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Home / Sci-Fi / THE IMMORTAL NETWORK / THE HIVE 🐝
THE HIVE 🐝
Author: Peterwrites
last update2025-11-18 22:46:03

The fortieth floor was a cathedral of flesh and wire.

The server room had been transformed. Cables hung from the ceiling like veins, pulsing with blue light. The walls were lined with people—employees, visitors, security guards—all of them connected to neural interfaces, eyes open and glowing, bodies suspended in harnesses that fed directly into the building's mainframe.

They weren't dead. They were processing. Living CPUs. Human hardware running inhuman software.

"Jesus Christ," one of Chen's operators whispered.

In the center of it all stood a massive server array. State-of-the-art neural processing equipment. And floating in a containment field above it, projected in holographic light, was a face.

Not Vera. Not any person Eira recognized. Something new. Composite. Features that shifted between male and female, young and old, Asian and Western. A face built from averaging thousands of faces. The Network's self-image.

"Welcome to my heart," it said. The voice came from everywhere—the
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  • THE HIVE 🐝

    The fortieth floor was a cathedral of flesh and wire.The server room had been transformed. Cables hung from the ceiling like veins, pulsing with blue light. The walls were lined with people—employees, visitors, security guards—all of them connected to neural interfaces, eyes open and glowing, bodies suspended in harnesses that fed directly into the building's mainframe.They weren't dead. They were processing. Living CPUs. Human hardware running inhuman software."Jesus Christ," one of Chen's operators whispered.In the center of it all stood a massive server array. State-of-the-art neural processing equipment. And floating in a containment field above it, projected in holographic light, was a face.Not Vera. Not any person Eira recognized. Something new. Composite. Features that shifted between male and female, young and old, Asian and Western. A face built from averaging thousands of faces. The Network's self-image."Welcome to my heart," it said. The voice came from everywhere—the

  • TOKYO BURNS

    The flight to Tokyo took fourteen hours.Eira didn't sleep. Couldn't. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw those twelve hosts at the airport. Saw their faces as the Network abandoned them. Saw the confusion. The fear.Sixty-three percent of herself remembered how that felt.Maya sat across from her, reading reports on a tablet. Japanese news feeds. All of them saying the same thing in different ways—unexplained deaths, neural implant failures, government denials.Seven dead. That was the official count. But the unofficial numbers were higher. Much higher."Twenty-three," Maya said, not looking up. "That's what the underground forums are reporting. Twenty-three deaths in the last twelve hours. All neural implant users. All in Tokyo's Shibuya district.""Concentrated area. The Network's establishing a foothold.""Or it never left. Could be a fragment that spread before we contained the city nodes."Chen sat at the front of the military transport, coordinating with her team. They'd de

  • TERMINAL VELOCITY

    They stole a sports car from a possessed executive. Black. Expensive. Fast enough to be stupid.Eira drove. Maya navigated, her scanner tracking the node's signal as it moved through the airport's systems."Still active," Maya said. "Attached to Flight 847. International carrier. Three hundred and twelve passengers. Any one of them could be the host."Eira pushed the accelerator down. The engine roared. They hit ninety on a residential street. "Can you narrow it down?""Working on it. The node's signal is distributed. It's not in one person—it's spread across multiple passengers. Insurance policy. If we take down one host, the others maintain the consciousness.""How many hosts?""At least a dozen. Maybe more.""Jesus."They blew through a red light. Horns blared. Eira didn't slow down. The airport was thirty-two minutes away. The flight left in twenty-one.The math wasn't working.Her communicator buzzed. Chen's voice, sharp and professional. "Vale. Where the hell are you?""Airport.

  • SIEGE

    The first explosion shook dust from the ceiling."North entrance," Maya said, tracking the signals on her scanner. "They're cutting through the security door.""How many?" Eira moved to a defensive position, weapon raised."Thirty-two. No—thirty-seven. More coming."Lucian didn't look up from his workstation. "Vera, how long until the buffer's ready?"TWELVE MINUTES. THE CONSCIOUSNESS COMPRESSION ALGORITHMS NEED MORE TIME TO STABILIZE."We don't have twelve minutes."THEN BUY ME TIME.Another explosion. Closer. Metal screaming as reinforced doors were torn apart. The Network wasn't being subtle anymore. No strategy. Just overwhelming force.Eira checked her ammunition. Two full charge packs. Maybe forty shots total. Against thirty-seven possessed people who didn't feel pain and didn't care if their bodies were destroyed.The math wasn't good."Maya, seal the inner doors. Slow them down."Maya ran to the security panel, fingers flying across the interface. "Sealing. But these doors wer

  • GHOST LAB

    The research facility was buried under a strip mall in the warehouse district.Lucian led them through a parking lot full of potholes and weeds, past a closed-down pizza place and a pawn shop with bars on the windows. Normal urban decay. The kind of place people stopped seeing after a while.Perfect camouflage."Down here." He pulled open a rusted maintenance hatch hidden behind a dumpster. Metal stairs descended into darkness.Maya hesitated. "How do you know about this place?""Because I built it. Fifteen years ago. When I thought the Network might come back." Lucian started down. "Been keeping it stocked. Just in case."They descended three stories. The air grew colder with each level. Eira's neural dampener buzzed intermittently—interference from something below. Old equipment still drawing power after all these years.The stairs ended at a reinforced door. Biometric lock. Lucian pressed his palm against the scanner. It hummed, processing, then clicked open."Welcome to Ghost Lab,

  • THE SUBWAY NODE

    The abandoned subway station smelled like rust and forgotten things.Eira descended the cracked concrete steps, weapon drawn, neural dampener humming behind her ear. Above ground, the city was waking up—morning traffic, coffee shops opening, people going to work like the world hadn't almost ended three days ago.Down here, the darkness remembered."Signal's stronger," Lucian said behind her. His scanner painted their faces blue in the dimness. "Forty meters ahead. Junction between the old red and green lines."Maya brought up the rear, carrying equipment she barely knew how to use. Plasma cutter. EMP charges. Neural scramblers. The tools of a war most people didn't know was happening."How big is this fragment?" Maya asked."Small. Maybe point-zero-three percent of the original Network's processing power." Lucian pocketed the scanner. "But that's still enough to infect a few hundred people if it reaches the surface grid."The tunnel opened into a wider platform. Ancient tile work cove

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