The Nobody People by Bob Proehl (manga ereader TXT) 📕

suits you could try on and discard, although the Hivebodies calcified over years until they appeared in the Hive as approximations of their owners’ physical selves. Fahima ultimately found her trysts in the Hive insufficient, recipes without food. But they led her to a truth about herself, and they helped her understand something about how the Hive works. It responds to what you want. It’s shaped by desire. If Emmeline wants to be found, she should be findable. If the Hive is fluid and responsive to personal desire, there should be no way to hold someone against her will.

“Is it possible she’s hiding from us?” Fahima asks.

“Us maybe,” says Sarah. “But why would she hide from her father?”

“There’s lots of reasons to hide from your father,” Patrick says. His Hivebody is smaller than his real one. It flickers like a bad television signal.

Bishop materializes next to Patrick. Most people blip into existence in the Hive, but Bishop crafts his Hivebody. It’s shapeless, then expands, as if it’s being birthed through a plastic bag. A puff of smoke becomes a man. A white beard forms on his chin like frost on a window, and two lines trace themselves around his eyes, wire-rimmed National Health glasses. In the Hive, he looks exactly like he does in person, if a decade younger, less careworn.

“What’s this about?” he asks.

“It’s Emmeline Hirsch,” says Kimani. “Someone has her trapped.”

“That’s not possible,” Bishop says.

“A cage,” says Fahima. “Someone built a cage.”

“That’s not the way this place works,” Bishop says. “No one can build here. This place resists permanence. Anything structural would have to be pushed through from the Source.”

“Or pulled through?” Fahima says. Bishop glances at her, and she knows she’s guessed right.

“Can that happen?” asks Patrick.

“It can’t just happen,” Bishop snaps.

Fahima hangs on Bishop’s every word. He knows more about the Hive than he’s told her, but the idea that it exists in a liminal space between the physical world and wherever Resonants draw their abilities from, the Source, is something he’s confirmed. That the Source can physically intrude into the Hive is news to Fahima and will require some reconsideration of certain theories.

Bishop’s Hivebody becomes translucent. It diffuses. He calls this casting, and it’s nearly impossible. Sarah, on a good day, can cast her Hivebody into a sphere about ten feet across. Fahima can barely puff out her cheeks. Even in the psychic space of the Hive, an individual consciousness stays focused at one point. Bishop now exists spread out like a net across the Hive, searching. After a few seconds, he coalesces back into a solid, becoming opaque again.

“It’s like a cancer on the skin of this place,” he says. In his face, Fahima sees the righteous anger of the man who plucked her from the garden of a mental asylum. “Come with me.”

In the all-at-once way travel happens within the Hive, Fahima and the others follow.

—

As they approach the thing, Fahima thinks of the words Bishop used: a cancer on the skin of this place. It’s a mass of black stone, shifting in shape, alternating between presence and absence. Abscess, she thinks. Not a building: a hole. The more she looks at it, the more frequently it changes. It’s a box, then a wound. Its edges are geometric, angles sharp, and then it’s fractal, a Mandelbrotian mess, a biomass of jet-black bubble and tendril.

“This can’t be here,” says Bishop.

“How do we get her out?” Kimani asks.

Fahima can’t stop looking at it. She steps forward, past Bishop, and lays her hand on it.

“Don’t,” says Bishop, too late. The black surface is cold to the touch. Fahima has never had a perception of temperature in the Hive. It’s one of the things lacking from sexual encounters here: no heat. But the abscess sends a numbing chill across her palm and up her arm. The surface seethes and roils under her hand. It doesn’t feel organic, she thinks. But it feels alive.

As she’s tallying these observations, a feeling washes over her, a memory boiled down into its emotional content. Her father dragged away by the feds. Her mother holding her back, shoving Fahima’s confession back into her mouth. Fahima feels angry and ashamed, the outsized emotions of a panicked child. They threaten to pull her down into them, the boundless dark space of them where logic and rationality are easily drowned. A small, ugly piece of the emotional complex expands, blotting out the others. It’s a feeling of relief and escape. It’s the sense she’s gotten away with something. Better him than me, she thinks. What good would he have done the world, the kebab-selling nothing he was? How much good have I done already?

Bishop grabs her wrist and pulls her hand off the surface.

“It wasn’t like that,” she says. “I never felt like that. I never thought that.” Maybe she had that feeling, so inchoate it couldn’t rise to the level of thought, to be seen and named and spoken. She stares at the spot on the surface where her reflection ought to be. It’s nothing but flat black.

“What did you see?” Bishop asks.

“I didn’t see anything,” she says. “I felt something. I felt bad.”

“This shouldn’t be here,” he says.

“Kevin?” Kimani shouts. She’s the only person on staff who calls him by his first name. She points at the crest of the hill behind them. Shapes emerge out of the ground, a dozen, more. They look like fingers on a corpse, black and bloated. In seconds, they become roughly human-shaped, lumbering golems made of the same shifting black substance as the abscess. Like it, they flicker, as if they’re trying to exist in two places at once. They encircle Fahima and her friends, trapping them with their backs to the abscess. They move in slowly, unspeaking.

“Back the fuck off, people,” Fahima says.

“They can’t hurt us here,” says Patrick. “We can’t be hurt here.”

“Ten minutes ago you couldn’t trap anyone here,” Fahima says.

“They’re not people,” says Bishop. “We push into this space from our side.