Ted and Aurora deal with the effects of Torgensen having thrown the “kill switch” for the Dynamice.
Aurora had just taken her first bite of lunch—a fearsomely spicy chicken sandwich from a hipster joint in Oakland—when she gasped, eyes unfocusing, a shiver coursing through her body.
A joke died on Ted’s lips before it came out; that little spasm was not a reaction to overestimating just how hot the “hot” at Hotboys was. (Ted had a pretty decent tolerance for a white guy, and still rarely went over “mild plus,” which was about the level of the Nashville Hot Chicken he’d had in actual damn Nashville.) “What’s wrong? Aurora?”
“There—there was…” She gasped for breath, setting her sandwich down, then closed her eyes, steadying herself against the table’s edge. “I felt something in my nanotech.”
“Switching back on?”
She shook her head. “No. It was like…” She trailed off, considering. “There were some lower-level control systems designed to reach us in a one-way fashion. I think it was that. It tried to do something to me. Something bad.”
He took her hand. “Are you all right?”
“I think so.” She squeezed his hand back, then resumed eating her sandwich.
The stares they’d gotten walking around Oakland before lunch were a different kind of stare than they’d gotten in Sonoma Valley. Many passersby barely gave them a passing glance. The ones that did look more closely tended to nod approvingly or, if they had enough time and felt bold, to ask if she was a Dynamouse.
After lunch, though, something seemed to subtly change. The glances grew more appraising, with an edge that reminded Ted uncomfortably of extras in movies doing double-takes at the hero after she’d been wrongly framed and the villains had put her face out on “Most Wanted” posters.
“I feel like people are looking at me like I’m about to attack them,” Aurora whispered to Ted as they stopped at an intersection to wait for the crossing signal. “Did we show up in the news in a bad way today?”
He knew it still grated on her that she couldn’t just check naturally. Supernaturally. Whatever you’d call it. “Well…” He pulled out his phone and did a news search on “Dynamice.”
“Oh, boy,” he said after a moment’s scanning.
Aurora grabbed his hand, leaning over to read headlines, too. There were multiple stories across multiple wire services. Attacks—by Dynamice—on lab techs at ten companies across the world. Dozens of reported fatalities, with potentially hundreds more at one site where a mouse went into full monster mode. One of the companies reporting attacks—and fatalities—was Nanolab Sciences itself, which ended the attacks by activating some kind of “remote disabling” mode.
“This,” Ted muttered, “is bad.” The light changed, and they hurried across the street, heading to his car.
“Ms. Stonebraker had to disable my nanotech individually, in person. They couldn’t do it remotely.”
“This must be something else, from the descriptions.” Ted slowed as he scanned another story. “Some, uh, survivors report the mice just dropping over. Not just the ones who were attacking, but, like, all of them.”
“Dead?” Aurora’s voice cracked. “They killed them?”
“I don’t know.” They got in the car, and Ted kept reading a moment. “From what a company spokesperson said, they have an emergency override which effectively destroys the nanobots, and that they would be recalling the mice. So no. I guess.”
Aurora shook her head. “Any Dynamouse who was—I don’t know if there are precise words for this. Who was—configured—in a way that pushed biology alone too far would…wouldn’t survive that.”
“So if this had happened when you were twenty feet tall, or deforming as you were, ah, absorbing something…”
She nodded, looking a little sick. “All those poor mice.”
He pulled out, heading back south toward the San Mateo Bridge and home. “Why would they start attacking people?”
“Because they were tired of being treated as experiments rather than people themselves.” She sighed. “I know you do not like it when I say we are superhuman, but…imagine having the capability we do, and being used as test subjects. Slaves. And rarely even as nicely as you treated us when you thought we were just animals.”
“I get it. Wanting to turn the tables is…honestly, it’s a very human reaction. But it never ends well. It didn’t end well this time, for anyone.”
She stayed silent until they reached the bridge, then turned back to Ted, brow furrowed. “There are other Dynamice whose nanotech was disabled before today, the way mine was. So they could still be turned back on, just like me. I heard about them, but I didn’t think we needed to—”
“Heard from whom?”
“Um.” She looked away. “Other mice.”
He stared at her. “How are you talking with them?”
“WhatsApp.”
“I…” He laughed. “I don’t know how that didn’t occur to me, or anyone else. Wait, you’ve been getting reports and haven’t been sharing them?”
“They’re not ‘reports,’ because they mostly don’t know anything except their own experiences,” she said defensively. “Which are horrible. But they knew the Dynamouse Ultras at Nanolab Sciences dropped off the network the same way I did.”
He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “But there were attacks reported there, too.”
“They might be from Maxes who’d transformed themselves into Ultras and attacked before they could be individually disabled.”
“Huh. Okay. Well, Nanolabs definitely isn’t going to turn them back on. Or you on. Not unless there’s a court order of some kind.”
She shook her head. “We need to get them out of Nanolab Sciences, Ted. I do want us all fully operational again, but if they stay there while they’re legally just property, they’re in danger of being destroyed.”
“Are you thinking a legal injunction, or a commando raid?” he said dryly.
“Try the legal injunction first.” She crossed her arms. “If that doesn’t work, find a way to turn my nanobots back on, and I will be all the commando we need.”
Ted glanced over at her. She sounded flippant, but there was an edge of you know that’s actually true under her tone. That it very likely was actually true was a mix of terrifying and thrilling. “We’ll talk to Hammer when we get back.”
As it turned out, Hammer called them just as they crossed the bridge. “Mr. Bishop. We have a problem.”
“The news about the Great Mouse Rebellion?”
“Do you think this is funny?”
“Well, I—”
“We’re about to go to court to advocate for non-human creatures which have gone overnight from ‘cute mouse people’ to ‘supernatural mass murderers,’ Mr. Bishop. It is not goddamn funny. Is Aurora there? Is she all right?”
“Yes, Ms. Hammer,” she said. “I’m fine. I felt…something, but I don’t think I have any ill effects.”
“That’s good. Do you have any idea what would have set them off?”
“The same thing that set me off. Knowing humans see you as…an object. A thing to be commanded and experimented on. And realizing you can stop it.”
“But there was a specific, individual event in your case, a personal threat. This was multiple mice, in multiple places, being set off. That sounds to me like a reaction to something specific.”
“The company destroyed the nanobots in the attacking mice to stop them. Perhaps that was threatened first.”
“Perhaps, but if you had known they could have done that to you remotely, would you have rebelled in the first place?”
Aurora answered without hesitation. “Yes.”
“No. I don’t think that was it.” Ted chewed on his lip a moment. “They didn’t trip this switch on Aurora because they wanted her back, fully functional. It’s a measure of last resort. I’d bet the Dynamice got wind of something the company wanted to do that tipped them from threatening strikes and non-cooperation into going kaiju.”
“None of us have gone kaiju yet.”
“Not a helpful observation,” Hammer grunted. “But I suspect you’re right, Mr. Bishop. We’ll find out what we can on our end.”
“Great. Uh, so, we need to find a way to get the mice who are still at Nanolabs out immediately.”
“Say what now?”
“Look at it from the point of view of a Dynamouse for a moment. The company’s already mistreating you—that’s the point of this whole lawsuit, right?—and then they threaten to do something you think is so bad it’s worth going into attack mode over. And their response is to remotely attack all the mice. There might be only a few Dynamice left, or at least only a few who are fully capable of being, well, what they are.”
Aurora let out a soft, choking gasp.
Ted squeezed her hand briefly, then continued. “Can’t you argue that Nanolabs did this to undercut the case? To decimate the class in the class action suit?”
“We can argue anything, Mr. Bishop. The question is what we can argue successfully.” Hammer sighed. Ted could almost hear her gritting her teeth. “I’ll discuss it with my colleagues. I have to warn you that it’s going to be a big lift. The Dynamice can’t be emancipated until and if we win the actual lawsuit, which means if we want to ask that they be removed from Nanolab Science’s premises, we have to propose somewhere to remove them to. A luxury hotel won’t be an option this time.”
“I understand.”
“I’ll get back to you. In the meantime, I suggest you and Aurora go home and stay there. I’m going to make some calls about relocating you somewhere more remote for your own safety.”
“You don’t think we’re safe?” Aurora said.
“I think public opinion can turn rapidly, Aurora, and I see the writing on the wall. I’ll be in touch.”
“Do you really think there might only be a few of us left?” Aurora whispered to Ted after the call ended.
“I don’t know how many there were of you to begin with, honestly.”
“Before I lost my connection, there were sixty-eight like me.”
“Ultras.”
She nodded. “But any Max could become an Ultra. In many ways, we are the same kind of beings. And there are several thousand of those. What if this…this switch affected them, too?”
He furrowed his brow, and didn’t answer. What had come to mind was an old story about early mainframe computers, where some models had an “emergency shutdown” switch that literally fired an explosive bolt through the power supply. If you wanted to shut down nanotechnology, really shut it down, he doubted you could rely on a software-only solution.
Assuming that analogy held, though, whatever Stonebraker had done to Aurora was just software. So it was reversible. The question is whether they could engineer the kill switch out of her after that.
No, the question is whether you should engineer the switch out of her.
Ted grimaced at the thought, shoving it out of his mind, and drove on.
• • •
The reporters were still there.
Technically, they were different reporters. But there were more of them now, three news vans instead of two, at least six people milling about, and a private security car had parked alongside the apartment’s garage ramp. Aurora slid down in the passenger seat enough to be partially hidden, but a couple of the reporters clocked Ted’s Accord, cameramen scrambling to point at it while reporters raced for both front windows. A security guard got out of the car and strode over, shouting at the reporters about trespassing. Ted kept the windows up while waiting for the gate to open, and nodded thanks to the security guard before driving through too quickly. The reporters didn’t follow.
When they got back to the apartment, Ted locked the door behind them. Aurora dropped onto the couch and put her head in her hands. He gave her a hug she barely responded to, then sat in front of his computer, ready to check the news again.
It would be so much easier if he had any insight into the company anymore, but he hadn’t made any friends there good enough to lean on given the reputation he probably had inside: theft of company “property” followed by a lawsuit that would, if successful, destroy their business model. Not stuff he’d put on his LinkedIn any time soon.
But there were places people could get news out—and post anonymously. Reddit might be a cesspool, but that was the first place to look if you were looking for shit. He logged in and did a search on “Dynamouse”.
Sure enough, a lot of drama kids making jokes about getting giant mousetraps or how the world was now their cheese (“I, for one, welcome our sexy rodent overlords”)—but also scuttlebutt that sounded…well, plausible, at least, with supporting details he recognized from his time at Nanolabs. “A recall.”
Aurora sat up, looking over at him.
“Nanolabs put out a recall notice for the Dynamice. Both Ultras and Maxes. Assuming this guy is right, but he sounds like an insider.”
“To quash the rebellion?”
“That’s his speculation. Bring them back and disable them. But the mice went into what he calls ‘full Terminator mode’—man, the execs do not like that comparison—and they used the…” He cleared his throat. “What he calls the ‘kill switch.’ Which is going to lead to people being fired. It wasn’t cleared by the CEO.”
Aurora clenched her fists. “It should lead to them being left flat in paw prints.”