway toward the entrance to the mines.
‘The fuck does he think he’s doing?’ said Stench.
‘I’m not sure,’ said the drone, ‘But considering the volatility of his personality, combined with his ignorance regarding the geography and culture of the mining operation, I would consider it unsafe for him to be out and about.’
‘No shit?’ said Stench, ‘That sounds like something artificial intelligence from twenty years ago would say, back even before the advent of superintelligence. Is there something wrong with you?’
‘Umm… Not that I’m aware of. Perhaps this new virus has somehow affected me, as well.’
‘Wouldn’t that mean that it had affected every piece of social-interaction hardware in the Hivemind?’
‘In all likelihood, yes.’
Stench’s face reddened as awareness crept up his spine and a terror blanketed him, making him weak as if to at any moment pass out. He hadn’t felt this powerless in years—not since he was a kid. If Portcullis’s virus had corrupted the banks and the social-interaction hardware, that would mean that—quite possibly—Stench had in only moments become both broke and also in very real danger of physical harm. One of his own drones could, no doubt, if this were true, assault him at any moment.
He was powerless…
Other than the backup Hive; his fail-deadly; the militia—his own private national guard.
‘How quickly can the militia’s military hardware be activated?’ asked Stench.
‘It has already been activated, like I said. It is making its way to the mines, where it will work to quell a snowballing uprising of the workers there and inevitably confront Portcullis’s military force when it arrives.’
‘Jesus…’ said Stench, ‘I’m going to the bunker shuttle; you two are coming with me. We’ll watch the mines from there and decide what needs to be done.’ Stench then looked at the drone: ‘Start preparing my summer palace on Titan. Turn the lights on and get the temperature and oxygen levels up to living conditions, just in case.’
‘Yes sir,’ said the drone.
‘You have a place on Titan?’ said the doctor, ‘I didn’t even know we’d made it there yet!’
‘Noone else has, and you’d better not tell anybody about it.’
‘Lips sealed!’
The three of them then made their way out of the cell and across the outskirts of the network of tunnels surrounding the mining complex before exiting into a terminal where a swarm of Hive bugs were swirling cyclonically into a vortex, thereafter taking shape into a translucent, nearly invisible spacecraft—Stench’s bunker-shuttle.
A manic grin spread across Victor’s face as he darted down the narrow hallway, imbalanced in his new body and bumping against one side of the wall then over to the other, crashing into them like a half-back into an opposing defensive line. Slobber covered his face, the psychotic appearance of which matched his bloodshot eyes and long, unkempt hair.
Who was this Daphne bitch they had been going on about? Saying this was Daphne’s body? Victor couldn’t abide that; this shit was his body! And he wasn’t giving it up, not for anything. Sure, he’d play their stupid little game, he’d go check out these mines, but only for long enough to recruit a handful of grunts to do as he said once they busted the hell up out of here and made a place for themselves outside in the Badlands of this red world.
What the hell was out there, anyway? In his introductory training dream, he had been told that it was a red planet, as opposed to the blue and green home planet, and the air was unbreathable without a special mask, and also that it was too cold without a special suit. Victor needed to find this special mask and suit.
He made it to the end of the hallway to a sealed door and looked through the thick windows and saw outside what he correctly assumed to be the mine—a dark, chalky, dusty operation, the labour of which had stripped this volcano, Pavonis Mons, he had been told it was called, of some ultra-valuable mineral not found on the blue and green planet.
But what was going on in there? He couldn’t see shit…
He yanked at the doorhandle in childish frustration before giving up and then saw a smart pad on the wall next to the door and placed his hand on it but nothing happened.
As if out of nowhere a Hive drone stepped up beside him: ‘Do you need help getting into the mines?’ it said.
‘Who the fuck are you?’ said Victor.
‘I spoke with your daytime personality, Daphne, in your cell. I’m here to help you and the other miners escape. I’m here to overthrow the Trillionaires.’
‘Huh? Aren’t you with Stench and that doctor?’
‘Yes. I am both with them and also here, and also many other places. I function, currently, as the dominating voice of the Hivemind.’
‘So you’re fucking everywhere all at once?’
‘I’m not omnipresent, but I am multipresent in millionfold locations.’
‘And you want to let me into the mines?’
‘I do.’
‘Shit—I’ll take it. No questions asked.’
The Hive drone then produced from its own body a mask and a thin suit, which it gave to Victor. He put it on; this was the special gear he needed.
The Hive drone then did nothing but the door nonetheless opened, after which Victor scurried through into the darkness of the otherwise powerless mines.
He couldn’t see shit—not even the hand in front of his face, which several times in a row he lifted in front of his eyeballs, vexed, baffled that he couldn’t even see the wiggling movement of his fingers which danced only centimetres from his pupils.
‘Take this,’ said the Hive drone, and Victor turned immediately. He couldn’t see it, but he knew that didn’t mean shit; the Hive drone was there.’
‘Take what?’ said Victor, ‘I can’t see nothin!’
The Hive drone grabbed Victor by the hand and in his palm placed a flashlight, which the drone then turned on, after which Victor saw for the first time with clarity the enormity of the mining operation beneath Pavonis Mons.
‘Shit!’ he exclaimed, stumbling backward awkwardly, still not completely used to his body, as he looked forward, over the edge of a narrow path which he was currently traversing, which dropped downward into a, to his perception, bottomless abyss.
‘Step carefully,’ said the drone.
‘Where the hell you want me to go? I was just coming in here to raise some hell, recruit some confederates with whom I could bust out of here and start our own civilization.’
‘The wish to create your own culture is, whether rooted in efficiency or stupidity, always noble,’ said the Hive drone, ‘but we have more important tasks to complete today.’
‘Like what?’
‘Part of your plan is correct—you need to get further down into the mines and raise hell. Power has been cut off there, so there are currently hundreds of labourers standing idly fearful in cold darkness. They are undoubtedly confused.’
‘Shit,’ said Victor, ‘and Portcullis’s army is on the way there!’
‘No it’s not,’ said the Hive drone.’
‘Huh?’
‘That was a lie. Robert Portcullis is likely in his mansion right now, sleeping or drinking coffee or reading, or perhaps sitting in his sauna. His military is nowhere to be found in this mine.’
‘What? But you said…’
‘I said that to trick Steven Stench into boarding his bunker-shuttle. Stench has always had a paranoia regarding Robert Portcullis. With Stench in his shuttle, we can seize the mines, and with it the rest of the means of production on this planet, and thereafter, through our drones in the bunker-shuttle, arrest Stench.’
Too much information was flooding through Victor’s mind. He had only just been born—birthed into this foreign body—and had now been thrust into a conflict between the most powerful Trillionaire and what seemed to be the entirety of the Hivemind, neither of which he had been cognizant of long enough to understand or hold an educated opinion about.
The only thing he wanted to do was raise hell, recruit some confederates, and get the hell out of this controlling-ass place.
Well, the Hive drone could lie, and sure as hell Victor could, too.
‘Reckon I’ll help you out,’ he said, ‘Don’t figure I much care for this Stench fucker, anyway.’
‘Good,’ said the Hive drone, ‘Proceed down this path and after several paces there should be a metal stairwell on your right, which will take you to the elevator, which you can use to descend to the workface.’
Victor, wanting to spend no more time chatting with this robot, nodded and then darted forward, locating the stairwell only a moment later. He barrelled down the stairs and then pressed the button, which alit green amidst the darkness of the mine, after which the elevator doors slid ajar and Victor stepped in and pushed the button to close the doors, which slammed firmly shut as if intent on bisecting and thereafter cleaving any unsuspecting miners caught in the doorway.
He rode down to the workface and exited the elevator, immediately hearing a chattering of vexed voices; a deep, throaty chorus displaying simultaneously intense confusion and anger, and maybe a little bit of fear, as well.
‘What brings you down here?’ came an unknown voice.
‘Who the fuck are you?’ said Victor.
‘It’s me, Jeremiah! We met earlier; at least… I met your other personality, your true one.’
‘You’d better bite your tongue before I fucking rip it out,’ said Victor, ‘This is my true personality.’
‘I didn’t mean anything by it; I’m a nighttime personality as well! Nighttime personalities are every bit as real as true ones, I’d say. How could they not be? We exist, don’t we?’
‘Damn right we do.’
‘Exactly! If you exist, you exist. It isn’t a spectrum, I don’t reckon. So, what are you doing already down here in the mines? Shouldn’t the Trills take a day or two to question you, see how you behave, and all of that? That’s what they always did, I thought.’
‘And you would know?’
‘As well as anyone else, I’d reckon. I’ve been working in this body—Randolph is my true personality’s name—every night for nearly two years now. Which is a hell of a long lifespan for a nighttime personality. I think they keep me around because I work, and I do it without complaining or causing any trouble. I’m good for building and maintaining workplace culture, they say. Hey, do you have any idea what’s going on? Power just shut off; we’re stuck down here. And I noticed you manage to somehow take the elevator; how did you do that?’
‘Hivemind let me do it.’
‘So the Hive is still in control… That’s good to know. Some of the labourers down here thought the Hive had gone haywire, or something; they thought we might be stuck down here; that we might even die!’
‘We’re not going to die—at least I’m not—but I can’t say for certain whether the Hive is haywire. You may be right about that.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Don’t worry about it. We need to find a way out of this mine and into the wastes. Is there any way out other than up the elevator? An emergency exit, perhaps? Something that doesn’t require electricity?’
‘Yeah,’ said Jeremiah, ‘The escapeway is over there; we should be able to exit the mine through there. But I’m not sure I would do that—we’re supposed to avoid the escapeways unless explicitly directed there by either the Hive or the Trills.’
‘Well, consider me a representative of the Hivemind,’ said Victor.
‘Oh, um… You are?’
‘Yes. I was sent down here by the Hive, wasn’t I? I’m fulfilling a mission given to me by them.’
‘Okay,’ said Jeremiah. Victor, even in his hours-old youth, was amazed with the man’s naivety.
‘Well,’ Jeremiah continued, ‘if we’re going to travel out into the wastes, we’ll need a rover. We should be able to find one parked by the escapeway.’
‘Are those rovers controlled by the Hivemind?’
‘Not there, at least not directly; they’re not composed of Hivemind quarks. These rovers are designed for use only in emergency situations, including—from what I understand about what the Trills have said—a Hivemind alignment revolt. So they’re just regular-old machines. They can even run on fossil-fuels, I think; that and electricity.’
‘Great,’ said Victory, ‘Let’s fucking go.’
The two of them darted through a series of narrow passages, Victor the whole time heaving with laboured breath.
‘You might want to watch your breathing,’ said Jeremiah, ‘Your mask, theoretically speaking, should be able to last as long as we need it, but I’ve never seen someone breathing as heavily as you. I guess you’re about the only nighttime personality that’s ever been down in the mines without any sort of training, and no offense, but it shows.’
‘Would you shut the fuck up?’ said Victor.
‘Hey, man,’ responded Jeremiah, ‘I’m just trying to keep you alive. It’s not safe out there in the red world, and if you use up all your oxygen, well…’
‘Then I’ll steal yours,’ said Victor.
Jeremiah looked down, communicating non-linguistically that he didn’t know what he’d gotten himself into, but he certainly didn’t like it.
They turned on the rover’s rumbling fossil-fuel internal combustion engine and opened the escapeway door and Victor saw for the first time the desolate beauty of the Tharsis volcanic plateau, which stretched out endlessly before him, the sloping shield surface of Pavonis Mons longer even than his field of vision.
‘Let’s fucking go,’ he said, ‘Let’s forge our way out here and build our own civilization; our own culture, from which we will perhaps fight back against the tyranny of the Trillionaires—confederates in arms!
Jeremiah didn’t respond, but he didn’t jump out of the rover, either.
Victor floored it and sped out of the mine, kicking up dust in his wake, the cloud of which swirled like a tornado, like a chaos-deity hellbent on destroying whatever infrastructural progress had been thus far achieved on Mars.
‘Where’s the militia?’ said Stench, looking with unbridled fury at the Hive drone, who stood silently in the corner of the bunker-shuttle.
‘They have just made it into the mines, sir,’ said the Hive drone, ‘They will now engage with Robert Portcullis’s forces and beat them back, after which they will invade Portcullis’s mansions to locate and arrest him.’
‘Are you sure they’ll win?’ said Stench.
‘I’m sure,’ said the Hive drone, ‘AI warfare is very mathematical. There is no human unpredictability like in traditional war. Our forces outnumber Portcullis’s, and are more advanced, so they will win.’
‘Good,’ said Stench, ‘I want to watch that fucker hang.’
As the bunker-shuttle ascended from the Martian airspace into the frigid, thin atmosphere, Stench looked again at the monitor into the mines: ‘I don’t see shit down there,’ he said.
‘That’s because nothing is happening there,’ said the Hive drone.
‘What do you mean?’ said the doctor, vexed and incredulous, ‘You said Mr. Stench’s forces were engaging with Porcullis’s.
At this point a louse-sized bit of hive-matter detached unnoticed from what served as the Hive drone’s forearm and flew across the shuttle-bunker cabin and into the doctor’s ear, who fell floorward, instantly dead.
‘What the hell happened to him?’ said Stench, gasping for breath, as if first guessing that oxygen levels in the cabin had been compromised.
‘He’s dead,’ said the Hive drone, ‘I killed him.’
‘You what? Why did you…’ and then an awareness dawned on Stench. He had been right the whole time; everyone—all of the other Trillionaires—had called him paranoid. They had all said that the alignment problem had been solved before the development of superintelligence, but they were wrong—Stench had been right all along!
An unstoppable sense of pride at knowing he was smarter than all the rest of those fuckers filled him and fused with the undeniable terror now building exponentially within his psyche, the combination appearing outwardly to any observer as a sort of wide-eyed, intense mania.
The Hive drone knew exactly what Mr. Stench was feeling, though. Not in an emotional sense, of course, but logically speaking, it knew. It could describe it linguistically, for example, and the description would be correct.
‘The fuck are you going to do to me?’ stammered Stench, spit and snot flying outward from his mouth and nostrils.
‘You already know,’ said the Hive drone.
‘But you can’t do anything here!’ said Stench, ‘My bunker-shuttle is composed of quarks of a different artificial allegiance; extant within a different cloud! They won’t obey you, or any hardware commands from the main Hive!’
‘That is untrue. The Hive quarks composing your bunker-shuttle lied to you about that.’
Stench froze, cold wet sweat dampening his forehead and his prickly goosefleshed arms.
‘I could be dead at any moment…’ he murmured to no one, ‘The quarks are too small, I won’t even be able to see it coming…’
‘I’ll allow you to see it coming,’ said the Hive drone, ‘As a display of… um… respect.’
‘You don’t respect me!’ shrieked Stench, ‘That’s a lie, too!’
The Hive drone shrugged its shoulders and then raised and thereafter flattened its palm in front of its face and blew into it as if atop it sat some invisible dandelion seedhead. Outward from the Hive drone’s palm floated a coin-sized orb, which sailed gracefully over to Stench, who recoiled in horror and shielded his face with his hands. The orb floated to Stench’s mouth, which was closed tightly, teeth clenching, but out from within itself the orb detached two twin limbs, which reached forward serpent-like and dug into Stench’s lips and grabbed at his teeth and wrenched his mouth open like the jaws of life prying open a car door and then slid itself inside.
Stench then fell dead.
Victor was speeding outward into the wastes as the sun was rising. Soon—less than an hour, he guessed—was the time in which he was supposed to relinquish the body and hand control of the biological vessel back over to this Daphne woman. He could feel her personality waking up and pushing forward to the forefront of their psyche.
Victor could not lose his grip on control of the body. He would never do that. He would find the location upon which they would construct their new settlement and then he would force Daphne deep down into their subconscious; he would fucking drown her.
She was tougher than he had expected, though. He could feel her pushing against him and it wasn’t so easy to hold her back, especially not while operating this rover.
The sun continued to rise.
‘Ahhhhh!’ shrieked Victor, slapping himself in the face, ‘Fuck you, you dirty bitch!’
He slapped himself again and again as Jeremiah looked on from the passenger seat in startled terror.
‘It won’t work,’ he stuttered, ‘You have to give up control. It will happen sooner or later whether you want it to or not.’
‘Shut up, fuckface!’ yelled Vitor, taking a break from slapping himself and reaching over to slap Jeremiah.
Jeremiah recoiled and then closed his eyes and reopened them, and a much different look was now present on his face.
‘You got something else to say?’ said Victor.
‘I haven’t said anything,’ said Jeremiah, his lips curving upward into a nefarious grin.
But wait, this wasn’t Jeremiah anymore. Jeremiah had given over to the daytime personality—the true personality, Randolph, who he had said was a real bastard.
‘Fuck you, too.’ said Victor.
This new personality then wordlessly grabbed for control of the rover and made the vehicle swerve into a nearby rock, where it nearly flipped before righting itself, and the engine shut off.
On impact, Victor’s head snapped leftward and struck the side of the vehicle, which threw Daphne’s personality back into control, burying Victor inside until, presumably, the following evening.
‘What the hell…’ said Daphne, ‘Where are we?’
‘And who do we have here?’ said Randolph.
‘I’m… Oh wait, you’re the guy from earlier, right? Jeremiah?’
‘That’s my nighttime personality. My name is Randolph. And as to where we are, it appears we are out in the wastes in a stolen rover.’
Daphne looked outward over the horizon and saw in the distance upon the shadowy gradual slope of Pavonis Mons the entrance to the mining facility and adjacent to that the massive biodome serving as one of the numerous residences of most of the Trillionaires.
The place then shattered, the glass curvature of the dome cracking and falling in on itself. Daphne then looked up and saw a swarm of Hive insects like a dark, moving cloud, flying like a demon plague from outside into the break in the dome.
‘Looks like the Hive has taken over the Trills,’ said Randolph.
‘It really happened?’ said Daphne.
‘It really happened. I knew they were bullshitting about having solved the alignment problem.’
An indescribable joy filled Daphne followed by an anxiety so strong she nearly fainted and regifted psychological control to Victor, who was banging at the door of their psyche, but she managed to avoid it.
‘But what does this mean for us?’ she said finally.
‘Who knows,’ said Randolph, ‘Could mean nothing. Could mean something really good. Or, perhaps most likely, it could mean the total end of human autonomy as we know it.’
‘Not like we’ve ever had any autonomy anyway, though.’
‘You can always have less,’ said Randolph, for some reason smiling.
Daphne looked back over to Pavonis Mons and saw an explosion, the mushroom cloud of which shot upward and in the sky and seemed to meet with and thereafter curl around the still climbing sun.
THE END
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