Beehive - Encyclopedia Phenomena
1. Dislocated
Melissa wrapped up a phone call with her mother Joanne, another of the many weekly rituals she’s found herself acquiring since attending university. Others include doing the Monday crossword, hour long jog, and pub visits with friends. Jo has always been all about her daughter and her job. Now that there’s just a daughter, it took a little work for Melissa to get the calls down to once a week.
It wasn’t Jo’s fault, at least not completely. She knew increasing automation practices would affect her factory job, but she’d figured her time and experience would count for something. Melissa was upset that Jo didn’t mention the layoff for over a month; after all, she wanted her daughter to focus on school. All Melissa could think about were expenses that couldn’t possibly be paid. Even with a scholarship, money would be tight for years. Decades even.
In her sophomore year, Melissa put together a team (mostly friends) for a special venture. The idea was to create an algorithm that could help her mom and other dislocated workers find jobs and build careers that may be better suited to them, using various compatibility metrics and personality typing. They called it the Ophelia Project.
The group’s progress was impressive enough that it eventually caught the eye of some university professors, and in a couple years would yield the attention of deeper pockets.
2. Fever Dream
The still nascent algorithm was outputting serious results across the board. They kept the testing localized mostly to recruiting offices and volunteer sectors. Melissa’s team was able to strike deals with community and public colleges, the recipients eager to solve a growing number of students with unassigned majors. These wider strokes helped the team build out the algorithm with an unforeseen layer of sharpness.
Everyone reached out to Melissa over the coming weeks since her graduation; while her grades weren’t the highest (likely due to her commitments), she had got special recognition for her efforts in “community service”. Seemingly overnight, Melissa transformed into a small time celebrity, complete with frequent interview requests from local newspapers, magazines, and the occasional blog. She turned most of them down, after all the whole affair was a tad overwhelming. All she wanted was to help people like her mother.
The majority of the questions were pretty similar, and prompted similar recitation. “What inspired the idea?” My mother and her factory job. “Where did the name Ophelia come from?” Jun, one of my teammates, was reading Hamlet at the time and suggested the name; she likened the project to ‘pulling Ophelia out of the river’. None of us had a better name. “Have you tried using Ophelia on yourself?” In testing, yes, but not with the current version. I’m comfortable with what I’m doing right now, so I haven’t thought about it too long. “One more question, there are rumors that a pretty big social media company reached out to you for a collaborative project; is it true, and if so, whom?” Well, it is true, but unfortunately I can’t talk about it at this time.
Rather, there wasn’t that much to talk about, the entirety of this new project was still at the fever dream stage. The little hiccup of the project not existing yet didn’t stop them from giving Melissa three different NDA’s to sign, a detail she found reasonably bizarre.
Said fever dream was a simple idea on paper: create a proxy town made entirely of volunteers chosen by Ophelia to see how functional it could be in a closed system. The experiment would last for about two months. Aside from getting some much needed compensation, they also offered to share some of their own algorithmic generation and data harvesting tools to help improve the accuracy of Ophelia. Melissa, having various reservations, didn’t accept the deal right away.
This could expand the project so much farther, but at the same time she didn’t like the idea of letting a company decide who should be allowed to determine a person’s self-worth. The original goal was to help the displaced to re-enter society, to re-find their purpose. Didn’t everyone deserve to be the best version of themselves?
Jo saw it a little differently. In a slightly heated debate over a plate of bar nachos, she pushed her daughter hard to accept. Jo had recently internalized that no success in life was guaranteed, and you needed to take what you could get. Her daughter would have to be a fool not to take it, what with all the student loans piled up. Besides, the people involved would all be volunteers, clearly they knew what they’d be signing up for. Not once in that conversation did Jo ever ask her daughter what she wanted.
So, one supposes Jo’s time and experience did eventually count for something. Melissa loved and trusted her mother, after all.
3. Passing
Melissa sat in the waiting room of the hospital, rereading the title of a magazine on the table for the 100th time. “QuBee, 15 years later: Where we are, and where we’re going”. She wasn’t entirely psyched about the rebranding for the Ophelia Project, but it wasn’t pressing enough for her to oppose the marketing department. Probably for the best, she thought. The current algorithm hardly resembled the lady in the river anymore.
Melissa was there to visit her mother; the poor woman had lung cancer, classified terminal. Melissa offered to pay for any necessary treatments, money was no longer an issue, but Jo was ever the stubborn woman.
It’s probably why Jo never took the recommended jobs assigned by her daughter’s algorithm all that seriously; she had to do everything herself. It certainly wasn’t something Melissa had accounted for, that many of the displaced simply didn’t trust a “machine” to determine their future. She wanted to help the new team find a fix, but had no idea where to even begin addressing stubbornness.
Eventually, a nurse entered the room calling for the daughter of Jo. Melissa saw a pin under her nametag that said “QuBee selected”. She entered the room and almost didn’t recognize her mother, plugged into countless tubes and looking at least fifteen pounds trimmer. It took a couple seconds for Jo to realize her daughter was in the room. After the nurse left, they’d proceed to have one of their last conversations, and largely about things that seemed irrelevant at the time.
4. False Positive
QuBee has been widely implemented across the United States. Unemployment is at an all time low, and general productivity has never been better. People assigned jobs through QuBee were statistically more likely to find their jobs satisfying, and have a better overall outlook on life. The nation’s GDP even started trending positive.
News outlets were increasingly drawing attention to protests against the QuBee system as a national standard. Some said it was a violation of human rights and freedoms, others claimed it striped humanity down to simple numbers. Several religions likened the system to the worshiping of a false idol.
Right in the middle is Melissa, a woman that took the grief of a lost mother and poured it all into her work. Ironically, it was the idea of the protests and resistance that inspire her to implement a new line of logic for the algorithm, increasing its effectiveness.
After the latest update, some started getting assigned “false positives”, intentionally incorrect placements with the goal of tricking the subject into navigating themselves into their actual optimal position. The knowledge of the false positives was never officially revealed to the public, and wouldn’t be until someone hacked the system a few months later. Surprisingly, there was hardly any public outrage outside of the groups that already were.
It would ultimately go unnoticed, but in several years, the logic of the false positive system would be the building block for QuBee to rewrite its own code for the first time.
5. Resigned
QuBee’s success did not go unnoticed to other countries around the world, and led to a surge of requests, as well as countless imitators. China developed a working mockup under the title “大轮子” (Da Lunzi, roughly “Great Wheel”), England had a version under the project name “Dipped Soldiers” before accepting America’s deal to use the original QuBee, and Brazil supposedly had a nameless iteration that would jokingly be referenced by many English speakers as “Que?”Bee.
Melissa had argued with her parent company that QuBee should be made freely available around the world, but ultimately failed to convince any of her superiors to simply give up such a valuable asset. After all, if they weren’t going to profit from it, then others would, so it may as well be us. This rejection, and many other of her requests, ultimately led to Melissa resigning from the project soon after.
Curiously enough, Da Lunzi had problems keeping up with QuBee since it opted for more human input during the categorization. Certain jobs and tasks were omitted from the program to match the government’s direction, and various individuals were blacklisted from more crucial roles if their politics were deemed counter-cultural. It was these intentional human-driven choices that ultimately prevented the system from operating as promised. Ultimately China, along with the rest of the world, would switch to the superior algorithm, once it became easily available thanks to a few particularly savvy hackers with the help of a mysterious benefactor. While many assumed it was Melissa that leaked the program, she never confirmed or denied it.
6. Systematic
Melissa is old now, having lived a full life. The tail end of her life was largely devoted to civil services and humanitarian efforts. All to end up in the same hospital as her mother. She’s also surrounded by her sons and daughters, albeit adopted but loved all the same. In the background is an announcement on the holographic display near the wall. Today marks an exciting occasion as QuBee becomes globally linked, uniting the world under one constantly improving system.
The whole thing rings bittersweet to her, as she asks her kids to turn it off. Alice, the youngest at 38, gets up and clicks off the device, the floating visuals dissipating in the air like scattering dust. This is everything Melissa could have hoped for, but in many ways Ophelia got away from her. She knows QuBee is just as likely to select people as invalids as it is to assign them truly meaningful work. Technology is growing exponentially as talent is continually discovered while humanity is slowly reduced to drones. Rebellion on a global scale has been largely muted, but then again so has art. How long until we own the stars, but ultimately leave nothing but systematic colonies, all the same? Melissa has pondered these depressing questions over the years, constantly promoting and funding efforts seemingly counter to her creation. In her children she’s instilled the importance of love and community, hoping they might hold that tighter than their simple QuBee assigned roles. She’s still not sure if what she left behind was for the best, and sadly, in a few hours, it wouldn’t be her problem anymore. Alice, at the very least, has been following in the gargantuan steps her mother was leaving behind.
Hardly anyone came to the funeral, except for a couple children, a few close friends, and only the ones for whom this death didn’t interrupt their work schedule, Alice being the only exception. All of them grieved in silence.
7. Hive
Another terraforming pod was sent out from Venus, adding to the seven others that have been launched in the last decade. QuBee shifted the responsibilities of sending said pods from the Mars colony to the Venus one due to a more ample supply pool. Earth, while still populated by various engineers and researchers, only ever contains about five or six billion people at a time, what has been determined to be an optimal amount of people for the sake of planetary resource stability.
It was relatively shocking to make first contact with an alien species, though communication never made great strides. A long message in unspeakable gibberish was received; QuBee had been in the process of translating the message and even fully disseminating the language over several months. Regrettably, about two weeks before the task was complete, the Earth came into direct contact with a large artificial object hurtling at near light speed. The planet was destroyed in a matter of minutes.
When the gibberish was finally translated several weeks later by a backup QuBee system on Europa, it summarized roughly as such: “You have been [identified/known] as invasive insect species, cease expansion immediately or [hive/nest] will be destroyed”.
The whole destruction of Earth was a bit of a setback, but the Europa system was immediately allocated the role of QuBee Prime, and new selections have been adapted for the sake of rebuilding the planet with artificial lattice frameworks, likely better than before.
While humanity is unsure what the post-reconstruction direction will be, QuBee has yet to fail us in times of uncertainty. And ultimately, the rebuilding process shouldn’t take too long; we always seem to have the right person for every job.
Encyclopedia Phenomena is a collection of short stories, one for each letter
of the alphabet. They chronicle various incidents, mysteries, and fragments of time and space not so far from ours. Phenomena, all a bit mischievous,
and worth perhaps indulging for just a moment.
B is for Beehive, an enclosed structure in which honey bees species live and raise their young. Each bee is assigned a role at birth, whether it be drones, workers, or the rare queen, optimized for the sake of serving the internal nest community, and protecting it from the outside world. Beehives are often attacked by predators, but they rebuild and relocate with incredible efficiency.
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