The air in Los Angeles tasted like smog and impending doom, but to Benjamin, it tasted like data.
He stood outside the hospital where Nick Clark was being held after his "hallucination" in the church. Benjamin felt the hum of the city—not just the noise, but the literal electrical frequency of the power lines. He reached out and touched a discarded smartphone on a bench.
His skin didn't just touch the glass; it integrated.
[System Initialized: Identifying Technology... Smartphone. Lithium-ion battery. NAND Flash memory. Absorbing...]
The phone dissolved into a metallic slurry, sinking into his pores. Instantly, Benjamin knew how to transmit radio waves. He felt his cells shift, mimicking the circuitry. He wasn't just a man; he was a living motherboard.
He met Alicia outside the school. She was worried, distracted by a boyfriend who wouldn't text back and a brother who was losing his mind. Benjamin approached her, his presence calm—unnervingly so.
"The flu isn't a flu, Alicia," he said, falling into step with her.
She looked at him, blue eyes sharp and guarded. "Who are you? Another one of Nick's 'friends'?"
"I'm Benjamin. And you should start looking at the shadows. They're starting to get back up."
That night, as the first riots began, Benjamin found himself in a park. He knelt and pressed his hands into the earth. He felt the DNA of a Great Horned Owl in the trees and the resilient structure of the Kudzu vine nearby.
[Biological Absorption Initiated...]
His vision fractured into a thousand points of light—thermal imaging, courtesy of the owl. His skin hardened with cellulose fibers. He was building the "Foundational Symbiote." He just needed a catalyst.
When the first "Walker" lunged at him from the bushes, Benjamin didn't flinch. He let it bite his forearm. The virus flooded his system—a chaotic, necrotic string of protein.
[Threat Detected: Solanum Virus. Analyzing... Neutralizing. Immunity Established.]
[New Blueprint Acquired: Necrotic Animation. Integrating into Symbiotic Core.]
He grabbed the Walker's head. With a thought, a small, bioluminescent tendril snaked out of Benjamin's palm and into the Walker's eye. He didn't just kill it; he disassembled it.
By the time the National Guard arrived in El Sereno, Benjamin had found the Clarks again. He saw Alicia struggling to keep her mother, Madison, calm.
"Alicia," Benjamin called out. The world was burning around them, but he looked like a god of the new age. He held out his hand. In his palm sat a small, pulsing opal-colored seed—a Symbiote. "The world is ending. But you don't have to die with it. Take this, and you'll never be alone, never be weak, and never be forgotten."
Alicia looked at the chaos, then at him. She reached out.
The moment her skin touched the seed, the Hivemind flickered to life. Benjamin felt her fear, her heartbeat, and her budding trust. And she? She felt his power.
[Link Established: Alicia Clark. Status: Loyal. Shared Knowledge: Bio-Tech Integration.]
"Welcome to the future," Benjamin whispered.
The moment the symbiote fused with Alicia's nervous system, her gasp echoed in the quiet suburban street. It wasn't a scream of pain, but of sensory overload.
"Benjamin... what did you do?" she whispered, her eyes widening as the iris flecked with a temporary silver shimmer.
"I gave you a chance," Benjamin replied, his voice steady even as the sound of distant gunfire rattled the windows of the neighboring houses.
In Alicia's mind, the world had changed. She could feel Benjamin—not as a physical presence, but as a warm hum at the back of her skull. More than that, she felt a sudden, intuitive understanding of things she had never studied. She looked at a nearby electrical transformer and understood the flow of the grid; she looked at a wilted rosebush and felt the cellular structure of the plant.
"Madison! Travis!" Benjamin called out as the Clark-Manawa family scrambled out of the house, loading bags into the truck.
The neighborhood was a maze of panic. The National Guard was setting up "Safe Zones," which Benjamin knew were nothing more than gilded cages waiting to become graveyards.
"We aren't staying for the fences," Benjamin told Madison, his tone brook no argument.
"Who the hell are you?" Travis demanded, stepping between Benjamin and Alicia.
"He's helping us, Travis," Alicia said, her voice sounding more confident than it had in years. She stepped forward, her movements fluid, almost predatory. The symbiote was already optimizing her muscle fibers. "The city is falling. We need to move toward the coast."
As they piled into the cars, a group of three neighbors—now turned into grey-skinned, snarling husks—stumbled out from behind a hedge. Madison froze, her hand gripping a fire extinguisher.
Benjamin didn't use a weapon. He stepped forward and raised his hand. From his fingertips, thin, metallic filaments—a blend of absorbed copper wiring and organic spider silk—shot out like a web. The filaments didn't just bind the walkers; they dissolved them on contact, turning the necrotic flesh into raw biomass that Benjamin pulled back into his own body.
[Biomass Consumed. Energy Reserves: 12%. Refining cellular repair protocols.]
The family watched in horrified silence.
"I'm what comes next," Benjamin said, turning back to the truck. "Now drive."
They bypassed the main highways, Benjamin using his integrated GPS—a byproduct of the smartphone he'd "eaten" earlier—to find backstreets the military hadn't clogged yet.
Every time they stopped, Benjamin "harvested." At a construction site, he pressed his hand against a high-grade titanium drill.
[New Material Identified: Titanium Grade 5. Structural Reinforcement available for Hivemind members.]
He felt the change ripple through the link. Alicia, sitting in the passenger seat, felt her bones density increase, her skin becoming subtly more resistant to tearing. She looked at her hands, terrified but mesmerized.
"You're sharing this with me," she realized, her voice a psychic echo in Benjamin's mind.
"Everything I find, we keep," he thought back to her. The Hivemind was quiet for now, a private channel between two souls, but he could feel the potential for more.
By the time they reached the outskirts of the marina where Strand's yacht, the Abigail, was docked, the sun was beginning to rise over a city in flames. The "Operation Cobalt" jets were already screaming overhead.
At the pier, they were cut off. A squad of panicked soldiers was trying to herd civilians back. One soldier, eyes wild with stress, leveled his rifle at Nick, who was shivering in the back of the truck from withdrawal.
"Back in the vehicle! Now!" the soldier yelled.
Benjamin stepped out. He didn't feel fear; he felt the biological rhythm of the soldier's heart. He felt the mechanical tension in the rifle's firing pin.
With a thought, Benjamin exerted his influence over the technology he had absorbed. The soldier's rifle jammed—the metal components simply fusing together as if by a localized magnetic pulse.
"The old world's tools don't work against me," Benjamin said.
He didn't kill the man. Instead, he touched the soldier's shoulder. A small needle of bone and metal pricked the man's skin.
[New Member Added to Hivemind: Corporal Adams. Knowledge Acquired: Military Tactics, Small Arms Training, Extraction Codes.]
Instantly, the information flooded Benjamin and Alicia. Alicia gasped, her hands instinctively mimicking the grip of a handgun she had never fired. She knew how to clear a room, how to lead a squad, how to kill with efficiency.
"I can... I know how to fight," Alicia whispered, looking at Benjamin with a mixture of awe and something darker.
"We both do," Benjamin replied.
As they boarded the Abigail and watched Los Angeles begin to sink into a horizon of smoke, Benjamin stood at the railing. He felt the vast ocean ahead—a treasure trove of biological diversity. The sharks, the deep-sea vents, the resilient algae.
He was the Archive. And with Alicia by his side, he would rewrite the book of life on a dead planet.