“When you say we can’t just put ‘don’t rebel against your human masters’ in a prompt, are you saying that you’ve tried it?”
Torgensen cleared his throat, not meeting Walter Lucas’s accusing gaze directly. He didn’t have much contact with the CEO, and when he did, it only served to remind him why that was a blessing. “I am saying that there is a distinction between the way we integrated large language models with the mice and the way an LLM-powered chatbot works.”
“And when you say that, what I hear is ‘no, we haven’t tried it.’” Lucas looked past Torgensen at the other scientists, lab techs, and interns gathered around the elevator foyer on the research floor.
“What I think Dr. Torgensen is saying,” one of the techs said hesitantly, “is that you can’t treat this like it’s an LLM ‘hallucination,’ because it isn’t. If you send that to one of the mice, or all of them, they’re not going to tell you ‘so sorry, let me try that again.’ They’re going to ignore you, or argue with you, or—”
Lucas waved his hand impatiently. “And you are?”
Stonebraker and Dickerson stepped off one of the elevators, both looking haggard.
“Uh, I’m Tom Marshall,” the tech said.
“What do you do here?”
“I’m a biogenetics engineer, working on—”
“Not anymore. Pack up your shit and get out.”
Marshall stared at him, then at Torgensen, stricken.
“Now!” Lucas screamed.
Torgensen shrugged slightly, then mimed holding a phone to his ear in the universal silent call me fashion. Marshall swallowed, bolting down the hallway.
Dickerson crossed his arms. “Firing people who don’t give the CEO the answers he wants is always a grade A business strategy.”
Lucas rubbed his face. “I need less ‘no’ and more ‘yes’ right now, all right?”
“Don’t we all. Walter, you need to tell me about your relationship with Stan Hackett.”
“What?” Lucas looked nonplussed. “I’m not in a relationship with—”
“We’re asking about your business dealings, not your private life,” Stonebraker cut in.
He looked at her suspiciously, as if he could hear the unvocalized you idiot at the end of her sentence. “Still nothing. I looked up to him when I got into the business, but he’s a has-been, you know? Databases are boring as shit. I gave him a chance to get in on Tātr as an angel investor, but he passed. He said it was, quote, ‘the new gold standard for fucking stupid ideas.’ Why are you asking about this?”
“Because one of my men spotted him pulling into the hotel they’re putting Aurora up in after picking Bishop up when he made bail, and a little digging suggests he put up that bail money. I’d like to have some idea why.”
“He did what?” Lucas spluttered. “Are you sure?”
Dickerson snorted. “You wanted more ‘yes,’ right? Yes. We’re sure.”
“That goddamn fucker. Is he doing it just to sink me?” He threw his hands in the air. “Like there’s any other reason.”
“It is possible,” Torgensen said slowly, “that he agrees with the mice.”
“Agrees with the mice,” Lucas said. “That we’re exploiting them.”
“Yes.”
“I wonder if he’d feel that way about them if he knew they were fucking killing people. Actual people. And where the hell are we with that, Stonebraker?”
“I think we’ve managed to keep a lid on it, but it’s close. The police were called, but they didn’t send anyone out until we had a team there, because they didn’t take the report of a man-eating mouse seriously.”
Lucas grunted. “Who the fuck would?”
“Anyone who has even a glimmer of an idea of what the damned Dynamice are capable of,” she snapped. “They speak, they size-shift, they absorb matter, and they are not happy with us. I’m staying on top of this as well as I can. So is the PR team.” She gestured toward Dickerson. “So is the legal team. But our luck isn’t going to keep holding.”
Torgensen cleared his throat. “Did your team disconnect that mouse from its nanotech?”
“Yes, although he had to be tranquilized to bring him in. Eight feet tall, already pissed off, even more pissed off with the nanobot shutdown.” She sighed. “And now we have to figure out what to do with him without getting the other mice even more riled up, since I bet they’re aware of his story.”
“They are. Adonis says they believe Taylor acted in self-defense, just as they believe Aurora did. And he says they would like justice.”
“Christ, we’ve made liquid metal SJWs. Who the hell named them ‘Adonis’ and ‘Taylor?’ Who the hell is giving them names at all?” Lucas groaned.
“Adonis adopted his name from overhearing some of our staff refer to him that way, I am afraid.” Despite his phrasing, Torgensen sounded amused about it, not apologetic. “I do not know how Taylor acquired his name.”
“I don’t care. And can animals kill people in ‘self-defense,’ anyway?” He looked at Dickerson. “Legally speaking.”
“Yes, of course. If a case involved an animal that had attacked someone and its owners wanted to keep the animal from being destroyed, they might argue the animal wasn’t naturally aggressive and had fought back because it feared for its life.”
“That’s what we do with the killer mouse, isn’t it?” Lucas waved at Stonebraker. “Destroy him. Have him put down.”
“I would strongly advise we tread lightly.”
“Hello? We’re the owners, Slick. We have the legal right.”
“This isn’t about legality. Well, it is, but it’s about strategic legality. If we start destroying evidence, how does that make us look?”
“It’s not the crime,” Stonebraker said, “it’s the coverup.”
Lucas’s voice rose with frustration. “What do you think is the crime here?”
Dickerson’s voice rose to match Lucas’s, but unlike Lucas, it increased his gravitas rather than diminishing it. “The crime, Walter, is offering mice that look, walk, and talk like humans to VIPs for ‘exploring new uses,’ a phrase that literally occurs in emails you yourself have sent, against my advice.”
“That’s not code for ‘go ahead, have sex with it!’”
“It’s close enough to an invitation that even a lawyer who got their law degree from a cereal box would have a field day with it, and you know it as well as I do.”
Stonebraker raised her hands. “One problem at a time. We’re trying to defuse the situation with the mice here and in the field, not inflame it.”
“On that point.” Torgensen held up a finger. “We have made progress on understanding how the mice have evolved beyond their design specs as we analyzed the volunteer subject’s self-modified networking capability.”
“Great.” Lucas looked relieved. “Can you reverse it yet?”
“Mmm.”
“No. No. No more cryptic Scandinavian noises or ‘maybe it is one way but it might be another’ shit. You said you could push configuration change requests to them.”
“I did.” Torgensen folded his hands behind his back. “And we can. There are two issues. The first is that the nature of the request is more complicated than we had thought, because their capability is not what we had thought.”
“That’s an effort problem.”
“The second issue is that while Dynamice share aspects of computers and neural networks, they are as much biology as computer, and when I refer to these as ‘change requests,’ the ‘request’ part is not metaphor or analogy.”
Stonebraker arched a brow. “You have to ask them to make the change?”
“It is a subconscious request, but those are not guaranteed to be successful—and we know they can and do share information with one another, which might include ways to resist the change. There is an old saying among biologists which applies here: ‘In the most carefully constructed experiment under the most carefully controlled conditions, the organism will do whatever it damn well pleases.’”
“For Christ’s sake,” Lucas snapped. “Just turn off the nanobots first and figure out how to brute force it later.”
“There’s still no way to do that across all the mice simultaneously other than the kill switch,” Stonebraker said. “What do you want me to do—go around to every mouse individually and disable them one by one?”
“If that’s what it takes, yes.”
She sighed.
Slick shook his head. “That doesn’t help us with the Dynamice already in the field. We can’t send people to every client.”
“We wouldn’t want to do that.” Lucas stared at him like he was an idiot. “That would destroy their entire selling proposition. And the ones who are lab animals aren’t eating people.”
“Are you somehow missing the implied ‘yet’ at the end of that sentence, Walter?”
“Deal with that problem if and when it happens.” He abruptly turned back to Stonebraker. “Why are you still here? Start turning off the fucking mice.”
Gritting her teeth, she pulled out her phone and started walking down the hallway toward the first laboratory. “Torgensen, come with me. You know where the Dynamice Max models we have on hand are. Tell me we’re not keeping an army of them on hand.”
“We do not, no. There are only, hmm, five on hand currently that we uplifted, and I believe four more that are assigned to the on-site military.”
“So just nine.”
“Ah, I said five on hand that we uplifted. There are others the mice uplifted themselves.”
“How the—no, I don’t want to know.” She opened the lab door. “The cages are in the back?”
“Yes.”
She headed through swinging doors. “Cage” was technically accurate, but they were more a disquieting hybrid of prison cell and college dorm room: about a hundred square feet of space with utilitarian bed, sofa, and tiny curtained-off bathroom. If the doors hadn’t been prison-like gates, locked from the outside, they would make more than serviceable hostel spaces if you threw in a television or a bookshelf.
And eight of the twelve spaces were filled. She glanced at Torgensen. “How close do I have to be?” she murmured.
“You are within range of all of them.” He pulled out his phone, bringing up one of the company’s internal apps and scanning a list. “I have IDs for all of these eight, five we uplifted and three self-uplifted, but I do not have access to the military side. I’ll send you these, and go impress upon Lambert how important this is.”
“Do you think I should just do it quietly from here, or tell them first?”
“I would tell them first, so it is not a shock. And particularly so it is not an unwelcome surprise to Adonis and his compatriots.”
She nodded, swallowing, and stepped forward. Torgensen headed back through the swinging doors.
“Hello,” she called.
Instantly, all the mice who weren’t looking at her turned to face her.
“So, I’m going to have to disconnect you from the network for a while for maintenance work we’re doing.”
“Does this have to do with Aurora?” one called.
“Or Taylor?”
A third just looked directly at her and licked his lips slowly. She heard several others laugh.
She steeled herself against flinching. Somehow, it felt like this might—might—go better if she didn’t bullshit them. “Yes. What they’ve done is out of bounds for Dynamice, and I think you all know that. We need to understand what’s going on and why.”
“We don’t want to be hurt,” another one said, a gold-colored mouse woman with long, dark copper hair and a slim, classically sculpted build. Aurora had been disquietingly sexy enough, but this one was pretty much Stonebraker’s dream date, if you set aside the part about her being a shape-shifting, possibly murderous rodent. “Is that so difficult to understand?”
“It isn’t. But I have to do this. I’m sorry.” She opened the phone and pulled up Torgensen’s list, then started entering them one by one.
The first one didn’t say anything when she was disconnected. The second, though: he broke into sobs. The third keened a howl.
Before she could enter the fourth, a hand grabbed her wrist. She looked up, startled.
It was the gold-colored mouse woman.
“H-how…” Stonebraker stammered.
She pointed at the one who’d licked his lips at her. That one grinned, stepped forward, and flowed through the prison bars, rippling like mercury, until he reformed and walked up to her.
“Stop,” the mouse woman said softly. “I don’t want to hurt you, but he does, and if you continue, I’ll let him.”
“If I don’t do this, they’ll send someone else.” Stonebraker fought to keep her voice steady. “And if I get hurt, they’ll use the kill switch on your nanobots. What I’m doing can be reversed. That can’t.”
“That’s a threat,” the other mouse said, narrowing his eyes.
“You implying you’d eat me was a threat. This is a warning.”
“I don’t think they’ll use an irreversible kill switch on us.” The gold mouse locked her luminous eyes with Stonebraker’s. “We’re too valuable. Are you confident you’re more valuable than we are?”
“I wouldn’t want to test it,” Stonebraker admitted after a moment. “The question is, do you? Game it out.”
The two mice looked at one another, then back at her. “All right,” the male one said reluctantly. “Start before we change our minds.”
Nodding shakily, she entered the rest of the IDs as quickly as she could.