Fiction

Swarm Think: The Rule of Nine

Swarm think is good. Go along with the hive or else. We don’t want to think about what the or else part means. It doesn’t sound good. They punish not-like-minders. It has never happened in our lifetime - that’s what they say - but you know how easily one could just melt into the dense crowd, or be melted. We can’t keep track of everybody, but we know somebody is. Somebody’s busy as we speak. We’d bet, well, we’d bet more than we’ve got and that’s not much.
We are successful breeders. The population is now over eight billion. There is some division amongst the nine tribes to facilitate groupthink. Over a certain number of millions, groupthink becomes sluggish, slow-witted and unable to decide.
Statisticians tell us the magic number is somewhere around four million, give or take three thousand. It depends on the minds contained in the group. Every effort is made to distribute quick thinkers evenly, while keeping families together, but mistakes happen.
We’re still only human, but humans need rest, healthy food and stimuli in order to be fully engaged. For generations there has been an acute shortage of the first two which leads to an overabundance of the latter.
We are too many. We need water, for we have bled the earth dry.
We are always afraid. Leery of the growing shadows, terrified of unknown diseases, laid flat by the weather demons, and undone by our own greed. That was then and that is now. As foretold, so say the greatest of the great, and who are we to dissent? We don’t like to rock the boat. We can’t swim. We’ve forgotten how.
We love group think. There is never another time in our existence that we feel so free, so alive, so filled to the brim with possibility and expectation. Anything can be anything when you’re all together. Our swarm mind swoops and dips with the others like a hundred thousand murders of jet black crows. There is no speaking. What need? There is only thought. Think it and it will be. Water? Who needs water when you feel the music of oneness in your bones, your heart and your soul?
The swarm sways in time to the symphony of humming, sparkling synapses, all fine tuned to one channel. What power! What exhilaration in the innocent air between our brains! Blue zaps of protons and neurons and electrons crashing together, melding into a concerto of pure thought and invisible will.
To the power and glory of Nine. Nine times nine forever and ever amen. And so it goes for us. The power of Nine never ends but rather circles back upon itself, and then closes, clean as a well-practiced surgeon, invisible as the thick air we suffer to drag into our crusted, baked lungs. The air tastes of greasy smoke. Old habits die hard and change is the breath of life itself.
One clean mind could change the world. That’s what my teacher preaches. The choir has not converted. That kind of talk could get him in trouble. We’re afraid for our teacher. He mustn’t preach individuality. That’s wrong. There is no power in the individual, only in the group. Everybody knows that. He is the only one who has ever taught that a single mind could do anything, that doesn’t strictly have to do with staying among the quick, as we are today, and today is all that matters.
Today he asks me a question.
“What are you?” he says, and I have to think alone. His question makes me think thoughts that lead me nowhere I wish to go. Down a lonely, twisted path, with no groupthink to guide me. No map for alone. Fear gnaws at my innards like the two-headed beast of myths and legends.
Suddenly, a bright light burns from my empty eyes. I behold the answer, as clearly as I witness the rising of our blood sun every morning and I know it to be true. I see it in the shadows of his dark eyes.
“I am one,” I say and teacher smiles.

Only for me.