The Hive Read online

  When she burst into the kitchen to grab breakfast, she stopped short at the look on Rachel’s face. “What?” she snapped. Her hands flew to her lips, to her hair. Maybe she looked really bad, even for her.

  Her mom’s mouth had shrunk to a shriveled pucker, so tightly was she pursing her lips. Cassie realized for the first time how tired her mom looked, how the lines around her eyes and mouth had deepened. She was even more pale than usual, her skin almost translucent. Rachel shook her head tersely, fatigue and anger radiating from her in nearly visible waves.

  “What, Mom?” Annoyance was overtaken by a jolt of worry then; she had a sudden flashback to that unspeakable day six months ago. Was Rachel about to say something else that would make Cassie’s life explode into pieces again? She wouldn’t be able to take that.

  It’s about your father. It’s about —

  But there was nothing left to explode, Cassie reminded herself. Nothing left to be taken from her. Rachel could say anything, and no matter how bad it was, it wouldn’t make a difference. Things were already rock bottom for Cassie: Dad gone. Shitty new apartment. No doubt a shitty new school. No friends. And of course, nothing to wear, just to add insult to a festering pile of injuries.

  When Rachel finally spoke, her voice was strained, like she was struggling to be heard through a wall. “What. Is. This.”

  Rachel spun her tablet around on the table, showing a video to Cassie. It took Cassie a few confusing seconds to understand why Rachel was so pissed.

  Someone had recorded the Hive Mob yesterday. And there, clear as the blue sky overhead, was Cassie. Her height and pitch-black hair drew the camera to her again and again as it panned over the crowd, shouts and chants drowning out whatever Rachel was saying now.

  The sick feeling started to bubble in Cassie’s throat again, the same one that made her turn and run yesterday. Only this time she held it down, forcing it back into the pit of darkness she carried around with her these days.

  As she watched the video, which was trending online, she was captivated. Watching yourself on-screen when you don’t know you’re being filmed is a total trip — though of course, everyone was filmed everywhere these days. It was like she was watching a twin she didn’t know she had. As the video played, Cassie could see it in her eyes: the weakness. The fear. If she had been stronger, she would have stayed. If the perpetrator hadn’t reminded her of her dad, well … the video wouldn’t be showing her turning her back and running away. Like a child.

  She wouldn’t make that mistake again.

  “Do you hear me, Cass?” Rachel flipped off the tablet. The juxtaposition of the screams of the video and the sudden silence of the kitchen made Cassie feel underwater, out of sorts. “What did we talk about? You are not to participate in this garbage!”

  “Garbage?” Cassie shook her head. Only someone who hadn’t felt the goose bumps on her arms from the energy of a Hive could call it garbage. And her mom, who barely knew how to operate her email, definitely didn’t get it. “Mom, this is the way the world works. Don’t you care about progress? About justice?”

  “This isn’t justice!” Rachel slammed her palm on the table so hard that her coffee cup jiggled and threatened to capsize. “Justice isn’t hunting down some miserable guy who was venting about the hand life dealt him and —”

  “This is justice now!” Cassie jabbed a pointed finger toward the window. “This is how we do things now!”

  “Other countries don’t do this,” Rachel pleaded.

  “That doesn’t make it wrong,” Cassie snapped.

  “Or right!” Rachel shot back.

  “Are we really going to have this fight again?” Cassie rolled her eyes. “Our greatest hits, right? Let me know if you forget your lines.”

  As soon as Rachel’s skin bloomed into that particular shade of purple that it turned whenever she lost her temper with her only child, Cassie tuned her out. It was like someone muted the room; Rachel’s voice just became background noise, blending in to the traffic and sounds of people outside. They’d been having this particular argument forever, it seemed.

  Cassie could barely remember what it was like before Hive Justice. Her dad used to tell her about the days when someone’s name trending on Twitter usually meant they had died or, best case, had dropped an unannounced album. But slowly, the online behaviors that were and were not acceptable began to change.

  “People act mean when you give them the permission to,” Harlon used to say. Any slight that someone shared, perceived or genuine, became fodder for vicious threats, harassment, doxxing. Send a mean tweet to an ex? Your name, your address, even your grade point average were almost immediately uncovered and broadcast to the world, potentially turning hundreds of millions of users against you. And it was all fair game. Cassie remembered a neighbor close to their old house, a sweet old woman who liked to spend most of her time gardening. She’d been the first person Cassie had known to be virtually shunned after she posted a photograph making light of some bad landscaping she’d seen in the neighborhood. Her photo went viral, and soon the internet hated her. She was a bully, a bitch. Her sharp tongue was a “microaggression cannon,” a danger to society. Eventually, she’d had to sell her house after groups of angry people kept showing up unannounced and pulling the flowers out of her garden, leaving a graveyard of colors on the street. Cassie didn’t know where the woman lived now. But she was sure she didn’t make fun of people anymore, wherever she was.

  So that’s what it was like in the beginning: slowly, people online became the judge and jury for all “uncivilized” online behaviors. This condemnatory mass of the social media majority became known as the Hive, responsible for identifying and punishing whatever actions were deemed socially unacceptable.

  With frightening speed, the Hive became known for its outright vigilante violence. With the national social media engagement rate at nearly 99 percent, anyone who was believed to have done something wrong was hunted down by angry crowds that meted out “justice,” as the internet deemed it.

  At first, the Hive was considered the price you paid for living in a free and open society, the way so many people used to treat mass shootings.

  Then came the riots. After a series of them in several cities, the government was forced to catch up and enact legislation to control them the best they could. But the Hive was decentralized. There were no leaders. There were no plans to disrupt. It just was.

  “It was us,” Harlon had said to Cassie. “We met the Hive and it was us.” And then he’d laughed in that way that told her he’d just made a reference to something old, something she’d have to look up if she ever wanted to understand it.

  It was too late to take away their power — the Hive was too big by then — but it could be directed. Channeled. With the help of all the big technology companies running the internet, the government set up new algorithms to legislate the management of the Hive’s justice system. A new, mandatory social media platform — BLINQ, available only to U.S. citizens — came into being, aggregating content from all the other platforms, making it easier to see a person’s whole social profile in one place. You could still Like or Dislike a person’s activity, just as before … but now you could also Condemn. And once a user’s Condemns hit a certain threshold, weighted by things like speed of virality and past social media content, they were officially sanctioned.

  Which meant actual consequences.

  In the analog world, where things were physical not digital, the courts still played their role. Crimes — robberies and embezzlements and assaults — were still all cops and lawyers and that antiquated crap. But everyone finally realized that the only way to police the internet was with and through the internet. For years, they’d tried applying the old analog tools to the digital frontier. It was a losing battle, as anyone who knew anything about the internet could have guessed. Now, people were fully accountable for their online behavior … an
d faced real-world consequences.

  And, as Cassie repeated to Rachel whenever she went on one of her anti-Hive crusades, things were better now. People were more careful online, more responsible. How could that be wrong, no matter how much her mother bitched about it?

  “I’m late for school,” Cassie said airily, right in the middle of her mother’s diatribe. “One of us should probably care.”

  *

  Rachel hated yelling. And she didn’t yell, usually. But Cassie getting involved in Hive Justice … well, that was guaranteed to nuke her self-control, not to mention trigger a migraine. Had Cassie been listening at all? It was hard to tell. Cassie had mastered her facial expressions in such a way that Rachel couldn’t decipher her feelings. “Perfect Teenage Apathy Affect,” Harlon had called it.

  Harlon. Jesus, Harlon. The part of her that she still allowed to dream and fantasize believed that if he hadn’t died, none of this would be happening.

  Cassie was right about one thing.

  Rachel’s eyes fell on the clock on the stove. “Shi — crap!” She tried not to swear in front of Cassie; she had a beautifully naive theory that her daughter would start modeling her mother’s behavior one of these days. “We’re going to be late!”

  “Yep,” Cassie said mildly. So maybe she was listening? Rachel shook her head. It didn’t matter. It was a big day for both of them: Cassie was starting her senior year at Westfield High School, and Rachel was starting her new professorship at Microsoft/Buzzfeed University. Maybe, she thought as she threw a granola bar and an apple into her briefcase, they should celebrate tonight. Maybe she’d order Thai. It was a splurge, but it was also Cassie’s favorite.

  Preparing for this new job had distracted Rachel from Harlon’s death, and for that she was grateful. But she was also terrified, somewhere deep down inside of her, in a place she couldn’t let Cassie — or anyone — see. As a part-time professor at the local community college in their old neighborhood, Rachel taught a few classics courses each semester, leaving plenty of time to join the parent-teacher association at Cassie’s school and to attend most of her soccer games and math meets. Not that Cassie particularly cared, Rachel remembered; no matter how many times she’d sat in the bleachers to cheer Cassie on, Cassie had been disappointed if Harlon wasn’t there, too.

  But Harlon had been a computer engineer at some of the biggest technology companies in the world and at some of the smallest but most influential; his frequent work travel had been a thorn in their marriage. After his death, she’d discovered that they were in fairly deep financial trouble in spite of his constant work, thanks to some bad investments and Harlon’s expensive technology hobbies. He had done a fantastic job keeping it a secret from her. Sometimes, it made her weep with regret, quietly, when Cassie was asleep. Other times, usually in the harsh light of day, it made her want to throw things. Why hadn’t Harlon prepared her? Why had he been so secretive for so long?

  Rachel had had no choice but to sell their house, pay off their debts and find a smaller (OK, significantly smaller) place in the city, where she could find a better-paying job. Even she had been surprised when MS/BFU contacted her for an interview. The university was a tiny, private one that had a well-deserved reputation for having a student body that descended from the wealthiest of the wealthy. Its students’ parents were founders and CEOs of luxury companies and technology firms, investment bankers and entrepreneurs, and oil and gas tycoons. While no student these days was clamoring for a classics education, their parents — the ones footing the bill — still thought it necessary. How she was supposed to reach kids like that, she had no idea.

  Cassie stood at the front door, tapping her foot. She raised her eyebrows in that bored, testing way when Rachel froze at the sight of her. Rachel couldn’t help it. She was suddenly struck by how grown-up her daughter was, with her height and her attitude, with the way her eyes seemed to have millions of stories to tell. Grown-up, Rachel noticed, but also damaged.

  *

  Outside, two men — it was always two men — waiting in an unmarked black sedan sipped the remnants of their coffee, the loose grinds sticking to the white paper cups in polka-dot patterns that could’ve been read like tea leaves. They’d been parked long enough that the coffee was nearing just that temperature that made you grit your teeth while you choked it down, that made you question why anyone drank coffee at all.

  They’d been there since the sun came up. It was the first day of school for both Rachel and Cassie McKinney, and they weren’t yet sure what their weekday schedules would entail. The top brass had demanded they make an early go of it. So here they were, slumped in well-worn seats.

  Finally, there was movement.

  Man One tapped the shoe of Man Two, who had crossed his long legs so that they imposed on Man One’s space. Both men sat up, but coolly, like they’d done this a million times before.

  They had, of course.

  “Targets spotted,” Man One murmured into his headset. He awaited further instructions. They had only one car, and the big brass would need to direct them on which target to follow.

  The directive, when it finally came a few seconds later, was clear.

  “Roger,” Man One said, nodding curtly. He waited until the targets had reached the end of the block, and then he started the car.

  In the city’s morning bustle, no one noticed.

  10010300101

  Cassie stomped across the scuffed marble floors of Westfield High. Her mom had tried to join her for new student registration in the administration office, the thought of which was so mortifying that Cassie felt she might actually keel over and die. But she’d managed to divert Rachel’s attention to her own first day, on her own need to get going. So now Cassie was alone. She preferred it that way.

  “Excuse me,” she said to the only person behind the large counter in the office.

  A harried woman, juggling a phone on one ear and a tablet in one hand, held up her remaining hand. “Be right with you — take a seat!” she blurted.

  Cassie sat in one of the folding chairs lining the wall and reluctantly grabbed her phone. All the avoiding she’d been doing this summer, including pushing away thoughts of starting a new school her senior year, was staring her in the face. Now that she was actually here, now that this was truly happening, maybe it was time to see what Westfield High had in store for her.

  She scrolled through BLINQ for any mentions of the school. It was all the usual stuff: kids talking about their teachers, about what they were going to wear, about who had broken into the school over the summer and was now expelled. There were a couple of pretty active hashtags, like #HowTheWestfieldWasWon (gossip about its athletes and the people hooking up with the athletes) and #EastOfWestfield (trash talk about the students at Westfield’s rival high school, Huerta High). She had just started to unthread a complicated discussion between dozens of people about the school’s dress code on #WhoWoreItWestfield when a BLINQ notification interrupted her, pinging in her ear.

  Hive Alert! Her notification sounded. #DumpSkylar!

  Cassie read through the hundreds of BLINQs linked to the Hive Alert. A funny little flutter had started in her stomach. She licked her dry lips and glanced up at the office administrator. Had she forgotten her? The multitasking woman who’d told her to wait was still at it, and was now frantically pounding at a laptop. For the first time Cassie noticed that she didn’t have any earbuds in — weird, since most people wore them during their waking hours. Some people even slept in them.

  Her own earbud pinged again. Hive Alert! WHS Courtyard in five minutes. #DumpSkylar!

  “Hon!” The multitasker waved to Cassie. “Thanks for waiting. How can I help?”

  “Hi,” Cassie said, pocketing her phone and approaching the desk. “I’m new. It’s my first day, I mean.”

  “It’s everyone’s first day, darlin’,” the woman said, tapping on her tablet. “L
ast name?”

  “McKinney.”

  “Let’s see … OK, Cassie, welcome. Here comes your schedule, your locker information, a link to the map of the school —” She tapped a few more times and Cassie felt her phone vibrate with the information. “And — oh! Great. You’ve been assigned a buddy. She should be here any moment.”

  “A buddy?” Cassie’s stomach kicked. A buddy was exactly what she didn’t need. “Is that really necessary?”

  The woman paused and peered at Cassie. “Well, do you know where your homeroom is?”

  “No, but I can check,” Cassie started to say.

  The woman shook her head. “Every new student gets a buddy. Now have a fantastic day!” Somewhere in the back office a phone rang, and the woman bustled toward it.

  Cassie slumped. Would anyone notice if she sneaked out without her buddy?

  “Eff your buddy system,” Cassie said aloud as soon as she was safely down the hall. She ducked into a little nook with a water fountain to check out the #DumpSkylar feed for a few minutes before finding her homeroom. After all, no one would miss her.

  It was a little unclear what Skylar had done, but Westfield kids were intense about Hive Justice if their BLINQs were any indication. It was refreshing, Cassie realized, to see that other kids were feeling the same drive to destroy, to tear things down and right the world’s wrongs, that she felt all the damn time. Maybe she’d find the courtyard, redeem herself from yesterday’s weak performance. Was that too much to ask?

  “Cassie!” A wall of blond hair appeared, a hand jutting out from her midsection and grazing dangerously close to Cassie’s. At the threat of unexpected physical contact, Cassie took an automatic step back, hitting her hip on the corner of a drinking fountain. She gasped as the blond creature in front of her came into focus.

  The girl chuckled and dropped her hand. “Not a handshaker, eh? No prob. I’m Sarah Stieglitz, your buddy.”