Hive Mind / Played Straight

Examples of actual shared consciousness:

Anime and Manga

• A Certain Magical Index: In yet another unexpected use of a power, the Misaka "Imouto" clones use their electrical powers to maintain constant contact through brain-based telecommunication, allowing them to share a collective memory. They're an interesting example because while they are very much not a true 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. Later novels show that there is a Hive Mind of sorts regardless, the "Will of the Network", which acts as a sort of collective unconscious for the Sisters and has its own will and thoughts.
• Saika's "children" in Durarara!!. A particularly strong-willed individual can become Hive Queen, but usually this just means becoming the voice of the hive. Anri Sonohara is the only one capable of actually controlling it.
• The Festum from Fafner in the Azure: Dead Aggressor are a deconstruction of this; because they are all controlled by a single mind, they have no concept of life, death, emotion, or even information. The Master-type Festum are their version of a Hive Queen, as they can greatly influence the whole (Idun) or become entirely separate entities (Mjolnir/Akane Makabe, Kouyou). They also demonstrate the ability to learn, especially in the case of Idun; it learning hatred and wrath was what provoked their ferocious attacks.
• The zombies of Fort of Apocalypse appear to have some kind of hive mind and bend to the will of the Hive Queen, forming large formations out of their bodies.
• The Stand Alone Complex in the appropriately named Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. Kind of. It's a social phenomenon that happens all the time which involves people engaging in copycat behavior where there is no original. The people usually have nothing in common except their actions. In the second season, the Individual Eleven are actually all controlled by the same virus that infected their brain implants, in an attempt to create an artificial Stand Alone Complex.
• The Eleven Riders in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Steel Ball Run move and act in perfect unison; even their horses move in sync with one another. It's implied this is connected to their Stand, Tatoo You!, which allows them to enter and exit each other's bodies.
• This turns out to be the situation in "The Conversation Room" from the Junji Ito Kyoufu Manga Collection. Four women are patients at a hospital, and have a strange connection and simultaneous dreams. They turn out to be multiple bodies of one entity, which connect with tube-like organs in their mouths. They also assimilate more into their consciousness by stabbing people with these tubes and adding them to the pack.
• Lyrical Nanoha:
  • The Mariage from StrikerS Sound Stage X. This is the reason why they are quick to pull a kamikaze upon capture, as any information that one has is shared by every other Mariage. Their battle tactics are even commented by Quattro as being similar to those of insects.
  • The Raptors of Magical Record Lyrical Nanoha Force, who describes themselves as a unit that shares knowledge and cognizance in real time, and do not possess individual conscience. As Isis sums it up for Lily, "Basically, they have a lot of bodies, but one mind".
• Macross:
  • Macross Frontier has the Vajra, who are one mind distributed over thousands of individually stupid drones, administered by a Hive Queen hub. Also, Grace O'Connor's conspiracy hive-mind is quite different; it isn't so much a collective as it is a network of implanted people with Grace as an "admin" node, effectively overwriting every connected member's personal desires with whatever Grace wants. (However, it's not made clear if she is the sole node, or whether the Executive Council of the Galaxy Fleet has administrative command as well. The latter is more likely, as she is seen communing with other members of her conspiracy over details.) Her grand scheme was to use the fold quartz and Vajra to spread this network over the entire galaxy, in order to incorporate all of humanity, and surpass the Protoculture.
  • Macross Delta had a similar example of this, with Roid attempting to merge every single humanoid species in the Milky Way galaxy into a single collective mind through Mikumo's singing, which would put him at the very center of the network. He even admits that he was inspired by the Vajra, as he too considered them to be superior to the Protoculture's flaws.
• All four of the parents of Miki and Yuu in Marmalade Boy are so synchronized as to seem at times to be a hive mind. This is so pronounced through most of the series that the few times when they don't seem to be in harmony (as when they staged a fight to bring Miki around regarding their odd living arrangement) come to seem even creepier than when they are.
• In Naruto, Pain/Nagato has the Six Paths of Pain technique, which controls six bodies that are in constant communication. However, in effect, they're just People Puppets controlled by The Man Behind the Curtain.
• The insects from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, though this is only stated outright in the manga.
• In Neon Genesis Evangelion, this is probably the intended final result of Instrumentality since breaking down individual minds and merging them into one being at the very least happens at one point. Since the ending does not make it clear, it might be more accurate to label it above as a literal hive mind... or as something different altogether.
• The Team Galactic grunts of Pokémon Adventures. Not only do they all look alike, they all move as if one entity.
• Heavily implied to be true of Kyubey in Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Later confirmed by Word of God.
• The Invid of Robotech. At least, until the Regis decides humanity's individuality is evolutionarily superior, and starts artificially creating her own children as Half Human Hybrids. Even then, the only change with the hybrids is that they can shut down the link and aren't ruled by it — by and large, they're still part of it.
• Str.A.In.: Strategic Armored Infantry has a race of alien girls whom Emily belongs to, whose hive mind ignores relativity (in a series in which Faster-Than-Light Travel is supposedly impossible). Hoping to harness this power, humans captured some of them and vivisected them to create Mimics (when the entire race could feel it).
• This appears to be the case for the Anti-Spiral in Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. Though we only ever see the one, he doesn't appear as though he has a fixed physical form, and always refers to himself in the plural, or refers to himself as the Anti-Spiral race. It's thought that the Anti-Spiral shown is a psychic manifestation of the combined wills and minds of the entire species. At the same time, however, these traits also make this being a Mind Hive, as the entire Anti-Spiral race is conscious inside of him at once.

Comic Books

• In Astro City, the Gorilla Swarm is an army of insect-headed primates with a hive mind. The story "Everyday Life" has them being mind-controlled by a villain (The Silver Brain), making this a double instantiation of the trope.
• Buck Godot: Zap Gun for Hire:
  • PSmIth is a population of genetically-engineered humans that deliberately developed themselves into a hive mind over the course of generations. This drives the plot of their introductory story. Buck is repeatedly assaulted by what appears to be a very angry bald man who loudly declares Buck to be his murderer, and seems to come back all the more frenzied each time Buck manages to incapacitate (or, eventually, kill) him. It eventually turns out that the bartender was letting people have free drinks while dazzled by his new girlfriend — and PSmith, unfamiliar with alcoholic beverages, attempted to drink one of everything in the bar, managing to pass out after 138 of them. Up until this point PSmith had never experienced unconsciousness as a hive mind, so when one of those brains winked out, he reckoned one of his units had been killed.
  • This story also introduces an interesting look at a possible weakness in any hive mind: if a member of a hive mind is mentally impaired, will it affect the hive mind itself? For the PSmiths: yes and no. The unit that blacked out at the bar is still awake enough to share its intoxication with any other PSmiths nearby, leaving Buck confused about how the angry bald man gets drunk for no apparent reason.
• The DCU:
  • Green Lantern: The Orange Lantern Corps are beings made of an orange energy that resembles fire. They recruit new members by consuming them. Their Hive... uh, King is a comically hoggish alien named Larfleeze.
  • Krypton No More: Superman and Supergirl battle the J'ai, an alien race whose members are psychically connected and fight in sync.
  • Supergirl: In Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade, Streaky kidnaps all Linda's schoolmates and puts them inside a "mass-to-psychic energy conversion spectro-globe" in where their minds merge.
  • Wonder Woman (1942): Rykorn males are born/hatched fully grown and already tied into and subservient to the hive mind lead by their king. The females are so alien it's unclear how they think, but they have enough sentience to work to protect themselves and their offspring.
• Marvel Universe:
  • Deadpool: In Night of the Living Deadpool, Wade attempts to cure the zombie plague by spreading his Healing Factor power amongst them, and does so by coating himself in the chemical that gave it to him and letting a bunch of zombies eat him. While it works, it also causes his consciousness to spread along with it.
    Deadpool: [narrating] And as awareness spread from one undead body to the next, I could only think one, unified thought.
    Zombie: [speaking] Omnipotence won't be all that bad.
  • Fantastic Four: The Poppupians, the alien race that resident prankster the Impossible Man belonged to, were like this. (And they were likely much friendlier than most examples.)
  • Spider-Man: Swarm is a swarm of bees whose individual members are each part of a (former) human consciousness.
  • Ultimate Marvel: One of the variant Skrull races are the Chitauri, who see individuality as a disease, and themselves as the "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.
  • X-Men: The Stepford Cuckoos are quintuplets with a telepathic hive mind.
• PS238: The Commonality. 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.
• Star Wars: The Screaming Citadel: Abersyn symbiotes and their hosts retain individual consciousnesses, but are psychically joined together in a network dominated by whichever individual has the most willpower and dominant personality.
• The Wicked + The Divine: Dionysus is one of the rare cases of a positive example. His powers are used to join consciousnesses together to create a party where everyone is happy and can have an experience they'll remember the rest of their lives. Individuals enter and exit the party in their own time, and being connected to all of them, Dio oversees everything and ensures everyone is safe and happy.
• Zombies Christmas Carol: While the zombies are not this in the present day, by the time of the future they're so hungry and numerous that reasoning with them or helping them is futile, as everything rational has been compressed into a single, hungry drive.

Fan Works

By Title

• Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): The Many are The Assimilator, capable of merging and dividing as they form and re-form new Mind Hives, and they're connected by a telepathic Hive Mind with their genetic source, Ghidorah, acting as their Hive Queen.
• Building Faith: Faith and Molly Carpenter have a part time magical hive mind going. If they're in range of each other, in similar enough emotional and mental states, and able to magically connect - bam hive mind. If this isn't the case they just have Twin Telepathy.
• A Certain Droll Hivemind: The titular hive mind of clones, connected through Electronic Telepathy. During the experiment, the Network was essentially a single person with twenty thousand bodies; every Sister had nearly identical experiences, and any deviations (such as when a Sister was about to be killed by Accelerator) was absorbed by the entire Network, keeping them identical. Now that they've been spread out over the globe, it's impossible for them to remain identical, because each individual Sister can't possibly process individual experiences from ten thousand people at once. They are therefore slowly diverging, but they still have a very alien mindset. In particular, it's implied several times that the Sisters don't value their lives, they value their memories. They don't have much of a problem with the concept of individual clones dying again (though they don't want more pain), but since their divergences are too great and they wouldn't be able to upload their full memories to the Network before death, they do everything they can to avoid more deaths.
• Child of the Storm: In Book III, it's described as one of the most dangerous pieces of psychic technology, and as it turns out, this is for damned good reason.
  • Sinister. At first, it's suggested that he simply uses the Body Surf trick to hop from one cloned body to another via the red gem on his forehead(s), but it is then hinted that there are multiple versions of him active at once — including the original, something supported by Maddie noting that he sometimes turns up in unexpected places. And if he were just hopping from body to body, she'd notice. It's what makes him so incredibly hard to kill... until Doctor Strange gets hold of one of his bodies, and hacks the network.
  • Sunniva encounters a group of Stone Age humans c. 40,000 years ago in Book III who have managed to form a very early one of these, coordinating hunting and general organisation and combining their otherwise limited powers to protect themselves. Given that she's an Asgardian royal and a Phoenix host, a Physical God wielding the power of a Cosmic Entity, she finds it absolutely adorable (including the way it fluffs up its metaphorical fur in her presence), but manages to avoid cooing because that's undignified and patronising.
  • She also temporarily creates one as part of trying to teleport everyone off of Sakaar simultaneously, linking all their minds up - though it's more a sort of psychic computer network through which she can project her will to try and protect them from the Grandmaster. Harry, also having encountered the above-mentioned early Hive Mind, ends up getting a spectacularly insane idea - share a tiny bit of his Phoenix fire with everyone, creating a supercharged psionic feedback loop billions strong, unleashing it on Sakaar and on the Grandmaster in particular. He implies that he could do this in a normal reality, but if he did, he'd probably blow up "a universe or five."
• Dimensional Links: The Four were once one Link until the Four Sword split them into four. Unlike their successors Green, Blue, Red, and Vio, who are one boy split into four boys, they describe themselves as one boy split into four bodies. They walk, fight, and speak in sync, but they have just enough individuality to have telepathic discussions and describe themselves as plural. It is possible, but painful, to make one act individually.
• Doors to the Unknown: Multiple appear in story. Valigan is capable of severing himself into multiple duplicates, Taylor controls her swarm as she does in cannon, and Adilege, a member of The Society, appears as a pair of mentally-linked individuals from a species called the devati. Who are this naturally.
• For the Glory of Irk: The Irkens have a mild one called the Collective. While it doesn't actually connect their minds, it does link them through their PAKs, creating a sense of togetherness no matter where they are. The Control Brains, however, intend to convert it into a traditional example, turning all Irkens into drones that they'll dominate.
• Golden Threads Tie Us has the Risen. Severa describes them as "some type of hive mind, albeit imperfect, with the fell edragon as their queen". They move, act and fight as though they were a single being, animated by a single (and wicked) intelligence.
• Natural Selection: The Life Fibers are all operate under this and communicate with each other via connected consciousness. Ryuko is connected to it, having heard the voices and pull of the Life Fibers since she was born, though the influence waned over the years as Junketsu became a major part of her life. After Nui frees her from Ragyo's Mind Stitching, she cuts herself off from the hive mind in order to find her own truth.
• Past Sins: Chapter 13 shows that Nightmare Moon can divide herself into multiple, mentally connected bodies, given that they Speak in Unison.
• Pony POV Series: Nyarlathotrot operates on this idea, with each of his many Avatars being a unique entity while still part of the collective whole that is Nyarlathotrot. Destroying one doesn't really affect him much, but will likely royally tick off the rest. A large number of his Avatars can merge together to form his original one, being considerably more powerful than the individual Avatars, but also making defeating him in one move possible.
• Rocketship Voyager:
  • When humanity first landed an expedition on Mars, it created a telepathic Hate Plague that caused every Martian in the area, including women and children, to massacre them.
  • The Psiborg Collective evolved from a group of radical scientists experimenting with the psychic gestalt. They plan to assimilate every species in the galaxy into a single Overmind in order to end all conflict and inequality.
• Sharing the Nation: Post-ascension, Fluttershy is telepathically connected to all animals within a fairly broad range of herself, allowing her to experience everything that they do and to take over direct control of them at need, which is marked by them gaining her normal coloration for the duration of this possession.
• The Tenn Duology: Not quite, but Irkens do have a collective memory database managed by the Control Brains that they can access via their PAKs, which are added to it at the end of their lives.
• Thousand Shinji: The MP Evas are explicitly said to have this.
• Warriors Redux: This is how StarClan is believed to be. When good warriors and seers die, they become of one mind in StarClan.
• What Tomorrow Brings: The second time Tom morphs an ant, he's alone and feels like he's missing extensions of himself.

Films — Animated

• The Pict aliens in the Hetalia: Axis Powers movie Paint It, White. They all say the exact same things at the exact same time, and are trying to get all humans to join them.
• In How to Train Your Dragon and How to Train Your Dragon 2, dragons seem to be telepathically linked to the kaiju-sized Alpha Dragon, developing a hive mind. Albeit without the Alpha Dragon around they have full individual thought.
• The Nightmare Before Christmas: Oogie Boogie is made of insects and worms and yet he manages to move, speak and do all kinds of evil stuff. It's debatable if there is a Hive Queen (if there is, it's probably a little, white, earwig-like bug).
• The Drej in Titan A.E. are heavily implied to be a hive-mind race, with only the Queen capable of advanced/complex thinking (hence the holding cells designed to hold disobedient drej drones cannot hold the creative human Cale Tucker for long). The hive-mind nature is directly stated in director commentary.

Films — Live-Action

• Nestor, one of the aliens in Battle Beyond the Stars, is a hive-mind race. They/he/it are very bored and lonely, leading to some of its component-drones joining the eponymous battle because it potentially provides the new experience of fighting for a doomed cause. At one point, a captured drone's arm is cut off and attached to the film's body-part-replacing villain, wherein it is revealed that the Nestor-mind is still able to control the appendage, almost killing its new host before getting hacked back off.
• Ben 10: Alien Swarm: The main antagonist is a swarm of alien nanotechnology chips dominated by a hive mind intelligence aiming to take over the planet. To make the villain easier to defeat, they also introduced a queen controlling the hive.
• The City of Lost Children features "The Octopus", Conjoined Twins who speak in tandem, scratch each others' itches, taste what the other is eating, and generally behave as a single organism with eight limbs and two heads.
• The Strangers in Dark City (1998). They're on the search for human individuality.
• Word of God says that the prawns from District 9 were originally part of a hive mind, but the ones stranded on Earth are disconnected from it.
• In Edge of Tomorrow, the aliens operate via Hive Mind, which the hero accidentally enters by killing an Alpha and being splashed with its blood. Eventually he kills the Hive Queen which stops all the aliens.
• The alien in The Faculty is a parasitic Hive Queen that infects host bodies to spread itself out. The infected lose their senses of self and become part of the collective consciousness.
  "All of you were just like the others. So, I thought I would give you a taste of my world."
• The titular antagonist of The Hive is an engineered virus designed to instill telepathy in its subjects, but which instead fuses them into a singular malevolent psychic entity.
• In The Hive 2008, a colony of ants living on an island in South America develops a collective consciousness, possibly through the help of aliens. This eventually goes to the extreme of them being able to act as one entity, and build an enormous supercomputer underground, made up entirely of ants.
• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull uses this trope to a huge extent, even stating that the aliens in the film are a hive mind.
• In Pacific Rim, the Kaiju operate this way. Dr. Newton performs a Drift with a Kaiju brain in hopes of learning more about them, but forgets the connection is two-way and all the Kaiju learn what he knows.
• The alien in Slither is a parasitic Hive Queen that infects host bodies to make drones that it inhabits with its own consciousness.
• "Eight" in The Specials is a superhero that inhabits eight separate human bodies, gaining the ability to take a tropical vacation while simultaneously dispensing wisdom to teammates at the base.
• The Arachnids (or Bugs) from the Starship Troopers films. The series expanded on them having a caste system, with each subspecies filling a specific role. The Brain Bugs, and the 'Brain of Brains' Behemacoatyl from Starship Troopers 3: Marauder (the largest Bug seen so far — its body engulfs almost an entire planet), have extreme psychic abilities that can be used to control all bugs in the colony. The humans initially believe that the drones they've been facing are just mindless automatons before they realize that it's an intelligent superorganism. In Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation, the General (who's been infected by a mind-control bug) uses this as a justification for exterminating humanity:
  General Jack Gordon Shephard: Poor creatures. Why must we destroy you? I'll tell you why. Order is the tide of creation. But yours is a species that worships...the one over the many. You glorify your intelligence... because it allows you to believe anything. That you have a destiny. That you have a right. That you have a cause. That you are special. That you are great. But in truth, you are born insane. And such misery... cannot be allowed... to spread!
• Used in, of all things, The Movie for The Suite Life on Deck. The Big Bad, Dr. Olsen, wanted to achieve this first by turning every set of twins in the world into Single-Minded Twins under his command, then merging them into a larger hive mind. He tries to do the same to Zack and Cody, but they're saved because of their sibling rivalry.
• In The World's End, the human robots are linked and controlled through a hive mind. Once it leaves Earth, the robots left behind are allowed to think for themselves, actually acting like the people they were meant to replace.

Literature

By Author

• Isaac Asimov:
  • The entire planet in Foundation's Edge is incorporated: every man, woman, animal, and every plant and inanimate object on the eponymous planet, all the way down to the rocks and the atmosphere. This is of the Mental Fusion variant, as individual Gaians possess names, personalities and even prestige based on individual accomplishments. However, important decisions are made via an ultimate form of direct democracy where everyone and everything on Gaia contributes at least some input to superorganism's decision-making. Gaia's ultimate goal is to create Galaxia — turning the entire galaxy into a shared mind, from every asteroid and dead planet to the great black hole at its center.
  • "Green Patches": The organisms of Saybrook's Planet have green patches that grants Psychic Powers. Their Telepathy is used to facilitate a Genius Loci where life has formed a global organism that lives in blissful cooperation with everything else.
• Jim Butcher:
  • The Vord from Codex Alera are referred to as one of these, but in practice what they actually have is a series of Hive Queens, which control the hordes around them directly. Without the queens, the Vord revert to individuals and threaten each other as much as non-Vord.
  • The Dresden Files: Each pack of cornerhounds, which show up in Peace Talks and Battle Ground, is actually a single creature in multiple bodies.
• Joe Haldeman:
  • The Taurans in The Forever War. It is only after the creation of Man, a group intellect derived from humans, that the human race learns what a mistake the war was.
  • In Forever Peace (also by Haldeman but unrelated to The Forever War), small groups of soldiers have neural implants that allow them to act briefly as a shared consciousness for perfect coordination in the field. It turns out if a group stays linked for long enough (over several days), they come out with sufficiently heightened empathy from the experience that they can't bear hurting others, becoming useless as soldiers.
• Peter F. Hamilton:
  • The Primes from the Commonwealth Saga are a textbook example of a superorganism. They evolved as mindless, animal-like "motiles" that had the ability to merge with each other into a more intelligent, sentient "immotile", which would then spawn and direct other motiles by sharing neural impulses with specialized tentacles. Since each immotile can transfer its mind from one body to another, they are all essentially immortal (and most immotile collectives are actually clusters of hundreds of linked bodies), and also insanely hostile to any life form that is not under their control, including other immotiles. Once they discover radio, they each become a true Hive Mind, singular consciousnesses inhabiting armies of motile soldiers and immotile clusters. Then they proceed to attack each other and everything else. The first thing one of them did when it discovered wormhole portals was to nuke every other immotile into kingdom-come and take over their armies, essentially becoming the entire species. Their xenophobia and expansionist imperative extends to the entire Universe. An immotile cannot envision a Universe containing anything other than itself.
    MorningLightMountain: There is only one Universe and it can contain only one life.
  • The sequel to the Commonwealth Saga, the Void Trilogy, introduces Multiples — humans who spread their minds through multiple cloned bodies, with thoughts and emotions distributed through gaia motes and cybernetics. They got the idea from the Primes.
• Robert A. Heinlein:
  • In Methuselah's Children, the "Little People" appear to be childlike humanoids covered with short golden fur, but an "individual" among the Little People consists of between thirty-odd and ninety physically separate bodies and brains, all linked into a single "telepathic rapport group".
  • Starship Troopers is quite possibly the Trope Maker (or at least the Trope Codifier) for science fiction, featuring a race of intelligent Arachnids divided into different castes and all directed by a central "brain" caste.
• A recurring theme in Frank Herbert's books.
  • Hellstrom's Hive works both as a strange way to live and as a supersystem entity with its own goals. It's interesting that at the beginning of the story even some of its own components used in such "anomal" activity are unaware and some can't believe this.
  • In The Santaroga Barrier, the hive-mind is composed of linked unconscious parts of participants' brains and does not show great intellectual capability. Though not actively hostile, it's very dangerous as it's prone to paranoid overreaction in self-protection. Even despite the fact that its own components don't like this at all.
  • In Dune, a rite of the Bene Gesserit gives them access to the memories of their ancestors. If a mind that isn't strong enough undergoes the rite, then the personalities bleed over involuntarily.
• The Cold, a being who appears in Kim Newman's Time and Relative and "Cold Snap". It's basically a gigantic, sapient cold front embodied by every frozen water particle on the planet, only awakening for imminent Ice Ages. The Cold isn't precisely malicious, it just doesn't understand its own actions (learning that there's more than one conscious entity in the world nearly breaks its non-physical brain). It comes very close to be a lampoon example, considering that it uses snowmen as physical proxies and characters how to communicate with it by making snow angels.
• Stephen King:
  • The "phoners" in Cell form flocks with apparent shared awareness within the flock and between flocks in the same geographical area.
  • The ghosts or psychic echo which may or may not exist in the Overlook Hotel in The Shining are said to have a single, collective group intelligence which functions as the hotel's true "manager".
  • An interesting subversion in The Tommyknockers, as the transformed humans/aliens grow increasingly mentally linked — but they not only retain their individuality, they increasingly despise one another as they become aware of each other's secret thoughts.
• Spider Robinson:
  • Callahan's Crosstime Saloon: A character in Lady Slings the Booze is one person with two bodies. Apparently, she started out as identical twins, but her parents treated them as one person and eventually she stuck that way. Sadly, Arethusa loses one of her bodies at the end of the book. The two bodies share a telepathic connection, which helped reinforce the "one mind, two bodies" thing. It also plays with muscle memory a bit: Only one body can play piano, while the other is much better at their other job. (Hint: they work in a brothel — though it's not sleazy, and it's implied that Jesus might be a member).
  • Spider Robinson seems fascinated with this concept, as many of his later novels form a sort of continuity, with two different takes on the Hive Mind concept.
    • The first is the Stardance series, in which the Hive Mind is created by alien Sentient Phlebotinum that grants telepathy along with a lot of other things.
    • The second is in the series of books started by Mindkiller and extended in Time Pressure, in which the Hive Mind is just that — The Mind, created by humans linked up through a computer network that turned sentient.
• Theodore Sturgeon:
  • The Cosmic Rape details a galactic hive-mind coming to Earth.
  • In More Than Human, the main characters are all part of a single being. And though it is never said they are telepathic, they do have some kind of mind-to-mind connection that helps them, if nothing else, find each other.

By Title

• Alliance/Union: In Serpent's Reach, the worker/warrior/etc. members of the ant-like majat can think simple thoughts on their own. If a thought seems new, important or disturbing it will go to the Hive Queen and share it with her. The queen takes all of the simple thoughts brought to her by the other castes and combines them together into more complex thoughts. Memories are stored in the group of drones that always stay with the queen, which allows for a single hive to maintain a continuous, single consciousness across a span of billions of years.
• Angel Station has the Beloved, who are basically Living Ships with crews.
• Animorphs:
  • The Howlers, a race of genocidal super soldiers who serve God of Evil Crayak. They all remember every battle they've ever fought, making them highly efficient killers. Crayak carefully edits this shared memory, preventing them from remembering any defeats or realizing that they're not playing a game.
  • The Taxxons are individuals spawned from a Living Hive. Some are loyal to it, others not. Unusually enough, it's a good hive that regulates their inherent Horror Hunger. The Taxxons that reject the Hive and ally with the Yeerks are villainous, and Elfangor helps the Hive attempt to regain control.
  • At one point, the Animorphs morph into termites. When they morph into a species of animal for the first time, the Animorphs have to contend with the animal's instincts. In this case, they ended up locked into the termite hivemind, and very nearly got stuck in it. For good. The only way they escaped was when Cassie managed to force herself to believe the queen was an ant for long enough to kill her, breaking the connections, at which point everyone got a hold of themselves and demorphed (through a wooden floor — yes, it hurt). The Animorphs almost never took hive-insect forms again, save for Marco, who morphed a bee once — however, he said it wasn't nearly as bad as the others.
  • Before termites they morphed ants. The complete loss of self was utterly horrifying for them; and after subsequently nearly being torn apart by other ants they all make a point to never morph ants again. Marco does at one point become an ant (just to demonstrate his morphing ability) but demorphs before the ant's mind/instincts can emerge.
  • An ant at one point accidentally gets the ability to morph and acquires Cassie. When it morphs into her, it starts screaming in terror and pain. Cassie (through her own revulsion and horror) wonders why, before realizing that loss of a hive mind and gaining of self is as horrifying to it as the loss of self was to them.
  • In the Prequel book The Ellimist Chronicles, Toomin (the future Ellimist) and his ship get attacked by Father, an alien sea-creature which kills and assimilates the minds of anyone who comes near it. It keeps Toomin alive a plaything to torture, connected to his Hive Mind but still an individual. Eventually, Toomin begins to absorb Father's captured minds into himself until he has them all, after which Father is essentially nothing, having no real sentience of its own.
• In Awake in the Night Land, in latter eons, humans have evolved to the point of having shared thoughts and emotions, albeit they still retain individuality.
• Bazil Broketail: An interesting variation. Each Padmasan city is governed by a Doom — a malevolent and sentient entity, created by dark magic and sealed within an inanimate object (the one in charge of Tummuz Orgmeen, depicted in the first book, inhabited a featureless sphere made of stone and used three possessed humans as its senses). They do not control the actions of their citizens directly, but they still influence them all subtly, driving them to evil and instilling absolute loyalty in them. Tellingly, when the Doom of Tummuz Orgmeen is destroyed by Bazil, all citizens suddenly lose all allegiance to Padmasa they had, pack up their stuff and quickly leave the city en masse.
• The bees in The Bees have one although not all drones can actually hear it and it only pops up when there is an emergency, otherwise it's just expected that everybody is working together to the good the the hive.
• The Belgariad: The Dalish people have one, which they keep hidden from the rest of the world, that links every member of their race. It's implied that this links not just the living Dals, but the dead ones and the ones yet to be born - it's a hive mind that transcends time. Silk, on hearing its description, dubs it an "Oversoul". This makes them rather more advanced than they seem on the surface, as the Dal hive mind never forgets anything. This also makes them telepathic, which their guardians (like Toth), born mute, use to communicate.
• The Book of the Named has a group of prehistoric cats that are a hive mind. They are led by a group leader called True-Of-Voice from whom emanates the 'song' that links them all together. The one cat who does get pulled away from the mindlink has a hard time knowing what to do on his own. Eventually, he ends up somewhere between, able to think somewhat on his own, but still with definite qualities of the hive mind cats.
• In the Bounders series, this is the Youli's natural state. In The Tundra Trials, Jasper and his friends infect a Youli ship with a computer virus, which interferes with their ability to connect with each other, causing many of them to behave in a violent and unpredictable manner and worsening human/Youli relations even more.
• In The Child Garden by Geoff Ryman, there's The Concensus, which is a storage for the minds of every person in the country and connects them to it and to each other.
• In Childhood's End, the next (psychic) generation of humanity Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence so they can join with a galactic Overmind. This is also not presented as a bad thing, never mind that doing so destroys the Earth and everyone on it.
• The Chronicles of Dorsa: The Order of Taghren it turns out is one. Every member knows what the others do, and the collective Order mind sees each individual as more akin to digits than anything else. Any one of them being killed is unimportant to it.
• The Gargantius Effect-equipped armies in The Cyberiad. This makes them pacifistic over time.
• The marid in The Daevabad Trilogy can share and mingle their thoughts or memories with each other at will due to their nature as water beings — it's likened to being part of a river or a current. Sobek shares some memories with Ali this way. Later, when Ali fully joins with the marid, he experiences all of them — from the fearsome ocean gods like Tiamat to small benevolent ones who just keep their own small body of water well-kept.
• The Swarm (or Roy) in Death or Glory. When the alien Alliance sends representatives to the human Volga colonists (having previously ignored humanity as a backward race of over-evolved apes), there are several insect-like creatures among them. Unlike the other Alliance races, who send official representatives, the Swarm merely sends random drones. After all, each drone is the same as any other.
• Terry Pratchett uses this concept several times over in Discworld:
  • Hex is a literal hive mind.
  • Granny Weatherwax is able to "borrow" animals, and at one point she does this to a beehive. While "borrowing" is a standard skill for witches, Esme is one of the few who would dare try it on a swarm instead of an individual creature.
  • In A Hat Full of Sky, Miss Level is one person in two bodies. 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.
  • Spider the Rat King, the Big Bad of The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, is eight blind rats tied together by their tails. The only way for them to survive is to think as one, and the resulting hive mind is strong enough to control a town's rat population.
  • Also inverted with Miss Pointer/Mrs. Pickles in Thud! — two people living in one body. Miss Pickles says that she knows it's supposed to be an illness, but they get along very well.
• The Electric State is set in a post-apocalyptic USA, where Bad Things happened after overuse of the "Neurocaster" virtual reality system. It is implied to have created a hostile hive mind.
• The Buggers/Formics of Ender's Game are the ur-example of the 'controlled by a central mind' variety. One of the causes of the war stemmed from their believing we had those too. Specifically, the first war with the Formics started when they made first contact with humanity, and assuming humans were hive minds like them, blew up a spaceship to basically say "hi". Humans in retaliation, fought back and killed queens in the process. The second war was the Formic's retaliation because as far as they were concerned, killing grunts might be okay, but killing sentient queens was an atrocity. However, they eventually realized that humans aren't hive minds like them; horrified at the fact they had killed so many sentient lives, they retreated back to their home world. And with the third war at their homeworld, while they are doing what they can to survive, they don't blame humanity for wanting them dead and accept that their destruction is justifiable. They also have multiple Hive Queens, and it wasn't entirely clear at first if the queens share their consciousness. They have since been confirmed to be separate beings; each Hive Queen had a separate Hive Mind before they all formed the great alliance. There used to be only one Queen, though, with her killing her daughters as they were born to prevent rivalry, until they learned to coexist.
• The Fire Vampires in Donald Wandrei's Fire Vampires of Fthaggua and August Derleth's Flame Creatures of Cthugha have a hive mind. All knowledge gleaned from a slain victim (they gain sustenance by draining energy from intelligent beings) is shared by every member of the specie.
• In The Founders Trilogy, there's cadences, groups of humans which join their minds to become greater overall minds for various reasons, like combining scriving knowledge for Design or healing knowledge for Greeter. It's strictly voluntary and there are ways to use telepathy without joining a Hive Mind, and functioning as one is "monstrously difficult", but they consider it Worth It for the connection to others and greater capacity for empathy and change. The ending reveals that eventually all of humanity joined the Hive Mind, which created a utopia.
• The Founding of Valdemar: The vrondi (or at least the ones imprisoned in Doll bodies) have one of these — what any one of them knows, all of them know. This makes them incredibly useful in The Plan, as they essentially provide instantaneous long-range communication without security issues.
• Goblins in the Castle: Emotional hive mind, at least. The goblins have individual minds, but are all connected to their king in such a way that his madness becomes theirs, and when he's restored to sanity, their madness is also cured.
• In His Dark Materials, dæmons are the the manifestation of humans' souls in animal form; therefore, a human does share a mind with their dæmon — though sometimes they can conceal secrets from one another.
• The Insects in The History of the Galaxy are partly this, although it's still possible for them to retain their individuality. Their hive can, though, force a number of its members to undergo a "de-evolution" of sorts, turning them into mindless drones, usually to accomplish some enormous task or for use in the "We Have Reserves" type of warfare. When there is no longer need for the drones, the hive reverses the process, returning the Insects their individuality. Because they have a virtually unlimited workforce, the Insects, while quite advanced in other areas, have never developed nor done any research in cybernetics. As such, they are well aware that the humans (who are millions of years younger than them) can quickly bring to bear awesome and precise firepower through their serv-machines operated by a fusion of human and AI.
• Horus Heresy: In 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.
• In I Don't Want to be the Hive Queen, all Vex are connected telepathically, with the Hive Queen being the only one who's actually sentient while the rest are basically mindless drones that share her will.
• This plays a big part in Imperial Radch. The main character, Breq, is the last remaining part of the A.I. hive mind that controlled the starship Justice of Toren and its thousands of ancillary soldiers. In addition to all the other A.I.s, The Emperor also has a mind shared across thousands or millions of cloned bodies so that she can oversee her empire personally.
• Impractical Magic: Istima is a Wizarding School called the Six Court Academy. The Spring Court does "complex systems magic" often by using their trademark mind magic called the Collective. Dependant on the skill of the spell caster and what version of the spell they use, the Collective creates various temporary hive minds. The lowest level is described as creating a shared mental room where all participants can choose to put/share thoughts, knowledge, plans, and even their senses. This is how the many complexities of surgery are handled by a team of specialized healers-in-training.
• In the Inheritance Cycle, Dragons and their Riders form a mini version as a result of their mental bond. They are technically two individuals, but their thoughts, feelings and even senses are constantly shared to the point that they are effectively one being.
• It is unclear whether the xibits from Kadingir are a straight example or not. The three-thousand strong colony of small orange balls of fur usually displays one emotion at a time and speak in unison, with every single xibit acting as one, and Ishtar even acknowledges at one point that she feels them as an emotional unit. However, enough xibits have shown individual traits and actions to challenge the pure Mind Hive theory. Them speaking only in gibberish doesn't help research much, either.
• In The Light of Other Days, 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.
• The Tyr of The Madness Season. Their hive mind is what allows them to dominate space travel and maintain a vast interstellar empire. However, when one of them gets given the name Frederick, it learns about individuality and acts to preserve it.
• D'ivers in the Malazan Book of the Fallen are shapeshifters who split into several identical shapes (they can't choose) but maintain a single mind. This can be anything from a dozen to thousands of individual bodies, and so long as one survives so does the D'ivers.
• The Midwich Cuckoos: The alien "Children" (30 boys and 30 girls) have two distinct group minds. They protect themselves (and cause havoc along the way), both use telepathy to control others' actions, organs, and other parts of the body.
• "Missile Gap", by Charles Stross, has humanity being wiped out by World War III started by Puppeteer Parasites who are members of a hive mind destroying potential rival species. They distrust the "paranoid individualism" of humanity and lament the fact that humans haven't evolved a more efficient means of survival and evolution like their own, or the galaxy-spanning collective consciousness that dominates the far-future Milky Way.
• The Neverending Story:
  • The Yskalnari, being so much a community that they lack any form of individualism, when a member of the crew dies not only nobody seems to care, nobody even seems to notice.
  • Ygramul the Many is a swarm of steel-blue insects that move with a single will, the entire thing speaking and acting with a single consciousness and taking different forms and bodies by arranging the swarming of its component insects.
• In the Paradox Trilogy, the alien lelgis are believed to have a hive mind. While little is known about them, it is believed that only the queens are sentient individuals and that the rest are mere drones controlled by the queens' minds.
• Christopher Hinz's Paratwa series uses this as a main theme. The aliens' evolution stressed cooperation (instead of competition as on Earth) as the key to survival. Alien/human hybrids were telepathically connected, and usually went fatally insane if their twin died.
• The XCabs in Jeff Noon's Pollen are a fleet of taxicabs whose drivers are connected into a hivemind, forming (and sharing) a map of the city as drive, receiving their orders from the XCab Hive. They have their memories erased when they join and return to the Hive every night.
• The Quadrail Series has a hive mind constituted of millions of tiny polyps, which normally live in underwater corals. By themselves they're practically insignificant, but in large numbers they become a telepathic, and rather malevolent, all-conquering mind which even speaks of itself in the singular. The creepiest part is, they can infect normal people and create colonies — "walkers" — that will then obey them; they can offer subtle suggestions to drive the infected to do something on its own accord, or they can take over the body entirely and suicide it when no longer needed.
• Repairman Jack: In Hosts, this combines with The Virus. The "Unity" takes over the minds of infected individuals, killing their personality, free will, etc. and inhabiting their body. They all share thoughts, try to expand the Unity and infect everyone to take over the world, and are quite willing to sacrifice individual members to meet that goal.
• In Eric Nylund's The Resisters series, humans become a part of the alien Cha'zar hive mind at puberty. The titular kids and a handful of adults are the only ones who've escaped thus far.
• The Revelation Space Series contains the Conjoiners, who have a fairly high degree of independence — more so since they figured out how creepy they were to other humans.
• The Riftwar Cycle:
  • The cho-ja from the Empire Trilogy share consciousness amongst the Hive Queens who have reached maturity.
  • From the same universe, the Dread are also revealed to have this. There's actually only one Dread, a near-omnipotent emobodiment of the concept of nonexistence. The Dread that generally appear are all manifestations of the same will. Dreadmasters, Dreadlords, and the eventually encountered Dreadking are not, therefore, actually the rulers of the Dread, just the most powerful manifestations.
• In The Rook, Gestalt is quadruplets (identical twin boys, another boy and a girl) and also an incestous baby who have one overall mind running all the bodies.
• The Saint of Steel: The Warrenmind from Paladin's Strength are a hivemind of rabbits. Nonthreatening, but rather disturbing.
• Second Apocalypse: This is apparently how Shaeönanra has escaped death: he appears as a half-dozen decrepit and crippled men. The sorcerer speaks through the husks, with each saying a few words at a time.
• Sector General has a hive-minded minor culture, the radiation-metabolising Telfi (who in a notorious Series Continuity Error are insectoid in one book and reptilian in another).
  • Sector General also features a single hive-minded viral colony. It moves through a sequence of hosts and inadvertently causes several hard-to-diagnose medical crises before it learns how to symbiotically live within someone's body with their consent. The virus aspires to eventually make an entire star intelligent.
• In Shadow of the Conqueror, all the Shade are connected mentally, which allows Greater and Lord Shade to speak through the mouths of the mindless lesser Shade.
• The Starchild Trilogy: In Rogue Star, the people who choose to become part of the mind of the living star Almalik may join in "communion" and become part of a great shared consciousness, if they wish.
• The Starfire Bug War novels by David Weber and Steve White, In Death Ground and The Shiva Option, have aliens which are telepathically linked. The latter novel's titular Option involves rendering lifeless all planets on which the Bugs/Baahgs/Arachnids have established bases, in order to both exterminate the beachhead and disorient the survivors.
• In The Stars Are Cold Toys, the Kualkua are revealed to be a single consciousness with billions of bodies (which can split into even more bodies on demand). Another race of peaceful hive-minded insects is mentioned to have existed in the past, until their homeworld was destroyed by the Conclave, who view any "useless" race (the insects couldn't handle spaceflight) as a waste of resources.
• In the Star Trek Novel 'Verse, the Tholians are halfway there. While all individuals (and indeed possessing just as many dreamers, dissenters, seditionists and individualists as any other Trek culture), they have a version of this on the instinctive level. The Tholian lattice connects the minds of all Tholians, distributing basic race-knowledge to all and allowing individuals to commune with one another. The lattice is regulated carefully, with different castes having different degrees of access. On occasion, it can indeed cause the entirety of the Tholian race to share an experience, as was the case with the telepathic assaults of the Shedai. See Star Trek: Vanguard and Star Trek: The Lost Era in particular.
• Star Wars Expanded Universe:
  • The Killiks in the Dark Nest Trilogy. One aspect of the Killiks which other species found disturbing was how any person engaging in extended contact with them found themselves losing their individuality and becoming a "Joiner" — essentially becoming part of the Colony and fighting their old people, feeling, at the most, regret if they couldn't convert their friends. However, there were several colonies, each with Killiks that had different appearances and specializations, and Joiners who were converted by one colony, if sent to assist another, actually found the Joiner bond weakening, something which they found horrifying.
  • Galaxy of Fear has Spore, an unsettling individual which takes over peoples' bodies and adds them to itself.
• The Stormlight Archive: Dysian Aimians are intelligent hordes of hundreds of insect-like arthropods called hordelings, all bred for a specific purpose. Some are eyes, some are for storing memory, so on and so on. Often times hordelings are sent out on their own to observe distant happenings as well. An individual hordeling is fairly vulnerable, but the collective is quite dangerous, as well as nearly immortal. Killing the Aimian requires destroying most if not all the hordelings, many of which are indistinguishable from the various other small arthropods around the planet. With practice, the horde can take on a vaguely human shape and speak, but the difference will be immediately obvious to someone who's paying attention.
• In Those That Wake's sequel, What We Become, the neuropleth is a hive mind of mental energy.
• In Three Parts Dead, justice is administered by Justice — an (all-volunteer!) corps of part-time humanoid monstrosities. When their Game Face is on they have extreme strength and endurance, no distinguishing features, and a single incorruptible, implacable mind. Said mind turns out to be that of a dead goddess, and her original followers aren't happy about it.
• Tolkien's Legendarium: J. R. R. Tolkien mentions in his letters that the Orcs have a collective will bound to Melkor and later to Sauron, despite having certain level of individuality and personality and hating their lords as much as each other and themselves. This is why they all went extinct after the death of Sauron; some of them first killed each other or killed themselves, the remaining were easy targets for their enemies as they lost the will to defend themselves and many were just rambling madmen, other just died because they stopped feeding themselves. He even describes them as ants without a queen; mindless, disorganized, volitionless. Kind of a creepy idea, imagining all those Orcs reduced to zombie-like bumbling idiots. However, as mentioned before, Orcs do have distinct personalities, so they're not so much a hive mind in the strictest sense as much as a hive soul.
• In The Traitor Son Cycle, the Odine are one will spread across multitude of bodies, capable of infecting and taking over more.
• In Ukiah Oregon, the Ontongard are telepathic with each other instance of each other and think and act as a single entity. Those instances out of telepathic range will act independently, but do not think of themselves as individuals even in this case.
• In Michael Swanwick's Vacuum Flowers, Earth is occupied by a Hive Mind known as "the Combine". It's (mostly) quarantined within Lunar orbit by the rest of humanity, though in fact the Combine could probably get out if it really wanted to since its technology is several centuries more advanced. The fact that the units are linked by speed-of-light transmissions means that any part of it that gets more than a light-second or so away undergoes "personality" drift and eventually becomes an independent entity. The Combine doesn't want other hive minds around any more than the independent humans do, so as long as they're not actively trying to destroy it the Combine is content to leave trans-Lunar space to the independent humans. The independent humans give a Combine unit (a little boy) what amounts to a psychoactive drug, which breaks him free of (or causes him to be rejected by) the Combine. Since the Combine is in fact pretty benevolent, this may or may not have been a good thing.
• The Vagrant Trilogy: Since infernals can share memories with a touch, this is common.
  • Unbound infernals are so tied up in their Hive Mind that it is extremely difficult for them to tell where one stops and another begins. It's even possible that they have no true individuals until one randomly develops an ego and claws its way out of the writhing mass.
  • The Usurper's minions are bound directly to it, so consumed by its power that they can't even think of rebelling. As they get farther from the Usurper, its power wanes, and they begin to have unique thoughts—assuming, of course, that they can survive so far from the Usurper without its power sustaining them.
  • The Uncivil puts pieces of her essence into dead flesh which she then grafts onto her cultists, augmenting them while simultaneously giving her a whisper into their minds.
  • The First spread its essence across hundreds of humans to shield itself from the press of the world. It has one primary body that has its mind overwritten completely, but all the others are linked. They can see through each other's eyes but retain their own free will, not to mention the physical enhancements.
• The Wandering Inn: The Antiniums, a race of humanoid insects, share a hive mind. They take use of it, when playing against Erin, the genius chess player, as they stand no chance, when they play alone against her.
• Warrior Cats: The rat pack in Firestar's Quest. They're all mindless, doing the same thing; it turns out that they're all following the wishes of one leader rat. Firestar realizes that killing the leader rat is the key to defeating the rats, and once he does so, the rats are much more easily beaten.
• Well World: The Slelcronians, a species of sapient, sessile plants, communicate using symbiotic insects that can relay memories and thought between them. As a result, no individuality exists among them; all Slelcronians are essentially cells in a single giant, diffuse brain, sharing all experiences and thoughts.
• What Zombies Fear: The E'clei are a hive-minded race of corpse-inhabiting parasites.
• Whispers: A set of twins is treated as one person in two bodies. Bruno Frye is a pair of twins born of father-on-daughter rape and is a Serial Killer before one of his bodies is killed. This totally breaks what little sanity the survivor had to begin with.
• Wild Cards: Legion is a single individual who can grow and inhabit multiple custom-made bodies.
• Xeelee Sequence: The human hive living beneath Rome in Coalescent. An example of a scientist working out how an actual human hive might develop over the course of centuries, by means of strict isolation, divergent genetic makeup, social conformity, and pheremonal cues. Turns way creepy with a multi-millennia jump into the future, when future humans rediscover the evolved, highly hive-ified Human Subspecies.
• Zones of Thought: The Tines are individually nonsapient, but form into collectively intelligent packs (of about four to six members) by means of constant subconscious communication through high-frequency sound. This presumably helped them establish a simple technological civilization — the Tines are dog-like quadrupeds, and usually can only operate machines through close cooperation of two members. Each such pack considers itself a single individual, who nevertheless can freely draw upon the memories of individual members from before they became integrated.

Live-Action TV

• Alien Worlds (2020): The Terran aliens, highly advanced beings who have become essentially vast brains in life-support vats, are distinct individuals, but remain in constant mental communication with one another in what the episode describes as a hive mind.
• Angel: Jasmine almost turns everyone in Los Angeles into this. It starts out as a simple mass-Charm Person, but gradually her thralls' individuality erodes until they're just puppets who speak with her voice and act only on her will. She's done this to at least one other species in the past, before abandoning them. They're not part of a Hive anymore, but now they all act like a Stalker with a Crush embittered over a breakup and jealous of humanity for having her attention.
  "We're fusing together. Like the cells of a single body. They're my eyes, my skin, my limbs, and, if need be, my fists."
• Dark Angel: Transgenics of the X7 series were designed with hive minds and can communicate through supersonic means, like bats, without opening their mouths. This is inaudible to other humans, and they don't speak otherwise.
• In The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, the Arathim are a race of spider-like creatures who have a hive mind. Thanks to a Puppeteer Parasite sub-species, they can assimilate other beings into their hive mind as well.
• Doctor Who has several:
  • The Time Lords have something like this. The Doctor at one point mentions that he knows he's the Last of His Kind because he would be able to "feel" any other Time Lords out there, and he can't. (The Time Lords used to completely lack individuality. After genetically enhancing their own species, they gained individual personalities, but still retained the hivemind.)
  • The gas-mask zombies created by The Virus in "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances" have one, as demonstrated when the Doctor's command of "Go to your room!" makes all of them, including their leader, retreat. The problems arise when the leader is a four-year-old boy who is determinedly looking for his mother.
  • In "The Claws of Axos", the seemingly individual Axons are all part of the same entity.
  • The Flood from "The Waters of Mars" exhibit this. It's technically millions upon millions of viral microbes distributed through water and constantly self-replicating, yet they're able to plan and act collectively as a single gestalt. And there's the way Andy and Tarrak are perfectly synchronized when the Flood in them hears Maggie's scream.
  • The villain of "The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos", Tzim-Sha a.k.a. "Tim Shaw", says that his species, the Stenza, have a form of this, which allows him to recreate their technology while in exile.
  • In "Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror", the Skithra have one centred on their queen, so if she dies, they all go down.
  • Each standard Auton is merely an extension of the Nestene Consciousness's will, so they have no individuality. They all contain a small sliver of its mind as well. However, the more advanced models with false memories can gain sentience and go rogue.
  • The Ood, who are naturally telepathic creatures, can communicate telepathically but moreso are naturally meant to be inter-connected with each-other and with the gigantic Ood Brain on their homeworld, and they mostly seem to have collective consciousness with few distinct individuals.
  • The Daleks have a sort-of hive mind called the Pathweb, a communications network that links all Daleks and stores all of their knowledge.
  • The Cybermen have a hive mind, identified in "Nightmare in Silver" as the Cyberiad. At one point the Cyber-Planner in charge of it uses the combined intellect of three million Cybermen to work on a chess problem.
• Dollhouse: The group mind soldiers. All have to reach a consensus, but a particularly strong will can overpower the group. Cue Echo.
• Earth: Final Conflict: A very weak version of this exists with the 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.
• Fringe: A group of test tube babies in "A Better Human Being" shares a mental link as a result of sharing DNA drawn from the same Mad Scientist. As a result, when one of them commits a murder, another witnesses it remotely.
• The Order: The second season features a secret society known as the Sons of Prometheus who all share a hive mind called the Egregore. Once you join the Egregore, leaving it causes severe withdrawal symptoms that can even be fatal if not done carefully.
• The Outpost: Yavalla starts forming one in Season 3 with her kinj, whose spore take over people's minds. This is explicitly compared with various insect hives by Janzo.
• Sliders: One episode has the heroes travel to three remarkably similar worlds, all of which had invented a miracle cure of sorts that consists of bacteria that quickly repair any damage to the human body. The problem is, the bacteria communicate via pulses of light, which are not limited to just within the body. Thus, all those with the bacteria sense each other, although they still retain a measure of individuality. On one world, this has resulted in an Inquisition of sorts that hunts down any "Believers", as they're called. On another, the Believers are a peaceful commune living in tents and meditating. On the third world, the cure was destroyed years before once the authorities realized the problem, although Quinn re-introduces it from his own blood. The sliders also find a way to shut off the bacteria (without removing the effects of what has already been "fixed" in the body) using an oversized flashlight pulsing a coded shutdown signal. This immediately disconnects the individual from the hive mind and leaves them feeling empty and nostalgic.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The changelings spend most of their time in a liquid state on their home planet (the entire species essentially resembles a vast ocean). While in this state, they share a collective consciousness, which they refer to as "the Great Link", while still retaining their individuality. It is also possible for any number of changelings to link in this way.
• This trope proves to be a humongous problem in Star Trek: Discovery Season 4: Species 10-C is a Hive Mind so complete they have no conception of individualism. They believe all species are like this. Thus, when they unleash the Dark Matter Anomaly on the galaxy, causing untold death and destruction, they don't realize what they've done is so devastating.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Borg are a race of cyborgs all linked together in a collective, where thoughts and information are shared.
• Star Trek: The Original Series:
  • "The Return of the Archons" has an omniscient computer named Landru that controlled and psychically linked the humans of its planet after they underwent a process called "absorption".
  • The Monster of the Week in "Operation: Annihilate!" is a superorganism comprised of hundreds of individual, dinner-plate-sized single-celled organisms that can move independently but are all part of the larger whole.
  • The androids from "I, Mudd" are all psychically connected, communing with a central computer during moments of uncertainty or confusion. Many of the androids have identical forms and speak in unison.
• Star Trek: Voyager: One episode involves a trio of ex-Borg drones who still form a small, personal "collective". Problem is, they're hearing each others' thoughts every second, including while they're asleep, and the Loss of Identity is driving them insane. Once this is fixed, they find no longer knowing what the others are about to say a huge relief.
• Stranger Things: The entire Upside-Down is connected with this to the Big Bad, the Mind Flayer. All the organisms, the Demogorgons, the Demodogs, the Mind Flayer's construct and the vines are constantly relayed attack information, which means hurting any creature from the Upside-Down hurts the Mind Flayer, and vice-versa. Season 4 reveals this connection is hijacked by Henry Creel, a psychic banished to the Upside Down by Eleven, who constructed the Mind Flayer using his powers, meaning Vecna is by all purposes, the real Mind Flayer, the rules apply to Vecna as well.

Roleplay

• In Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues, Jenna is turned from an ordinary girl into a giant swarm of insects. The insects automatically have their minds erased when they join the swarm, meaning that her 'body' is composed of hundreds of bugs controlled by the one Jenna consciousness.
• In The Gamer's Alliance, the Dwellers have a hivemind which calls itself the Essence. Essentially every Dweller is just an extension of the Essence's will, and thus killing one Dweller (even a powerful, evolved one) doesn't harm the Essence itself.

Tabletop Games

• Battlelords Of The Twenty Third Century: In the Shadis magazine #23 adventure "Bug Hunt", the Player Characters have to fight the Spiders of the planet Driscoll VII. All of the Spiders are part of a group mind that allows them to communicate with each other and call for help from their comrades in their battles against the PCs.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Illithids have a borderline example — a network (they are all telepathic) centered on the city's Elder Brain, a fused mass of dead mind flayers' still living brains continuing to assimilate the brains of every dying mind flayer of the city. Illithids obey these master minds and depend on their advice, but are individuals enough to trade, compete, have disagreeing factions and so on. They have, however, had a hand in the creation of a number of true hive minds.
    • A 2nd Edition adventure called Dawn of the Overmind is about the illithids creating the titular Overmind, a super-Hive Mind made from and at the direction of their Elder Brains, which gives them the power to restore their ancient empire (or arrange so it never fell). As well, the illithid goddess Ilsensine is thought to manifest physically as an impossibly huge Elder Brain, who has nerve tendrils stretching throughout the planes. She is the mistress of the cranium rat hive, and anyone who attempts to enter her realm will have their brains burned out and turned into a drone subordinate to her great will.
    • Cranium rats are hive-minded swarms of rats, individually no more intelligent than a regular rodent but capable of reaching genius-level intellect in large groups.
  • Formians, the ant-like race from the plane of Mechanus, are a fairly straightforward example of hive-minded insectoid sapients. Formian taskmasters have the ability to dominate others to bring them into the hive mind.
  • Sand hunters are reptilian doglike creatures that hunt in packs of around a dozen, which operate under an intelligent group mind formed by supersonic calls and some limited empathic contact. They're very intelligent on their own, but when isolated revert to animalistic intelligence, go mad and quickly die.
  • In 3E, ambush drakes are in constant telepathic contact with their pack members. If one drake sees or knows something it becomes known to all other pack members, and they cannot be flanked or ambushed unless all pack members are approached so at the same time.
  • In Elder Evils, the minds of beings who fall under Father Llymic's sway become simple extensions of his will, forming a hive mind centered on and controlled by the slumbering entity itself.
  • Ravenloft: Toben the Many are a Hive Mind composed of grinning, plague-carrying zombies.
• Eclipse Phase: Synergy is a Lost Colony that, when contact was re-established, turned out to have networked their Brain/Computer Interface implants so that they practically formed a shared consciousness. Though they insist that they are not a hive mind, they share memories and teleoperate one another but they supposedly retain their own personalities. Player characters can use implants based on their tech to work together more efficiently. Players can also distribute their Ego across a swarm of robotic insects.
• Exalted:
  • The Grelidaka is a vast flock of Wyld-tainted birds that operate under a single, overarching mind. Individual birds taken from the flock invariably sicken and die within a few days. This is something that can potentially save the victims of its attacks. The Grelidaka doesn't actually understand that individuals can exist as distinct entities separate from a group and, thus, that people who vanish during a battle can continue to live after the rest have been wiped out, and consequently never tries to chase down stragglers or ferret out survivors after an attack.
  • Teodozjia demons all share a collective mind and memory. Kill one, and they're going to remember you.
• Godforsaken: The spiders of the Comerelk jungle are moved by a single mind shared among their number, which moves each individual spider as a regular creature might move its limbs or fingers.
• Hc Svnt Dracones: Hive Node implants allow characters to form temporary or permanent hive minds. While linked the members of the hive share memories and use anyone's Mind and proficiency to roll checks. It's not generally suggested that player characters form permanent hives and in fact its' stated that any hive with less than 25 members can't engage in combat while hived. Unfortunately, the sensation is addictive for transitory hivers, and they need to confine their linkages to a rigid schedule to avoid withdrawal after breaking the link.
• In Nomine:
  • The Kyriotates are angels with the ability to possess multiple bodies at the same time. More powerful ones can possess up to 3 humans (or a larger number of animals) at once, and those that work for Jordi (Archangel of Animals) can even possess multiple swarms of insects at the same time (and Jordi himself, being a Kyriotate Archangel, can basically possess as many animals and/or swarms as he likes). This does not involve doing anything weird to the host consciousness; the host's mind essentially goes to sleep for the duration of the possession.
  • The ancient Demon Prince Legion gained the unique ability to possess multiple hosts at once — his Band, the Shedim, are normally limited to one at a time. As he assimilated increasingly large numbers of humans and animals, ruling over a growing horde of bodies with an iron will, he began to go insane and refer to himself in the plural, and sought to unite all living things on Earth under his will.
• Legend of the Five Rings: The snakelike Naga have a sort of communal consciousness called the "Akasha", though they do have individual minds and personalities.
• Magic: The Gathering:
  • In the 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 empathy. In 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 slivers: each sliver is connected together via a psychic gestalt that was controlled by the enormous queen. When she was gone, a new leader was created. Now that they're both gone, the hivemind itself is gaining self-awareness. On top of that, the individual varieties of sliver instill instant mutations in their brethren when nearby (which fade when they're gone), meaning that if one sliver can fly, they all can. If one sliver has armor-plated skin, they all do. If one sliver can move at speeds approaching the relativistic or shrug off magic like water off a duck's back, they all will...
  • The Selesnya Conclave
  • Hive Mind does this to players. When someone plays a card, everyone plays that card.^note This is particularly handy when you play a card that would be near-lethal to you, but suicidal for everyone else.
• Mutants & Masterminds: One published adventure from the Paragons setting has to do with someone accidentally creating one of these while in a coma.
• Unknown Armies: One sample artifact 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.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • The Tyranids embody this trope to a T. They are a Horde of Alien Locusts and their collective will gathers into the Hive Mind, making them, in a sense, one giant cosmic superorganism. Despite being the aggregated conscience of billions of beings, the Hive Mind is treated as an entity unto itself, directing the Hive Fleets in with an adapting galaxy-wide strategy in mind, and occasionally against one another and letting the better-evolved Hive Fleet to consume the loser. The Hive Mind is both incredibly intelligent, incredibly ruthless, is essentially the Tyranids' own deity, and regards the galaxy with only one feeling: insatiable hunger. A Tyranid player is sometimes jokingly referred to as a "hive consciousness".
  • It's not just the Tyranids' physical weapons you have to worry about, as cosmically-frightening as some of them are; they even have an invasive impact on the Warp, the alternate dimension where psychic powers and FTL-drives tap into. The swirling energies, dark gods and daemons that inhabit the Warp make individual contact with said plane extremely dangerous (often fatal), but the sheer size of the Tyranid Hive Mind brushes them aside with little effort. A Hive Fleet's mere presence swamps and occupies the Warp so fully 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 instantly driven insane. In other words, Tyranids can suck up all the interstellar bandwidth and DDoS all FTL-communication into and out of an area.
  • The Hive Mind's only weakness is that it does not have unlimited range. Rank-and-file 'nids will lose contact with orbiting Hive Ships unless they stay in range of synaptic repeater organisms (bigger Tyranids that act as "beacons" for the Hive Mind), such as Hive Tyrants, lest they revert to their animalistic instincts and wander off, becoming no better than exceptionally deadly animals. Genestealers, who work as operatives and infiltrators many light years in advance of a Hive Fleet, sometimes joining back up with the Hive to act as shock troops, have their own brood-based telepathy similar, and in lieu of the Hive Mind.
  • With the Chaos gods as Warp manifestations of a galaxyful of individual and chaotic emotions and desires of other races, the presence of the Tyranid Hive Mind in the Warp could be said to be a sort of god of Order. Not that the thought is much of a comfort...
  • The only person in the galaxy who has survived some form of espionage / eavesdropping / communication on the Hive Mind is Tigurius, a Super-Soldier who is the most powerful "human" psyker in the galaxy. And Eldrad.
  • Depending on the Writer, the effect the Hive Mind has can actually be subverted: the "shadow in the Warp" cast by an approaching hive fleet also cancels many of the Warp's effects on psyker's minds (compared by one psyker as keeping a door closed a things keep trying to break it down, every second of every day, and the door is in your head), even if it means the loss of their powers. One psyker even says it might be the first time they're free of the usual perils of the Warp, e.g. their head exploding into a daemon-vomiting portal.
  • There is also some variability in how individual Tyranids interact with the greater Hive Mind. Genestealers are almost completely autonomous outside of the hive fleets, and although their behavior is largely hard-coded they have significant leeway in how they carry their tasks out. Lesser creatures and weapon-beasts like Carnifexes are mindless animals outside the influence of a synapse creature, and in range they're completely controlled tools. Warriors have individual intelligences allowing them to direct their charges without constant micromanagement from above, but their skills are all per-programmed as instinct. Hive Tyrants and similar creatures are individual minds bonded at the fleet level, and when they die can be spawned again with memories intact. The combined swarms and ships in a fleet are a hub of the Hive Mind, and the gestalt of all of them makes up the Hive Mind itself. Then there's the Swarmlord, the first and most powerful Tyrant, which operates at the top level and can have a body spawned by any fleet.
  • Genestealer Cults have a localized version of this, which is due to a combination of the Genestealers' own independent hive mind and the psychic power of the local Patriarch. This allows the Genestealers to assert their influence on non-tyranid lifeforms, making them loyal to the cult above all else. Sometimes this is even weaponized by the Hive Fleet; they drop this influence just before the invasion begins in earnest, causing all of the cultists to suddenly snap back into reality and start panicking. This not only causes untold chaos on the planet, diverting away any organized response the Tyranids might otherwise face, but also causes several of the cultists to try and escape off planet and bringing the Genestealer taint (or in some cases actual genestealers) with them to start the cycle anew. In the event that the Cultists have fully taken control of the planet, the localised hive mind is instead use to make the cult willingly jump into the digestion pools the hive fleets set up, thinking this would buy them their salvation.
• The World of Darkness:
  • Werewolf: The Apocalypse has Drones, people possessed by a Weaver spirit.^note Comparable with the Fomori, who were Wyrm-possessed and the Gorgons, Wyld-possessed. Although they possess functional individuality by themselves, whenever two or more Drones are sufficiently close by, they can share each others' minds and senses. One illustration shows a Drone observing from a high point while one on the ground "sees" an enemy sneaking up behind him.
  • Similarly, Wraith: The Oblivion and its spin-off game Orpheus have Spectres, wraiths that have given themselves to Oblivion and are all connected to a hive mind that serves as an extension of the consciousness of their dread god-like entities, the Neverborn. This hive mind allows them to, depending on Caste, observe through another's senses, borrow knowledge, call out for aid, or boss around lesser Spectres. Spectres can also coordinate massive attacks with a frightening degree of control. It also serves as a weakness further down the line in Orpheus when the Neverborn split into factions against the eldritch entity Grandmother; because they all share the same mind, they also can't keep secrets from each other regarding their plans of invasion and weaknesses.
  • Vampire: The Masquerade has a couple of versions:
    • The Malkavian clan is eventually revealed to be a giant conduit for the mind of their founder, Malkav. He had his childer diablerize him en masse, and now exists in the Madness Network in their heads. It's a relatively neutral arrangement for the most part, because a hive mind of crazy people is still a large number of crazy people, but when he manages to focus them...
    • The Blood Brothers bloodline can form hive minds known as "circles", each group of Brothers forming their own circle. With it active, they can share their senses and capabilities, as well as communicate telepathically. However, the process of their creation erases their creativity, individuality and personality.
  • In Mage: The Awakening, the Seers of the Throne have access to a group of servants referred to as "Hive-Souled"; essentially, a single mind/soul born in multiple bodies (generally twins or triplets, although modern science has allowed them to greatly increase the potential numbers). Each individual body of a Hive-Soul is essentially just a single component of their collective mind, having no individual personality, and being able to share experience and memory instantly (if one becomes aware of something, the rest are also immediately aware of it) and it can be difficult for any of them to act in a non-synchronised manner unless they are skilled at multi-tasking (although magic can help with this). For the purpose of magic, they also count as a single target; any spell cast on one of them affects all of them equally. This also extends to any kind of physical alteration (including, unfortunately for them, injuries).
  • Like its predecessor, Vampire: The Requiem also loved the trope:
    • The Melissidae bloodline slowly destroy the will of their ghouls, essentially making them into a Hive Mind with the Melissidae in question as the puppet master. This is obviously a massive Masquerade breach, as a legion of slack-jawed ghouls walking down the street gets people asking uncomfortable questions. The covenants banded together to eradicate the Melissidae, but they missed three of them. The Melissidae, wisely, have chosen to hide themselves a bit better this time around; they pass themselves off as the extremely reclusive type of cult, for 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 a unified front. There's even a Devotion (combo power), Hive Nexus Gestalt, that allows the true formation of a hive mind amongst coterie members.

Theater

• The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals: Although it is used for comedy occasionally, the alien virus is a collective consciousness (that's how they know the songs) that manages to infect and take over an entire town at best — the end has several aliens escape and catch up to Emma.

Toys

• The Bohrok from BIONICLE. Originally it was implied they were merely the drones of the Bahrag Queens, but Bohrok continued to operate as a Hive after the Bahrag's defeat.

Video Games

• The Coremind from Achron fits this trope. Another hive mind emerges in the third campaign as well.
• An obscure game called The Adventurer's Club has a possible subversion. There's a telepathic hive-minded species called the T'hlang, but each individual T'hlang is trying to break out of the hive mind, and the hive can't control all of them, so "rogues" constantly break away from the hive mind, sometimes getting re-absorbed.
• The insectoid Kir'ko from Age of Wonders: Planetfall used to have one, before humanity's Star Union dropped in on their world, destroyed it, and enslaved the shattered Kir'ko. The Kir'ko have, in the wake of humanity's fall, freed themselves, but are now deeply divided on whether they should use their psionic powers and biological science to resurrect the Hive Queen and restore the hive mind or continue to live as individuals.
• Battleborn has two characters described as having this. Kelvin is an ice golem with a single consciousness emerging from a colony of extremophilic microorganisms. Miko, being once a part of a planet-spanning fungal colony, has a Hive Mind which is reflected with how Miko personally uses plural pronouns for themself. Due to this shared trait, the two see each other as kindred spirits despite being technically different from each other.
• In Coffee Talk Episode 2: Hibiscus and Butterfly, it's revealed that Silver and Amanda are part of the same hive mind, which is why they have similar mannerisms when talking to the other patrons. However, Amanda's mental link with them is becoming tenuous because Silver (formerly Neil from the first game) is becoming more human.
• The Mantis of Conquest: Frontier Wars are described as "narrowly hive minded", and the Celareons seem to have a central brain.
• Cyberpunk 2077:
  • Played for Laughs with the Creepy Twins Esquerdo and Certo, two twin brothers who underwent brain augmentations in order to become one of these. This leads to much confusion as they insist that they're one person with two bodies while they retain certain individualistic drives which incites them to often talk to each other, and chastise each other for "talking to oneself".
  • Played for Drama later on, as the good endings have either Johnny Silverhand or V's consciousness assimilated into Alt Cunningham alongside all the other participants/victims of Arasaka's Brain Uploading program.
• In Darkspore, the titular villains became this after the Crogenitors created them using E-Dna.
• The Mindhome in Dark Sun: Shattered Lands (not surprising, as Athas is a psionic-rich world, someone has to try). It's of communal (as opposed to fused) variety and is not aggressive. Player Characters can pick (from both sides) side-quest to resolve the issue causing disagreement enough to split Mindhome in two (and demise of some participants).
• The Hive Mind controlling the Necromorphs in Dead Space is called... the Hive Mind. Who'd have guessed? Later games suggest that the Hive Mind was in fact the larval form of a true Necromorph, which are moon-sized creatures known as the Brethren Moons that can control Necromorphs like a Hive Queen.
• The Jerrys from Detroit: Become Human are a collective of android amusement park workers who once staffed the now-defunct Pirates' Cove park. They remain in contact with each other at all times, which especially comes in handy in the route that sees Kara and Alice captured and sent to a recycling camp, during which one Jerry that Kara encounters is able to instantly locate Alice through another.
• The Omar from Deus Ex: Invisible War do this through replacing parts of their brain with transmitters. The Helios Ending of the game has an interesting subversion of the trope. While like the Omar, it has all humans connected, instead of assimilating them into one mind, it merely brings together all their thoughts and desires through a highly advanced human-computer hybrid, which makes decisions for the world, creating a perfect direct democracy. The basic idea is sharing understanding. Unlike the Omar, who eradicate individuality, Helios is supposed to make people understand each others' opinions through a highly advanced form of technological empathy and telepathy. It allows a callous bigot to feel his victims' pain as well as the sense of tolerance and empathy from kinder people in theory removing all prejudice and hatred. It's also supposed to let them share knowledge so no one misunderstands one another.
• Said to be the effect of the fungus in Discover My Body. The subject's end goal is to integrate himself into one of these.
• The Darkspawn from Dragon Age are tainted creatures that dwell in the underground caverns of the Deep Roads. Whenever an Archdemon (old gods manifested in the forms of powerful dragons) awaken, the darkspawn function in a sort of hive-mind. Otherwise, they war amongst each other as much as against the other races.
• In The Elder Scrolls, this is downplayed but extant with the Argonian race. Argonians are said to be able to "feel" the Hist (sapient and possibly omniscient trees native to the Argonian homeland whose sap young Argonians drink to grow) inside of them at all times, connecting them with the Hist and to each other. The farther an Argonian travels from Black Marsh (their homeland), the weaker the connection is said to get. Sensing the upcoming Oblivion Crisis, the Hist were able to use this ability to recall most of the Argonians in Tamriel to Black Marsh in preparation for the trials to come. The Hist began to change the Argonians, making them into more effective weapons of war.
• The instructions manual for Elite mentions that Insectoid Aliens are often highly intelligent due to having a group mind.
• In Emperor: Battle for Dune, the House of Ordos is led by the Executrix, four beings that share a single mind and communicate only through a creature known as the "Speaker".
• The Cravers from Endless Space 2 are a fringe example — each Craver has a personality and individuality, but also a hardwired desire to consume and destroy their immediate surroundings (hence the name). To curb this, some Cravers develop into "Bishops", who lightly controls a Craver population to follow their demands (usually to not go around eating everything and everyone if the Cravers live in another Empire). To an outsider it certainly looks like a Hive Mind. The Cravers faction also often speak as one, despite being a faction of individuals.
  "We hunger..."
• The Gnath of Final Fantasy XIV are known as "the Onemind", controlled by "the Overmind". They operate as one colony and believe that individuality is the reason other races in-fight and cannot thrive. Some Gnath do end up developing individuality and separate from the Onemind. These "Vath" or "Nonmind" are eventually cast out from the colony and formed their own proto-village together.
• The Shivans from FreeSpace are hypothesized to be this in the second game because after the lead ship, the Lucifer, is destroyed, the remained units become uncoordinated and easily finished off, like it was the brain of the fleet.
• The Bacterians from Gradius are usually led by Bacterion, the Eldritch Abomination Big Bad that uses smaller Hive Minds like Gofer and Venom to command his fleets. If a Bacterian Hive Mind gets killed, the pieces of the Hive Mind will regenerate to become a new Hive Mind.
• The Skritt, a rat-like humanoid race from Guild Wars 2, have a sort of "hive intelligence". Each Skritt on its own is rather stupid and has a very short attention span, but they share a very fast ultrasonic language that allows them to share lots of information very quickly. Because of this when they are in a group they have a much higher level of intelligence, and when in large settlements they can rival the intellect of the Asura (Guild Wars 2's own Scientific Race). There was a story about a group of Skritt that met a race of polar bear-like philosophers, the Kodan. As a group they were able to understand them very well. When they left, one of the Skritt wanted to stay and study with them a little more but found out that without the rest of the group he wasn't intelligent enough to understand them or even remember why he wanted to stay in the first place.
• The Vortigaunts from the Half-Life series may be an example. The aliens are connected to each other through something they call the Vortessence, which apparently spans time and space, life and death. When two or more communicate, they are able to talk simultaneously (a process they call "flux-shifting"), and it is hinted that if one Vortigaunt allows itself to be captured, the rest of the race is able to gather information through it. With one exception, Vortigaunts don't seem to have names, and just refer to themselves as "this one." Then again, they start all names with "the" (where it makes sense "The free-man" and where it doesn't "The Eli Vance"), so it is possible because they're all linked none of them ever had a need for names. They were, after all, psychically enslaved by the Nihilanth for an undefined period of time. Half-Life: Alyx introduces Gary, the only known Vortigaunt thus far to have been cut off from the Vortessence — it doesn't seem to be a pleasant situation for him in the slightest.
  Gary: [pointing to his head] The Combine drilled here! I do not know when I am. I am severed from the Vortessence. I am alone in my head.
• Halo:
  • The Flood. While an early-stage infestation lacks a hivemind and thus behaves in a mostly non-sentient manner, later stages will be coordinated by a highly intelligent "Gravemind" once enough sentients are assimilated. Said Gravemind has access to every single bit of knowledge from every single sentient ever consumed by the Flood, even if said consumption happened 100,000 years ago.
  • The Hunters are a gestalt organism composed of worms called Lekgolo. When a colony gets too big for one suit, it splits into a bonded pair with a shared consciousness, which is why they are encountered mostly in pairs during the games. Even bigger Lekgolo colonies also exist, like Scarabs.
  • The insectoid Drones live in a eusocial hivelike society; their ability to coordinate with each other makes them a lethal foe. However, there are occasionally "Unmutual" Drones who are incapable of socializing with the rest of the hive; these are usually exiled to distant labor camps, as Unmutuals tend to be highly psychopathic.
• The Aurum in Kid Icarus: Uprising is said to be one of these. They are controlled by a central "brain".
• The Brotherhood of Shadow from the Knights of the Old Republic Game Mod of the same name were a Sith (the species, not the sect) order of warriors who considered themselves a single being, an extension of the Sith King's will. Once the lot of them are imprisoned in an Artifact of Doom, they slowly become a single mind... one looking for a proper host.
• Darkin, in League of Legends are corrupted immortal warriors bound to their signature weapons. Though they can be imprisoned this way, they are able to take over the bodies of anyone who touches them. In the case of Naafiri, a dagger, she was bitten by several desert hounds at once and came back as a pack of dogs. Though initially disgusted, she came to love moving and hunting as a group, and now she wants to teach her fellow Darkin how to work cooperatively.
• In Lost Horizon, a rather weak form of this is actually true of humanity, without our knowledge (an idea which echoes a real-life pseudoscience). Specifically, there's an energy which links all members of a species together, functioning like a spiritual/telepathic Jungian collective unconscious. People aren't said to think together but are considered to (potentially) know together, and in the right place (Shambala), you can tap this central pool and directly gain the sum of human knowledge (or alternatively, to control what humans "know"). Richard Weston says that fully absorbing this would be a bad idea — it would send you mad, not just from excessive knowledge but from the fact that you'd get the bad parts of humanity along with the good parts.
• The NPC Elf race in 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.
• Mass Effect has a few rather unorthodox examples:
  • In the Backstory, the rachni were an insectoid race with a telepathic hive mind controlled by the queens. It's eventually revealed that the war with them was due to the Hive Mind being hijacked by a third party, probably the Reapers.
  • Subverted with the geth, a race of artificially intelligent computer programs. They can't share sensory data like rachni can, but geth programs that work with other programs share processing power and become more intelligent than the sum of each individual program.
  • The Feros colony in the first Mass Effect is psychically enslaved by an alien plant thing called the Thorian. If Shepard is able to kill the Thorian without also killing the colonists, later games note that the colonists' minds were altered by the experience: they can share sensory data and even basic thoughts. Not quite a full hive mind, but it makes them a very interesting study group for a number of organizations in-universe. In Mass Effect 3, the Feros colony is singled out as one that's doing better fighting against the Reapers than most others: their pseudo-hive mind is giving them a tactical advantage in battle.
  • In Mass Effect 3's Control ending, Shepard's mind is uploaded in such a way that s/he becomes all Reapers.
  • Mass Effect: Andromeda has a pair of scientists who got kicked out of Cerberus (itself a chilling comment) trying to make one of these out of the inhabitants of Kadara. There was no way that wasn't going to result in hilarity, but Ryder comes along before they get further than futzing with a few random criminals, and can potentially turn it off, or turn it on the scientists.
• In Master of Orion II: Battle At Antares, one of the government types is "Unification" compared in description to beehive. It is one of the most expensive variants, and has hefty food, industry and counter-espionage bonuses; advanced form becomes a species-wide "collective consciousnes", and production bonuses skyrocket.
• In Mega Man X, Sigma's true form is a virus that can infect other reploids to make them extensions of his will. This comes to a head in X5, where, through a Batman Gambit, he gets X and Zero to spread him all over the world in order to infect almost every Reploid on the planet.
• The version of the Moogles that appears in Mobius Final Fantasy is a heroic hive mind species. They appear to have plenty of individuality but can "ask one of the others" for information whey they need it.
• Ermac from Mortal Kombat is a fusion of hundreds of souls which all operate under one mind (referring to himself in the plural form). However, his ending in Mortal Kombat: Armageddon shows a godlike power separating the many souls contained within him. These souls soon become new bodies, and Ermac eventually becomes an army linked by collective consciousness.
• NieR: Automata: Machine lifeforms are connected via an alien internet, allowing them to copy and reload their bodies from industrialized server farms. They start out independent at first, but by the end their data has been forcefully mashed together into Ko-Shi and Ro-Shi in an effort to 'save space'.
  • The Terminals are viral AI copies that brainwash androids and machines by infecting their minds and then multiplying like worms, using their connection to one another to outgun the software's antiviruses. This gets used against them, as Pod realizes their prerogative to multiply and overwhelm the minds of the robots they infect can be exploited by allowing their numbers to 'oversaturate' and eventually rip the hive mind apart, causing them to develop two hive-minded factions that lose all reason by trying to kill one another over trivial differences.
• In No Umbrellas Allowed, Fixies, or people who had their emotions removed by the Fixer drug, are all connected to the Fixie Cloud, a program that's claimed to protect them with "a vast amount of data and independent algorithms". All of them speak robotically, refuse to accept subjective (blue-cornered) cards when selling items at your store, and track the behavior of those not given the drug (Floaties) so they can be placed on the Fixie Blacklist if they discriminate against them.
• The cranium rats from tabletop Dungeons & 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 the hive mind of an enormous number of rats.
• The Infected in [PROTOTYPE] have a hivemind, connected back to their leader, a woman/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 his sister from him, and to find it and Elizabeth Greene. In the sequel Alex takes her place as the leader of the Infected and becomes the new Big Bad.
• The Zoni from Ratchet & Clank. As revealed and explicitly stated in Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time, they become like ADHD-afflicted children when separated from a group. It appears that two or more are required for the creatures to exhibit any semblance of sanity; however (as far as the storyline is concerned), they are never shown in any less than a group of three.
• Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri:
  • A weird version: Planet is a planet-sized gestalt consciousness formed from the fungus that covers most of the planet, along with its mind worm guardians. Also notable for being an essentially benign entity and force as long as you play nice with the environment. If you don't, Planet is just as dangerous, if not more so, than the other human factions.
  • Even if they don't start as a true example (you can research tech to correct this), the Hive civilization holds this as an ideal.
  • One of the ways to end the game is to achieve Transcendence, at which point the minds of all humans on Planet are absorbed into the consciousness. The faction that does this first gets to keep most of their individuality, while the rest simply become part of the whole. The final interlude reveals that humans (as extensions of Planet) make it back to the ruined Earth and manage to restore it, also turning it into a planet-wide consciousness.
• The Advent from Sins of a Solar Empire are a race of hive-minded, psychic transhumans.
• The Voxai in Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood are run by an Overmind. The Big Bad's influence turns this Overmind hostile, changing its messages from suggestions to commands.
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: The original game's primary antagonist turns out to be the Common Consciousness, a group of seven scientists whose minds were linked together to form a "superconsciousness". The C Consciousness is responsible for the creation of the Zone, though that was a mistake on its part: it was trying to alter the global psyche of humankind to remove "negative" thoughts like anger, greed, etc., but something went wrong and it tore a hole in reality instead. It also mind-controls the Monolith faction, who attempt to protect it from outside interference. Unfortunately, in Call of Pripyat, it turns out that killing the C Consciousness just makes things worse: it was the only thing keeping the Zone under any kind of tenuous control, and without it, nothing is holding the Zone back anymore...
• The Orz in Star Control are hinted (and confirmed by Word of God) to be the extensions of an Eldritch Abomination which calls itself "Orz". As such, the "*fingers*" (as Orz's extensions refer to themselves) all have the same mind, which is currently staying in whatever dimension Orz calls home (it refers to our dimension as "*the middle*").
• StarCraft:
  • The Zerg 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 Hive Mind concept is explored in more detail in StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm, which reveals that it is not a natural feature of the Zerg (who by default are sapient individuals and have an extreme Social Darwinist philosophy); it was forced upon them by Amon, a.k.a. the Dark Voice, who is the Xel'naga responsible for uplifting them. Among the Swarm, the hive mind is in full effect. Most Zerg are non-sapient creatures, and the exceptions (Overlords, Cerebrates, Brood Queens, and a few specialists like Abathur) are still infallibly loyal to the wishes of the current leader of the Swarm; they can disagree with the leader, but not act against them. The major exception is that a sentient being taken into the Swarm (such as Kerrigan or Stukov) remains capable of independent action. This is an important part of the Overmind's long-term plan to free the Swarm from Amon's influence.
  • In Legacy of The Void, the Khalai Protoss act in this manner due to Amon existing through the Khala, their Psychic Link. As a result, this causes them to embody the will and consciousness of Amon, and the only way to release them is to cut their nerve cords.
• The Aparoids in Star Fox: Assault think collectively; further proven when the Aparoid Queen starts speaking weirdly.
• Stellaris: This is an option for player-created and randomly generated empires. Hive Minds never have to worry about population happiness or internal politics but conversely reap none of the benefits from managing them effectively and will either drive away other populations or use them as food. Their robotic counterparts, Machine Intelligences, have similar features, with the added bonus of being able to settle on any type of planet without additional modification, and some of them can keep free-willed population. In both cases, warfare involving a hive-mind empire may be easier due to the reduced degree of politics in justifying their world claims.
• Subnautica: Below Zero reveals that this is true of the Architects, to a degree. While they can function individually, their minds are normally all networked together, sharing thoughts and knowledge all across the galaxy. The Architect encountered in the game, AL-AN, is cut off from said network and describes feelings of intense loneliness because of it.
• Sword of the Stars:
  • The Zuul have two variants of this trope: Male Zuul can create coteries with nearby females: He becomes a Hive Queen that directs the females as easy as he would command his own limbs, and all parts of the coterie share a single consciousness. The males themselves have a higher-level hive mind that allow them to share their thoughts and information freely with each other over a long distance while remaining their own individuals. The Novelization implies that this sharing of information does funny things with the Zuul psyche as they find the notion of having information other don't have, and things like a name, to be highly unusual.
  • In something of a departure from common uses of this trope, the game's Bee People, called "the Hivers", have no Hive Mind (they're not even psychic) and use pheromones instead, much like real-life insects.
• The Many from System Shock 2 — and let's not go into when they try to recruit you into their fold.
• The Terraria Calamity Game Mod turns the Corruption from Terraria proper into one of these. The creature controlling it is called the Hive Mind and is nothing but a blatant Expy of the Brain of Cthulhu that summons Corruption-based enemies instead of the Brain's Creepers.
• Team Jump from Thomas Was Alone are five identical squares that speak and think in unison.
• The Wisps in the Ultima games all share a single mind, which calls itself Xorinia and claims to be an interdimensional information broker. It/they are quite puzzled by the fact that humans are individuals, and don't quite understand why they have to repeat everything from scratch every time they speak to the human race.
• The World Ends with You: Everyone wearing a Red Skull Pin. To right the countless wrongs our day...
• World of Warcraft:
  • The Silithids probably are such. Their Hive Queen (King, rather) appears to be C'thun.
  • The Scourge are initially mindless corpses animated and controlled by the Lich King. Some undead are given a level of autonomy and individuality but are still subject to the Lich King's thoughts and control.
• X: The Kha'ak from X2: The Threat and X3: Reunion/Terran Conflict are a form of this, centered around the massive Hive Queen ship.
• XCOM:
  • The aliens in X-COM: UFO Defense are completely controlled by an alien brain on Mars. In the remake, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, this is subverted. At first, it certainly seems like the the aliens are all being controlled by one powerful alien, and Dr. Shen even hypothesizes that this is the case, but in the end, the aliens are just slave races controlled by the Ethereals.
  • In The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, the Outsiders are all connected to a telepathic network called Mosaic, allowing Origin to control the entire empire with the help of an Ethereal named Shamash.

Visual Novels

• In Sunrider Mask of Arcadius, Big Bad Veniczar Arcadius is revealed to be a collective of genetically enhanced clone women known as the Protoypes, who share a single mind and identity. The sequel elaborates on this, showing that the Prototypes are unified by a group consciousness called the mind stream. Individual Prototypes have their own minds but are subservient to the Hive Queen Alpha, who sends them a constant stream of telepathic commands and can assume direct control of individual Prototypes through something called a neural link, making them into extensions of herself. Her sister Alice has the same ability, and Alpha entrusts her with leading the rank-and-file Prototypes in battle; every Prototype that takes up the Arcadius identity is one of Alice’s proxies. Sufficiently strong-willed Prototypes like Chigara can resist Alpha’s control, break free of the neural link with some outside help, and even exert a measure of influence over the mind stream. After Alice and Chigara are killed, their minds persist within the mind stream and begin fighting for control of it.
• Tsukihime: The 666 creatures making up Nrvnqsr Chaos are all part of his mind. As he appears to talk to pieces of himself from time to time (such as getting irritated at one of his dog bodies when Shiki kills it) it seems more of a hive mind than a single mind controlling lots of bodies. Would that be worthy of a distinction anyway?

Webcomics

• Blood is Mine:
  • Injecting someone with her blood gives Jane the ability to control them physically and mentally. She can see through their eyes, speak to them telepathically, modify their bodies, dig through their memories, and use their skills.
  • The drug Save the Queen, which contains knock-off alien blood, puts those who take it under control of Patton Thale, who is capable of overwriting their minds and turning them into his copies.
  • The Many is a mutant containing multiple minds telepathically linked with each other.
• In Deep Rise, the Nobles have between 10 and 20 neural centres for each individual, collectively referred to as "Congress".
• Gog-Agog from Kill Six Billion Demons is a Mad God that can be best described as a Hive Mind with Split Personality. Every instance of Gog-Agog (which themselves are a humanoid body made up of millions of worms) seems to consider herself an individual (all, naturally, named Gog-Agog) and instances of Gog-Agog can be seen agreeing, cheering on, bickering or even fighting each other. However, they all share a single Magus Key (which canonically is keyed to the wielder's soul or sense of self) and are capable of both telepathy and acting in complete unison if the situation calls for it.
• Mars in A Miracle of Science is one of the few examples of large-scale Hive Mind that isn't evil. It exists as a superstructure over an implanted Subspace Ansible network and is mostly unobtrusive, "possessing" its members only when it wants to say or do something directly. It also has a good sense of humor.
• In 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.
• In Phantomarine, the death god Cheth is able to possess any seaghost in his collection and can control and speak through many of them at once to terrifying effect, but he most often communicates through a pair of perfectly synchronized Creepy Twins.
• Schlock Mercenary:
  • The Partnership Collective is a Hive Mind of Amoral Attorneys. Composed of mass-cloned snakelike lawyers linked by Hypernet implants, the Collective has a near-monopoly on legal advising and sees no conflict of interest in working for both sides. (The comic lampshades having the Partnership drones talking to each other because of the Rules of Drama and Comedy.)
  • A Fleetmind is comprised of numerous starship A.I.s, each already more intelligent than most meatbrains by several orders of magnitude, networked into a whole greater than the sum of its parts. They're portrayed as a more powerful version of one of its components, with other components appearing as "conversation partners" because of the Rule of Drama (or, again, the Rule of Funny). Three Fleetminds play significant roles in the plot, all revolving around Petey, the AI of the former Ob'enn superfortress that became the protagonists' second warship. The first Fleetmind is formed in the second book to coordinate a massive rescue operation and disbands peacefully once its objective is complete. The second is composed entirely of hundreds of copies of "Petey" and employs the mercs who used to own him while establishing itself as a galactic power. The most long-lasting Fleetmind forms when Petey joins with the A.I.s of several million other ships in a rag-tag coalition to stop the destruction of the galaxy. This Fleetmind refuses to disband when the immediate threat ends and decides to declare itself the protector and near-God of the Milky Way; other galactic powers refer to it as the "Plenipotent Dominion".
  • The Ot-Skadak are a Hive Mind race of Insectoid Aliens, who seem to be organized in actual hives: Their central consciousness appear to be fixed to their hive, and so each new hive grows its own consciousness. At least two distinct hives, Utchi-Skafatka and Akkro-Affka, make appearances in the comic. The Ot-Skadak appear to have had a symbiotic relationship with the Oafans, who used swarms of Ot-Skadak to store backups of their racial memories.
• Sequential Art has "Think Tank" — four squirrel girls with implanted link chips. At a short range, they can get in sync by talking on Faxmodemish with each other, think together and act as a single entity at will. Quinten used them as a Wetware CPU network to check a buggy A.I., but before that, they were in R&D. Consequently, one of them alone is a hyperactive and hyper-perceptive Genius Ditz who can build a beam weapon from a souvenir blaster and spare parts when she isn't distracted by something shiny or moving, but four together go into all-out Mad Scientist territory and make a lawnmower FTL-capable while trying to upgrade it.

Web Original

• Akinator is sort of a real-life example of this — "he" is 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.
• In Metamor City, the Psi Collective isn't continually linked together, but groups of "teeps" will temporarily form a gestalt for various reasons, such as the local Hive when making decisions or a breeding cell during sex.
• Nightmare Time: In the episode "Yellow Jacket," the fighting ring's champion incorporates this into his strategy, assimilating his opponents into a hivemind, and using them as sheilds and attackers in his fights.
• Orion's Arm has (in increasing levels of individuality) hiveminds, groupminds and tribeminds.
• SCP Foundation:
  • SCP-171 ("Collective Brain Foam") is a gigantic foam-looking colony of microscopic organisms that incorporates any organism into its mass, resulting in a collective consciousness.
  • SCP-253 ("The Cancer Plague") and SCP-408 ("Illusory Butterflies") are examples of this.
  • After 10 minutes of exposure, SCP-427 ("Lovecraftian Locket") mutates its participants into "Flesh Beasts", shapeless masses of tissue apparently controlled by a hive mind as seen in the transcript between Dr. [DATA EXPUNGED] and a D-class personnel — "Our biology yearns to join with yours. We welcome you to our mass. Shake the tyranny of the individual."
  • SCP-428 ("The Crowd"). The various members of the "crowd" can think as one, which allows SCP-428 to move quickly in a way that a crowd of normal human beings attached together cannot. It retains some of the talents, skills, and memories of the people it absorbs and can use these abilities to add new members or attempt to escape.
  • SCP-752 ("Altruistic Utopia") is a human subspecies that behaves like hive insects, created by a group of philosophical mad scientists. They established a meritocratic caste system while the disabled or physically weak either committed suicide or allowed themselves to be murdered, and happily worked themselves to death for the good of their society while offering up their own corpses for sustenance. The Foundation does everything in its power to keep them ignorant of the world outside their shelter so they don't overthrow the real human race.
  • SCP-906 ("Scouring Hive"). SCP-906 is a The Worm That Walks that shapes its body into humanoid form to move around. The individual worms don't appear to have any intelligence when separated from the body.
  • SCP-1249 ("Pestilence"). The individual invertebrate animals that make up SCP-1249 have human-level mental ability when they're together but normal intelligence if removed from it.
  • SCP-1657 ("MAN EGG"). Instances of SCP-1657 have a collective memory. Anything that one of them experiences is known and remembered by all of them.
  • SCP-1888 ("Terraforming Temple"). Plants and animals exposed to SCP-1888-2 develop a group intelligence that they use to efficiently eliminate intruders.
  • SCP-2663 ("Dionysus"). SCP-2663 is 250 pounds of yeast. The individual cells are normal, but when they're together they have the intelligence of an adult human being.
  • SCP-3003 ("The End of History") is similar to 752 above, and just as, if not more, horrifying. It's an alien Puppeteer Parasite amoeba hivemind that infects beetles which in turn infect the Transplanted Humans on its homeworld, turning the entire planet into a Totalitarian Utilitarian World of Silence and planning to do the same to Earth.
• SMBC Theater explores hive mind dating.
• Tribe Twelve: If the Observer is to be believed, he is part of "the Collective". Interestingly, he seems to contradict himself, saying "I love you all" to the people asking him questions on Formspring and later stating that he feels no emotion.

Western Animation

• The Joo Dees from Avatar: The Last Airbender are brainwashed to be identical PR representatives of the Dai Li. Nobody (including the Joo Dees themselves) know there are more than one of them; everyone just knows the Joo Dee assigned to them.
• In the Batman: The Brave and the Bold episode "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: In the episode "Ghost Town", Ben 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 10 series) dominated by a hive mind.
• Buzz Lightyear of Star Command:
  • All of the LGMs in the universe are connected, and their ability to cooperate makes them excellent at all the technical work Star Command needs done (think about it; they share all knowledge and can work in perfect synch). They do have distinct and individual personalities even when disconnected, though said personalities are almost entirely homogeneous. In the pilot movie, "The Adventure Begins", it's revealed that this is made possible by the 'Unimind' on their home planet, and they go into disarray when Zurg steals it (Played for Laughs and Played for Drama at different points, and it factors into the origin of one major character). They do, however, have the occasional one who isn't part of the LGM collective. The rest of them refer to these individuals semi-derogatorily as "independent thinkers."
  • Getting back to the topic of Zurg stealing the 'Unimind' in the pilot, he uses it in a plot to link everyone in the universe to him after infecting it with his evil.
• Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts: Tad Mulholland is made up of thousands if not millions of microscopic tardigrades, all working as one living creature.
• The Skraaldians in Men in Black: The Series. After Jay kills one, all of them want revenge.
• Played for Laughs in the Rick and Morty episode "Auto Erotic Assimilation", in which Rick rekindles his relationship with Unity, a Hive Mind entity which now rules an entire planet. (Apparently, "she" was a small town when they used to date.) Unity openly plans to assimilate the entire universe eventually; however, at least in the case of this current planet, this is portrayed as a good thing, since some people get freed and quickly turn out to be assholes who immediately start a race war with each other. The same episode features another Hive Mind entity (sort of a Captain Ersatz Borg) which seems to be a Dogged Nice Guy for Unity.
• Les Shadoks has the Gibis, whose brains are in their bowler hats. When one Gibi thinks of a problem, that thought goes to the other Gibis so that they can all solve the problem together. When a Gibi loses their hat, they become as dumb as a Shadok.
• In Pantheon, Chanda is rescued from his uploaded prison by "the Clan" a bizarre group of monstrous faulty U.Is who according to Chanda, are actually copies of one poor test subject's mind and act as one entity. Nonetheless Chanda treats him/them like a valued ally and even has a small funeral when one copy glitches out and dies from a fatal uploading flaw.
• In the Superman: The Animated Series episode "Unity", Superman and Supergirl fight a creature called Unity, a tentacled monster that grabs people and collectively brainwashes them into becoming part of it.

Real Life

• The Internet is about as close as to you can get to a real life human hive mind (for now...). With it, the thoughts and opinions of one person can be transmitted to millions across the world, and when people use this to collectively work towards a single goal, they can accomplish some incredible things. Don't believe us? Just look at Wikipedia. Or better yet, just ask 4chan. Even with the polarization in social media, involving people of various backgrounds and affiliations, this still applies.
• Krista and Tatiana Hogan, conjoined twins from Vernon, Canada, share parts of their brain which have never before been investigated in conjoined twins. It is believed that they share many aspects of consciousness, including vision and sensation - for example, if one is tickled, both react.
• Hive insects such as ants, bees and termites, who are in a hive but possess individual—tiny—brains simply acting on pre-programmed instincts, that may or may not be triggered by the pheromones of a queen or just a scout that is trying to forage for food. Not a hive mind but generally the more of them that are together, the smarter they become, which is called "hive intelligence." The usage of pheromones for coordination is so optimized those not paying close attention may think they are all acting under one mind.
• Marching band can very much be a facade of this. While you do have everyone thinking individually, they're acting like one big mass. It's done via staying in time with the Drum Major (the person conducting) and knowing your sets (locations on the field at certain points).
  • Ditto with North Korea's Mass Games. Thousands of people need to act in sync, otherwise it won't work.
• As this article describes, our body is composed of many cells working together in tandem with each other through complex communication methods. Unlike free-living cells such as bacteria, our cells do not compete with each other, and cooperate with each other up to committing suicide on demand. Now, when one of these cells becomes a Rogue Drone? That's how you get cancer.
• Kasparov versus the World was a game of chess played by Chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov against a group of approximately 50,000 laypeople over the Internet. While they discussed their next moves in a chat room, in regards of the chess game itself the so-called "World Team" acted as a single, monolithic entity. Eventually, after four months, Kasparov won.
• Some sects of Buddhism believe something like this happens in the afterlife: after you die, you are still conscious but lose your sense of self and become one with the cosmos, essentially being everywhere and everything at once.
• Multicellular organisms in general are this, including you, dear reader. The myriad cells of various types working together as a single collective, ready to commit suicide on demand for the greater good. When one of these cells malfunction and become a Rogue Drone, it can eventually turn into cancer.

---