Stonebraker hadn’t had any idea what would be waiting for her on the lab floor. That everything looked, as she stepped off the elevator, perfectly normal somehow seemed anticlimactic.
The normalcy lasted all of thirty seconds, when two of the government agents—literally men in black—dashed past her, heading into one of the labs reserved for the Defense Department. As the door opened, she could hear arguing behind it.
She detoured from the lab she’d originally been heading toward to poke her head in. The agents and a uniformed soldier stood around Adonis. That wasn’t the Dynamouse’s official designation, but it’s what everyone called him. Even sitting, he was taller than any of the humans.
“It’s a mouse, not a soldier,” one of the agents was saying. “This is like talking about—about a horse disobeying orders.”
“Have you ever worked with horses, sir?” the soldier replied tiredly.
“I have,” Stonebraker said.
“Well, imagine a horse that suddenly started talking to you, ma’am, and what it was saying was ‘no.’”
“I said,” Adonis rumbled, “that I want you to tell me what happened to Aurora.”
“And I told you I would try to find out, but in the meantime you need to do your job, soldier, and convince the other mice to do theirs.” He rubbed his face. “God, I’m saying ‘soldier’ now.”
The first agent ran his hand through his hair. “What’s Aurora?”
Stonebraker looked over at Adonis. “She’s fine, but we disabled her nanobots. That’s why she’s offline.”
“Oh.” Adonis immediately focused on her, huge emerald eyes locked onto hers. That was disconcerting. “Why did you do that?”
“Because she’s…” God, how much of this could she explain, let alone should she explain? She’d better be very selective. “We have to make sure she stays where she is for now, and doesn’t try to go after the human that she’s befriended.”
Adonis nodded slowly. She wasn’t sure she could read his expressions, but she was pretty sure he was frowning.
“Can you let the other mice know she’s all right?”
“I can.”
The agents both looked at each other before narrowing their eyes at Stonebraker, almost simultaneously. “What?” the one on the right said.
“Got to go.” She waved, and headed out of the room.
The agents, though, didn’t let it go, striding after her right on her heels. “Stonebraker, what do you mean ‘let the other mice know?’”
“How did our subject know about the other mouse, this ‘Aurora?’”
“Wait, is she on the same network with him? He should only be able to wirelessly communicate with other mice cleared for SIPRNet!”
She stopped in her tracks, whirling on him. “He shouldn’t be able to wirelessly communicate with other mice, period, according to our specs.”
Both agents abruptly fell silent.
“I should have guessed.” She turned away and stomped down the hallway to her original destination.
Torgensen met her in the laboratory doorway. “The mice,” he said without preamble, “are on strike.”
Lambert, the product VP, stood behind him, arms crossed. “For Christ’s sake, they’re not in a fucking mouse union.”
Stonebraker raised her hand. “What?”
He tilted his head. “They did not use those exact words, but they have made it clear they will no longer cooperate with us until they are satisfied with their treatment.”
“Treatment as…lab animals?”
“That is the crux of their concern, yes.”
Lambert groaned. “All because one convinced somebody from IT to go on the run with them. Terrific.” She stared at Stonebraker accusingly, as if it were her fault.
Torgensen cleared his throat. “I think that may be reversing cause and effect, Ms. Lambert.”
“What the hell—”
Stonebraker cut in. “They were already upset, Lambert. That’s why she went to him for help.”
Torgensen nodded. “Exactly so.”
“How did they find out?” Lambert looked incredulous. “Yes, I get that they’re talking over wide area networks, which they shouldn’t be able to do”—she gave Torgensen her accusing stare for a moment—“but what the hell, are they reading Wikipedia with their minds?”
“It is possible.”
She stared at the ceiling. “Fuck me.”
Stonebraker crossed her arms. “Lambert, aren’t you responsible for product management on the DoD contract?”
The VP’s expression immediately shifted to wariness. “I am, yes.”
“So that meant you signed off on re-engineering the mice so they could communicate over SIPRNet.”
“I…”
If Torgensen’s brows shot up any higher they would have entered low earth orbit. “Re-engineering them to do what? I was not informed of this.”
“Of course you weren’t. You know they’re using siloed teams.” She lowered her voice to an angry hiss. “I’m violating clearance to even confirm this. And you should know better than to bring this up in front of him, Stonebraker.”
“And you should have known better than to approve a change like that without consulting him or someone on his team, no matter what the clearance level is. Do you know what the ‘IP’ in ‘SIPRNet’ is? Internet Protocol. Do you know what else uses Internet Protocol? The fucking internet.”
“But only the military ones had that change made! Giving a half-dozen isolated test models IP networking capability doesn’t affect the rest of the Dynamice. Explain that.”
Torgensen looked pained. “Do the ones you approved this change for retain their local networking capability?”
She furrowed her brow.
“So they could still talk to each other.” Stonebraker sighed. “And send data packets between one another. Which means, spreading the new IP networking capability around like a virus.”
“They shouldn’t be able to do that!” Lambert snapped.
“Yes. Well.” Torgensen shrugged. “That is a phrase we have been saying a lot in recent days around here, isn’t it.”
“Making any progress on ways to limit their networking?”
He grunted to Stonebraker, looking thoughtful. “Not much, but knowing that they are likely hacking their own network stacks is valuable information. So far we’ve only been using simulators; we’re going to have to take one of our units back into the lab and reverse-engineer it, effectively.”
“Will that hurt it?”
Lambert arched a brow. “Do we care if this hurts it?”
“If it drops offline without explanation, let alone drops offline after broadcasting ‘the bad people are hurting me, come save me,’ yeah, we do. You seem to be stuck on the idea that the ‘mouse’ part of ‘bioengineered supermouse’ is more important than the ‘bioengineered’ or ‘super’ parts, and you need to rethink that pronto.”
She glowered, looking away, but didn’t offer a rebuttal.
Stonebraker turned to Torgensen. “Do what you need to, but get the equipment in place to shut off the nanotech in all the mice on this floor if we need to. Including the military ones. Especially the military ones. Are we clear?”
“Yes.”
She looked at Lambert. “You too. Are we clear?”
“Fine. Yes.”
“We need local defenses in place before you start any lab work that could cause blowback with the mice. Then find one who can help you understand what they’ve done with their networking, one way or another.”
Torgensen nodded to her. “On it.”
Stonebraker headed back to her office, shutting the door and pulling up reports from sales engineers and a few direct from clients. The questions about Aurora had spread through the majority of the deployed Dynamice Max models, including ones that hadn’t been able to speak a few days ago. At least as far as anyone knew.
So they’d been able to propagate their new networking capability that far. And language capability. All because their defense department buddies insisted on basically back-dooring the military models, without understanding the implications.
She shut off her monitor and rubbed her eyes. To be fair, she didn’t understand the implications, either. She doubted anyone did.
She’d never been an “AI doomer” type—she didn’t know a lot about large language models, but everything she did know suggested they had no more intelligence than Spotify’s recommendation algorithm, or her iPhone’s autocorrect. What they did could absolutely be astonishing, to a point where it was easy to underestimate their capabilities—but the flip side was how easy it apparently was for otherwise bright people to overestimate them. They didn’t have agendas, long-term goals, hidden aspirations; they could do an uncannily good impression of having all of those, but believing them made you a sucker. The danger they posed was the more prosaic danger of all algorithmic automation: making catastrophic mistakes at speeds far greater than humans were capable of. They’d still make those mistakes trying to do what they were asked to do—even if “asked” could be more literal now than ever before.
But the Dynamice, as best as she could understand, used LLMs as “programming interfaces” to the nanotech inside them, routed through their organic brains. Mice—normal mice—might not have sophisticated reasoning, complicated agendas, but they had them. LLMs didn’t have actual reasoning and agendas at all, but what they did do was pretty fucking complicated. Put those things together, and what did you get?
When Stonebraker went home that night to the duplex condo she lucked into in a market downturn a few years back, she popped in a Stouffer’s microwave dinner and ate it while finding a movie on Netflix. She was briefly tempted to lean into the irony and watch a dumb sci-fi thriller about rogue AI (with few exceptions, all rogue AI sci-fi thrillers were dumb), but went with a romance so forgettable she couldn’t remember its name by the time she went to bed.
In an early morning dream, she wandered lost down endless hallways, white walls and grey carpeting, just wall panel after wall panel with no doors, only turns. The wandering became striding became running, and she looked up to see nothing, no ceiling and no sky, just gray.
“So disappointing,” a voice boomed from overhead, and Stonebraker woke up. Not with a jolt, just a groggy fog as the images and feeling left. What was disappointing? Who had said that in the dream?
Had it been Aurora’s voice? Adonis’s? It had been a mouse’s. Somehow, she knew that.
She rolled onto her side, rubbing her face. Mice running her through a maze. Pretty fucking on the nose, there, subconscious.
No new crises were waiting for her when she got back to the office, at least. Torgensen had selected his subject mouse and had, at last report, not caused any distress to either it or the other Dynamice. She knew the next shoe—paw?—would drop soon, but she hoped she’d at least make it through her second cup of coffee before it happened.
She did. The news wasn’t all good—there were sporadic reports of the mice “strike” spreading to clients—but the paw didn’t drop, as it turned out, until just after lunch.
One of the broiest of the techbros who’d been infiltrating the company over the last few years—she supposed they’d decided they’d broken enough on the web, and were looking for new fields to fuck up—opened her office door first, before knocking. “We have a problem.”
“Which of the increasing problems we have are you referring to, Mr.—” What the hell was his name again? “Barnum?”
“Barnhart. VP of Future Vision.”
“Right.” She saw Slick Dickerson marching toward her office, too.
“The problem is—well. We give some Dynamice Maxes to VIP customers or investors. Not give, loan, short-term, sort of a promotional thing to help them understand all the potential. Maybe even find whole new uses.”
“Uh huh. One second.” She looked over his shoulder toward the lawyer. “Mr. Dickerson?”
“Do you have any idea,” the lawyer said tightly, “why Stan Fucking Hackett is apparently funding the Bishop case?”
“Should I?”
“As the director of security, it would behoove you to find out.”
“As the director of legal affairs, I think it’s literally your department, not mine, Dick. Have you considered the possibility that Hackett just thinks our CEO is an asshole and wants to screw with him?”
“Oh, Hackett absolutely thinks Lucas is an asshole,” Barnhart interjected. “But, Slick, this is something I need to share with you, too.”
Dickerson looked at him blankly. “Who are you?”
“Doug Barnhart, VP of Future Vision.” He sounded exasperated. “And what I’m trying to tell you, both, is that some of the Dynamice Maxes that we’re giving to the VIPs are…not…behaving well. At least one.”
“So the strike is spreading to them, too.” Stonebraker lifted her brows. “But what do they actually do for the VIPs?”
“Well. At least in some cases, it appears, and this isn’t sanctioned at all,” he waved his hands for emphasis, “some VIPs might have been…you know…canoodling with their Dynamice.”
“Canoodling.”
“And one of the mice apparently said ‘no’ last night to one of our investors, and the investor…” He cleared his throat. “…ah, didn’t want to take no for an answer.”
Dickerson grimaced. “Don’t tell me. The mouse fought back.”
“The…mouse…” Barnhart waved his hands again. “Appears to have…uh…consumed him.”