Hellsborough Exposed

I used to file jellyhead under vocabulary, not bestiary — just what the crosslanders call anyone born under a psycmask and the hive mind's constant hum. Then I watched a queue of forty of them turn to the same doorway at the same moment, for no reason a single one of them could give me, and moved the file. On a fed day they're no trouble at all — docile, orderly, the sort of neighbour who holds a door for you without thinking about it, because thinking about it is precisely what the feed spares them. It's the gap between feeds that wants watching. Cut the biofeed and the compliance doesn't switch off, it redirects: forty content strangers become forty people sharing one narrowing question, and whatever sits underneath doing the deciding changes the subject whenever I ask it outright. I've taken to counting stutters at the mask queues now, the way you'd count seconds between thunder and light, because the first stutter is nothing and the second is when the neighbours stop being neighbours.