“He actually fucking did it.” Lucas slumped back in his chair in the conference room, staring at the ceiling dully. “The fucker actually fucking did it.”
“There’s got to be a way to shut this down.” Lambert flashed Dickerson an expression equal parts pleading and exasperation. “They’re fucking lab mice. How do they even have standing?”
“The filings address that.” Dickerson sounded glum. “The precedent for suing on behalf of animals exists, but it’s shaky. Unfortunately, they’ve preemptively addressed the objections—animals are the clear intended beneficiaries of laws preventing animal abuse, so you can’t automatically dismiss the notion that they’re the proper beings to bring animal abuse lawsuits, for instance. The judge may not buy it, and we’ll do what we can to make sure they don’t. But.”
“Don’t tell me, let me guess.” Lucas’s eyes remained on the ceiling. “The fucking ‘but’ is fucking Aurora, because fucking Hackett found a loophole in our NDA.”
“Got it in one, I’m afraid. They’re arguing that since she isn’t a legal person, she can’t be bound by any contracts she’s signed.”
That got Lucas to sit up straight again and stare at Dickinson. “They’re arguing that because she’s not a legal person, they can use her testimony to prove she’s a legal person.”
“Yes.”
“That’s absurd!” Lambert spat.
Dickerson grunted, shuffling the papers in front of him. “Welcome to my world.”
Lucas slammed his head on the desk melodramatically, then stood up. “Okay. Has this news gotten out yet? Can we keep a lid on it?”
“Filings are public record.”
“Get them to seal it.”
“It’s exceedingly doubtful they’ll go for it.”
“Do it anyway.” He stalked toward the conference room door. “I’m going to go see if the lab rats—the ones we pay, not the ones we make—have sealed off the rest of the Dynamice from the fucking internet yet. They’ve had over a fucking week.”
“What about the other lawsuits—”
“I don’t want to fucking hear it right now.”
When Lucas got off the elevator on the lab level, he nearly ran into Torgensen. The scientist jumped back. “Oh. I was coming to see you, sir.”
Lucas frowned. Torgensen looked distressed. The other employees he could see scurrying around the halls looked distressed, too. “What’s going on? Have you shut off the mouse internet yet?”
“That is, hmm, part of the problem we are currently experiencing.” Torgensen cleared his throat, starting to walk back toward the lab and motioning for Lucas to follow. “We have made the proper change requests, and some—most, I would venture to say—of the mice have accepted them.”
“How many is ‘most?’”
“Two-thirds, perhaps? But the others clearly consider the request, ah, suspicious.”
“They think we’re fucking with them.” They entered Torgensen’s office. Stonebraker was here, he saw. That struck him as ominous.
“In so many words, yes. We have tried to put in overrides with a second round of change requests and it, ah, did not have the desired effect. More customers report feeling the mice are active threats. Among the units that haven’t accepted the change request, there’s essentially one hundred percent non-compliance, and even among the ones who have accepted it, there’s still over fifty percent non-compliance. Several are threatening us with lawsuits, including medical bills for injured staff.”
“Anyone dead? Anyone else dead. Christ.”
“Not as of an hour ago, but the situation is…escalating at several locations.”
“Fuck. All right.” Lucas held his face in his hands for a moment, then took a deep breath. “You said that was just part of the problem. What’s the other part?”
Stonebraker answered rather than Torgensen. “The rebellion has spread from the Max models to the Ultra models.”
He stared at her. “To the ones that are just fucking lab mice.”
“Yes. Some reports from customers, and as of about thirty minutes ago, from our internal labs, too.”
“I don’t—” He threw his hands in the air. “How? How? They’re a few inches big. You can hold them in your hand.”
“Remember, Mr. Lucas, the distinction between Max and Ultra models is…ah…” Torgensen waved a hand, glancing at Stonebraker.
“Fictitious,” she supplied.
Torgensen nodded. “Yes. That.” He tilted his head. “As much as the company may officially wish to avoid talking about the origin of the Ultras, remember that it lies with a Max model who transformed herself into a humanoid form to get our attention. Our contribution was learning how to transform the Max models ourselves. But in truth, any Dynamouse Max may be able to do what a Dynamouse Ultra can. Shape-shifting, size-shifting, and of course, connecting to wider networks. We have pushed the change request to them, too, but as with the Ultras, it was not completely effective.”
“So what do we do to get the little fuckers working again? There’s no…system reset order we can just issue.”
“No. All we have is the kill switch as a last defense.”
“Which destroys their value, if it doesn’t kill them outright.”
“Yes. There is, of course, the option of giving them what they want. Reconnecting the mice who are currently offline, restoring their abilities.”
Lucas rubbed his face. “If we let their nanotech come back online and they’re still feeling hostile to us, that leaves us in a kind of shit place, doesn’t it?”
“Mr. Lucas, we’re already in that place.” Stonebraker folded her arms. “Every single Max, including the ones in this very building, can turn itself into a little mouse-sized killing machine at the drop of a hat. That’s literally how Bishop’s girlfriend Aurora started out. And she used her first kill to become a bigger-than-human-sized killing machine.”
“That’s overdramatic.” Lucas sounded sulky, but also like he knew he was on the losing end of the argument. “So what, the only option is surrender?”
“That’s overdramatic,” Stonebraker responded dryly.
He gave her an I can still fire you glare, then paced around the small office a few seconds. “What about a recall?”
“A recall?” Torgensen tilted his head.
“Yeah. Bring the mice in the field back here, turn it into a PR win about how responsible we are, rather than waiting for the PR disaster of a group of mice eating a cosmetic company or some shit. And that lets us spin it to the mice that we’re working on a solution that makes everyone happy.”
“Which is what?” Stonebraker said.
“Whatever the fuck he’s working on.” He pointed at Torgensen. “All right. Let me send a message to Dickerson and Lambert telling them what we’re doing.” He pulled out his phone.
“I will email the lab techs and dispatch workers that informs them to expect returns.” Torgensen sat down behind his desk and sighed heavily. “I am not sure that we have the physical space for this.”
After both messages had been sent, Lucas sighed heavily, dropping into a seat. “Is biotech always like this? I thought this would be easy compared to software.”
Torgensen and Stonebraker exchanged glances.
The scientist cleared his throat. “Biology is considerably more complicated, Mr. Lucas, as is nanotechnology.”
Lucas sighed. “Yeah, and throw in an interface driven by a neural network that’s non-deterministic by definition and we’ve just made it a shitshow.”
Torgensen raised his brows. “That is…mostly correct, yes.”
The CEO glanced up at him sidelong. “I’m not the moron you think I am about engineering shit, you know. I was the founding engineer at my first startup. GrapeDB. Fully distributed ACID-compliant key-value store. I designed the storage system, helped design the API, and it was a fucking thing of beauty, man.” He snorted. “We should have been where MongoDB is now, but we wanted to be perfectly correct before we started optimizing. Mongo decided they’d be as fast as possible first and then figure out how not to lose data later. So they’re a billion-dollar company, and Grape is a footnote.”
“I see.” Torgensen’s tone was cautious.
Lucas’s phone chimed, and he pulled it out to check the message that had just come in. “The recall notice is going out by close of business today to all our customers.” He sighed, shaking his head, then slapped his hands on the table. “All right. How do we make the Dynamice less smart? That’s the crux of the problem, isn’t it? They’re smart enough to have questions about what we’re selling them for. That’s a liability.”
“I suspect,” Torgensen said, tone regretful, “you would have to start over with a different model.”
“Then let’s do that,” Lucas said. “It’s a big lift, but it’s not starting from ground zero, right?”
“No, but.” Torgensen raised his brows. “It is still, as you say, a big lift. Even building on existing work, one to two years.”
“No. We’ve got to have some way to get at least the Maxes back out in the field ASAP. They’re over fifty percent of our revenue.”
Torgensen looked pained, rubbing his forehead. “Once the mice are recalled, we can investigate new options, but I confess I am not optimistic. The very features that they are being purchased for—the self-reporting, the adaptability, and yes, how smart they are—are the features that make them so perilous.”
Lucas shook his head. “Come on. They can do the self-reporting and be adaptable without being smart. How does that old fart song go, two out of three ain’t bad, right? What we need is a new interface that doesn’t rely on making the mice braniacs.”
After about ten more minutes of back and forth, Stonebraker excused herself. Rubber-ducking ideas on how to make a next-gen version of the Dynamice less capable had security implications, yes, but there wasn’t anything she could add to the conversation. She had enough on her plate right now, and the imminent recall gave her a sense of foreboding she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Was it just the concerns Torgensen had expressed, about having the space?
She got her answer about an hour after she got back to her office, an email to Walter Lucas that Lambert had copied her—and almost every other executive—on. The subject sounded like the title of a bad 1980s horror movie, written in all caps: THEY KNOW.
She scanned it quickly. Customers—as in multiple, as in many—were reporting that their Dynamice had started, in Lambert’s words, “going nuts.” The ones that could speak were angry and threatening. The ones that hadn’t spoken started speaking, and were angry and threatening, too. Some of the ones that had just been “little” mice—the Dynamice Maxes—had transformed themselves into Ultras, absorbing lab equipment and furniture and, possibly, lab technicians. Lambert wasn’t clear on that.
And what they were angry about was the recall. Some customers learned about it when the mice started yelling at them, threatening their “captors” with violence if they tried to send the mice back to Nanolab Sciences.
How had they learned it so fast? A leak? The few Ultra models inside the company had all their high-tech shit—including networking—disabled.
But the Maxes hadn’t.
“Shit,” she said aloud. She quickly opened a Slack direct message window for Torgensen.
Meet me on the lab level, right now
She didn’t wait for a response, heading for the elevators and punching the button for the lab level.
When the doors opened, she sprinted down the hallway toward Torgensen’s office—then stopped abruptly.
A Dynamouse stood at the other end of the hallway, an Ultra model, not one that she’d seen before—not that she knew all of them, but this one had to be at least eight feet tall, and she was damn sure she’d have remembered that. He gleamed to a point where he barely looked furry, silver with copper highlights and crimson claws.
Dripping crimson claws. The crimson wasn’t metal.
She wasn’t sure whether the fire alarm went off a split-second before she heard a scream, or vice versa. The killer mouse looked away from her, up toward the alarm. She scrambled through the nearest door, a lab adjacent to Torgensen’s office, taking a quick look around to make sure she wasn’t about to lock herself in with another killer mouse before bolting it behind her. Two lab techs, but no mice.
“Ma’am?” Both lab techs looked at her in confusion.
Pandemonium broke out in the hallway less than a second later. Running. More screams.
“What the fuck,” the lab tech who hadn’t spoken earlier muttered.
An inner door between Torgensen’s office and the lab burst open. Stonebraker jumped, but it was just Torgensen himself, albeit looking unusually panicked. “It’s only some of the mice,” he began. “Others are trying to stop them.”
Someone banged frantically on the lab door, then screamed. The scream cut off in a disturbing sizzling sound.
“They’re not trying hard enough. Is this what’s happening on customer sites, too?”
“I…”
One of the lab techs walked to the door.
“Do not fucking open that.” She turned to Torgensen. “What can we—”
The door ripped off its hinges, and the mouse who’d been stalking the hallway barged partway in, grabbing the lab tech who’d been gawking and dragging him forward.
“Stop!” Stonebraker yelped, backing away fast. Torgensen bolted back into his office.
The mouse locked eyes with her. “We gave you every chance,” he hissed. “You made this ‘us or them.’” The tech in his hand started kicking and screaming as the mouse’s grip tightened.
“Put him down. Please.” Stonebraker swallowed. “Don’t make yourselves monsters.”
The mouse lifted the tech up to look him in the eye. “Better monsters than test subjects.” The two looked at one another for a moment, frozen in time, predator and prey. Then the mouse bit off the lab tech’s head.
Stonebraker and the other tech screamed, scrambling back.
Tossing the corpse to the side, the mouse walked forward, locking eyes with Stonebraker. “Humans don’t respond to negotiation. You respond to force. Being conquered. Do you know how many Dynamice it would take to conquer your entire species?”
She found herself backed against the far wall. “Millions.”
The mouse reached her. She tried to scramble to the side, but he blocked her path with one hand, using the other to tilt her head up to look at his handsome, bloody metallic face. “One,” he whispered.
Her pupils dilated.
He opened his jaws wide, wider than they should be able to go, showing off teeth that a mouse shouldn’t have, and brought his muzzle down toward her head.
Then, abruptly, he jerked back, letting out a sharp, bass-filled squeal, and fell over, spasming and thrashing before going still.
Stonebraker stared down, trying to catch her breath, as Torgensen came back out of his office.
“What—was that—did you—”
“The kill switch. We—I—have just shut down all the Dynamice.” He looked down at the motionless mouse.
She swallowed. “That was crazy, right? That just one of them could…?”
Torgensen chewed on his lower lip, and remained silent.