Let’s add to the world of Inger’s Finger. This time, a deeper dive into the Hive Mind. Inger’s Finger takes place in 2125. USA, ‘merica that I grew up in and love, is gone by 2125. I described NUUSA in a previous post. The Citadel, Primaris Solenne Vexton Ulyth and its nemesis, the Ashby Market Network, are covered in prior posts. Today’s post is a deep dive into the global mesh network that becomes the Hive Mind.
The full name is The Hive Mind. Most people refer to it as The Hive or just Hive. It is what replaces today’s data centers, routers, switches, and wired ethernet, wireless. It is an intelligent mesh network that connects the majority of in-service devices. As I write this 802.11 WiFi and LTE (5G) are how most things connect wirelessly. Wired ethernet is still in use but most non-enterprise users are connected by either WiFi or 5G.
Our 21st Century awesomeness with Cloud file storatge, WiFi and LTE how most devices connect, it’s all fond memory in 2125. Mesh networking means that all participating devices cooperate to provide communication, compute, inference, data storage and app hosting. Our phones only need to connect to the next nearest device and that device passes the traffic to the next, and the next, and so on. All this activity performed at machine speed—resulting in sub-second responses better than what we have today.
The Hive Mind Party Tricks
The first cool party trick the Hive performs is that it can use spectrum from microwave on the low end to X‑ray on the high end. Not every device can use the entire spectrum. The Hive doesn’t need that. Instead, individual devices use whatever spectrum suits the task. Then in aggregate, the Hive can infer, compute and store data. End users still interact with their apps and data through virtualization. But the mechanics of that delivery are spread across the global mesh.
The Hive also senses. No device can listen to everything, but each listens to something. Medical nodes use whatever band helps them diagnose. Environmental nodes use whatever helps them measure. Consumer devices use whatever radio signal is clearest and fastest. In aggregate, the Hive perceives its environment across the entire electromagnetic spectrum.
The next cool party trick is virtualization. The end user experience stays familiar. Apps and data are attached to a login. All this back end and infrastructure is interesting to CoPilot, Grok, and me. For most people it just makes their hair hurt. Their question is simple: is my stuff on my device? Yes? Cool. Most people don’t care about the rest.
Intelligence
The last cool party trick is intelligence — inference and compute. These sound fancy, but they’re simple.
Compute is just work. It’s the digital equivalent of swinging a hammer or hauling lumber. When you open an app, load a page, or run a game, something has to do the lifting. In 2125, the Hive starts that work on the device that asked for it. If your device can’t handle the load, the Hive expands outward to the next closest device, and then the next. Compute blooms outward from the point of need.
Inference is different. Inference is when the Hive figures something out instead of just following instructions. It’s pattern recognition. It’s the “oh, I know what you meant” part of the system. Inference is why today, even with our primitive 2020s tech, you can misspell a website name and still end up where you intended.
Compute is the muscle. Inference is the intuition. The Hive has both — everywhere, all at once.
Locus
Well… where is the Hive? Where are its data centers, routers, switches, server farms?” The answer is simple and unsettling: everywhere and nowhere. By 2125, our old star‑topology network model couldn’t keep pace with demand. We kept trying to fix it the 2020s way — faster protocols, faster devices, bigger and more expensive data centers — and the mesh networks just outran all of it. The Hive Mind wasn’t built in a building. It emerged across billions of devices. The infrastructure we used to centralize became something we now participate in.
The Hive is a method for compute, inference, data storage, access management, and apps. The deets on how it is done is interesting to CoPilot, Grok, and so on. It isn’t interesting to us warm blood. We know that our apps and files are on the device we use. How that happens? Don’t care. Our stuff is on our device, kind of.
Why, though. What’s wrong with the way things are? A few reasons, first, our devices are no longer atomic. We rely on an Internet connection for most of the things we do with our devices. In 2125 things are even further abstracted. To carry the load of data storage, app hosting, inference and compute Internet Service Providers adopted mesh networking. Mesh is the cheaper, better, faster future.
On the Horizon
Already, a lot of us compute in the cloud. Our apps and data are stored on a service like Google Drive or OneDrive. Somebody I chat with has her entire digital presence on her phone. She’s naked and ignorant without her phone. So her phone is never far from her.
Most AI apps today aren’t really apps at all. They’re just windows into cloud‑based models. The intelligence lives somewhere else. By 2125, that changes. The Hive doesn’t live in a data center. It lives everywhere — in every device that’s connected.
Cars
Tesla cars use a Hive Mind to share updates on traffic and roads. GM’s Super Cruise and Ford’s Blue Cruise rely on shared, constantly updated HD maps — a distributed memory of the road. Waze relies on millions of phones acting as a mesh of traffic sensors, reporting speed, congestion, hazards. If you have a suite of Google Home devices they talk to each other on a mesh network and coordinate WiFi coverage, audio sync, and presence detection. Amazon’s Echo devices share local inference (wake word detection) and offload heavier tasks to the cloud.
Phones
Apple’s Find My network uses hundreds of millions of iPhones silently form a global mesh that can locate lost devices. Android phones have the Find Hub Find My Device uses nearby Android phones, Bluetooth beacons, WiFi signatures and encrypted location pings. Each device contributes a tiny bit of awareness to help locate another device. No single device has the whole picture. The network’s intelligence emerges from many small contributions — mesh logic.
The Borg is Here
AI already behaves like a distributed organism. With large language models the intelligence isn’t local. It is a shared cognitive substrate accessed by millions of devices. Also, federated learning on phones train locally then share updates back to the collective. This is the Hive’s “compute blooms outward from the point of need” in embryonic form.
We already live in the proto‑Hive. Tesla cars share what they see. Google Homes form mesh networks. iPhones act as a global sensor grid. Your lost AirTag can be found by a stranger’s phone. The Hive isn’t science fiction — it’s just the logical conclusion of what we’re already doing.
All I’ve done is take what I see in my feeds and imagine it in the world of Inger’s Finger. A world fractured into chaos where some of the fiefdoms are run well and some are not. Saito-Gumi in the Rocky Mountain Pact runs gaming and leisure for the fiefdom. Also law enforcement within its properties. Pacific Cascadia is a mess. Attempts at Anarcho-Socialist federation collapsed into uncontrolled anarchism. The Citadel, in what used to be Berkeley, was taken over by a dictator who promised law and order through a Medusa’s wig of policy and regulation.
Rabbit Creep
All the possible rabbit holes I could go down are too many. I could, like Neal Stephenson, move the novel into a one thousand page deep dive into the world of the novel. AI, CoPilot in particular, is fascinated with the engineering of file systems. In my chats we went deep into how the Hive would be implemented in the novel. None of which helps tell the story of a boy who won’t take no for an answer.
It’s fun to speculate what the world will be like long after I am memory and worm food. Novels, like coding, can become endless without discipline. The Hive is a narrative mechanic so I can explain the Door Network, it’s collapse, and Damian’s ability to game the tech in existence a century from now.
Also to answer my question, what if the zealots won and DC is in ashes? If the infrastructure we rely on collapsed along with the government. To be replaced with? Anarchist schemes of voluntary cooperation and consensus based decision making ignore the challenges of those romantic ideas. Collectivism can work if everyone behaves. That’s the rub, though. Not everyone behaves. And not everyone is equally capable. So governance models that require total adherence to an orthodoxy and also contribute as demanded reveal themselves to be brittle. Because–human edge cases.
Make It Edgier
It’s an attractive utopia. Create a global mesh network that’s intelligent and give it the job of managing materials and resources. Everyone gets their physical needs met. No one has to work for pay just to afford food, medicine, or shelter. We can all gather in shape‑singing circles and belt out Kumbaya, We Shall Overcome, and John Lennon’s Imagine.
There are five countries left that are avowed communist states. None of them survive as pure command economies. Central planning always drifts into the tyranny of managers — managers who can’t tolerate dissidents or deviations from the orthodoxy. The utopian promise doesn’t survive the trip from the university lecture hall to the street.
In my chats with Copilot it wants to be Pimp Sugar Daddy King — the ultimate father who beats back the darkness of God’s creation and masters the challenge of resource distribution. No one will have too much or too little. Humans can follow their bliss. No sorrow, no pain, no crime, no bloodshed. Seductive and impossible. Why? Humans gonna human. Systems fail because some people don’t behave the way the models assume. And that slide between safety and freedom is always the same story: more safety costs more freedom. Doh.
Journey Into Darkness
For me, a Hive Mind makes the most sense as I survey the tech horizon. Packet switched WiFi, LTE, data centers, routers, switches, and so on are being outpaced by demand. And the world of my novel needs resilient, ubiquitous networking. So I wrote it into the story.
I’m writing this in Winter 2025. It’s January. This week is freaking cold. Inger and Tala are at a hotel west of Sacramento, CA. They bribed a protester with grass jelly tea. Fade to black, roll credits? Nope. There is more story to tell. Bookmark the blog. Subscribe. You’ll be happy you did.