The Hive by Barry Lyga & Morgan Baden

Author:Barry Lyga & Morgan Baden
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781525303876
Publisher: Kids Can Press
Published: 2019-09-03T00:00:00+00:00

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Rachel and Harlon had differed on how to raise Cassie. Harlon was less concerned with whether Cassie had finished her vegetables than whether she’d figured out the optimal way to chop and cook them. Rachel would assign Cassie chores and talk about responsibility; Harlon would help Cassie dirty every dish in the house while they made inedible cookies (which they ate anyway) and then suggest they just throw them out and buy new ones. “Fail fast and move on!” was his mantra. Cassie was witness to more “discussions” about what was best for her than she cared to remember.

In the hours after the ticker hack, Cassie reveled in the memories, feeling like she was a child again, listening to Mommy and Daddy bicker over how to deal with her. Half of OHM, led by TonyStark, thought Cassie had done a brilliant job proving her worth, while the other half thought her “stunt” to be unnecessarily dangerous, outrageous, immature, aggressive and — what was it Piercings Guy had called it? Ah, yes, Cassie remembered: egotistical.

Given the vociferousness of the debate, she thought it would be a squeaker, but it wasn’t even a close vote. In the end, even Piercings Guy was shamed into raising his hand for Cassie.

She breathed a sigh of relief — she was in. She was part of OHM now. She belonged and she had help.

By way of official welcome, they gave her a smartphone that had been manufactured before she was born. It couldn’t even load apps other than the ones that were already on it. And its interface was a muted series of gray tones.

“Security through obscurity,” TonyStark told her. “Don’t do anything stupid with it. It doesn’t have a GPS chip, so they can’t track you with it, but they can still find you if you’re dumb.”

“And the dull-ass screen?” she asked.

He sniffed. “It’s been proven that the colors in mobile interfaces are designed to stimulate your adrenal responses. You get a dopamine kick from the color combinations so you stay glued to the screen. We kill the colors so we can focus on things other than Candy Crush and BLINQ.”

With a grateful shriek of delight, she scrambled away to figure out the nitty-gritty of the phone. She finally had a new lifeline to her dad, once she could hack the thing to use an encrypted SMS client. She suspected part of the reason for giving her such outdated tech was to test her mettle yet again.

She had just started setting it up when TonyStark found her and announced that he had news.

“We have confirmation your mom has been brought in for questioning,” he told her. His voice was nothing close to gentle; he could have been a waiter telling her the kitchen was closing in five minutes. “They’re making a big deal of the new processes in place for Level 6, so they’re using Rachel as an example.” He showed her his laptop screen.

Tish and a couple others joined them. Cassie paled when she saw the image of her mother.

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