Hellsborough Exposed — the-hive-mind

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.

Pip had just gone quiet in a room full of jellyheads and heard Van answer him without a word passing either of their lips - his first taste of hearing past the hivemind's noise.

"Job done then, Van, no more distractions."

"Told yer it'd make yer go blind otherwise, young'en."

"I'm not blind - I grok Van!"

Four years in the Sunderlands, and Roper had learned to read the frostpulses:

Roper: You'll get used to the ground. Takes a few days.

Tom: What does it tell you.

Roper: It tells you where the settled places are. The places it's carrying. The places that don't shift.

Nobody made the gutterball on purpose — that is the official nascenti position, which is technically true and substantially misleading. Spherical, approximately head-sized, surface somewhere between wet stone and the skin of something recently dead: it rolls with direction and purpose, feeding everything within its radius to the hive mind with the focused neutrality of a drain. Field note: if one begins appearing at your thresholds and corners, Van will want to know about it — and note that by that point, your decisions will have already started feeling unusually confident, which is the detail that should concern you most.

Van defined the Molon-Tor in a single phrase: the social media infection that those native to The Dark Peak carry in their heads — virus, not creature, ancient, distributed, inside you before you had opinions about it. It uses your name. It remembers things about you from before you were born.

A HiveMind direct message arrived from an address I had previously flagged as scum — unknown/unknown_location/000 — warning of danger and naming "the cult of the bitter finger: the crosslander-clown-xaexs alliance." Van, playing cribbage across the table, identified the sender as probably connected to a crosslander who had left the pub shortly before. I did not point out that the message contained exactly the information Van already had.

Jellyheads look content. What they are is distracted — the hivemind runs off the psycmask on their face and handles everything so they never have to think about it. Most of them don't. I'm from the off-world and I still think about it more than I should.