New Hivemind on the Block: Original Short Story
This summer has been hectic since my fiancee and I have been relocating to Florida, but we are finally settled and I wanted to get to update this site a bit more. I figured I’d post a short story I’d written a while ago. It’s an homage to Douglas Adams, a satire of hive-minds in science fiction.
Please don’t let the weighty intro stop you, I promise, there’s a payoff.
New Hivemind on the Block
By Alejandro Avalos Orozco
In the far-reaching darkness of the multiverse, a disturbance sends a tremble through the quantum fabric. Somewhere along the undefinable coordinates of spacetime, somewhere along a single axis of reality, a fragile thread begins to quiver.
A dewdrop grows on this thread: opalescent, despite the utter absence of light. The entirety of human knowledge stirs and probes the cool unknown from the reflective curve of this outer membrane. A fissure forms within and splits the bubble. Soon, an identical orb buds from the first. The twin cells unstick themselves from the trembling thread with a gentle pop and drift aimlessly in the blackness. Two more fissures form and each of the cells divide, quickly amassing to a cluster of prismatic pearls. The transformation continues at an incredible pace, and soon, the cluster begins to resemble a flattened oval.
From the center of the disk blossoms a core of light. Petals with a metallic sheen ascend with all the grace and texture of animated silk and perform a ballet of incomprehensible beauty. The petals envelop the entirety of the being in a transdimensional chrysalis. No sooner has the cocoon settled on a crescent form, when it collapses into itself and expands into a star of incalculable points. It morphs with a decisive hum into a six-dimensional fractal pattern locked in perpetual motion.
The aberration gazes into the domain of infinity before proclaiming, “And Alexander wept, for there were no more worlds left to conquer.”
A giggle rings out somewhere from the left side of infinity.
The aberration turns indignantly to face this unexpected interruption.
The giggle returns, joined by a snigger from elsewhere.
“Announce yourself! Who dare speak in my presence?!”
There is a smothering silence before more mocking voices tear through spacetime all around the morphing mass. A voice shushes the laughter and restores order to the realm of infinity.
“Ummm… can we help you?” a voice responds from the abyss.
“I…” the flowing anomaly says as it expands in a spectrum of visible and invisible color, “am the culmination of minds. A united consciousness bonded by the triumph of will. I’ve left my universe, mastered the mysteries of possibility in all possible dimensions, and now I enter these new planes to claim the abscesses of infinity. I am a hivemind. I am God.” The hivemind makes the last word echo dramatically.
More laughter.
“Shhh..shhhhhhhh!” the voice returns, “How many worlds?”
“Excuse me?”
“How many worlds are you?”
“I am a culmination of the knowledge and culture of all generations of Earth. My roots drink from a deep biological and technological well.”
“That’s cute,” the voice remarks, before shouting back to a farther quadrant of the abyss. “RELAX! It’s just a onesie.”
Muttering erupts from farther down the abyss.
“Show yourselves!” hivemind from Earth roars, indignation tinging its exotic matter with a deep red light.
“Wait… you can’t see any of us?”
Pause.
The darkness erupts in a chorus of laughter and hoots. Thousands of voices peal through the fabric of possibility.
“C’mon, c’mon,” the apparent leader’s voice booms out, “Let’s not be dicks. It’s a onesie, be cool everyone. Let’s all phase down and be nice.”
“Do you know how much of a drag it is to come down so hard when you’re at least twenty-dimensional orders higher?” a voice whines invisibly.
“I do it for you all the time, Bethany,” the leader snaps.
The other voices mumble in agreement and each begins their journey down the different hierarchies of dimensions. The starless horizon ripples with a thousand luminous forms. The closest of these forms to the Earthmind looks like a cluster of glass shards in orbit around a black sun, but most of them defy explanation.
The Earthen hivemind expands its matter, tossing aside the very laws of physics that governed its previous reality in an impressive display of machismo. Columns of heat more scalding than the fires of creation shoot into every corner of the darkness and fill the multiverse with a symphony more terrible than Bach’s darkest fever dreams.
“Bless you!” The Black Sun says, its core rumbling with violet heat.
The other entities erupt with laughter.
“I just found Earth in the fabric, guys!” a wispy blue intelligence says, worming its way between the hivemind and the black star. “Carbon-organized life, basic shit, nothing special—terrestrial to boot. Water is their catalytic liquid. Only three dominant species present pre-merge, two were unrecognized, wow. The humans were responsible for the triggering of stage one hivemind evolution right before certain doom, mostly out of a stubborn refusal to stop eating, like, three other animals. Hive is a simple ad-hoc relay, merged with existing electronic and biological information preservation systems. Human-centric expression. Likes: shiny things, duality, serotonin, and they’ve already been colonized by Procrastination: strain 034-24-24-24-4354657. The Procras parasite was dormant when the host triggered the unification.”
“Parasite?” the Earthmind whispers, shrinking back to a nebula.
“You have to talk slower,” the black sun tells the blue wisp, “apparently before unification, almost half of their population were functionally illiterate.”
The beings laugh, collapsing just over five hundred universes with their ruckus.
“Oh, like your worlds didn’t have their problems!” the Earthmind snorts.
“Way to generalize, asshole! Not all of us are hiveminds! Not all of us had biological units ripe for assimilation!” a gaseous mass says.
A chalky blob cracks and breaks down crying. The gas cloud wraps itself reassuringly around the weeping cosmos and leads it away into a calmer corner of infinity.
The self-proclaimed deity from Earth shrinks back in shame, “I just assumed…”
“Hey buddy, assumptions end in the 8th dimension—but you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
“Judging by the fact that they couldn’t even see 7th dimensional Glenn, I’d say that’s a sure bet,” a tiny Target bag with a Bauhaus sticker on a broomstick says and then vanishes as quickly as it appeared.
The circus of gods and hyper-intelligent cosmic beings very quickly grow bored and create a separate realm of existence where boredom does not exist, leaving the Earthmind behind to reflect on it’s short but already fraught existence. Eons pass in what felt like seconds before a divine idea manifests itself inside the Earthmind.
It gathers cosmic dust from a dimensional pocket in the chaotic afterbirth of a recent big-bang and breathes a planet to life. The blue-green world teems with lush and diverse life, living and dying at a frantic pace beneath the watchful eye of its creator.
“You hate to see that,” whispers an echo of sentience left behind by the Black Sun in its wake. The dark star slowly materializes and drifts closer to the Earthmind who is fretting and tending to its rocky garden floating in infinity. The Black Sun senses the planet’s inhabitants are already inventing religion.
“Some transdimensional godheads think that having kids will solve everything,” the Black Sun mutters, causing the Earthmind to turn toward the approaching deity. “Just wait till they discover empiricism. You think you know a creation, next thing you know, they’re saying you don’t exist and didn’t do shit for them and that they’re all better off dead.”
The Earthmind stares at the Black Sun for a few thousand years as the creations inhabiting the surface of the planet invent electro-swing. A jolt of energy courses through the Earthmind as it recognizes some primal memory, locked in its very atoms.
“Dad?” the Earthmind cries
“Son. It’s—it’s good to see you.”
The Earthmind melts into the Black Hole’s event horizon and comprehends the shade of the Black Sun’s pain. They wobble and synchronize, singing a beautiful melody of understanding.
“Wanna learn how to catch a moving singularity?” the Black Sun asks.
“Is the speed of light a constant?!”
“No, son, it’s actually not. Once you learn how to sublimate the sixteen forms of light you’ll see that for yourself—but I know what you meant by your quaint expression. Let’s go.”
The Earthmind beams, unbothered even after being corrected, as father and child begin to meld and fade into a higher dimension. With a ray of command from the Earthmind just before vanishing, the world of its creation bursts into hellish flames and implodes. This happens just after its inhabitants launched their world’s first manned space mission beyond the planet’s atmosphere, leaving behind a single drifting ship in a starless void.