The Nanolab Sciences executive team discusses their options in the aftermath of the aborted Dynamouse rebellion.
• • •
“What the hell were you thinking?” Lambert demanded of Torgensen as she stalked into the conference room, twenty minutes late.
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
“Save it,” Lucas snapped, raising a hand. “You’re the third person who asked that, and his response isn’t going to change. The mice in the field were starting to kill people, one literally in his lab had just bitten off a tech’s head and was about to do in Stonebraker.” He waved in the security chief’s general direction.
“That’s—” Whatever protest Lambert might have been about to make died under the force of Stonebraker’s sullen glare. “There really wasn’t any less…drastic solution?”
“Not that I saw then.” Torgensen folded his arms. “Nor, as I have told both Walter and Mr. Dickerson, any that I see now.”
“While I confess I barged in just as apoplectic about the loss as you are, I quickly came around to Mr. Torgensen’s perspective.” Lucas grunted; Dickerson ignored him and continued. “He saved lives, both right here and at customer facilities. From a moral standpoint, that’s simply the right thing to do, and from a legal standpoint, we have more than enough mounting liability already that we don’t need to add ‘failure to prevent deaths in order to preserve profits’ onto it all.”
“I understand that, but this isn’t just preserving profits, it’s preserving the whole shebang. What are we left with now? Hoping sales of the original Dynamice are strong enough to let us re-engineer new versions of the Maxes and Ultras before the money runs out?”
“And that the lawsuits heading our way don’t bankrupt us first. We already have two filed, and I can only imagine what’s going to come out of the aftermath of yesterday’s ruination.” His phone was out on the table; he picked it up and squinted at it a few seconds.
“At least three threatened ones I’ve heard of,” Lambert said glumly.
Dickerson raised his brows. “And an injunction, courtesy of our good friends at Hammer Keller.”
“An injunction?” Lucas threw up his hands. “What the fuck now?”
“Forbidding destruction of any Dynamice Maxes and Ultras whose nanobots remain functional until the case is fully resolved.”
Torgensen shook his head. “As I said, there should not be any such Dynamice.”
Lucas shrugged. “Then it doesn’t matter, does it?”
“That’s not all,” Dickerson continued. “They want the mice to be held in a separate facility we don’t have access to.”
That got Lucas to scowl. “Wait, fuck that noise. They’re still ours.”
“It’s a reach on their part. We can argue it’s illegal taking of property, and beyond that, the class action they’re attempting to bring was only filed on behalf of the Ultra models.”
“Also,” Torgensen cut in, “it is imperative that we do destroy surviving Dynamice, both Max and Ultras.”
“Excuse me?” Dickerson lifted a brow.
“Think about what happened yesterday. Think about it. They are not just an existential threat to this company if we follow Mr. Lucas’s plan to bring them back to market. They are an existential threat to humanity.”
“Oh, bullshit,” Lucas said.
“They’re literally our business,” Lambert objected. “Are you saying our business is an existential threat to humanity?”
Torgensen rubbed the back of his ear. “I believe I am,” he said at length.
“For fuck’s sake.”
“I am serious, Ms. Lambert. Have you heard of the ‘alignment problem?’”
“Only when I take my Volvo in for service.”
Lucas snorted. “He means for AI. It’s the idea that the goals of an AGI—artificial general intelligence, not like chatbots but like science fiction—may not be aligned with the goals of humanity, and if they’re not, you get Skynet and Terminators and shit.” He turned his gaze to Torgensen. “And you’re seriously fucking saying we have an alignment problem with mice?”
“I am saying they are, from all appearances, at least as intelligent as humans. And when they are fully operational, they network with one another, can call on all knowledge across our networks and act as a distributed hive mind to solve problems, and physically can take the shape of virtually anything, consume virtually anything, and easily exceed what would be immutable limits were they purely biological.”
“So they’re potentially dangerous. We knew that.”
“We knew it in theory. We knew it on paper.” Torgensen’s voice grew more fierce. “But yesterday was a mass casualty event our creations caused, and it was a mere trifle compared to what even one single determined Dynamouse could do.”
“Fine,” Lambert said. “But that doesn’t mean they’re ‘aligned’ against us, even with—” She waved a hand. “Everything. They just need to be brought back in line.”
Torgensen raised his brows. “The issue that I do not think any AGI researcher has considered is the reverse. What happens when the Dynamice no longer believe we are aligned with them?”
“Who cares? What do you think they’re going to do about it?” Lucas held up a hand. “Not you. You’re making me reconsider not firing your ass.” He turned to Stonebraker. “You.”
“The one who nearly killed me talked about conquering us, because he thought it was all we understood.”
“Conquering us. Mice enslaving humanity.” Lucas looked at the ceiling, laughing bitterly. “Jesus Christ, I feel like I’m losing my mind. There’s only, like, what, twelve of them who maybe didn’t get zapped by the fucking kill switch.”
“Thirteen if you count Aurora.”
“Oh, no, let’s not forget about Aurora, heavens.” Lucas waved his hands in the air melodramatically.
“Mr. Lucas, you need to take the threat they represent seriously.” Torgensen sounded unusually animated. “What has kept the mice in check until now has been no more than their shared acceptance of humanity’s superiority over them.”
“We built them!” Lambert said incredulously. “This is like—like—”
“Like AIs turning on their creators, which is exactly what Torgensen is talking about.” Stonebraker stabbed a finger toward the scientist. “Except that unlike most of those ‘rogue supercomputer’ sci-fi stories, the Dynamice have real grievances.”
“If cows could speak, how many do you think would say, ‘hey, humans, I’m best if you don’t cook me over medium rare, and don’t worry, I absolutely love industrial farming?’ You know it sucks more to be a cow than it does to be a million-dollar lab mouse.” Lucas leaned back in his chair, spreading his hands, and looked at Torgensen. “And you threw the fucking kill switch, man. As pissed off as I am about that, that was a real definitive demonstration of just which species is in charge here, don’t you think?”
“The survivors now know what their one weakness is,” Torgensen said tightly. “If they develop a workaround—”
“It’s a hardware function, isn’t it? Not something they can override?”
“They shouldn’t be able to, no, Walter. But they shouldn’t have been able to evolve themselves from Dynamouse Max to Dynamouse Ultra, and they’ve been doing things they shouldn’t have been able to ever since. If the surviving mice return to full capability, there is every reason to assume they will put all their efforts into becoming literally unstoppable. And if they have the same attitude that the one who threatened Ms. Stonebraker does—”
“We are not having a conversation about killer fucking mice, all right? We’re having a conversation about keeping the Dynamice we have here, and getting fixed versions back on the market as soon as possible.”
Torgensen had been staring at Lucas for the past few minutes, and remained staring at him silently for several more seconds. “What kind of idiot are you?” he finally said.
Lucas furrowed his brow. “Excuse me?”
“Have you been listening to anything? We cannot ‘fix’ those models. We have to start over.”
The CEO opened his mouth, closed it, wiggled in his seat restlessly, then pointed at Torgensen with two fingers. “See, we don’t have to do anything. You have to pack up your things, and I need to hire your replacement.”
Torgensen stiffened. “You can’t be serious.”
“Yeah, Pete, you pretty clearly don’t want to be here anymore. So do me a favor, do yourself a favor. Get the fuck out.”
The scientist stared down at the table, breathing heavily, fists clenching and unclenching. Then he pushed back, stood up, and stalked out of the room.
“Seriously?” Lambert looked after him, then back at Lucas in exasperation. “Firing one of our head researchers is going to make things faster?”
“When the head scientist is turning into a doomer nutjob, yeah, I’m pretty sure it will. We can find somebody under him to promote who’s not going to be so much,” he waved a hand, “that.”
Stonebraker got up. “I’m going to go see Dr. Torgensen out.”
“What, you think he’s going to break shit on his way out the door?”
She glanced at Lucas. “I sure as hell would.”
Torgensen wasn’t breaking things when she caught up with him, though. He was standing behind his desk, not as much collecting personal items as shuffling them around on his desk, looking shell-shocked.
“Someone will be here with a box for you in a few minutes,” she said softly.
“Thank you.” He swallowed. “You are here to ensure I am not stealing company assets, hmm?”
“That, and to say I’m sorry.”
“I cannot be surprised, can I.” He rapped his knuckles on the desk. “I cost the company a great deal of revenue and insisted that trying to restore it might doom humanity. It was, as they say, a career-limiting move.”
“Yeah, I can’t argue with that.” She sighed. “I’ll nudge Sherry in HR to make sure you get the full severance package, treat it like a layoff.”
“Will Walter argue?”
“He won’t notice.”
An intern appeared with a cardboard box, setting it down on Torgensen’s desk. The scientist carefully set his few things inside it: coffee mug, pencil mug, desk calculator. “Perhaps not, although I suspect the severance package will come with difficult terms.”
“It’s just a boilerplate non-disparagement clause that runs, uh, I think twenty-four months. That doesn’t stop you from getting work somewhere else. It’ll be over before you know it.”
He checked the desk drawers. Stonebraker watched carefully while looking casual about it, but didn’t see him packing up anything he shouldn’t. “If the worst comes to pass, Ms. Stonebraker, twenty-four months will be too late. Not that ‘disparaging’ Nanolab Sciences will help either way.”
“Torgensen—Peter—look. I’ve seen how terrifying a Dynamouse can be up very close. I’m going to have nightmares about that for the rest of my life. But I don’t buy the idea that just one of them could roll over the world’s armies.”
“I don’t blame you. It sounds outlandish.” He put the lid on the box, hefted it, and flashed her a humorless smile. “Yet I think of how difficult it would be to stop one Dynamouse Ultra of today, fully aware of its capabilities and determined to use all of them. And I consider how exponentially more capable one of them is today than it was a year ago.”
She walked with him toward the elevator. “You’re saying humans would be to them like normal mice are to us.”
“In a real sense, yes.”
They lapsed into silence on the way down to the first floor, all the way outside. Stonebraker wracked her brain for a pithy goodbye, but Torgensen derailed it by putting the box under one arm and putting his hand on her shoulder, looking her in the eyes. “Helen. We have to stop them.”
She blinked rapidly. “Who, the mice?”
“The humans. Mr. Lucas only cares about profits. I think Mr. Bishop’s legal team has the best of intentions. But if either of them get their way and we do have to stop the mice, we have already lost.”
“Uh.” His look was so serious that she couldn’t muster any response beyond a mute, slight nod.
He kept meeting her eyes another few seconds, then readjusted his grip on the box and headed toward the garage.