Susan herself didn’t know the phrase, but others did, and they shared it. Group mind: a collective consciousness, the aggregate will of countless people, each one still separate, each a nexus, an individual, but each also linked, connected, networked. Unlike a hive with expendable drones, those who were joined now composed a vast mosaic, every stone precious, each member cherished, no one ignored or discarded or forgotten.
The world continued to turn. Dawn broke over Ottawa, Ontario; over Rochester, New York; over Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; over Atlanta, Georgia. The squares were subdividing so quickly they seemed to flicker.
She thought again about the motorways and their myriad drivers. Those individuals spurring their cars to action were…a term she’d learned from Singh’s memories: excitatory inputs. Those that counseled inaction were inhibitory inputs. And, in a true democracy, greater than what Washington or any other place had ever seen or could hope to aspire to, the excitatory and inhibitory inputs were summed, and the whole—the collective, the gestalt—acted, or not, depending on the result.
Sudbury, Ontario, saw first light, as did Saginaw, Michigan; Indianapolis, Indiana; and Memphis, Tennessee. Millions of additional voices joined the choir.
But surely, Susan and countless others thought, a species could not operate that way. Individual will was necessary! Individual will was what made life worth living!
It was individual will that let someone try to assassinate me.
It was individual will that let someone abuse me.
It was individual will that let someone kill my child.
It was individual will that let someone set off a bomb in my city.
The sun rose over Green Bay, Wisconsin; Columbia, Missouri; and Dallas, Texas. Daylight was spreading across the continent. Tens of millions were now interconnected. And with each passing second, more who weren’t yet connected turned to face east, face the dawn, face the new day, and they recalled a dozen, a hundred, a thousand similar mornings as the Earth spun on.
On any given day, about 150,000 people die, almost all peacefully from natural causes. When Josh Latimer had been shot, only Janis Falconi had been linked to him. But behind each person dying now stood millions of others, all connected to him or her. As lives slipped away, the gestalt strained to hold on to the expiring individuals: first this woman; then this man; then, tragically, this child. With the attention brought by millions, with the scrutiny of the legions, each demise was examined in detail and seen for what it was: the piecemeal dissolution of self. It didn’t depart all at once, it didn’t transfer from here to there, it didn’t go anywhere. Rather, it decayed, crumbled, disintegrated, and ultimately vanished.
And so, reluctantly, sadly, the majority began to accept what the minority had always known. The dead hadn’t passed on; they were gone.
But, at least now, they would never, ever be forgotten.
Chapter 51
Pteranodon—the E-4 Advanced Airborne Command Post—continued its westward flight through the darkness, the black waters of the Pacific far below.
Susan Dawson—the physical body of the Secret Service agent—was still in President Jerrison’s office at Camp David. She had previously doubled over in pain but now fought to dismiss it from her mind.
Alyssa Snow—again, the body called by that name—was attending to the form called Seth Jerrison, who also had been experiencing great pain.
Susan felt herself simultaneously inside and outside her body, and what Singh knew about observer and field memories came to her: sometimes you remembered things as your eyes had seen them, and sometimes you saw yourself in your memories, as if observing from a distance. But this was both simultaneously—both an in-body and an out-of-body experience. She looked at Dr. Snow—and looked at herself looking at Dr. Snow—and saw in Alyssa’s eyes that she must be experiencing the same duality.
The president’s face was a battleground, with grimaces coming into existence and then being suppressed. Susan watched for a moment in concerned fascination, but then saw a preternatural calm come over Prospector’s face, as if he was now drawing strength from all the linked minds. “My God,” he said. “It’s wonderful.”
Perhaps fifty million people were linked together now—but there were still seven billion who weren’t. The daybreak line would continue to sweep across Canada, the US, and Mexico, but it would be four hours until New Zealand—the first non–North American landmass of any size—saw the dawn, at about the same time that Ketchikan, Alaska, did. If it really was going to take a full day for the effect to circle the globe, covering fifteen degrees every hour, then the United States would be fully absorbed long before Russia or China or North Korea.
“We’re not safe,” Susan said. “If those who aren’t linked decide that we’re an abomination, they could nuke us. We have to maintain the appearance of normalcy until tomorrow morning—until the transition is complete.”
“But how?” asked Jerrison. “Everyone would have to act in concert to maintain the illusion, and…oh.”
Susan nodded. “Exactly. We’re linked; we’re one.”
“E pluribus unum,” said Jerrison, his voice full of awe. He looked at Singh, then back at Susan. “Still, it can’t be that everyone wants this. Why’s it happening?”
“It’s like my kirpan,” Singh said. “An instrument of ahimsa—of nonviolence; a way to prevent violence from being done to the defenseless when all other methods have failed.”
Susan looked at him, and he went on. “In the ancient past, a crazed human could only kill one other person at a time. Then we developed the ability to kill small groups, and then larger groups, and still larger groups, and so on, until now a person can take out a major portion of a city, or”—and Singh glanced at Jerrison—“even a whole country, and soon after that, the whole wide world.”
“And so this is happening?” Susan said. “We’re linking together as a survival strategy?”
“I think so,” said Singh. “Once again, the needs of the many will outweigh the needs of the few; the human race in aggregate will do the things that are best for the human race. The individuals will still exist, in a way, and those that need to do work to support the collective still can: farming and maintaining the infrastructure of civilization, but—do you feel it? Any of you?”
Darryl Hudkins spoke up. “I do,” he said, and then, “We do.”
Singh looked at him and nodded. “It’s gone, isn’t it? Racism, prejudice. Gone. Hatred, abuse. Gone. They were never the majority state of the human race—or, at least, hadn’t been for decades and maybe longer—and they’re being diluted away into nothingness as the gestalt grows.”
Susan looked out the window. The sun wasn’t directly visible anymore, but the trees were still casting long shadows. It had been perhaps two hours since daybreak, meaning it would presumably take another twenty-two hours for the process to finish. She was worried that someone here who had ties to people in Russia or China or another nation with nuclear weapons would alert them, urging them to stop the expansion in the only way they could.