I watched his heart burst into flame. It was soon after I found out about the role of Axa’s “gods” in that matter, and I could have sworn I heard the hum of wings flapping at 70 beats a second as it happened. I see little Torry-FFFF3487E’s face again and again in my dreams, and the hum is louder and louder each time.

Sometimes I have these dreams even when I’m awake. I remember when Grendles… or was it that tree in Sedona… broke my spine. Only Hive science was able to save me. I know it wasn’t really Grendles, it was a copy that Tom Anderson made, but still…

I want to flinch whenever I see a goddamn tree. Telling myself how stupid it is doesn’t make it any better.

I remember reading Sorceress One’s reports. Her vivid decriptions of what he did to her, and the places she went to and the things she talked to as a result. I dream about them as well… I’m trying to help her, but I can’t move. 

I remember sweating and training a gun on a winged Angel of the Lord, flaming sword in its hand. In my dreams, I see them pouring into the Desert, and then into the Gates and elsewhere. They trust their swords into Hiver hearts, and those hearts burst into flame. The trust their swords into the Desert, and it all turns to glass.

I remember the zombies in that graveyard even before the Fall of New Orleans, wave after wave, even a half a rotted torso crawling toward me. For every one I shot, two more came. In my dreams, ten more come for every one I shoot, and it gets mixed up with the Fall that came later.

I remember everything I saw during the Fall of New Orleans, how it was only by directing artillery fire at those… things… that I was able to remain sane. But I had to give those people a chance to escape. Now, I have nightmares about what’s going on there in the aftermath, about human torsos being treated like pork belly futures by things not even faintly human.

I remember the nightmare trip to scuttle the Gate device in New Orleans, and the even more nightmarish attempt to recover Bud and Al… and their bodies. And the failure of Hiver science to save them.

And I remember how the cynic in me muttered: “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.”

Oh, Valerie, our dear angel Valerie, how she wailed when she knew Al was dead… But was numb to the deaths of the people she didn’t know. For me, trying to save the pair was repayment for how they tried to save me. How few of my JET colleagues have actually tried to save me from anything? In perhaps an inversion of the saying about one man’s death, I didn’t become sympathetic to most until millions of my people had died.

Submissive One is my only comfort. Willing and eager to couple, even as her belly grows, but able to cope with the Outside without trauma… or, at least, any more trauma than what made her a willing slave. I couldn’t expose a Hiver woman to what I’ve been through just for my own comfort.

I can’t expose any more of my people than absolutely neccessary. They don’t have the experience. They don’t have the fortitude. I have to rotate my staff constantly, especially after December-F3894321 went catatonic after I described the New Celtian situation to her.

Those nightmares are the worst… Just December-F3894321 alone in a cube, staring listlessly. It’s not as chaotic as waves of zombies, but it’s horrifying all the same.

I work so hard to aid humanity, and at the end of the day half the people I work with still don’t believe I’m human.

So, instead, I’m listening to Zombie Girl’s cover of “Riders on the Storm”. I don’t know who the Doors are, but I know who Zombie Girl is.

Perhaps I should back up and explain. When we were in LA, the JET got invited to a “rave”. I found the elaborate mating rituals involved to be… interesting, in a sort of primitive way, but I felt more at home in the “breeder pits” of USD, frankly.

But one thing that fascinated me, ever since I found out about music using “instruments” — rather than one’s voice –  was electronic music, leaving instrumentation behind and crafting pure sounds, direct from the waveform.

Of course, it’s not usually like that. But I asked the “Party Patrol” about electronic music, and instead of explaining, they put a slap-jack on the back of my head (the Technosphere device, not the torture device that General Sykes told me about), and forced all the knowledge about electronic music into my head.

Since then, I’ve found the Hive’s archive of the pre-Event Internet to be very interesting. Once I was able to get an MP3 player to run on one of our advanced machines — it only took a little coding on my part — I’ve been amazed by the wealth of music available to me.

Of course, it’s just another way I’m set apart from my fellow Hivers. Unlike many of my brethren, I can’t sing — I’m not tone deaf, but I might as well be. I don’t hear what I actually sound like, I only hear the correct note in my head. But that’s not what I’m singing.

So, being a computer guy, being able to produce music with a computer fascinates me. A couple of times, I’ve tried to put on some of this music while coupling, but the harder, stranger stuff — where white noise and beeping is made into music, like this track from Zombie Girl now playing, “GO ZOMBIE” –  isn’t a hit. Some of the more melodic “New Wave” synth stuff… Arg. Digression: It’s sort of spooky how these terms come to me after the slap-jack, unbidden, almost without context. I know the New Wave came out of punk, but I don’t know what punk is — I guess it wasn’t as electronic. But as I was saying, some of the more melodic “New Wave” synth stuff seems to work better. I’ve been spending less time with Torry-AE003489, and more time with some of the more extreme strains, because they seem more able to deal with my… strangeness.

I’ve been categorizing these women by the music they’ll tolerate.  Heimer-F3890278 likes the Eurythmics, wrapping me in silk while we couple. Dragon-FF237890 likes Gary Numan, and thinks I’m a fascinating psychological study. Tavi-00003456 likes to get tweaked on Kopi Luwak and finds Kraftwerk hilarious. She says they sound like how she imagines Technomages talking, and won’t let me tell her anything different. Keiser-FFFFECBA forces me to play New Order’s “Blue Monday” for her over and over, spinning her dwarfish body around. She leaves the smell of polymer behind her.

Blue-45D23901, being a Trader, seems to get it more. She seems to like the later Ministry stuff, and Nitzer Ebb reminds her “of the worst elements of the Desert, in a good way, if that makes any sense.” But she’s never actually encountered zombies, so she doesn’t get what I see in Zombie Girl.

The sexualization of… eating humans raw, like in her songs “I Want It” and “Bleeder”. The feminine voice, so soothing, yet the content so disturbing… I imagine this must be what it’s like to lose oneself to Aphophis. Maybe this is what some people view Hivers as, with our open sexuality and “cannibalism”… But it makes me think of fighting to not puke when I caught wind of the zombies in that graveyard in New Orleans, and they way they talked like people but attacked like animals… It reminds me of a member of the Pat strain who I coupled with once, who only would do it in a “pre-processing” room for the Vats, near the corpses.

The longer I’m Outside, the less I think like a Hiver. But I have to push on for as long as possible, so as to spare others what I’ve had to go through. I hear the rotation on the ENY Embassy is rather aggressive… Too many go crazy, catatonic even, dealing with the sort of prejudice we get in the Empire. Every time I go home, I’m reminded how I don’t exactly fit in anymore, how I’ve increasingly found myself finding stranger and stranger women to couple with, because I confuse the average Worker woman too much. But I’m even more awkward Outside, no matter how much I learn it seems I’m a lifetime behind, and the myriad cultures and mores are worse than trying to untangle a Syzygy’s pheromones.

Damned if I do, damned if I don’t, or so The Alan Parsons Project tells me. Sing along with Zombie Girl: “We’re gonna getcha, we’re gonna getcha…”

I think I need to find Blue-45D23901. I’m not going to be able to go to sleep like this; I need some coupling as a distraction. I know Dragon-FF237890 is awake, but I’m not sure I can deal with the unhinged way she laughs during orgasm right now.  Blue-45D23901 understands what it’s like, if only in the Desert.

The Three Queens

1. Humanity must live, and live forever.
2. What must be done ought be done cleanly.
3. Humans must be protected, particularly from themselves.

I knew we had a snapshot of the pre-Event Internet, but that most of the more “useless” stuff had been archived, and wasn’t easily available on HiveNet.

So, I talked to some of my fellow computer techs, from before I was a Trader and just a simple code monkey, and they eventually pointed me to a little-used RAIN (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Nanomemory) cluster, about 30 years out of date, running a 50 year old build of nanomachine-compatible Linux, from the Moth branch that was popular back then.

There I found the file, crap.tar.gz, which contained a lot of what I was looking for, particularly certain old Wikipedia entries.

But what had me in awe was the username on the file: einstein00000001

Yup. Einstein One, the first-ever Scientist born in the Hive. I was in awe. That file was about three hundred years old… and it had been copied, dutifully, from server to server, along with his account.

I got a second surprise when I found some of the files in the archive were originally owned — and archived — by chen00000001, aka Chen One, the Founder geneticist, who, while not quite a Scientist, worked closely with Einstein One on the early Hive genetics program, including naming the earliest domesticated strains of humanity. In fact, she was the first woman to hear Einstein One speak, while he was still but a baby.

So few of us, except certain Scientists, particularly sociologists, study even our own past. I bet half the Hivers I passed in the corridors today wouldn’t even know who those two people were.

It’s also kinda sad to see the notes from these great people about why none of this stuff was needed but nonetheless there was “no harm in archiving it”. Their vision carried us for three hundred years, but they never expected it would turn out that quantum reality is a lot stranger than we expected.

Not exactly correct, but I should have known better than to try and limit Magenta-F3459107’s creativity. I’ll see if I can find a black hat when I visit the Empire of New York to buy a second gun. I wouldn’t want to disappoint that nice gentleman who threatened me at Lincoln County.

Wow, I have more hair than I realized. It comes from spending too much time with Outsiders. I keep forgetting to use the foam. This explains why I keep getting mistaken for a Scientist — too much hair is something the Marx strain is known for, if I recall correctly.

That was another thing I liked about Andrea. She kept her hair short, tho still pretty long by Hiver standards.

In any case, Watson-FF2389E9 tells me the case of DG6 is ready for the PHMW deployment. I hope we won’t have to be cleaning out too many wounds with it. He asked me if I wanted any DF2P, and I said no. No matter how sanitary it actually is, I didn’t think the Outsider doctors would be comfortable with a disinfectant activated by saliva.

On the way back from seeing Watson-FF2389E9 a couple of women from the Mikee strain grabbed me for coupling. I really didn’t have the time, but they… persuaded me. It’s very difficult to resist two determined women, especially if one of them is willing to hold you down.

She could have been a Hiver herself, with her brown skin and encephalitic folds. She was the only Outsider who was willing to couple with me more than once, and didn’t mind when I took our son to live in the Hive. She had her hands full with her other children.

She was on my old Trader route, before I got appointed Ambassador. Now I hardly ever get to see her. Mikee-AAAA9993 is covering the route now. I hope he’s coupled with her a few times. She seemed to appreciate it a lot; the men of her survivor community seemed to lose interest in her as she got older.

I don’t understand that. Once someone is past their fully reproductive period, maybe. But there’s something unusually exciting about a woman with a proven history of fertility. She always smelled so glad to see me. I know Outsiders don’t have the nose I do, but surely they could smell something.

That’s the thing that’s missing from Rosie. She doesn’t smell fertile… Though there’s an odd note there. Her past has been… unusual. I can’t put my finger on it.

I coupled with Torry-AE003489 again today. There’s just something about the way her breasts swing during coupling that I find soothing.

She always asks the same question: “Why don’t they want our help?”

And I always have the same answer: “I don’t know.”

I had to come up with something selfish to satisfy Joe Kemo as to why I was supporting him. Isn’t it enough that I want to see LA’s people fed?

Torry-AE003489 had to go on duty at the diary so I ended up coupling with a member of the Heimer strain I met in the corridor outside my dorm. I’d never been with one of her strain… it was unusual. She kept wrapping me in silk.

She asked me what an Ambassador was. I almost gave her the same answer as I gave Torry-AE003489: “I don’t know.”

But I played it straight. She’d never met anyone who’d been Outside, not even one of the Traders. So I explained.

She went patronizing rather quick, clicking in an odd way.

I tried to grin and bear it. It happens so often. My brethren don’t understand why I’d want to go outside. They treat me like I’m crazy for going.

Sometimes I feel crazy. Shrugging into the garments, wonderfully bright though they are. Smelling their confusion and hate and pity… But worse is smelling the pity from my brethren, when they think I’m crazy.

The Heimer woman stank of pity, so I excused myself even before I learned her full designation.

All my dormmates are Traders, or people who support Traders. They understand. Blue-45D23901 could tell I was down, so we coupled until she fell asleep. I could smell some pity on her as well, but it was more kindly meant.

I think I’m going to turn in myself, I’m tired and I’m babbling…

I must say, that while I find Outsiders — and their food — to be very invigorating, it’s good to be back among sane people again.

More later.