Ted opened the Mercedes’s door, trying to make sense of—anything, at this point. “You’re my anonymous benefactor.”
“Get in and buckle up. I’ll answer your questions.”
Ted did so. The moment he fastened his seat belt, Hackett hit the gas pedal. It felt like launching one of those linear accelerator roller coasters.
“So.” Hackett waved a hand. “Legally speaking, no. Your anonymous benefactor is the Hackett Legal Foundation.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s better for tax purposes.”
“No, I mean—” Ted sucked in his breath as Hackett sped up to make a left turn just before he lost the protected arrow.
“I know what you mean, I’m playing dumb. And I’m kidding. It doesn’t actually help with the taxes.” He swerved into the driveway of an expensive-looking hotel. “And we’re here.”
“We’re here, where?”
Hackett opened his own car door before the valet could. “The Kimpton Sawyer. Either your mouse or your lawyer has some fuckin’ highfalutin’ tastes.”
Ted got out of the car when the valet opened his door, looking bewildered.
“Okay.” Hackett handed the keys off to the valet and headed to the entrance, waving Ted along. “They said room 366.”
He had to hurry to keep up with the older executive. “It’s not that I’m not grateful, really grateful, but don’t foundations do things like fund malaria research and exhibitions at art museums?”
“It’s a legal foundation. Taking on legal cases is kinda the damn point, right?” Hackett punched the elevator button. “Usually class-action lawsuits. We do a lot of civil rights shit. And animal rights.”
“Oh.” Ted rubbed the back of his head.
“So you’re thinking, why take on your case? It’s a theft and assault case, corporate espionage shit that doesn’t even involve this Hackett guy’s companies.”
“I, uh, am thinking that, yes.” The elevator opened on the third floor, and Hackett took the lead again, striding down the hall.
“Two reasons. One, I don’t like Walter Lucas, and I am actually that much of a petty little fucker. Two,” he glanced over at Ted, “while this is definitely an animal rights case, it might also be a civil rights case in disguise.”
“I…hadn’t really thought of it that way.”
“Well, start, even if it’s enlightened self-interest, Teddy Boy, because your best shot at not going away for a very long time is probably convincing a jury your girlfriend is a person.” He knocked on the door of 366.
Ted grimaced. “Please stop calling her my girlfriend, Mr. Hackett.”
The door opened, a stern, impeccably dressed young man standing there. Finley, Hammer’s assistant. Or junior partner. Or something. He stood back, holding the door and motioning them in. “Welcome out, Mr. Bishop.”
“Thanks. Uh—”
Aurora dashed over, all seven feet of her, hugging Ted so tightly she lifted him off his feet. He hugged back awkwardly as she pressed her muzzle to his lips in a kiss. Sally, sitting at the room’s tiny office desk, stared with wide eyes.
“Wow,” Hackett said.
Aurora let Ted go, turning to look down at him.
“Hi.” He held out his hand. “Stan Hackett.”
“I’m Aurora.” She hesitated before taking his hand in her larger one, gently. “You met one of us before.”
“Yeah. How did she feel about that?”
She furrowed her brow. “About…you?”
“About me, about being used as a prop.”
“We didn’t…fully understand yet.” She tilted her head. “How did you feel?”
“Uncomfortable. Your creators never gave me a straight answer when I asked them why they made you look… I mean…” He waved a hand up and down at her.
“Attractive to humans. We did that ourselves. To try to appeal to your empathy by…” She shrugged. “Being appealing to you.”
“No shit. Huh.” He sat down on one of the beds and looked up at Finley. “I’m not wrong about this being a civil rights case, am I?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think you are, no.”
“Also.” He waggled a finger between Ted and Aurora. “She is absolutely your girlfriend.”
Ted blushed. Aurora just grinned.
Sally gaped. “Have you…had…with each other…”
“Could we stop talking about this, please,” Ted snapped.
“That’s a ‘yes,’” Hackett stage-whispered to Sally. Her eyes got even wider.
“So that’s a subject to steer away from in court as much as possible,” Finley muttered, then raised his voice back to a normal conversational level. “Ms. Hammer’s on her way up. And, Mr. Bishop, we’re having your car driven here.”
“I’ll never be so happy to get back to that apartment.”
When Hammer joined them, Finley left; it was almost like a changing of the guards, setting aside the fact there were still actual police officers posted outside.
“We have a trial date,” she announced without preamble. “It’s seven weeks from now.”
“That seems fast.” Ted blinked. “Uh, is it fast?”
“It’s as fast as they’re legally required to do it, which they usually never make, so yes. There’s pressure coming from somewhere.”
“Lucas,” Hackett said. “He brought an army of lobbyists from his last company with him to Nanolabs.” He looked at Ted. “You know that, right?”
Ted shook his head. “No. But that’s probably how he got the military contract.”
“The what?” Hackett laughed. “Holy shit, are you telling me they’re making fucking mouse super soldiers?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know there’s a military contract, there’s just a lot of…” He waved a hand. “Suspicious things. Uh.” He glanced at Hammer. “I’m not supposed to be saying this, am I? I’m still under non-disclosure, even if I’ve been terminated. Which they haven’t told me I am yet.”
Hackett waved a hand dismissively. “I’m not a direct competitor, and if you’re just offering speculation, you’re not violating your NDA.”
“Yes,” Aurora said.
Hackett looked over at her.
“Yes, they are working with the military on making giant Dynamice with combat training.”
Hammer groaned. “I don’t think you’re allowed to share that.”
“Hey, they don’t think she’s a person.” Hackett had a wide, vaguely demonic grin. “So they didn’t have her sign a fuckin’ NDA, did they.”
Hammer opened her mouth, then closed it again, brow furrowing.
“By giant,” Hackett continued, “you mean bigger than you are? Because you’re pretty big.”
“She’s been bigger,” Ted murmured.
“My current height, up to nearly twice this height.”
“Okay, that sounds intimidating enough I won’t try and make killer mouse jokes. But how do you know this? They’re not training you, and I bet this is all top secret inside the company, unless Lucas is even sloppier than I thought.”
“The Dynamice can, and do, share information with one another.” Ted shook his head. “A group of them together forms a mesh network that’s supposed to be self-contained, just for telemetry, but clearly they somehow figured out how to connect themselves to wide-area networks.”
“No shit.” Hackett rubbed his chin. “So, Aurora. One last question before I stop bothering the lawyers. How would you prove you’re a person?”
She blinked rapidly, looking at a loss.
Hammer cleared her throat. “That’s not a fact we have to establish to win Mr. Bishop’s case.”
He arched a brow. “Isn’t it?”
She crossed her arms. “Mr. Hackett, is that the case you want us to be trying to make?”
“Maybe.” Hackett slapped his knees and stood up. “I’m just saying, my fucking company is legally a person, right? If lawyers got that bullshit to stand up in court, getting a human-sized intelligent talking mouse declared a person can’t be that much bigger a lift.”
When he left, Sally looked at Hammer. “He has a point.”
“He has an angle.”
“That doesn’t mean he’s wrong.”
“How do any of you prove you’re people?” Aurora asked.
“I, uh…” Sally spread her hands. “We just are.”
“Because you said so.”
“Essentially, yes.” Hammer sighed. “Humans are people, people are humans.”
“But Stan wasn’t wrong,” Bishop said. “Corporations are people, even though they’re not humans.”
Hammer held up both hands. “Okay, this is a pet peeve of mine. There’s a distinction in the law between a ‘natural person’ and a ‘legal person.’ All natural persons—humans—are legal persons, but not the other way ’round. There are a lot of rights and obligations only natural persons have.”
“But legal persons have the right to free speech,” Sally pointed out.
“And that was a stupid fucking decision.” Hammer shook her head, then said, “Ms. Dimalanta, could I ask you to step out for a break? I have to discuss the case with Mr. Bishop and Aurora.”
She looked momentarily crestfallen, then smiled stiffly, rising to her feet. “Of course. It’s about lunchtime. I’ll head over to the Yard House.”
After she left, Hammer looked between Aurora and Ted, locking eyes with the latter. “As loathe as I am to admit it, Hackett is partially correct. The best strategy for getting you acquitted is to successfully argue that you believed Aurora was a person, and you were effectively rescuing her from slavery.”
“I did believe that. I do believe that. Don’t you believe that?”
“It doesn’t matter what I believe, it matters what I can prove, Mr. Bishop, and the goddamn truth is that I don’t know how to answer her question.” She stabbed a finger toward Aurora. “Every legal definition I’ve ever seen for ‘natural person’ incorporates the phrase ‘human being,’ which she is not. I’m not saying there’s no way to make that leap—two hundred years ago, y’all did the legal equivalent of triple backflips to keep Blacks from having standing—but I’m saying that if the goal is to keep your ass out of jail, ‘mice are people too’ may not be a hill we have to die on.”
“You’re saying that as long as I believe she’s a person, I was acting in good faith.”
“Right. We can’t argue you didn’t do it, and we can’t argue you didn’t know that you were committing a crime. But we can argue you thought you were doing the right thing.”
Aurora spoke softly. “But do you believe I’m a person?”
Hammer looked at her silently for a few seconds. “I think you could be. But if they challenge one of our witnesses to prove it, and they will, how do they do it?”
“Just ‘could?’” Ted looked incredulous.
“Mr. Bishop, I’m not a computer scientist or a bioengineer, and all I know about Dynamice is what you’ve told me and what my interns have found combing through research papers. But I know that your company used large language models in getting them from normal mice to supermice, and from what you’ve told me, the mice themselves went from those first supermice to…” She turned to Aurora. “To you.” She looked between them. “Is that all correct?”
“Yes.”
Aurora nodded, too.
“And,” Hammer continued, “large language models aren’t intelligent, no matter how much Sam Altman jacks off about ‘AGI’ being just around the corner. But they’re shockingly good at making people think they’re intelligent. You ask ChatGPT to argue that it’s a person, and it’s going to do a good enough job to convince the average Facebook employee because they’re all intelligence 18, wisdom 3 types.”
Ted lifted his brows.
She looked back at him, eyes narrowing. “Yes, some Black girls played D&D, too.”
“You just seemed like you’d be too cool for that.”
“Nothing cooler than killing Balrogs and snogging Kobolds. But are you getting my point about the personhood argument? Slick’s going to have the state arguing that Aurora’s basically a furry LLM, and that you, as a company employee, knew that.”
“But,” Aurora said hesitantly, “if the only way to defend Ted is to argue that he does believe that I am a person, even knowing how I was made, then you either have to argue that he was deluded or that I really am a person. Don’t you?”
Hammer fell silent, clearly considering that.
Ted cleared his throat. “And I don’t like the delusion argument. I get it from a strategic perspective, but it tacitly accepts the premise that she isn’t a person. Even if you don’t want to make that case, we shouldn’t set that as a precedent. Especially with Mr. Hackett’s legal foundation footing the bill.”
She sighed. “Fuck. All right.” She motioned at Aurora. “Let’s figure out how to prove you’re a person.”