Episode 5 - The Tide Recedes, and What it Leaves Behind

  Chapter 47 - Hive

  A barb of pain plunges into my neck. I can feel the flash of heat down my veins that slowly diffuses through my body leaving my fingertips tingling. For a moment, I hold my breath, not sure what to expect next.

  Then, the edges of my vision blur, my focus narrowing. A feeling like loud, rushing objects in my ears leaves me fighting a primal urge to run. My mind expands, and I feel my bond with Pooka waver as if it will be consumed within this intruding wave of vastness, so instead I seize our identities with my mind and hold us tight. Pooka grips me back; a bubbling pit of rage at this intrusion to his being.

  I am the conduit. The bond does not flow where I do not let it. I lock us both tight, wrapping our thoughts until they are small and safe against the rising tide of vast oblivion around us.

  Then I surge down the pathway that has opened and snatch every body I find along the way. Eyes open, one by one, as each Vespa falls under my control. They do not have distinct consciousness, not like Pooka; they are vessels to be filled with the will of another.

  I can feel Adrian’s heart pound as I reach down the bond and grab him next. I pass into him, feeling his weakness, his weariness, the weight across his chest and the chafing, constant itching where the hive meets his skin. I feel the chair beneath his body, the discomfort of his stiff joints. His fear at my intrusion is cold and visceral. His heartbeat flutters, his stomach clenches.

  His memories and thoughts flash before my eyes.

  I step onto the manifestation platform, nervously twirling a scalpel between my fingers. The amphitheater behind me is quiet and empty. I cannot imagine a crowd large enough to fill all the seats. Computing Solutions Ltd does not raise assets in family units like I have heard other companies do. It has never been their culture. The guards on either side of me hold their rifles confidently, faces buried behind masks, tactical laser sights hovering on my chest. I have been shuffled from dorm to showers to rec rooms to messes to classrooms to dorm again so many times by those weapons that their threat to me is numbed by familiarity.

  I knew this would be my fate one day. Server farms breed bodies to act as the computing backbones for companies worldwide. The men, like myself, are valued as sellable goods. When we finally manifest, our female symbionts will become the queens of hives that provide computing power. The women, who manifest lone male drones, are valued only as breeders of the next generation. I was glad to be born male, and I am detached now from almost everything else that could resemble feelings.

  When I nick the paler underside of my finger, and smear the metal platform with my blood, from the tiny red streak a small form swells. Paper-thin wings unfurl, transparent like glass, and jointed legs stretch and solidify. The body is elongated, with a narrowing between each body segment and a cruel pointed face. The thorax ends in a pointed barb. It is no formicid, nor an apid, nor a termitid. As the sensors around me pick up her signature, confirmation of my worst fears flashes on a nearby screen, ready for the waiting guards. It is a vespid. Useless for their comparatively small colonies… forbidden for their toxin.

  At first, I feel only relief that my suffering might end.

  But she is so tiny, and her small antennae bob as she orients herself and tests her wings for the first time. Through the numbness that is my only companion, cuts a presence, a tiny plaintive softness at the edge of my mind. She’s so alone, so small. How can she be so dangerous? I feel an odd connection to this little thing that has come for me, and it would be so sad if she died because she was not what they wanted. As I scoop her up, I gulp with trepidation.

  Several gunshots fire. And somehow I am not dead. I clutch her to my chest in the cage of my hand, feeling her legs wrap around my finger, staggering backwards across the platform. My other hand instinctively goes over my head as I duck and shield myself. I bolt across the exposed platform, ducking between the sensors and floodlights mounted on tripods. From there I wait, expecting more noise, or the screams of men ordering me back to my dorms or to stand for my execution. But there is an eerie silence instead. I gather my courage, and peek back out over the platform.

  A man approaches. No, a beast approaches.

  A mane of black and silver hair bristles down his back and between the ripped seams of his clothing - a mix of military fatigues and body armor modified to accommodate his size. Wild, brilliant blue eyes flash beneath dark, heavy brows. His teeth are long and protrude from his dark lips, like the fangs of a monster. His arms ripple with muscle, and his fingers are elongated to end in curled claws. Behind him, a confident woman in in her late teens, with curled coffee-dark hair, who seems half the size of the monstrous man at her side.

  “You are safe now. We’ve been waiting for an opportunity like you,” declares the woman with the authority of someone much older than she appears, her eyes sparkling with jubilant confidence.

  The wolf-man at her side straightens his hunched stance, dark lips curling back over his white fangs and looks over his shoulder to the team of men and women that follow. All are dressed in miss-matched body armor, combat fatigues and civilian dress. His voice has a decisive, resonant snap as he thunders orders. “Secure our perimeter. We have our target.”

  “What is going on? Who are you people?” I say, my hands still cupped around my new symbiont.

  The wolf-man turns his unsettling blue eyes back upon me, towering to his full height as he comes closer. “It’s your lucky day, cob. Welcome to being smuggled,” he says with a good-natured rumble to his voice and a grin that only looks menacing with all of his pointed teeth.

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re dead otherwise,” quips the small woman, holstering a handgun. The dead guards on either side of the platform are quickly being dragged away by the rest of the team.

  “But why me?”

  “My crew and I have been paid by an interested buyer to get a Vespa. That’s you.” replies the wolf-man, turning one clawed finger to point at me. Then he extends his thumb and gestures towards the woman. “This is your new employer’s agent. Don’t make any trouble for me now.” He turns to go support the rest of his men, leaving me with the woman.

  She extends a hand, cocking one hip to the side and smiles. “My name is Regina, nice to meet you.”

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  I open my hand, looking at the tiny queen Vespa who buzzes in appreciation at being freed from my protective cage. I extend my other free hand and place it within Regina’s palm. She closes her fist and shakes my hand vigorously.

  I push past the memory. The next one assaults me in quick succession.

  Aster brushes back his black bangs and sighs as he drops the soft-shell carry case of his sniper rifle in front of me. His eyeliner is smudged, with streaks running down one cheek. When he sits, he sniffs, and seems for a moment like he might be able to hold back his feelings. Then the young man bursts into tears, hunching over the case of his rifle and burrowing into his own arms.

  “Hey, hey” I reply, patting his shoulder.

  “I can’t believe she would do that?”

  “What- Oh. Yeah. Sorry,” I say tiredly. I feel like the apologies Regina will never say always come from my mouth. Privy to her plans, I have to hold them secret, watching as they slowly unfurl to hurt the people I try not to care for.

  Sure, she is not incapable of saying her apologies. Her heart always aches, things are always tough, times are cruel, and we must do our work proudly and hold each other strong. But they are never sincere words. Regina is driven by ambition and has long since stopped feeling any other human emotion.

  I actually think having her son bottled the sincere emotions she once had even tighter. The poor boy was born with eyes too like his father, and I think it reminds her too much of the bridge she burned. When she lost her second… well, she never tried again with Owen. Even that relationship I am uncertain is real, more a relationship of convenience or another play in securing Aquila’s continued survival with Owen’s financial support.

  Everett cries himself to sleep some nights, the toddler is still too young to understand that it is not his fault, just that she will not hold him. I think she’s learned some of her callousness from me; that, or she drowns it all in a constant buzz now. She’s not been field-capable in several years.

  Aster is also too young still, or he just lacks that unfeeling organ that Regina and I both have grown.

  I hold my numbness as a protective shield. I coat my skin with it, just as my symbiont’s nest has grown across my chest. She started over my heart, coating it with the paper-like material she vomits from her stomach despite consuming no mass. I can never hear her voice, nor do I know her name, but I feel like this was her way of protecting me as I protected her before she had more bodies.

  Now, my left pectoral is almost completely covered with the growing hive. It protrudes outwards like a tumorous mass, and already clothing will not fit me unless obnoxiously oversized. Even then the excess fabric is not where I need it, so it pinches me around my shoulder and armpit on the side of the nest. Regina has offered to have clothing custom made to my measurements, but the hive keeps on growing, and I have no desire for someone to touch me to measure my dimensions. I’d rather wade in my self-disgust I think, buzzing in my mind like the constant drone of beating wings that haunts my existence.

  The nest makes movement hard now, even just walking I am unbalanced. I’ve started using a crutch under one arm, and I can feel my body beginning to atrophy as I move less and less with each passing day as the weight grows. Just like the other men I was raised with at Computing Solutions Ltd, my fate will eventually be nothing but host and scaffold to my symbionts.

  Aster wipes his face, takes a sigh and sits backwards. Then he unzips the soft-shell case and begins to disassemble the sniper-rifle within. As his hands work, his eyes glaze and he stills his trembling lower lip. It has only been a few years since he joined Aquila, recruited directly from a paramilitary contractor. He is young and handsome, with a feminine roundness to his cheeks and a slim frame. His long hands work with ?familiar efficiency to clean his weapon.

  It is not the blood that unsettles him. He’s seen blood. I’ve seen his memories. The missions that shake him is when Regina asks for a different kind of work from him and he lets himself get too close still. He’s a beautiful man, and sometimes a pretty face gets someone talking far faster than a knife to a throat. He’s good at it, he likes people, he loves deception. He loves slipping into a new skin and living another’s life. He’d spent six months undercover with this target, slowly getting to know her. Growing so close he was sharing her bed at the end. He thought she was just a target for information, not that it made his decision any less stupid.

  Then, I had to pass the order along one morning. ‘Tonight, as she is escorted between her dinner appointment and her apartment to retire, you will assassinate her.’ Aster did his bloody work, and I listened for the gunshot on his ear with a Vespa.

  Regina never has to give the hardest orders. It is always from my mouth that operational parameters come. Everyone knows they are Regina’s words. But it is my voice they are spoken with.

  “That fuckin’ bitch,” Aster mutters. “Next time she can be the honeypot.”

  “I know,” I say, not really sure what emotion should be put into the words. I don’t know why he comes to me when he is like this. I’m practically the person who did this to him.

  I lift a hand to pick up the scope as he puts it on the table in front of me. He catches my hand with his own and looks at me as I pause. In his dark eyes, I catch a feeling I have caught in his mind when he locks in.

  “Aster, I can't,” I say.

  “Just for one night?”

  “No. This is not what you would want. You are mourning. I am your superior. It is inappropriate,” I say.

  He holds his breath, and slowly his fingers curl as he withdraws his hand.

  “I cannot, Aster. Not ever.”

  “Why?” he asks so quietly I almost cannot hear the words.

  “You know why,” I say, pushing my chair out from the dining table and standing with the help of my crutch under one armpit. “You could never keep a secret from me. Every time you lock in I will know your every thought. We would never be equals in any relationship. Let alone how deeply inappropriate it would be.”

  “You know how I feel,” says Aster, looking down at the cleaning cloth in his hand.

  “Yes.”

  “And I-”

  “The problem is that you do not know how I feel. And that you are doing this because you are hurt. This is for the better,” I say.

  “You could tell me with words, like people normally do,” replies Aster, hiding his disappointment by continuing to clean his rifle.

  "I am not interested then. If those are the words you must hear." I hobble away before I can see his reaction. The words are not a lie. My body disgusts me so much I cannot stand the thought of anyone coming near it. My skin itches as I walk, I can almost ignore it... most days.

  Aster will move on, he is young. And I shove my own feelings aside, they sink into my bones adding to my weariness. My symbiont will build another chamber for her nest and hatch new bodies soon enough, and my armor will grow.

  I only feel whatever I feel for everyone because I see so much of their minds. None of it is real feelings. And if they were, I would never be able to tell what is me and what is them anymore. I love them all, whether or not I want to.

  And if I am truthful with myself, I know why he comes to me. It is the same reason they all do. They love me. Because that is the greatest ammunition I have to protect myself.

  It is the trap I leave behind in their minds.

  almost all bees! There are some insects you and I would definitely recognize as bees that belong in other families such as mason bees and some other odd bees. Apidae has all the 'main' bees though, and a few they look very 'wasp-y' as well.

  almost all wasps, including nearly all eusocial species, but a few solitary species as well! There is another family of 'wasps' which are actually wingless and probably don't look like something you might consider a wasp at first glance. (Whoops, go back up to Formicids now, we came round in a circle).

  might have guessed that these are termites (but not all termites), another well known eusocial insect. Termites are not a close relation of ants (which might be your first guess) but actually grouped in the Order Blattodea with cockroaches! This might seem weird at first, but they actually share a lot of similarities such as being social (you see one cockroach, there are usually others right?); liking dark, moist places; and behaviors like grooming, kin recognition, food sharing (aww) and cannibalism (oh no D:).