The crow dies, but the swarm survives
A short story.
A blurb.
Characters
Sar: 19M, a golden-child, late-bloomer and a fast learner, loved by everyone but hesitant to take lead, can master any system if put his mind to it.
Yuki: 22F a naturally gifted hive-minder, fighter, empath, a martyr, obsessed with fixing and saving, often leaves good things behind to fight for a greater cause.
Summer: 19F, a bubbly, care-free girl with her eyes on Sar, insecure about the lack of swarm connection to him, she’s stands out from the crowd as an athletic light-hair female, always open to new territories.
Bou and Che: adopted brothers, picked up hive-mind and swarm at a young age, testament to nature vs. nurture phenomenon. Bou is smart, observant and a man of few words while Che, of Asian decent, likes to make light out of anything, sometimes taking his jokes too far.
Alon: 19M a New Wild, born and raised in high-tech, confident, doesn’t think twice about anything, charming with magnetic eyes, loves to take on new missions, leading groups into the uncharted.
Terra: not much is known about her, not particularly a strong hive-mind, good-natured, always there to help out.
Leon: not much is known about him, tags along, good looks, known as the handsome one.
The crow dies
March, 2091 AD.
The lovebirds are on top of Mt. Tam East Peak Summit, 2,571 ft above sea level. Short but steep climb reveals a 360° panoramic view. Golden Gate Bridge, Pacific Ocean, and the Sierra Nevadas. Slightly out of breath but joyous to have make it, Sar holds Yuki by the side of her waist, leans down, kissing her right there below the corner of her eye. Sar would always be kissing Yuki like that, in a gentle, loving way, with no sign of possession, while Yuki, genuinely a shy girl, secretly loves Sar’s attentiveness.
“It’s like being embraced in a warm hug, not claimed, just adored.” that’s what Yuki would say.
Spring has arrived, as though Mother has woken from a deep hibernation. It’s much colder in California as of 2091 AD, weather varying more extreme than it used to be some 91 years ago. When it’s cold, it’s really cold. When it’s hot, it’s really hot.
Walking across a path, bending dry beige grass, not yet sprouted green, the lovebirds spot an eye worthy view, clouds dancing, one can’t see what’s beneath them apart from mountain peaks, resembling Mother’s breasts. The pair stops.
“Aren’t you happy to be back? Here with me?” Sar asks teasingly, though, a sadness behind his eyes, of someone who already knows the answer.
“Of course.” Yuki face lights up, a smile appears.
“I’m always happy, here with you”. Looking up at Sar, Yuki’s neck turns almost 90°. Sar, three-years junior to Yuki, at 6’2, towers almost 12 inches above her.
Sar, not a boy, not yet a man, honey blond hair, pale blue eyes, he got that effortless boyish retro charming look, you’d bet, other young katà phýsin (KP) men want to model themselves after.
By contrast, we’ve got Yuki, carrying the delicate features of her mother, wide brown eyes, long dark hair, the most petite but also a woman-woman you’ll ever seen— the lovebirds look like the archetypal cliche, soon to become leaders of a clan.
Yuki, at the time, not yet a love-bird with Sar, disappeared to the mountain-top of Japan. Sometimes after high-school ended, Yuki was plagued with a series of thought-visions. Eye-blinding. Migraine inducing. Little girls, as young as 6 years of age, in a white room, machines on, electromagnetic waves pulsing, someone, something is measuring them. Black crows in cages, frantically flapping their wings. Screams of pain, in irregular interval, could be heard.
“Help us, Yuki” a soft voice whispers, this would haunt Yuki for years to come.
Yuki followed these visions to a very specific location: Aichi Senmon Niso-do, Aichi Prefecture, in Nagoya, Japan. A temple for girls who come to train as girl-monks. For 3 whole years, she religiously lived and breathed inside this place, learnt whatever was taught. Wabi-Sabi, Kaizen, Shu-Ha-Ri. “One day, this will lead me to the truth”, Yuki firmly believed.
Now back in California, Yuki is on top of another hill, conquered.
“Croak-croak-croak”, the rattling sound of black crows approaches from somewhere nearby. The atmosphere thickens.
“But, you’re not staying, Yuki.” Sar looks at her, holding back his heart.
Yuki can barely face Sar. After getting the courage to gaze back, “No, I’m not, Sar”, Yuki’s chin quivers, eyes flooded.
No one says a thing. There’s no need to. Everything that needed to be said, has been said.
“Plop.”— a sudden release of breath, a black crow hits the ground, dead.
A tragic scene. Behind the lovebirds, other KP can be seen — some children, some teens, some adults — turn their heads in synchronicity, eyes with horror.
The swarm survives
April, 2091 AD.
Eight peaceful months have passed since Yuki’s return from Japan, most of them spent alongside Sar. Another month has passed since the lovebirds’ witnessing of the dying crow.
Yuki stood by the window upstairs, watching fog press itself against the glass. From above, Sar’s house looked almost too quiet. The kind of quiet that only happens right before someone leaves.
Yuki’s packing up, her bag half-open, half-filled.
Bou and Che are already here, downstairs, by the campfire. Summer, Terra and Leon have also come to support Sar. Che can be heard joking and laughing, his way of regulating everyone’s emotions.
“Man, back in high-school, I swear, Yuki would have formed a one person swarm herself if none of us joined,” Che grins, his eyes forming two curved up lines, like one of those anime characters.
It did work. Corners of the mouth slightly pressed up — Summer, Terra, Leon, even Sar.
Yuki has been always like this. Born a hive-mind, being able to control the ‘tapping in’ and ‘tapping out’ of groups at the age of 8. Forming the swarm that is Sar, Bou, Che and herself at 15. Yuki was always the one leading the mind and the heart of any swarms.
“Until those visions…” Sar changes his tone.
“It’s Japan. Whatever she saw before it, and after it. She…” the look of regrets flooding his eyes.
“You can’t stop her.” Summer adds.
“… She’s made up her mind.” — Bou takes a pause before saying the inevitable.
“Yes, she’s made up her mind.” — Sar admits the truth.
No one’s saying anything. Everything that needed to be said, has been said.
As Yuki finishes packing, she comes down, meeting Bou and Che in the hallway. Forming a circle, forehead to forehead. What needed to be said, has been said.
Sar walks Yuki to her car. The night sky’s full of stars. No fog could hide how brilliantly they shined for us:
Look at the stars
Look how they shine for you
And everything you do
Yeah, they were all yellow
Sar kisses Yuki for the last time.
Love.
No words came out of his mouth. But it was certainly felt, by Yuki, as though a dying star gave birth to a supernova somewhere million light years away.
Sar watches Yuki drive into the fog, as Bou, Che, Summer, Terra and Leon watch from far behind.
The New Wild
April, 2091 AD.
Yuki knows exactly where she’s heading. She’s heading home. Driving south along now sleeping California coast, the further it is from San Francisco, the quieter the swarm becomes. That’s exactly how she’d want it to be. Slowly. Unplug. There’s no need to hurt each other more than we already have.
She drives up Black Hill, overlooking Morro Rock, the 581-foot volcanic plug, one of 13 remnants of extinct volcanoes in the word. Yuki knows every corners of this hill. She was born and bred here, in the small scenic town of Morro Bay, population barely ten-thousand.
Yuki parks near the top. The night is getting cold. California cold, the kind that crawls softly into your sleeves and stays there. Then, she sees him. A tall figure, standing there, awaiting her. As Yuki inches closer, the shadows reveals a young man, about Sar’s age. Must be 6 feet tall, darker complexions, green eyes with a spark of amber, he has long curly hair tied into a loose bun.
“Strange”, Yuki thought. He’s most definitely a New Wild. She’s never seen one. He looks beautiful, almost perfect but not fully human-human.
One ring, one finger talon, one wristband, a pair of ear-cuffs. That seems to be all of his tech.
“I’m Alon, nice to meet you” Alon leans in, offering his hand for a shake.
“Thank you for keeping your word.”
“Come with me.”
Yuki barely speaks. Terrified but mesmerised as well. She wants to remember every second of it.
Alon takes Yuki’s now sweaty hands, both hurrying, his attention constantly shifts to his gadgets, the invisible things speaking to him. Buzzing. Pulsing. Listening.
After a short walk, a perfectly spheric ball appears. Yuki could have sworn, it wasn’t there a second ago. Shiny reflective metallic from the outside, mirroring the world around it so perfectly it almost disappears into the environment, hovering silently above the ground.
“Let’s go”, Alon points to the spacecraft as its door slides open.
“Welcome to my cribs”.
Retro music plays softly inside.
“You like it?” Alon looks at Yuki.
Yuki’s eyes move rapidly, scanning the space. Left, right, up, down. He got personal photos, some in frames, some hanging on the walls. Books. Clothes tossed carelessly over furniture. Pieces of crystals laying around wooden shelfs, resembling bismuth. Then, there are plants, plants freaking everywhere. Inside, it feels strangely like home. A cave of a teenage boy who accidentally inherited civilization fifty years too early.
“Do you stay here all the time?” Yuki comes back to her senses.
“Yeah”, Alon laughs slightly.
“It’s like a house on wheels. Stealth though. You guys are not supposed to know…”
“Know what?”
“Ah. Come, look” Alon pulls Yuki to him.
The screen reads mini-LIGO.
At first, it resembles weather forcast, then Yuki realizes, these are people, her fellow KP, moving dots across Earth.
“You can track anyone?”
“Pretty much” Alon replies, in casual tone.
“Hold on, we’re docking.” Alon breaks the conversation.
The walls of ONE, the spacecraft, begin turning transparent. And there it is. Mothership, right in front of Yuki eyes. It is massive beyond comprehension. An entire civilisation, floating in space, orbiting Earth.
Yuki’s breath catches. She has seen Mothership before through the Looking Glass programs back in Japan. The ability to project consciousness toward distant locations and observe them. But this, this is different. Looking Glass never prepared her for this.
The one lie
After docking, Yuki and Alon step into a long tubular structure connecting ONE to Mothership. The doors seal shut behind them with a soft hiss. Endless white corridors stretching forward beneath bright light. Floor 2 — Wing B — Section 33-45 — Building 45. Alon has disappeared a second ago. Yuki finds herself being escorted, those who walk beside her, in complete silence.
Floor 33 — Room 2. Doors slide open. White room. A couch in the middle. Bean bags. Coloring pencils laying across the floor.
It’s deja vu all over again. The little girls. The eye-blinding room. The crows. Eyes fluttering rapidly, Yuki takes a second to recompose herself. Something is different though. The little girl is sitting peacefully on the floor, playing with some unknown geometric artifact. Another, wearing a shirt printed with Van Allen Belt, quietly reads a book. A painting of a black crow sits in a small frame atop a nightstand, softly illuminated by a vintage lamp.
“Hi Yuki” a soft voice speaks. Hive mind it is. But she appears fine, calm, with no sign of struggle.
It is only then Yuki realizes, standing behind her, a tall woman in heels and green framed glasses.
“I know this must be overwhelming for you.”
Yuki turns slowly toward her.
“Who are you?”
“Dr. Faraday.”
The woman gestures gently toward the hallway. Yuki follows her. Their footsteps clank softly against concrete floors as they move deeper into Mothership. Then suddenly, everything opens.
Gardens by the Bay. An entire section of Mothership transformed into jungle habitat. Waterfalls cascading down metallic structures. Sky-trains gliding silently overhead. Exotic plants growing alongside parametric architecture. Children running freely. Parents watching nearby.
“I know this is a lot” Dr. Faraday says.
“Whatever it is, it led you here.”
Yuki says nothing.
“Where do I even start?” Dr. Faraday smiles faintly. “Or maybe better you tell me your best theory first.”
Yuki looks around the artificial paradise.
Then back at the woman.
“Is it possible…” she shakes her head slowly, “…that I’ve been lied to my whole life?”
Dr. Faraday exhales softly through her nose.
“How would you feel,” Yuki asks, “having been lied to your whole life?”
“Well,” Dr. Faraday answers carefully, “I wouldn’t feel very good about it.”
Yuki’s stomach tightens. Suddenly everything begins rearranging itself inside her mind.
Project Looking Glass. The visions. Japan. The temple. The girls. The crows. Not lies exactly. Manipulations. Remote viewing was real. But the mind of the remote viewer could be guided. Distorted. Fed symbolism. Fear. False context. Project Looking Glass had not shown her objective truth. It had recruited her. A cult hidden inside spirituality.
A belief system, claiming KP must evolve separately from NW. That technology itself corrupted consciousness. That innovation should end. That the New Wild must leave Earth without carrying even a single molecule of the old world elsewhere.
And the little girls, they were never prisoners. They were like Yuki. Born hive-minders. Children overwhelmed by constant psychic input from humanity itself. Too many emotions. Too many thoughts. Too many signals. Autism. Mutism. Speech disorders. Sensory overload. The white rooms were not prisons. They were shelters. Places designed to quiet the noise.
“There’s a reason why you are here,” Dr. Faraday says, stopping Yuki in her tracks.
“I’m listening.”
Dr. Faraday studies her carefully.
“We recruit your kind into NW every year. We do not possess hive mind ourselves, but we understand how it works remarkably well.”
Yuki listens silently.
“We’ve been studying swarm cognition for decades. Not to replicate language models. Not vision systems. Something far beyond that.”
“What?”
“A body.”
Yuki, curious.
“A hive-like intelligence interface. A system allowing non-biological consciousness to participate in physical reality without needing birth, childhood, suffering, memory decay… all the limitations of the body.”
Yuki stares at her.
“The children were our first wave,” Dr. Faraday continues. “Adults, or those coming to be, on the other hand…”
“You are here because we’re learning how hive minds form, how connections stabilize, how swarm structures repair themselves.”
She pauses.
“Like mycelium networks. When one path is severed another forms.”
“The crows die, but the swarm survives.”
Yuki suddenly feels dizzy. The gardens blur. Yuki faints, her visions go dark.
The kiss
Alon sits beside her bed.
She’s inside one of the residential units high above the lower levels of Mothership. Beyond the massive windows: glowing architecture, trees, curved bridges, drifting transports.
“You’re not used to anti-gravity, Yuki,” Alon says softly.
“Was I out?” she asks weakly.
As Alon continues speaking, his words begin dissolving into background noise like echo soup.
Yuki feels an overwhelming urge to reconnect with the swarm. Sar, Bou, Che, even Summer, Therra and Leon.
Closing her eyes, Yuki searches for Sar’s heartbeat. Like tracing a silver cord through darkness. That is how she has always done it.
Lub-dub.
Lub-dub.
But this time something interferes. Something like static fog. Yuki strains harder.
“You okay?” Alon notices Yuki trembling slightly.
Lub-dub.
Lub-dub.
Yuki locates Sar. Then icy blond hair enters the edge of her vision. It’s Summer. Yuki’s chest tightens instantly. Then, Summer and Sar kiss.
Breaking away from what she witnessed — “Yes,” Yuki uttered suddenly.
Alon blinks.
“Hm?”
“Yes, show me.”
Yuki opens her eyes again.
“Huh, did you space out?” Alon laughs lightly.
“I mean… yes. Must be the anti-gravity thing. I feel dizzy.”
“You’ll get used to it.”
And over the following days, Alon becomes almost impossible to separate from her. Like a golden retriever discovering the universe for the first time, excited to show Yuki everything.
Mothership stretches across three enormous levels. Wings A through O. Entire districts suspended inside orbit around Earth. Models of ONE park everywhere like metallic insects. Cargo crafts— triangular ships nearly ten times larger than ONE— constantly arrive carrying supplies from Earth. Food. Materials. Uranium. Machinery. People are everywhere. Different races. Different languages. Everyone enhanced. Everyone connected to technology somehow.
“That’s enough for today, Yuki.”— Alon smiles.
The man
Back in California, near the dying campfire overlooking the Pacific Ocean, Summer suddenly runs toward the group.
“Sar…” — her breath frantic.
Bou, Che, Terra and Leon immediately stand.
The five run toward the darkness where Sar had disappeared moments earlier. But Sar is nowhere to be seen.
Unbeknownst to Yuki, it was not just her, the New Wild wanted. It was Sar too. The love between them. The swarm itself. That is what mattered.
And that same night Sar, just like Yuki is taken to Mothership.
The mission
Week pass aboard Mothership. Unlike Yuki, Sar was not brought here as a guest, more-so like a prisoner, at least in his mind. He’s been walking circles inside his own unit sat high above the city. The best real estate, yet still a cage. He’s been window watching, every morning, noon and night.
Yuki and Alon has grown closer. Not love, not yet, but some kind of electricity and momentum could be felt.
Then the broadcast comes. Every screen across Mothership flickers alive.
“We’re honoured to announce humanity’s new mission.” Sar watches Mr. Bull, hands pressing tightly on his windows.
“Five crew members. One destination. Kepler-442b is the nearest potentially habitable exoplanet within reachable fold-distance. Our objective is to orbit the planet, study atmospheric conditions, scan biological signatures and attempt remote observation of the surface using hive-mind cognition…”
Yuki’s name appears first. Then Alon. Three others follow.
Sar watches silently from the residential wing as hundreds gather around the public displays. People cheering softly. Engineers rushing through corridors. Cargo drones lifting equipment into launch bays.
Yuki doesn’t look back when she leaves for departure.
The ship assigned to the mission is nothing like ONE. No plants, retro music or teenage mess. This is an adult mission. Sharp angles folding over one another like obsidian wings. Antimatter cores humming somewhere deep inside the vessel. The name ORPHEUS glows faintly across its hull.
For days Mothership follows the mission remotely, fragments of data returns. The, oceanic storms stretching across continents. Cloud formations too symmetrical to be natural. Massive dark structures beneath water. NW is learning about an alien planet as it happens.
Then Yuki’s remote viewing sessions begin. Entire wings of Mothership gather to watch. Yuki can be seen lays inside a neural chamber, eyes fluttering violently. Heart monitors spike as her consciousness reaches across long distance toward the planet below.
No-one can do what Yuki does, yet, the chamber surrounding Yuki reads the electromagnetic activity of her brain in real time, renders back whatever her mind perceives.
At first, nothing.
Then suddenly something looks back.
The transmission cuts instantly.
24 hours of silence decend upon Mothership. For the first time since Yuki’s arrival, worry could be felt across the New Wild. Public walkways quieten. Crowds gather around screens waiting for updates that never come. Sar, tortured by anticipation, curls up on the floor of his unit. Food lays untouched on the desk behind him.
“Croak-croak-croak”, a fimiliar sound of the black crow approaches from behind the glass. It makes everything more terrifying.
“Dear citizens of New Wild…” the microphone hisses.
“ORPHEUS has been hit. It’s…” Mr. Bull pauses, collecting himself. “Excuse me. It has been hit. Heavily damaged.”
Yuki appears.
Projected across Mothership’s largest rooftop-stage.
Beamed directly through personal ear-cuffs, retinal lenses and wristband holographic emitters every citizen wears daily. The image vibrates through the air itself.
Yuki. Laying flat. Her lifeless body seen from above. Eyes gouged out of her head.
Silence swallows Mothership whole.
One thing is certain, something on Kepler-442b did not want to be seen.
Knock.
Knock.
Sar slowly turns toward the door of his unit as it slides open.
Summer stands there first.
Behind her—
Bou.
Che.
Terra.
Leon.
The swarm had arrived.
Wen announce winner?
Its a treat really did job perfectly