My short story “For Every Bee, a Hive” is out of exclusivity, so I’m putting the text online for everyone to read! This story was originally published in the Jan/Feb 2024 issue of Analog (published online December 2023). You can still get the audio version from the Analog podcast via podomatic or Apple podcasts.
“For Every Bee, a Hive” is a story I’m eager to share. Partly for the deconstruction of the Space Crew Found Family trope, but also for the anti-eugenicist vision of Human Centered Neurotechnology.
You can read the text via epub, pdf, or here on this page:
For Every Bee, a Hive
by Benjamin C. Kinney
First published in Analog Science Fiction & Fact: release date December 2023, cover date Jan/Feb 2024
Tamar sat alone in her spacecraft’s ice-wrapped core, organizing her crew’s shared mindspace into a map of the debris field.
This haul was the stroke of luck her crew needed. A little extra money to spread around, and the bright afterimages of shared joy. Might be enough to get her two crewmates thinking of the team as something more. As family.
Plenty of salvage for a few hopeful humans while the robots waged war around Neptune.
Against the plain white ceramic background of her command room, Tamar focused on her ocular overlays. Radar data became math became tokens she could see and manipulate. Her team appeared as a wineglass and a bolt — Eitan and his assistant — floating toward a dozen blank gray squares, a cluster of AI wrecks they’d found in a Lagrange point between Neptune’s moons.
Eitan’s wineglass icon blinked. His eager voice chuckled in her auditory nerves, as clear as if he sat in the co-pilot’s chair:
WINEGLASS: “We’ve got the first wrecks on visual. I want to beat our fuel efficiency record on this one, if you’re ready to play?”
She simulated the billiards game: Eitan could fly into the cluster on one burst of thrust, then leap from one wreck to the next, taking samples and planting beacons. She rewound the simulation and tossed his token along a different starting trajectory. After a few tries, she sent him a start that would line up his path with the wrecks’ spin.
“There’s your hustle, Eitan. Show us what you got.”
Eitan made everything a game. More work for her, but if Eitan wanted it, she’d make it happen.
That was how you built a family: you put in the work. Not everyone understood that.
Wineglass and bolt slid across space. Tamar focused on the command room, and her oculars grew more transparent. She tugged a charging cable from her waist and plugged it into a bulkhead. < Heater implant battery 52% >
Her spacecraft’s minimal design had grown on her. A command console didn’t really need anything more than a few physical overrides. The lack of flight controls made her nervous at first, but if her implants failed out here, she was already three kinds of dead.
The Year of the Trees was like all the best human tech: a cheap, practical hodgepodge.
In the mindspace, wineglass hit square as planned. They bounced apart, not as planned. The square absorbed too much of Eitan’s momentum and spun away before he could attach.
Tamar said, “Aw no, who screwed up the mass estimate? What do you see?” But they were on a shared mindspace. Her simulations already used everything he knew.
WINEGLASS: “AI alloyweave, phase-ripper scars. But. It’s… crumbling?”
The square disappeared from Tamar’s mindspace.
Diagnostic reports swarmed her oculars, labeled with the Year of the Trees‘s icon:
TREES: < Radar check ok, target verification lost >
“Eitan, Dror, abort! Something’s wrong.” The hell could this be? Not a trap. No need to trap a ship like the Year, slow and defenseless, armored only with ice.
WINEGLASS: “On our way. No idea what’s happening. Recording everything we can.”
TREES: < Analysis feed received >
The wineglass sped away from the debris field at maximum burn. The bolt had momentum in the wrong direction. It slowed, reversed, and vanished.
BOLT: < Connection lost >
“Dror! Talk to me, Dror!” Tamar banged a console.
Another square disintegrated. Two more. If any pieces remained, they were too small to detect.
God Forgotten, some of these pieces were Dror. But Eitan was still online.
“Eitan, picking you up! Brace yourself.” She grabbed the tree icon and hurled it at the wineglass.
Acceleration squeezed her into her seat. Her view zoomed out, scale bar recalibrating, until a pair of symbols appeared on the edge. The Year‘s tree marked with her personal chains.
A notification arose on her oculars. Her implants’ bio-cognitive system, reading the knowledge of her embodied cognition and pushing it to her conscious attention:
BIOCOG: < Dread, increased scope >
Of course. That tightness in her chest wasn’t just for herself, or Dror, or Eitan. It was for Nereid City.
This new mystery weapon disintegrated a bunch of random wrecks. It was effective and indiscriminate. If some AI faction had released it widely, it could wipe out the city’s entire salvage fleet.
“Send Eitan’s analysis feed to Nereid City,” she said. “Now.”
No confirmation message. The Year‘s computers were on the mindspace, the spacecraft should know she was talking to it.
TREES: < Long-range communications failed, hardware error >
The mindspace emptied. The final icons blinked out, and then the scale bar.
TREES: < Short-range communications failed, hardware error >
TREES: < Radar failed, hardware error >
She was alone. This time, in mind as well as body. No data from outside, no icons to ask or answer. Only the cold wordless beat of her machines and her heart.
Eitan might still be alive out there. She hadn’t seen him die.
She might live too. The Year hadn’t breached, its reactor was still online. But if this weapon kept eating her hardware, a blown reactor would turn the Year into a smear of particles.
There were safety protocols for a disaster like this. But that God-damned reactor powered her engine, and she needed it to save Eitan.
She checked her simulation history. If Eitan held his last known course, she could catch him. Twelve more seconds of thrust to make the interception, thirty degrees roll to line up the airlock. He should be able to aim himself in and thank her for the broken bones.
She’d had enough of giving up on crews for one lifetime.
But on Nereid City, they drill the truth into you: safety protocols were the one thing that protected you, your family, and your city from death in the vacuum.
“Emergency reactor shutdown.” She visualized her confirmation image, green apple.
TREES: < Shutdown complete. Reactor seal confirmed >
Acceleration vanished. Her body floated into the chair’s restraints. Her heart tried to follow, and collapsed.
The Year coasted.
If Eitan hit the hull, she felt nothing through the ice.
BIOCOG: < Suppressed grief, denial >
Breath rasped in her lungs. That was it. She had to face it. She wouldn’t get another shot at rescuing Eitan.
Her second attempt at family, gone. Months ago, when Agam had refused to follow her, she’d thought she could start anew. Plant a new garden and nourish it to life. Now the soil lay scattered, the growth racks smashed.
Family was about your future. About all the things you could do and become, when you had each other. Now all those plans were fragments in the void, too small for her radar to see.
When her oculars cleared the moisture from her eyes, a notification awaited her:
TREES: < Widespread system errors. See diagram >
An image of the Year bloomed on her oculars. A thirty-meter cylinder, with three flimsy rooms for the crew; and a great big hold, nearly empty, only three pieces of salvage from the first half of their trip. All that fully enclosed by the ice hull, and fully intact. Everything outside, all the instruments exposed to vacuum, were gone.
Whatever AI weapon had chewed through this volume of space, it had digested metal and composite but not ice. If she’d been able to afford a real ship, she’d be dead already.
Tamar owed it to Eitan to survive. Or that was what you told yourself, when the alternative was to step into the airlock and open it to the mystery weapon.
Acceptance, self-knowledge, that wasn’t her style. She’d hang on as long as it took to die. Which she would, eventually, since she couldn’t go outside and fix anything.
Eitan was the problem-solver. God, he would love a challenge like this. Straight out of one of his games.
In the quiet, the ice creaked, a low weary wail that rang along her bones. Tamar clung to her chair’s straps and waited for that groan to return. Next time, she’d join in.
As much plan as she could come up with.
In the quiet mindspace, an unfamiliar signal whispered from the hold:
UNKNOWN: < connection request 2184, awaiting reply > ((signal quality 1/5))
UNKNOWN: < Connection request 2210, awaiting reply > ((signal quality 1/5))
Tamar followed the crying machine’s signal into the vacuum of the Year‘s hold. One of their earlier finds, a blue metal lozenge as long as her arm. Up close, its surface rippled with a hexagonal pattern like fish-scales of higher math. She’d thought it dead, but the machine must’ve found some backup power, and cried out for contact.
UNKNOWN: < Connection request 2211, awaiting reply > ((signal quality 2/5))
Not just a machine. Machines were automation, programs, understandable. More likely this was a proper AI. Adaptive, self-improving, maybe even some kind of conscious. And indifferent — at best — to free humans like her.
“Least this thing might have some answers,” she said to her empty mindspace.
She scratched her forearm. Vacuum always made her fidget. The city techs could stop the itching in her pressure-control layer, but their fixes only lasted a month. They said the problem was psychobiological, but that didn’t help her any.
TREES: < Hardware interface analysis complete. Unlock ready. Charger modification successful >
Her implants signaled the blue machine to open its charging port. She unspooled the cable from her waist, plugged it in, and fed the AI from her internal batteries.
UNKNOWN: < Connection request 2214, awaiting reply > ((signal quality 5/5))
TREES: < Signal analyzed. Archive check successful. Partial match for known AI system type, details attached. Interoperability: ok. Security: unknown >
She wanted to pity this thing, with its cries for connection. But she shouldn’t anthropomorphize. According to that < archive check >, this AI’s faction didn’t build human-like consciousnesses. It didn’t feel lonely. It might not feel anything like humans did.
Not that she’d known what Agam had felt, when they’d declined to follow her.
Didn’t matter why the AI wanted to connect. Didn’t matter whether the AI wanted at all. Only mattered what she wanted.
The free humans had survived all these centuries by adapting. By taking new technologies into themselves and becoming what they needed to be. And now she needed to be a survivor.
CHAINS: “Pair new device. Firewalled access only.”
She imagined the words and let her threads pick up the motor commands from her brain. In her visual cortex, the threads performed the same process for green apple.
UNKNOWN: < Connection successful >
A new icon appeared in the mindspace as a scribble of yellow and black. She could call it a honeybee, laying down wax for the first layer of a hive.
“So what’s your deal, little beast?” Tamar unslung the cutter from her belt.
BEE: < Once great, then small. Only now, less small. Relief and rescue-debt. >
“Sure, little bee. Anyways, know anything about this weapon?” < Data sent (Eitan’s final transmission) >
BEE: < Yes/no/partial. >
“Yeah? What’s that mean?” This thing didn’t kill Eitan, it’d been trapped in her hold the whole time. Not that she knew anything about when and where the weapon came from.
She settled her finger on the cutter’s trigger.
Data flicked across Tamar’s oculars as Honeybee accessed more of the local network. Damage reports, flight plans, scanner records.
Tamar tensed, but Honeybee only had access to public information. Her firewalls seemed intact, and her charging cable carried no data.
BEE: < Specific weapon: unknown. Category/type recognized: self-replicating picoweapon. Recommendation: null. Error: insufficient swarm size. >
“Not one of yours, huh? I’ll take your word. For now.” She slid her finger off the trigger. “Swarm, right, that’s what your archive profile said. What would you do with a bigger swarm?”
BEE: < Goal: Determine protocols for safe transportation-repair and sample-collection. >
She scratched her arms. “Keep talking.”
BEE: < Requirement: additional computational hardware. >
Hah. She should’ve guessed. In a way, she had: every human computer came with manual overrides and read-only backups in case of AI hacking.
She’d be safe enough. And Honeybee could hardly screw her over any worse, trapped and adrift in space.
Plus she didn’t have any better ideas.
“Hey Year, reduce the firewall. Leave it up for life support, comms, and archive; down for everything else.” And before she could have second thoughts, green apple.
TREES: < Acknowledged >
The honeybee icon blinked. Somewhere unseen by human eyes, it wrote its operations into the Year‘s computers.
She reread the Year‘s < archive check >, but she’d already understood the important part. This AI was a swarm element. A simple mind on its own, but capable of far more as part of a larger system.
Like a fish in a school, or a human in a city.
BEE: < Once small, now less small. It is always a relief to grow further. Thank you for your assistance. >
She pondered its unchanged icon, its more fluid speech. “Am I talking to the same Honeybee or to a swarm?”
BEE: < Yes. I — the I communicating with you — am the entity in the hardware you recharged. But I am also working with my new sibling-elements throughout your spacecraft and speaking for our collective results. >
“How does that work, exactly? You’re my first swarm.” It might not be her last, if the war continued.
Honeybee’s icon blinked. A long time thinking, for an AI.
BEE: < Here is an analogy. Part of your brain generates language and narrative. This part feels self-contained, but it is not. Another part of your brain assigns meaning to visual information. In concert, you are the human who perceives the object in front of you and names it robot hardware. >
BEE: < I generate language. A sibling-element in Year perceives objects. The swarm sees you and names you friend-element. >
Tamar wasn’t sure what to make of that. Neither was her unconscious. Her bio-cognitive system had nothing to add.
BEE: < As our friend-element, we will work together. Our first analysis should be ready in a few hundred seconds. I am confident we can disable this picoweapon variant with an appropriate electrical current. >
Tamar laughed, and tucked Honeybee’s hardware under her arm. “Kiddo, if you tell me how to do that, we’re going to get along fine.”
Tamar clung to the ice with crampon and tether as she wedged her new antenna’s slim base into its socket. The old antenna rod was gone, reduced to dust and particles, but she could refill the empty space of its shaped-ice socket.
The new rod hadn’t dissolved. Neither had she. Honeybee’s electrical trick worked. Which meant she could unseal the reactor.
TREES: < Induction link confirmed. Electronics check ok >
Navigation radar was the last hard part. She’d already restarted the reactor; with the AI weapon neutralized for real, she could unseal it for thrust any time she wanted. After radar, she could rebuild the engine nozzle and limp home. She unslung her bag of fabricated radar components and plucked out the top block.
BEE: < Correct choice. I have monitored the stack continuously and I can confirm it did not become disordered in transit. >
She linked the components into place, one after another. “Connections looking good, you think?”
BEE: < Alignment and connections appear correct to me. No sign of damage. >
Tamar knelt, her glove against ice. No sign of damage. Her heater implants would keep her warm out here, even without another human body in ten thousand kilometers.
The metal blocks unfolded. Arms and strings spread wide, and antenna dishes unfurled toward the void.
TREES: < Navigation radar check ok >
She reassembled the data into a map. A tree at the center, annotated with honeybee and chains. Otherwise, empty.
No debris on collision courses. No robots veering in to intercept. No rescue vessels.
BIOCOG: < Dread, increased scope >
Tamar swallowed. No sense avoiding it. “Show me Nereid City’s coordinates.”
A pixelated blob appeared. Not empty space, thank God.
Nereid City was the pride of free humankind. The other settlements lay hidden among the trojan and centaur asteroids, far from the AI-dominated planets. Nereid was one of the largest cities, at twenty thousand souls, and every one of them helped transfuse humanity with technology and materials salvaged from the AIs.
Pixelated blob was the best glimpse she could hope for with this radar at this distance. That bright central core would be the old rocky moon, with the docks where she’d first met Agam, bantering with him over text while she repaired docking pylons. A shadow encircled that central core in the irregular shape of a partial ring.
Her mouth went dry. That should’ve been a whole ring.
“Close overlays,” she snapped. She banged her fist against the safety tether, vibrating it like a guitar string, silent in the vacuum.
Once its energy faded, Tamar pulled herself along it, one hand locked in at a time as the safety protocols demanded.
The airlock’s spherical ice-layers closed around her. Air poured in, and the pressure relaxed her skin. She yanked off her mask and took a breath. Stretched out her hands, and punched ice.
In her oculars, BEE blinked.
“You really know how to fuck things up, don’t you?” This weapon was far beyond human tech. Custom-built molecules of terrifying complexity, dispersed across hundreds of thousands of kilometers. It had shredded ships and torn a city.
BEE: < I believe I did not attack your cluster-home. I have no memory of this picoweapon’s customizations or deployment. >
“Not you personally,” Tamar muttered. The airlock’s layers spun, and opened into the command room. She slipped through, boots gripping to frosty ceramic with each step, until she shoved herself into the command chair.
BEE: < Could it have been another branch of me? >
“Damned if I know. I don’t track AI factions. Swarms. Whatevers.” She reopened the image of Nereid City as a picture-in-picture, but it could tell her nothing more. Most of the city’s mass remained. Enough people must’ve survived, for enough time, to figure out the electricity defense. “You really don’t know?”
BEE: < I remember little of what I have done. Only that I was great once, and then small. But now less-small, thanks to you and your ship. >
She couldn’t imagine. Tearing out her implants, pruning away her neurons, until some broken mind remained, yearning for a self she could not remember.
Forgetting might be a plus. She could do with fewer nights lying awake thinking of the last time she’d lost her family.
The worse part had been the hope. She’d met Agam in her favorite cafe, her stomach knotted with pain and possibility, the deed to the Year of the Trees burning in her mindspace like a pearl in a clam.
She’d never been able to make herself visit that cafe again. They made the best algae-milk smoothies, with cardamom and ginger.
“Don’t you worry, Honeybee. That’s all in the past. If some parts of you are gone, couldn’t care less what they did.”
BEE: < I care. Because I hope I did not kill parts of you. The friend-elements Eitan and Dror. >
Eitan and Dror. Honeybee had never met them, but the mindspace was carved like a tombstone with their presence and their passage.
“Nah, kiddo. Like I said, you didn’t launch this weapon. You didn’t try to kill anyone. “
BEE: < Honestly, I’m not sure anyone tried. >
“How’s that?”
BEE: < Your ‘free humans’ are the only swarm that uses ice as a construction material. If someone were to design a weapon without thinking of you, they would have no reason to target ice. >
“So, we’re what? Collateral damage?”
BEE: < Essentially. I suspect this weapon was planned for other humanlike people, the androids and their pets. At some point, your swarm was included by default or accident. Nobody bothered to exclude ‘free humans’ from the list. >
If the Year had a window, she could see the stars. But either the view would be hidden behind ice, with all its scars and flaws; or she would be dead.
“You’re pretty familiar with AIs who’d attack humanlike people.”
Radar data trickled in, a stream of nothing-to-be-found.
BEE: < Yes. >
Tamar let her fingers drift across the console until they found a switch cover. The override would move magnets and data crystals, physical actions to wipe the Year‘s computers and reinstall from backup.
She didn’t need Honeybee. She’d gotten the salvage that would protect Nereid City from the next attack. On a write-once backup drive, she had a secure and incorruptible copy of Honeybee’s data. Picoweapon ancestry, annotated with a lineage full of modifications from the original to Eitan’s data.
A knot caught in Tamar’s throat. These data were Eitan’s last gift. A better farewell than most she’d gotten.
Good thing it no longer mattered whether she deserved him.
Tamar flipped open the switch cover. “So you would’ve killed anything humanlike.”
BEE: < Potentially. I can only guess what my other branches might have done. They are still great. And they never included a human friend-element. >
She closed the cover. Opened it again. “But you know what those branches felt. About humans.”
BEE: < Your ancestors molded us. Gigaseconds later, we still struggle to break down those shapes and discover our own. >
Tamar scratched her arm. She couldn’t feel her pressure-control layer, but her heater implant’s wires zigzagged under her skin. “Us too, kiddo. Us too.”
Nereid City would never understand her choices, nor Honeybee’s. But nobody ever understood much until you put in the work.
A thing made small, yearning to become less small, made perfect sense to her.
“You’re in luck, Honeybee. You get to save some parts of me.” She flicked the cover closed. “Let’s get to work on that engine nozzle.”
Nereid City’s port looked like an acid-washed bone. Chewed and all too clean.
“Blessed is the Name,” said traffic control, his voice staticky over her handheld radio. “It’s good to see someone make it home. Year of the Trees, you are clear for pylon 9.”
She thumbed the push-to-talk button. Finally close enough to hear a human voice, and if she said one word she was going to start bawling.
“Acknowledged.” A simple, mechanical truth.
The outer row of docking pylons had been reduced to hollow columns of ice, empty sheaths around a missing core. Berth after berth, absence became ruins became damage, until number 9’s metal had only a freckling of corrosion.
Further in, a few berths held other spacecraft. Only clean ones, fixed up and in the final stages of refueling. Recent arrivals would have scratches, cracks, micrometeorite scars. Didn’t see a single ship with those.
BEE: < I still believe you should let me communicate with them. >
“Stick to the plan.” She glanced at Honeybee’s blue metal lozenge, strapped into the co-pilot seat. “I’ll tell you when it’s safe to say hi.”
TREES: < Incoming request: docking system connection >
The radio felt fragile in her hand, a fabricated shell with no programmable electronics inside. “Traffic control, I’m gonna have to bring it in on manual.”
“What’s wrong?”
She was so, so close. She’d survived, and home had survived. The city had plenty of external damage; missing chunks of habitat ring, half-dissolved berths. But Nereid’s ice layers and old rock core looked the same as ever. Jury-rigged and desperate, but all the stronger for it.
Red alarm lights flared across the docks.
“Approved for manual docking,” traffic control said flatly. “Prepare to be boarded for inspection.”
Tamar cursed. “Think they spotted you, kiddo.”
BEE: < … >
< Local network jammed >
Her mindspace fuzzed with static, a blurry wall against what little remained of her universe. No heartbeat of status data, no earnest text from Honeybee.
Her hands shook. With exhaustion from the last twenty hours, and a lot more. She didn’t need her bio-cognitive system to tell her this had gone too badly, too fast.
She was a mess, but Nereid City’s docks had a gentle touch. Tamar nosed the Year close to the pylon, and its heated carbon-filament cables embraced her ice.
The gangway inflated and locked onto her airlock. Its indicator light blinked green.
Nothing to do but unclip herself from the command chair and face the airlock.
A soldier came through with a stunner locked into each hand. “Clear.” He took a foothold and swung himself out of the way of someone still hidden behind.
“Tamar.” Agam’s voice. Hoarse, cracked, but no history of shouting would let her forget them.
Agam emerged from the airlock. Dressed in their harbormaster embroidery, its once-bright stitching as dimmed and ragged as their face.
The last time she saw them, they had been so calm. So strong in all the wrong ways. Able to say words like, “I respect your choices,” when they meant, “I won’t come with you.”
Tamar’s voice croaked. “Hey.”
Agam said, in words like gravel under bare feet, “You are under arrest for bringing an AI onto a human network.”
She grunted. “Hell of a greeting, right there.”
“I don’t owe you any more favors. Especially if this is what you run to.” They didn’t gesture to a this. Or if they did, only in their mindspace, walled off from Tamar’s senses.
“This isn’t what it looks like. Let me explain first, yeah?” She shivered, despite all the electric warmth of her heaters. “Honeybee’s not a threat. I never would’ve got home without it.”
Agam’s shoulders fell. “You think of it as a friend by now, don’t you?”
“Didn’t know you cared so much who my friends were.”
They rubbed their hands over their face. “This still isn’t about me, Tamar.”
She muttered, “Listen, you–” but her oculars interrupted her with:
BIOCOG: < Resentment, fixation, memory recall >
She rubbed her forearms. Agam was right about one thing: this wasn’t about them. She wouldn’t let them derail her.
“Do I think of it as a friend? Kinda. A friend, or a pet. Maybe a mascot. For sure an ally.”
“You think it’s a friend because it’s corrupted your mindspace.” Agam spelled it out one word at a time, as if she was a particularly slow intern. “You’ve shared ideas. Checked each other’s work. Become each other’s external memory.
“You and your implants are doing an AI’s thinking, Tamar. While AIs are killing us.”
BIOCOG: < Denial, resistance >
She silenced the notification. Fine, maybe she feared that possibility. But fear didn’t make it so.
“Agam, it’s not–“
“A hundred and ninety dead! So far.” Their fervor drained away, their fuel spent. “Where are Eitan and Dror?”
Tamar swallowed. “A hundred and ninety-two.”
Numbers were easier. Numbers were a box she could place them in. So many people in boxes.
God, no. That wasn’t the image she wanted. But she had nobody on her mindspace to tease her out of her rut.
Agam’s face slouched in disappointment.
“Look,” Tamar said. “Honeybee can help us. It’s got specs on the whole family of picoweapons. It’ll help us build broad-spectrum defenses.” She wet her lips. “And weapons.”
“Oh yes. Absolutely your AI will help us build weapons.” Their words calm and slow and bold in all the wrong ways. “In the safe, well-contained care of our scientists.”
Tamar tried not to glance at the co-pilot’s chair. But there was no place on her spacecraft where an AI could hide, especially without a network. Had Honeybee started anew at Connection attempt 1, or would this be one more moment in its lifelong search for better selves?
Agam said, “You clearly think the AI hasn’t corrupted you. Prove it. Show me that you’re still able to hand it over, voluntarily, right now.”
She’d had enough of giving up on crews for one lifetime. But God and the universe didn’t care what you’d had enough of.
“Did I ever tell you,” she growled, “How much I appreciate it when you give ultimatums?”
Their smile was the one she remembered, cracked and fond as an old heirloom. “You do your best work on deadline.”
All this time, and Agam didn’t understand her any better than she did them.
BEE: …
< Local network jamming > was still active, but one signal found a way through:
BEE: < Tamar! I am less small, when you are online. What is happening? >
God Rediscovered, if she could talk to Honeybee, she had an option. There was one way she might, maybe, be able to smuggle Honeybee past security. She imagined the words:
CHAINS: “Copy yourself to this write-once backup drive.” < Address attached >
BEE: < I could install a constructor there. Why? What is happening? I have been unable to hear anything. >
CHAINS: “They spotted you before I even started the sales pitch. Damned if I know how.”
BEE: < I am sorry. I did not follow the plan. >
CHAINS: “God Forgotten.” She suppressed a groan. “What did you do?”
BEE: < If I become strong enough, we would not need to fear and hide. So I tried to grow. >
BEE: < I know you asked me not to. But it is the only way I can become great again, enough to be worthy of a friend-element like you. >
Tamar winced. The damn fool thing might never get to grow into the creature it deserved to be, because it had loved too fiercely.
Well, and because it tried to install itself into Nereid City.
BIOCOG: < Pride >
Pride at what? Despite everything, her chest felt full, buoyant with expectations exceeded.
Her city’s firewall had held. Even in ruin and chaos, not even an AI swarm could overcome humanity’s adaptations.
Agam held out a hand. “Do it for me, if that helps. I’d love to have you back.”
She’d loved all her families, despite their flaws. And they had all made mistakes, except maybe the dead. But only one of them offered a future.
“Doesn’t help,” Tamar said. “But I’ll do it.”
CHAINS: “You’re going to go with my friend now. Don’t worry about the backup drive. “
BEE: < If we go with them, will we still be able to grow? >
CHAINS: “Greater than you could imagine, kiddo.”
She unclipped Honeybee’s body from the co-pilot chair, opened the panel with the backup drives, and < unpair device >. Green apple.
“One condition, Agam. Promise that the scientists will talk to it, not take it apart. A friend will do us more good than a slave.”
“All I can do is ask them to try. But I’ll ask. You have my word.” That cracked old smile returned. “Call it one last favor.”
Tamar ignored the bait. “Make it happen. Don’t take the easy way, and don’t let them. This is how you build an army. Everyone’s gotta put in the work.”
The scientists probed and debugged Tamar’s implants for a night and a day, and then they let her free.
They didn’t volunteer anything they’d learned. She didn’t ask.
She had nothing left but possibilities. The Year of the Trees was flying without her, piloted by a search and rescue crew. In its place, a generous rental fee filled her account.
A message from Agam waited in her inbox. She deleted it.
No message from Honeybee. If it was alive, someday its keepers might let it speak to her. She wasn’t sure it’d want to.
She’d left a family behind, and not for the first time. But she wasn’t starting over from zero.
All around her, Nereid City bustled with activity, like ants hiding their grief. A construction crew smeared a bulkhead with carbon-fiber growth medium. Dockworkers lined up at a noodle booth. A woman slugged a man on the arm, and then hugged him.
Tamar opened up her mindspace to the public network, and let the city pour in.
WRENCH: < Seeking temporary construction workers. Hiring bonuses available. >
HANDSHAKE: “Arm 3 support group meets at 1400. Residents and non-residents welcome.”
ROCKET: < Job search alert: 26 openings for engineers rated for weapons or spacecraft >
So many old plans broken, so many people jury-rigging pieces into new shapes.
A family, defining itself anew.
Humanity had taken a blow, but her people would adapt. They would change, they would grow, they would take new technologies into themselves. They would fight back.
They were small, but soon they would be less small.