I stare dumbly at the illusion in front of me, my brain still too sluggish to fully process what I’m seeing. Is it a hallucination? Maybe I actually took a hit to the head in the church, and the entirety of the last day was just my last delusional moments of consciousness before my final breath slips away.

  I think I want to throw up.

  And yes, I did include this in my calculations on your new deadline, Minerva adds smugly. I figured it might make for a decent enough surprise for your celebration.

  My celebration? If I could glare at her, I would. What exactly is there to celebrate about this situation?! To be clear, I just ran myself ragged, got a concussion from fucking tripping, and then woke up to the fact that I spent the last eight hours lying unconscious in a park while you were reconfiguring my brain so I wouldn’t die or whatever. What is there to celebrate about this?! Not to mention just how pathetic my current condition is. I haven’t even been training for a full day, and I already managed to get two major injuries in one session.

  I know, I know, Minerva says calmly. Yes, the last day has been… a lot for you.

  Hah! Understatement of the century.

  Look, I’m just trying to make the most of our situation here. Yes, tripping and receiving a mild traumatic brain injury and a sprained ankle is highly suboptimal and unsafe. But it also helped your transition along greatly.

  Ah yes. I suppose I must grant you that, it was a highly rewarding boon. Assuming I didn’t die in the process or fall just a little bit harder and fracture my skull.

  Considering the mass of your skull and your height when standing, falling “harder” requires you to stop being short.

  I flip her the middle finger, then realize I’m flipping off empty air, alone in a park, and put my hand back down. Also, how does that even work?

  If you had paid attention in physics you would know that how hard you hit the ground depends on your mass, the acceleration — gravity, in this case — and how high up you start. Assume the mass of your skull is 3 kilograms, gravity is 9.8 meters per second squared, and given that a skull fracture would require…

  Tuning out the rest of Minerva’s rambling, I shift my focus back to the screen in front of me. It still feels surreal. I’m almost hesitant to look directly at it, for fear my eyes will see through the delusion and disperse it, along with the greatest desire of my youth.

  But when I do look, it does not disappear. It doesn’t even flicker.

  [Welcome to the Hive, Rowan.]

  [Please review personal details before proceeding.]

  Name: Rowan Losha

  Age: 16 | Gender: Nonbinary (They/Them)

  Occupation: Student, [Vessel], [???]

  Skills: N/A

  Physical Statistics:

  Strength: N/A

  Dexterity: N/A

  Constitution: N/A

  Mental Statistics:

  Gen. Intelligence: N/A

  [No majors specified.]

  [No minors specified.]

  [Set up skills?]

  [Set up physical statistics?]

  [Set up mental statistics?]

  Okay, one thing at a time. First, my name is correct. Age, correct. Gender, correct. Occupation: Yes, I am a student. I make the executive decision to come back to the weird bracketed second and third items in my occupation list after the rest. Everything else is simple enough, no surprises there. I’ll set up stats and skills later — they’re more a nifty feature than a necessity.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  That leaves me with really only one thing to look at. I already have a good sense of what [Vessel] implies, and I have a growing suspicion that the [???], whatever it means, is related to Minerva as well.

  It takes me a moment to figure out how to prompt the Hive for things — they taught you that in freshman year, and most people already knew how, between talking with family and getting a driver’s license, but I hadn’t exactly expected to ever use the information myself. I have to resist the urge to voice my request out loud. It’s a lot like how I talk wiith Minerva, only less… personal, if that makes sense. There’s no expectation that the display, the Hive, will talk back, not like a headmate. In that way, it feels less like a conversation and more like staring into the void.

  I prompt the Hive to display the details for [Vessel] first.

  [Vessel]

  Occupation

  At the pinnacle of thought lies reason, at the peak of technology rise nations, at the summit of progress sings perfection. Child of the Spear, the wave of change is not mounted by an empty ship. To devote the mind to thought and hand to technology and heart to progress is to make ascension possible. To devote the body to ascension is to be reborn anew, the new, the [Vessel] of change. Carry your standard with pride, O Herald, march on unto the new age, or sacrifice your body to its cause.

  | Integrating Numen: 16%

  | Effects:

  || Classify [Vessel] and Numen as single entity [Rowan Losha]

  || [lvl 1] Physical Statistics [+1 to all] per 2% completed [+8 to all]

  “That is… freaky as hell, if I’m being honest. There’s a lot of information to unpack, and not a lot of brainage to unpack it.” I speak aloud, for no reason in particular.

  Point taken, but brainage isn’t a word.

  “Point still stands.”

  Point still taken.

  “First, I have—”

  Ask away, child, Minerva interrupts me.

  “Okay then. First, not a child! Second: what is “child of the spear” supposed to mean? Third: what wave of change? I thought the wave of change happened decades ago, when Innova perfected the first model of Autopilot. Fou—”

  One question at a time! She snaps, cutting me mid-sentence for the second time, ignoring my indignant stuttering.

  The first question is simple: have you not heard the term, “tip of the spear?”

  “Yes… but I don’t see where that comes in. Maybe because you’re the tip of the spear in technology, the most advanced system ever created, but that doesn’t account for the question itself. How exactly can you be a child of the spear?”

  I get the distinct sense that she is thinking, running calculations. Before she even articulates her response, I can guess what she’s about to say.

  I don’t know. Then, a mental nod adjacent to a nod in the direction of my predictive ability. As we integrate further, you will be able to read me as I read you. It is only natural that you will begin to notice hunches of my thought process increasingly as time goes on. This will be especially accelerated for you given the nature of our deadline.

  Huh. I guess that makes sense — it would be weird, or at least unfair, now that I think about it, if this continued to be a one-way street despite us supposedly becoming one entity. I’m still vexed that neither of us has an answer. I can’t prompt the Hive about it, either, since the title isn’t in brackets; something I do remember from school.

  “Alright, fair enough. Question two, then?” I press on.

  Again, I can only guess at what the wave of change is referring to. The most logical answer, as you already suspect, is that the description is not referring to the same “wave of change” as we generally think of. From the context of our situation, it makes sense that it might be foreshadowing a new wave of change.

  “What doesn’t make sense to me is…” I trail off, uneasy. Something about that doesn’t quite… sit right with me, but I can’t put my finger on it. No, I had it! I had it in my grasp, on my tongue, and then it just… slipped away…

  Something about this feeling is… familiar. Is it familiar? I’m not… sure why it would be…

  Conclusion: neither of us know what the wave of change is. Next? Minerva says flatly. Or are we ready to get to the conspicuously redacted third item?

  “... Whatever I was going to ask, I’ve forgotten already. Guess it wasn’t that important.” I hear an inaudible chuckle of amusement at that.

  “Well, then. Time for the elephant in the room, yeah?” I say.

  I get the feeling that it being redacted indicates we may not get an answer to this issue either, Minerva says.

  “If that’s the case, I guess the elephant will have to stand a while longer.”

  I return to my profile, where there is now also a 3D avatar of me next to my name and age. I guess the Hive must have rendered it while I was talking with Minerva. They’re wearing the same tank top and mid-thigh shorts as I am, a plain and simple black. It’s even detailed the burnished brown roots of my hair — same color as my eyes — where the bright flourescent red has grown out a few inches, and the single lock of that fiery hair I’ve grown out is faintly animated, wafting behind my back in an invisible wind. The avatar doesn’t mirror my motions, their head facing forward and aligned with their body, slightly angled away from me so they’re staring off into space rather than meeting my gaze. I get the sense that I can mentally direct the avatar to move. When I focus on it, it feels like an extra limb.

  Child. Focus.

  “Right, right. Not a child!”

  Well, nothing for it. I look to my occupation list, keying in on the third item. I hesitate, trying to recall any lessons mentioning redacted elements in the Hive; nothing. Even Minerva has at most a best guess as to what it could be. Sensing her growing impatience, I finally probe the Hive.

  [???]

  Occupation

  [Error 384] bad request.

  [Error 335] encrypted message D-504.

  [Unauthorized]

  [Node breach detected. Initiating secu…]

  [Override: Operation Berlin] [Override: live directive recieved]

  [Error 384] bad request.

  Suddenly, I’m staring at my profile again, as if nothing happened. As if the Hive didn’t just crash out on me.

  Rowan. Look.

  I follow her probe of attention to the third line of my profile.

  Name: Rowan Losha

  Age: 16 | Gender: Nonbinary (They/Them)

  Occupation: Student, [Vessel]

  “I’ll take a wild guess. The fact that it’s gone from my status does not mean I can stop worrying about it.”