Hive Mind: Difference between revisions

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** Even more so the ''Individual Eleven'' in the second season, {{spoiler|which are actually all controlled by the same virus that infected their brain implants}}.
* The {{spoiler|Pict aliens}} in the [[Axis Powers Hetalia]] movie. They all say the exact same things at the exact same time, and are {{spoiler|trying to get all humans to join them.}}
* ''[[ToA AruCertain Majutsu noMagical Index]]'': In yet another unexpected use of a power, {{spoiler|the Mikoto "Imouto" clones}} use their {{spoiler|electrical powers}} to maintain a collective memory. (Season two of ''[[A Certain Scientific Railgun]]'' explains how this works in one episode.) They're an interesting example because while they are very much ''not'' a Hive Mind, they are brainwashed into thinking they are, to the point that they originally put zero weight on individual lives. After Touma convinces them otherwise, they're like a very large family in constant radio contact.
 
 
=== [[Comic Books]] ===
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* ''[[Battle Beyond the Stars]]'' has the Nestors as a hive-mind race.
* "The Octopus" in ''[[The City of Lost Children]]'' is apparently a pair of conjoined twins who act as a single creature. In addition to working in perfect unison and finishing each other's sentences, the twins scratch each other's itches and taste what the other is eating.
* Both the Squeeze Toy Aliens from the ''[[Toy Story (franchise)|Toy Story]]'' series films and the Moonfish from ''[[Finding Nemo]]''.
 
 
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* The "phoners" in [[Stephen King]]'s ''[[Cell]]'' form flocks with apparent shared awareness within the flock and between flocks in the same geographical area.
* ''[[The Light Of Other Days]]'' by [[Arthur C. Clarke]] and [[Stephen Baxter]]: direct interfaces between the human mind and computer networks leads to the development of a hive mind. This is not presented as a bad thing, and the hive mind has no interest in doing anything to force anyone to join who doesn't want to, or anything like that.
* In [[Dan Abnett]]'s ''[[Warhammer 4000040,000]]'' ''[[Horus Heresy]]'' Novel "Legion", the Alpha Legion invoke this trope: They use identity, conformity of appearance, and anonymity as a weapon. To the casual (or even acute) observer, every soldier appears identical (the fact that they all call themselves Alpharius doesn't help). Due to their particular doctrine of being incredibly well informed (beyond even the normal Astartes' capacity for knowledge), and each soldier being just as capable of leading each other as their immediate superiors, they could very well be considered a hive mind. Even more appropriately, the twin Primarchs of the Legion (Alpharius and Omegon) are so identical, they even think, breath, blink, talk, etc in EXACTLY the same way as each other.
 
 
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* In the [[Ultimate Marvel]] Universe, one of the variant Skrull races are the Chitauri, who see individuality as a disease, and themselves as the "[[Scary Dogmatic Aliens|immune system of the universe]]". In order to operate among humans, they create an "officer" caste who have a limited degree of individual personality, presumably absorbed (along with physical form) from those they devour.
* The [[The Stepford Wives|Stepford]] [[The Midwich Cuckoos|Cuckoos]] of ''[[X-Men (Comic Book)|X-Men]]''.
* ''[[Buck Godot: Zap Gun for Hire|Buck Godot, Zap Gun For Hire]]'' has [https://web.archive.org/web/20150415124804/http://www.airshipentertainment.com/buckcomic.php?date=20070804 PSmIth]. (Unusual, in that PSmIth is a population of genetically-engineered humans, and friendly to normal humans.)
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20080920165657/http://nodwick.humor.gamespy.com/ps238/comics/index.php?date=2008-09-17 The Commonality] from ''[[PS238]]''. Although presented as a benign entity, this is probably not much of a consolation for the one individual human left on the planet when everyone else is adjoined in it.
** Especially since he was the one who accidentally created it.
* The [[Green Lantern|Orange Lantern Corps]] are beings made of an orange energy that resembles fire. They recruit new members by literally consuming them. Their [[Hive Queen|Hive... uh, King]] is a comically hoggish alien named Agent Orange.
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* Legion of the [[Wild Cards]] novels is a single individual who can grow and inhabit multiple custom-made bodies.
* The [[Bug War]] novels ''[[Starfire|In Death Ground]]'' and ''The Shiva Option'' have aliens which are telepathically linked. The latter novel's titular Option involves literally rendering lifeless all planets on which the Bugs have established bases, in order to both exterminate the beachhead and disorient the survivors.
* Like Spider Robinson, [[Terry Pratchett]] uses this concept in ''[[Discworld/A Hat Full of Sky|A Hat Full of Sky]]'' where Miss Level is one person, in two bodies. {{spoiler|Also like Robinson, one of the Miss Levels gets killed. However, the surviving one learns how to ''act'' like she still has two bodies, becoming de facto telekinetic.}}
** Also in ''[[Discworld]]'', Granny Weatherwax is able to "[[Mind Control|borrow]]" animals, and at one point she does this to an entire beehive.
** Spider the Rat King, the [[Big Bad]] of ''[[Discworld/The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents|The Amazing Maurice and Hishis Educated Rodents]]'', was eight blind rats tied together by their tails. The only way to survive was for them to think as one, and the resulting hive mind was strong enough to control an entire town's rat population.
** He also inverts the idea with Miss Pointer/Mrs. Pickles in Thud. [[Mind Hive|Two people living in one body]].
** Not to mention [[Magical Computer|Hex]], which is a ''literal'' hive mind.
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* A very weak version of this exists in ''[[Earth: Final Conflict]]'' with the [[Energy Being|Taelons]], whose minds are joined in the Commonality. However, they are full individuals and don't share each other's thoughts. The Commonality mainly serves to keep the Taelons from reverting into the savage Atavus state. A human jacked into the Commonality experiences the greatest high possible, and a few seconds can feel like hours.
 
=== New Media ===
* The protagonist of ''[[Conquering the Horizon]]'' has a hive mind. Her individual bodies have semi-independent lines of thought. She also often treats her bodies as individual people as both a way of playing/entertainment as well as coping with isolation. When circumstances permit she even [[Attending Your Own Funeral|gives her dead bodies funerals]].
 
=== Tabletop Games ===
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** For another ''[[Vampire: The Requiem]]'' example, it's mentioned that particularly radical members of the Carthian Movement (vampiric modernists and political experimenters) will attempt to form a hive mind amongst the members of a coterie, using telepathic powers, identical patterns of speech and uniforms to present the image of an unified front. There's even a Devotion (combo power), Hive Nexus Gestalt, that allows the true formation of a hive mind amongst coterie members.
* In ''[[Magic: The Gathering|Magic the Gathering]]'''s Lorwyn setting, the kithkin are a race of halflings with a hive-mind referred to as the ''thoughtweft''. Each kithkin has an individual mind and personality, but groups of kithkin have access to each other's thoughts and feelings that goes beyond mere [[The Empath|empathy]]. In [[Mirror Universe|Shadowmoor]], this makes the kithkin incredibly xenophobic and hateful toward any creature that isn't "one of us."
** A somewhat more frightening example would be the [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Search/Default.aspx?output=spoiler&method=visual&name=+%5Bsliver%5D slivers]: each sliver is connected together via a psychic gestalt that ''was'' controlled by the ''[[Authority Equals Asskicking|enormous]]'' [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=5233 queen], when she was gone, [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=45166 a new leader] was created. Now that they're ''both'' gone, the hivemind ''itself'' is [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=136146 gaining self-awareness]. On top of that, the individual varieties of sliver [[Adaptive Ability|instill instant mutations]] in their brethren when nearby ([[No Ontological Inertia|which of course fade when they're gone]]), meaning that [https://web.archive.org/web/20090426014640/http://ww2.wizards.com/gatherer/CardDetails.aspx?&id=4746 if one sliver can fly], they all can. [https://web.archive.org/web/20081002130843/http://ww2.wizards.com/gatherer/CardDetails.aspx?&id=42017 If one sliver has armor-plated skin, they all do]. [https://web.archive.org/web/20081002120150/http://ww2.wizards.com/gatherer/CardDetails.aspx?&id=42029 If one sliver can move at speeds approaching the relativistic] or [https://web.archive.org/web/20090426015644/http://ww2.wizards.com/gatherer/CardDetails.aspx?&id=5134 shrug off magic like water off a duck's back], they all will...
** The [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Chorus%20of%20the%20Conclave Selesnya] [http://www.wizards.com/magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtgcom/daily/mc7 Conclave]
** [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=190556 Hive Mind] does this to players. When someone plays a card, everyone plays that card.<ref>This is particularly handy when you play a card that would be near-lethal to you, but suicidal for everyone else.</ref>
* The Tyranids of ''[[Warhammer 4000040,000]]'' embody this trope to a T. They are a [[Horde of Alien Locusts]] that do not have independent minds at all, instead being one giant cosmic superorganism. Their mere presence causes such a weird dissonance in the Warp (the alternate dimension where psychic powers tap into) that technologies that use psychic powers (including interstellar travel and communication) are rendered useless, and people attempting to psychically communicate with this strange hive mind are [[Go Mad Fromfrom the Revelation|instantly driven insane]]. When removed from this hive mind (by taking them away from a suitably psychic repeater), the smaller Tyranid organisms become no better than exceptionally deadly animals.
** The only person in the galaxy who has survived some form of espionage / eavesdropping / communication is a [[Super Soldier]] who is the most powerful semi-human psyker in the galaxy. [[Running Gag|And Eldrad]].
** As a result, a Tyranid player is sometimes jokingly referred to as a "hive consciousness".
** ''I can feel them - scratching at the back of my head. They're coming for us, '''mind, body and soul!'''''
* In ''[[Dungeons and& Dragons]]'', there are a few species with a Hive Mind. One of these is the Abeil. Cranium rats are one of the most ''annoying''. Illithids has a borderline example—a network (they are [[Psychic Powers|all telepathic]]) centered on the city's Elder Brain—fused mass of dead mindflayers' still living brains continuing to assimilate brains of every dying mindflayer of the city. Illithids obey these master minds and depend on its advice, but are individuals enough to trade, compete, have disagreeing factions and so on.
* One [[The Virus|viral]] example of this trope exists in the [[Ravenloft]] setting, in the form of Toben the Many, a [[Hannibal Lecture]]ing Hive Mind composed of grinning, plague-carrying zombies.
* One sample artifact from ''[[Unknown Armies]]'' is nothing more than a few words on an old wax audio recording, called the Alter Tongue. Hearing a conversation in the Tongue runs a Mind check, and failing that test imprints the Tongue into the listener's mind. There's no [[Psychic Link]], unless the GM wants there to be, but new words in the Tongue appear out of nowhere and those afflicted with the Tongue isolate themselves from or even attack others that can't speak it, and have better-than-typical success conversing with other speakers of the Tongue, even finishing sentences for anyone who's talking in the strange, chittering language. Oh, and knowing the language starts breaking down the local fabric of the universe, too.
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=== Video Games ===
* The Coremind from ''[[Achron]]'' fits this trope. {{spoiler|Another hive mind emerges in the third campaign as well}}
* The Zerg in ''[[StarcraftStarCraft]]''. They are led by a mind called the Overmind, "the eternal will of the Swarm". The Overmind is an odd one since, in essence, it is simply the Hive Mind itself, but it can create intelligent Cerebrates as leaders of individual broods. The Cerebrates have a certain amount of individuality, but they are still incapable of betrayal. If either the Overmind or the Cerebrates are killed, the Overmind can simply resurrect them in a new body (since they are, essentially, simply minds), unless they are killed by a dark templar. In ''that'' case, the individual Cerebrate is [[Killed Off for Real]]. However, the Overmind can create a brand new Cerebrate, and if the Overmind is killed by a dark templar the surviving Cerebrates can fuse together and create a new one.
* The Many from ''[[System Shock]] II'' - and let's not go into when they try to recruit '''[[Player Character|you]]''' into their fold.
* The [[Zombie Apocalypse|Infected]] in ''[[Prototype (video game)|Prototype]]'' have a hivemind, connected back to their leader, a woman/{{spoiler|[[Plaguemaster]]}} named Elizabeth Greene. Eventually, the protagonist is able to hack into this through consuming a Leader Hunter and see people carrying the infection who are not yet aware of their illness. He does this to get the trail of the Leader Hunter which took {{spoiler|his sister}} from him, and to find it and Elizabeth Greene.
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* The NPC [[Our Elves Are Different|Elf race]] in ''[[Mabinogi (video game)|Mabinogi]]'', although individuals, share a collective memory via a central "memory bank"; and aquire all of their knowledge and skills from this collective memory. Player characters, being spirits from outside Erinn, do not share in this collective memory; a fact which is pointedly imparted to the player during the introduction.
** A repeatable quest for Elf characters is to recover "lost elves" who have been severed from the collective, and reunite them with the racial consciousness.
* The cranium rats from tabletop [[Dungeons and& Dragons]] appear in ''[[Planescape: Torment]]''. A group of rats in one place will form a hive mind, and the more rats there are, the more intelligent the mind will be. The mysterious Many-As-One turns out to be {{spoiler|the hive mind of an ''enormous'' number of rats}}.
* ''[[Mass Effect 2]]'' reveals that the Geth, a race of super-intelligent AI, are actually a hive mind, all sharing the same consciousness; instead of all geth thinking alike, "individual" Geth runtimes act as different perspectives to the same information that all programs share. When the 'heretic' geth chose to work with the [[Big Bad]] pre-series, the other geth peacefully allowed them to leave.
** They also explain how this works rather more than other examples of this trope; the physical bodies are "platforms" and the actual geth are program runtimes (the character Legion comprises at least a thousand individual geth). The more platforms there are in the same place, the more processors can be devoted to their various tasks; this is why geth are smarter in numbers. [[Fridge Logic|Presumably, each platform is equipped with the right hardware to accommodate many runtimes at once without slowing down, overheating, or straining the hardware]].
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=== [[Web Comics]] ===
* Mars, in the webcomic ''[[A Miracle of Science]]''. One of the few examples of large-scale Hive Mind that ''aren't evil''. It exists as a superstructure over implanted [[FTL Radio]] network and mostly inobtrusive, "possessing" its members only when it wants to say or do something directly. It also [http://www.project-apollo.net/mos/mos042.html has a good sense of humor].
* In ''[[Schlock Mercenary]]'' Petey after migrating from old hardware - and more broadly, the Fleetmind.
* The Peteys (and more broadly, the Fleetmind) in ''[[Schlock Mercenary]]''
** And the infamous Partnership Collective: A Hive Mind of [[Amoral Attorney]]s.
** The Ot-Skadak (Flechette bugs evolved on Eina-afa) - they are carnivores, so the primary use of swarm communication is [[Synchronized Swarming|to coordinate high-speed attacks]]. [http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2013-06-28 These] are up to 3 meters long (see the previous or next page for how huge the dragon-like critter was) - see a close-up image [http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2017-06-30 here]. There smallest are finger-sized, though they still can kill a human wearing light body armour in a few seconds, even without the advantage of high approach speed. Like other linked minds in ''Schlock Mercenary'', they can overcome range limitations via FTL communication implants. Their natural organization seems to be local swarms acting on a single purpose independently, while keeping in touch with nearby ones to much lesser degree (which makes sense resources-wise), so when Ot-Skadak get into the wider galaxy, they travel as distinct "clusters" with their own names, specializing as a diplomat, engineer, warrior...
* In the comic ''[[MSF High]]'', the Legion are a Hive Mind which maintains individuality amongst Legions. Their society is very in-depth, and they are surprisingly friendly. Now.
* ''[[Bob and George]]'' has X, in his first chronological physical appearance (note: the rest were pre-existent spirit forms or time-travellers. Or Alternates. Or future alternate spirit forms. Or a pair of kumquats, hiding in the shape of X. Something along those lines.) go omnicidal (in a way) when no one would be his friend, and then proceeds to link up every robot to his mind. And then picks up a cyborg. And then through that cyborg the entire human race.
* Gavotte from ''[[Skin Horse]]''. An actual hive.
* ''[[Sequential Art (webcomic)|Sequential Art]]'' has "Think Tank" - four squirrel girls with implanted link chips. At a short range they can [http://www.collectedcurios.com/sequentialart.php?s=493 get in synk talking on Faxmodemish] with each other, think together and act as a single entity at will. [[Mega Corp|Quinten]] used them as a [[Wetware CPU]] network to check a [[AIA.I. Is a Crapshoot|buggy AI]], but before that they were in R&D. Consequently, one of them alone is a hyperactive and hyperperceptive [[Genius Ditz]] who can build a beam weapon she knows [http://www.collectedcurios.com/sequentialart.php?s=199 from a souvenir blaster and spare parts] is she isn't distracted by something shiny or moving, but four together go into all-out [[Mad Science]] and [http://www.collectedcurios.com/sequentialart.php?s=542 turn] a lawnmower [[FTL]]-capable when trying to upgrade it.
 
 
=== Web Original ===
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* ''[[SMBC Theater]]'' explores [http://www.smbc-theater.com/?id=205 hive mind dating].
* [[Akinator]] is sort of a real-life example of this—he's a program who knows, in intricate detail, tens, if not hundreds of thousands of characters both real and fictional, assembled from the contributions of millions of players worldwide.
 
 
=== [[Western Animation]] ===
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* In ''[[Batman: The Brave And The Bold]]'' (specifically "Revenge of the Reach"), the Green Lantern Corps is attacked by an alien enemy called the Reach. Judging by their simultaneous dialogue and referencing themselves as "The Collective", they must have some form of hive mind.
* ''[[Ben 10: Alien Force|Ben 10 Alien Force]]'' - In the episode "Ghost Town", Ben Ten is forced to team up with his arch nemesis, Vilgax, to battle one of his rogue alien forms, Ghost Freak. Vilgax released Ghost Freak from prison on the condition he defeat Ben, but Ghost Freak betrays him and possesses his planet, Vilgaxia. The planet's citizens are turned into Ghost Freak's minions (who look like his original less hideous, unmasked form in the first Ben Ten series) dominated by a hive mind.
 
 
=== Real Life ===
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{{reflist}}
[[Category:Hive Mind{{PAGENAME}}]]
[[Category:Bizarre Alien Biology]]
[[Category:One With the Index]]
[[Category:Speculative Fiction Tropes]]
[[Category:Fantastic Sapient Species Tropes]]
[[Category:Hive Mind]]
[[Category:Mind Manipulation Tropes]]