Dawn of the Hives

By Rebecca Troup

Human civilization has proven its ability to terrorize, its weaknesses and its ineffectiveness throughout history. The planet is in peril. Simply stated, things cannot go on as such, or they could not have. A group of elites have secretly come together and created compounds called Hives, which have proven effective in alleviating several problems, but at what price? Only Eleven Sectors remain part of the free world while the rest of civilization lives in Hives, or horrors of horrors, as the Freers, or an army of rebels, claim. The destiny of mankind hangs in the balance of a number of threats not only from the Hives, but dangers from advanced alien civilizations. Who will win? Will humanity’s soul be triumphant or has the time of the human race passed?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jan 3, 2013
• ISBN: 9781300594314

Book preview

Dawn of the Hives

Dawn of the Hives

Rebecca Troup

©2012 Kaela Creighton

ISBN:978-1-300-59431-4

Cover Art By Hazen Wardle

Chapter 1

53

Where I grew up was far from Beverly Hills. There were no palm trees, no swimming pools, no ocean and no trees. There was desert, blank and red and orange and tan. There were yucca plants and dunes and rocks, lots and lots of rocks.  The ground reminded me of what I was.  I was nothing, dirt, a maggot.  I was number 53 and that was all, a lab rat awaiting my turn at the zombification process, bioweapons testing, regular weapons testing or the euthanasia that would follow any imperfection or that would follow simple time. 

It was the luck of the draw sometimes.  Draw luck?  We didn’t draw.

We learned our lessons fast and those of us that survived learned them well.

Let nothing show.  Ad infinitum.

If one did let anything show, the result was dire.

I remember seeing what happened to the first girl who got an emotion sickness, who let her face glisten with tears.   One always did something like this no matter how many examples passed through.  Someone always lost it, gave up, and surrendered to some primal instinct that’d gone haywire.

What can you do to the human mind before it crumbles?  And whose mind can take more?  Is it a question of inner strength or is it a question of something else, internal genetic makeup?

Not only were there the weak.

Some still clung to things like altruism and hope despite the conditions they were under.  These were things that I could never understand.  It must have been some universal part of them.  The only thing that kept me going was fear.

I cared for no one but Fear.  He was a person, alive, though some didn’t know his name well enough.

I, I can’t take it here anymore! the girl with the golden curls had cried loudly and a scout, a bee, had heard her.  We all heard her wailing as she hugged her blanket.

I watched as they carried her off into experimentation then we all got to watch through the glass as she was transformed into something less than human.  If any of us were really human to begin with. Her body curled and twisted as the drugs interacted with her fragile system, and then there she was, a jerking snake on the floor with her mouth fixed open and her eyes focusing on something not there at all.

We are all grateful that we are not her, we said in unison as was programmed.  And we walked down the hall as if nothing had happened.  She was of no importance.  We were of no importance.  And we knew these veracities well. 

One is one and one is all.

One of the roots of emotion sickness was thinking that one mattered in a way that others did not matter.   They told us so, and everything they said was true.  The Earth was round.  The sun is hot and has an atmosphere hotter than its surface.  They could prove their arguments.  They had sense while some of us were senseless maggots, which of course is what they called us maggots.  We were worthless.

Complain. Die.

One of the other examples had been taken in for complaining about the FS or food supply. 

We all have to eat, we echoed in unison as one of the bees commanded us to say.  And the boy was dragged off, and we were all told to rejoice and smile, and we all did as we were told because we always did what we were told.

Our lives were regulated to the tee.  We were controlled.  From the time we got up until the time we went to bed we were busy with studies or remedial labor, maggots were.  People that passed their marks went on.  People that failed became examples.

There were a lot of examples.

45, what is the definition of ameliorate?

To grow in strength, he said wearily.  I learned long ago to always say answers firmly.  When said that way, the mind had a habit of coming up with the correct answer.

Let’s try another one, 45, since you obviously neglected your studies last night.  What is a gnomon?

A rectangle? he questioned.  One was to never question, not even in tone, and they knew his tone like they knew everything else.

SEND HIM TO EXPERIMENTATION AT ONCE! The instructor yelled.

No sooner had the words come out of her mouth did two men wearing red come rushing in for the boy.  They had biohazard symbols on their suits, the signs of fate. 

In unison, we all got up to the glass to watch.  The glass was cold, smooth, and transparent on one end, a shield on the other.  When he looked in mirror, all he saw was himself, his own failure ate away at him.

This boy took a little longer than usual.  First they got out a syringe.  Then they got out a knife.  Then they tied him to the table.  Then they injected him with something long, something to relieve pain so that he wouldn’t squirm.  It certainly wasn’t for his comfort.

NO! he screamed, I’ll do better tomorrow, he pleaded, but it was to no end, for the knife began to cut and the injections continued until he was covered with sores and new growths were sprouting from various parts of his body, crimson in color.

That’s a nice one, the Queen commented, That ought to make the enemy nice and respectful to us.

Get me another maggot, the Queen commanded, The one that overslept this morning.

The girl with long red hair was brought to him, and she was injected with the blood of the boy that lay dead on floor.  They’d tossed his body off the table like a used rag. 

The girl jumped a little.  As soon as the sores appeared, she started to scream.  As soon as the growths started, she wailed.  Then she too died in the most horrific way a person could die.

We are all grateful we are not them, the body of us said in unison.

And we were.

Before I’d mentioned that some people still retain a natural ability for compassion and understanding under such conditions.  They shared their meals.  They sacrificed their lives for each other, claiming them to have made the mistake.  This was something that I could never comprehend.  It was a dark world of kill or be killed.  It was a grim existence, and yet these people wandered around with little fear or care as to their lives or their deaths.  They lived in simple obedience and took great risks for others.  Something in me wished that I could be more like them, heroes, but they made errors and those were the ones that became experiments against the enemy, for they too were part of the enemy.

I was not the enemy.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned the enemy yet.  Saying enemy to us was like saying them in casual conversation, ambiguous but potent.  There was an elusive group that we were fighting against, a group that kept us on our toes, to perfection.  The enemy was not perfect.  The enemy was weak.  The enemy overslept.  The enemy didn’t know what ameliorate meant.  The enemy couldn’t speak other languages.  The enemy was imperfect, pathetic.

Perfection was something that we all reached as maggots, or we were not allowed to fully form and went off to experimentation.  

Oh, there were all sorts of experiments, especially epigenetic ones.  What happens when genes behave in different mannerisms?  Well, there was mad cow disease, prions, but that was too simple for them to use.  No, they had to come up with something better, more deadly to the enemy.

Shaking wasn’t enough.

Bleeding wasn’t enough.

No, it had to be truly horrific for the enemy, and we all knew this truth to be self-evident. 

After all, if it wasn’t them, it’d be us.

Most of the time, they did not tell us what they were doing unless it was a simple dissection.  They knew so much, yet they left us in the dark in so many ways, so many ways that I didn’t recognize.

I was born blind, you know?

I was born with sight, but I couldn’t see but slowly the gauze was lifted from my eyes and I began to see things in color, or I saw them in the hue of my reality, the one that I inhabited, would inhabit for the rest of eternity.

Things were the way they were because they had to be.  I could not change them but I could find my place among them and survive. 

Survival was the crux of the argument.  Since the time we were a young species it was about survival of the fittest.  Australopithecus had to suffer the same burden that I had to, the effort to survive an ever-changing, ever hostile world.

I had a fascination with our early ancestors like Australopithecus and Homo erectus.  We studied them in school along with History of Cycles.  See, in my civilization, there was no history because history was written in illogical mannerisms, they said.  Time cycled instead and it could be easily explained to a child, the different stages of man’s need to survive, how he had to change to live in this environment or that environment.  Why we had to live the way we lived with dark utensils and plain food and cold water for showers.  All of this had to be, and we had to tolerate it to survive the enemy, them.

In English class they taught us that it was man against nature, man against man.

In this world, it was man against man.

Most maggots, save a few that I already mentioned, were fierce fighters against their fellow being.  They were not the enemy, no, nothing could be as bad as the enemy, but they were a threat, a trick, a trap, and oftentimes a route off to experimentation.

The end of life.

89 doesn’t know what sybarite means or any of the others, 76 echoed to us after hours, I know that’ll be on the test tomorrow along with envelopes and singularities.  It was common for others to spread gossip like this.  Some wanted others to come down with emotion sickness—and it often worked.

So many were weak beings.  They came straight from their mother’s side and remained there, like they could, like nothing would happen when something happened every day to us.  We were like diapers to the higher-ups.

Maggots were disposable creations.   I was disposable.

I could have nothing.

Sybarite meant a person who’s devoted to pleasure and luxury.  What meaning did that have to us anyway?  We all knew what luxury meant.  We all knew what things were that the enemy had that made him weak, wanting things of no value like silver and gold pots, like icing and cakes.  Things that distract.  Music.  Yes, yes, we all knew what these things were, though we didn’t know where they were.

A few tried to escape, enemies, and they were promptly brought back for experimentation, thinking themselves wily, willed, wise.

Not.

In our hearts, we developed a negative ardor for these kinds of people, for the kinds that would leave us behind.  How dare them.  They were leaving the mission behind and for what, a birthday cake, a moment of vanity like one of the Hive was more important on any particular day than the others and to get things.  Only the enemy wasted so much time on things of luxury, meaningless items, that terrible word, luxury.  We had a better word: purpose.  We had destiny as a whole.  We didn’t waste time with birthdays or Christmas or things of the Lords.

But some wanted to leave for a birthday apparently. Some wanted that cake, that moment away from death.

What is death but a break from life?  We all die, I thought, but I didn’t want to, not yet.

None of us knew our birthdays, just our levels due to the colors that we wore, and there was no celebration from one color to the next, just a change of duty.

Maggots wore white so that if a single dot of dust collected on them, they could be dragged off as examples.

Many maggots were enemies it turned out, like the other enemies, like them, the ones of luxury, the ones that stole and wasted.

Some maggots were selfish, self-serving, everything against what the Hive stood for.

Some wanted mothers or their mothers back.  Some wanted fathers like in the books we read to understand the prior condition of humanity.  And they tried to escape for birthdays and Christmas and other holidays that existed somewhere someone said, but people say lots of things. 

Most humans lived in compounds by that time.  It was the year 2515.  There were simply too many for there to be free travel, which resulted in high crime.   The structure of the family had changed four hundred years prior.  We were separated at three and raised on these farms without the traditional family.

We knew what that meant as well, family, but for most of us the bees were our family.  They wore yellow uniforms meaning courage with a hexagon.  This symbolized that they knew about the Earth, space and the six components of the compound that kept us in unity:

Duty

Honor

Respect

Discipline

Knowledge

Loyalty

It was well-known that those that do not work do not eat, as well as those that didn’t contribute to the Hive die.  Everyone had to maintain their duty.  Jobs were assigned based off of the aptitude test given to maggots right before they became bees.  It was the duty of the bee to carry out the task of the Hive with honor, respect, discipline, knowledge and absolute loyalty.

Anyone who showed any disregard for loyalty, even a bee, even a Queen was immediately taken away for experimentation. 

I’d only seen one bee taken.  He’d been male.  Maybe you’d call him a man, and he dared to question the order of the day.  He thought, and vainly so, that Physics should be taught before Chemistry in the day and had the nerve to tell a Queen that, a Queen!  Needless to say, they splattered his blood all over the wall with a weapon designed to zoom and behead.

It was quite a fascinating weapon.  It launched itself from a position on the wall.  It looked like a mirror, and then it would slice the head off of its target.   The enemy would certainly dislike that.  The enemy had a quick death that time though.  Some respect was shown bees if they were taken away.  They weren’t subjected to the torture that maggots were, the agonizing moments of biohazards, sometimes hours.

While they never told us what they were doing to a particular person, we learned about all sorts of diseases in our classes.  We learned about e coli, Ebola, HIV.  We learned their effects on our friends.

In the lab, they’d said they’d created something ten times more deadly than Ebola.  Viral hemorrhagic fevers were a favorite.  As we learned, they are caused by groups of RNA viruses such as Filoviridge, Bunyavidiadae, Arenaviridge, Flaviviridge.

RNA was fun for the Queens to play with.

I did not enjoy watching experimentation at that age, but I pretended to.  Sometimes, they gave us ice cream, which slipped down my throat like blood.  In truth, I was terrified.  What if I spilled something on my shirt at lunch?  What if I overslept?  I was a mere maggot.  While I knew the importance of the mission, I also had some sort of drive to survive, instinctive.  I had to be better than the others.  I worked, and I worked, and I worked for perfection.

Altruism was not in my instinctive nature.  Instead, pain was, jealousy was the fire in my heart.  My friend, if you could call a fellow maggot a friend, stole two packets of sugar from the kitchen then asked me to take the heat for it when the packages were discovered in our room.  I would not do it. 

I was rewarded for my honesty, loyalty to the master order and she, well, we never saw her again after the green vile and the Prussian blue skin.

They wanted us to feel this fear.  They nurtured it to its fullest extent.  Maggots were to be afraid of everything.  After all, the first path to knowledge was to fear the Master Hive, the first road to true wisdom.

The Master Hive was the top of the top.  They were the ones that decided the experiments, protected against the enemies while the Queens carried out their orders and gave the orders down to the bees.

No one ever saw the Master Hive.  They were too important, though their rules were perfect, their augury perfect and their knowledge profound.  Their ability to transform anything into anything else showed their extreme talent.

Maggots never saw them.  Bees never saw them.  Queens took orders from them, and that was the hierarchy that we followed.

A maggot’s job was simple: follow the rules and do the artless tasks assigned to him.  Make no mistakes.  As a maggot, I cooked and cleaned for the bees, sometimes carried bodies.  It was imperative that I do my task properly saying, I do what I do, and I do it until it’s done well. 

There were many phrases that we had