'SEE YOU MORNING' 092 Hive Mind

Because of the flying cars, the meeting place for Li Haojun and Lily this time was set at the airport in Kalispell. But Lily did not come in her vintage plane as before; she simply took a commercial airline flight.
Li Haojun sat in the car, waiting outside the airport terminal. From a distance, he saw her walk out of the main entrance, glance around, spot Li Haojun sitting in the car, and walk over.
Li Haojun marveled at her sharp eyesight as he watched her approach step by step in her high heels. Today she wore a pair of deep purple leggings, the muscles of her thighs trembling with each step as the balls of her feet struck the ground in a rhythmic line, the ground reaction force rippling as if that cadence had drifted into Li Haojun’s heart.
Lily wore a linen-colored off-shoulder cropped T-shirt on top, the loose hem fluttering in the wind against her taut waist, a sharp contrast that lent her an edge of resolve amid the softness.
Her golden hair was divided into fine strands and braided into a tight, no-nonsense fishtail, dark butterfly sunglasses hiding her eyes, but her vivid red lips made her whole person radiate heat.
“Is this your new car? Very nice,” Lily bent down, hand on the roof, and asked Li Haojun.
“Yeah,” Li Haojun replied, then suddenly felt like a guy in a luxury car picking up a call girl. But then he thought—Lily loved and was good at operating these machines anyway, so why not let her try. So he said,
“Want to take it for a spin?” and opened the door to get out of the driver’s seat.
“Really? Sure,”
Lily was a little surprised at first, but when she saw Li Haojun willingly give up the driver’s seat, she happily swapped places with him.
Lily first kicked off her heels and tossed them into the back seat, pressed the brake pedal with her bare feet, fastened her seatbelt, and started the engine. Li Haojun asked,
“Won’t that hurt your feet?”
“It’s fine,” she said. Without setting navigation, she just checked the basic controls, disabled the computer driving assist, and pulled out.
At first Lily drove in cruise mode, but through the stops, starts, and turns she kept probing the car’s handling qualities and physical limits.
When they left Highway 2 and merged onto the mountain road, the massive horsepower of the rotary engine seemed to have nowhere to go. Lily rolled down the window, let the wind whip through her hair, and relied on the dual feedback of g-force and the screech of tires against pavement to carve through the mountain road with a style that was safe yet wild, the metallic clang of the exhaust and the howl of tires echoing through the valley.
The car soon reached a lake—a mountain lake with no gentle shoreline, only steep cliffs. A branch of the road led to a facility built into the mountainside, its huge metal doors resembling a military installation.
After verifying credentials, Lily led Li Haojun inside. A long corridor, nothing special, with unidentifiable rooms on either side. At the end was an ordinary personnel elevator, like an iron cage, dimly lit, clearly a repurposed old facility.
But when the elevator reached the third underground level, the interior was contemporary—even ahead of its time. The walls were smooth silver-gray, the floor marked with colored guide lines, and the lighting was bright. Biometric recognition went beyond face and fingerprints; iris scans were routine, and the next steps made Li Haojun suspect they were recording his brainwaves and bioelectric signal patterns.
Li Haojun’s clearance ended here. Lily first showed him the standard life-support facilities on this level, then a series of functionally identical rooms used by system visitors. Here was the human-machine interface for the entire comprehensive social management system of the Kalispell region, but the access was almost entirely limited to browsing, searching, and data analysis.
As Lily gave her brief introduction, Li Haojun gradually confirmed his earlier suspicion: the residents here were indeed under consciousness control, precisely suppressed down to different awareness levels or behavioral motives. That was why incidents like the riots in Boise would never happen here.
While learning about the system, Li Haojun noticed that this consciousness control network spanning all of Kalispell was not just used to prohibit certain behaviors. It could also network the consciousness of people doing the same or similar work for information exchange, sometimes even linking brains across disciplines and fields. This genuinely shocked Li Haojun, because clearly this would evolve into a super collective intelligence that would crush any individual.
But perhaps no system is perfect, and this Kalispell ecosystem was no exception. Some individual members or social dynamics had not developed as expected, which was why Li Haojun was needed—to verify the actual situation, analyze the causes, and propose solutions.
After learning all this, Li Haojun realized he might be facing a complex systems project, so he asked Lily,
“Can I request more expert personnel from different fields? I honestly feel my level is limited. It seems this work might need a team,” he said, spreading his hands with a wry smile.
“Of course you can,” Lily smiled too, studied him for a moment, then said,
“You’re still the same old you.”
“What?” Li Haojun felt awkward. He didn’t know what she meant by “the same old you.”
“Heh, you don’t like taking on big responsibilities.”
“Oh,” he replied, looking into her eyes. Li Haojun wondered how much she still knew about him that he didn’t even know about himself.
“But once you accept a task, you’re always reliable. That’s why you’re here,” Lily said, watching Li Haojun’s expression.
“Oh, thanks for the praise, thanks for the trust,” Li Haojun didn’t know what else to say. He couldn’t remember anything about Lily, so all he had left were polite words.
Lily stared into his eyes for a while before saying calmly,
“The praise is mine. The trust and the appointment came from the company. It has nothing to do with me.”
Li Haojun wanted to ask, don’t you trust me? But he didn’t say it. He didn’t understand why she would say that. Then he thought—maybe he was overthinking it. Maybe he should focus on the first half of what she said: the praise was from her, not that she didn’t trust him.
“Ethan, you zoned out.” Lily had clearly noticed Li Haojun had missed part of her explanation, and she stared into his eyes as she called him out.
“Ah, sorry,” Li Haojun replied. He was quiet for a moment, but after thinking it over, he gathered the courage to ask directly,
“Sorry, I was thinking about what you just said. You said the trust and the appointment came from the company, not from you. I don’t quite understand. Are you saying I did something wrong before that made you not trust me very much?”
“Oh, you won’t do anything wrong, because what you do is logical and predictable. The point of what I said is that the company appointed you. It has nothing to do with whether I trust you or not.”
“Oh, I see. Then…” Li Haojun wanted to ask, then do you trust me or not? But he didn’t say it. After all, he and Lily were just colleagues—it wasn’t appropriate to ask something so personal.
But Lily seemed to sense his intention. Before Li Haojun could finish, she cut him off and said,
“Do you trust Emily?”
“Mm, I trust her.”
“Then does she trust you?”
“I think so.”
Who knew that after asking, Lily simply turned her head away and stopped looking at Li Haojun, as if she didn’t care about his answer at all.
The first day at the Ashley Lake facility passed quickly. On the way back, Lily still had the window down, letting the wind blow over her, but she no longer drove as aggressively as on the way there—just silent, ordinary driving.