Back at Nanolab Sciences, Walter Lucas has brought in a new chief scientist to get a “safe” version of the mice back to market ASAP.
• • •
“So how’s progress?”
“Fantastic,” Terence Kelly said, flashing Lucas a thumbs-up.
Lambert flashed both of them a sour look. Their new head scientist had been Lucas’s engineering co-founder from his robot fry station startup. Technically, he had biotech experience from his next job, albeit all of fifteen months of it. As far as she could tell, he responded to all status requests with “fantastic,” which meant anything from actually fantastic to barely coming along, or “coming along,” which meant not coming along.
“This is an ambitious schedule,” she prodded.
He shrugged, flashing a boyish smile. All of his smiles looked boyish to her. She wasn’t convinced he was more than a few years out of high school. “It is, but it’s less work than it appears. Replacing the model was easy, limiting the nanotech to get around the injunction was less easy but it’s done, and reworking the telemetry system is…” He waved a hand. “Coming along.”
Lambert rubbed her forehead.
“We need the Pluses shipping this quarter.” Lucas tapped his watch as if it were a calendar.
“They will be, Walter.” Kelly gave him two thumbs-up this time.
Lucas grunted. The “Dynamice Max Plus” models they were, God willing, about to release were not only locked to mouse shape, the nanotech could only adjust their biology in ways narrowly scoped to their customers’ most common use cases. No flowing through cage bars or absorbing file cabinets or growing movie-monster teeth. Dickerson gave them about a fifty-fifty chance of getting around the injunctions, plural: they’d gotten a new one slapped on them, affecting the original Max models as well, thanks to “ongoing criminal investigations.” Fighting those made getting a quick cash infusion even more crucial. So cripple the nanotech, throw in the new language model they’d licensed, top it off with a price cut, and they might—might—be able to survive the fiscal year.
Once the two execs were back in the elevator, Lambert turned her sour look on Lucas. “Do you really trust this guy to pull this together?”
“Yes. This sort of shit is exactly what you need a guy like Terry for.”
“And he’ll do it in a way that isn’t a hack job?”
“It will absolutely be a fucking hack job, but we need speed more than we need perfection. Get to a minimum viable product first—in the legal sense this time—and keep iterating while it’s shipping.”
She shook her head. “This is crazy, you know that.”
“It’s either this, Lisa, or you start updating your résumé.”
“Please. As if I haven’t been doing that for the past two months.”
When they got off the elevator, they went their separate ways for a whole forty-five minutes, until the next meeting—this one with Stonebraker. Dickerson was waiting for them in the conference room, too.
“Okay. So.” Lucas dropped into a chair and slouched. “What’s the latest spy report?”
Dickerson visibly flinched; Stonebraker pursed her lips.
“Come on, nobody’s recording this.”
“It would nonetheless behoove us to avoid making jokes about illegal activity, since we are keeping this all completely above board. And we have a problem.” He glanced to Stonebraker for confirmation. She nodded.
“Of course we do, because it’s a new fucking day. Speaking of problems, how’s handling the guys at Defense going?”
“Delicately.”
“Which means…”
“They understand our situation, but they don’t give a shit. They want their super mouse soldiers.”
“We are in a fucking comic book. All right, what’s the new problem?”
“Activity on the Dynamouse telemetry network this morning.”
“Meaning what?” Lucas narrowed his eyes, answering himself before she did. “The ones at Camp Mouse are back online?”
“They didn’t ping again, and there’s no responses to outbound signals. So it could have merely been an anomaly, some kind of…blip in biotech that I can’t explain.”
“But they might fucking be back online.”
“They might.”
Lambert groaned. “Why are we hearing about this from you instead of our new chief scientist?” She glared at Lucas.
“Terry’s heads down on the new nanotech. The networking guys, though—”
“Brought it to me,” Stonebraker finished. “Which followed standard operating procedure.”
Dickerson frowned. “Is there any way for the Dynamice to have gotten back online without help from Hackett’s people?”
“No.” Lucas shook his head before brightening up, snapping his fingers. “That means we have those fuckers on violating the court order, doesn’t it?”
“I’m damn well going to bring it to the judge and find out.”
“Also,” Stonebraker continued, “our man in Oakhurst says one of the mice—Aurora, from the description—came into town about an hour ago and caused a disturbance we are definitely going to hear about.”
“A disturbance,” Dickerson echoed. “Just what is that a euphemism for, pray tell?”
“I’ll show you.” She started tapping on her laptop. “With one exception, she didn’t say anything or respond to anyone. It’s the first time any of them have been spotted by locals.”
“Why’d she come into town?” Lambert frowned. “Does it have anything to do with the network ding?”
“Ping.” Stonebraker shook her head. “And we don’t know.”
“If it doesn’t, that’s a hell of a coincidence.”
“So here are a few pictures from social media, though, which are…something.” She tapped on her computer keyboard a few seconds, sending her screen to the room’s wall monitor. An image showed Aurora striding down the street, hands clenched into fists as they swung by her side. She didn’t look angry, precisely, but she didn’t look friendly, either. In fact, she looked surprisingly intimidating. (Not surprising to Stonebraker, though.)
She flipped through a few more images. Mostly more of the same, until they came to one with Aurora holding a car over her head, as casually as if it were a basketball.
“Christ on a cracker.” Dickerson rubbed his face.
Stonebraker flipped to the next picture, which had Aurora walking again, apparently having just set, or maybe dropped, the car down behind her. It looked askew in subtle fashion. Two young guys—maybe barely drinking age—could be seen in the car; the passenger looked like he was about to throw up, while the driver was staring at Aurora open-mouthed.
“My guy didn’t see this, but he talked to some of the crowd gawking in the background. Apparently those two wanna-be Lotharios drove alongside her, cracking a couple of jokes about bestiality, and she picked up the car, spun around, set it back down behind her and kept walking without a word.”
“I think she got her message across without speaking.” Lambert shook her head, looking wryly amused. “But, without the nanotech working, how could she possibly do that?”
“She couldn’t. I am going to beat Hackett to a bloody pulp, I swear to God.” Lucas threw a pen across the room, bouncing it off the far wall. “Except that I’d be stopped by the squad of fucking supermice that we fucking gave him.”
Lambert raised both her hands off the table. “Does it blow back on us?”
“That remains to be seen.” Stonebraker shrugged. “It’s going to raise questions that neither us nor Hackett’s group probably want raised, but they’re the ones who are going to have to deal with the media descending on them en masse. We’re just going to get asked for comments.”
Dickerson leaned his elbows on the table, holding his head in his hands. “If nothing else, it makes it considerably more likely the judge will find them in contempt.”
“Our next concern,” Stonebraker said after waiting a few seconds, “is Torgensen and this ‘Institute for Humanity’s Future’ he’s apparently hooked up with.”
“How is that a concern?” Lucas gave her an exasperated glare. “They’re just some kind of utopian AI think tank, aren’t they?”
“They’re an influential utopian think tank,” Dickerson corrected. “And they’ve just published an article on their blog about the Dynamice calling them the clearest example yet of the dangers posed by uncontrolled AGI, Artificial General Intelligence. Not to steal your thunder, Ms. Stonebraker.”
“You did, but I forgive you.”
He smiled apologetically.
“The mice.” Lucas turned the glare on Dickerson. “They’re claiming the mice are AGI.”
“Not exactly. The post makes the case that mixing biology and nanotech with machine learning models created an entirely new invention,” Stonebraker said. “Not only do the mice not hallucinate, so the argument goes, they have actual initiative and volition.”
“Bullshit. I mean, no more than mice do. Right?”
“As someone who nearly had her head bitten off by one, I’m not going to argue with the idea that they’re showing initiative and volition.”
“That’s just—going rogue.”
“Which is a sign of initiative.” She locked eyes with him until he grunted and looked away, then continued. “I find it harder to believe the mice are ‘superintelligence,’ which the article postulates—and it says, in so many words, that if they are superintelligent, they need to be stopped by any means necessary.”
“Like what?” Lambert crossed her arms. “Sending in the marines? Dropping the bomb?”
Lucas sighed. “I’ve read some of the shit these TESCREAL doomer types put out, and they’ve literally argued that nuclear war is better than a ‘misaligned’ superintelligence. I should have known from that last meeting Torgensen was one of them. Did he write this shit?”
“No, it’s written by an Ezekiel Jablonski. But he ‘warmly thanks’ Dr. Peter Torgensen, quote, ‘late of Nanolab Sciences,’ for input.”
“Oh, fuck me.” He turned. “Slick, this guy has got to be violating NDAs.”
“We’ll check it it all with a fine-toothed comb,” Dickerson said.
“Sue him first, find the evidence later. I’m serious.”
“I have no doubt that you are.”
Lucas raised a brow at him. Dickerson raised both of his in response and smiled blandly.
“Look, just find a way to shut him up,” Lucas said after a moment, waving a hand dismissively. “We have more than enough shit on our plate as it is.”
Lambert raised a hand. “What’s ‘TESCREAL’?”
“It’s an acronym for a bunch of ideologies around AGI. Transhumanism, Extrasomethingism, Singularity, something with C, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism.” Lucas grunted. “The people who coined it want to make everyone who likes AI sound like weird cultists, and people like this Jablonski guy give them ammunition because they do sound like weird cultists.”
“Are they an actual danger to us?”
“Pfft. No.”
“Yes,” Dickerson said. “I don’t disagree with Mr. Lucas’s description of them, but it downplays that several of them are very rich, very influential, and they have the ears of power players in both politics and industry. So they’re not only a danger in the sense of creating bad PR for us, which we do not need any more of, but also in the sense of bringing more legal and regulatory scrutiny our way.”
“If they think nuclear war’s preferable to runaway AGI, and they believe we might have created runaway AGI, I consider them a potential threat,” Stonebraker added, tone flat.
Lucas looked away, sighing theatrically. “Yeah, I suppose.” He waved two fingers at Lambert. “Get marketing going on how to pitch the Max Plus line as AGI-proof.”
“We can just go back to talking about machine learning and neural networks.” She opened her laptop.
“Don’t use ‘neural.’ It’ll make people think about brains.”
Lambert started typing up short notes. “Got it.”
• • •
It took another three days before Kelly gave Lucas two thumbs up when he walked into the lab. “We’ve got it.”
“You’ve got it?”
“The Max Plus changes, working as intended.” He waved both hands grandly at a row of mouse cages behind him. “They pass all the unit tests now. Change the way they’re supposed to, don’t change the way they’re not supposed to, send back the data researchers need.”
“That’s where you said you were at the end of last week.”
“No, last week, we were at manual testing. Now we’re at running through the full testing harness over the control network. That was the last piece—getting the telemetry systems back up.”
“And they’re not connected to the internet or SIPRnet?” Stonebraker asked, tone severe.
Lucas jumped. “Jesus, where’d you come from?”
“Behind you.”
“Nope.” Kelly shook his head firmly. “Just our telemetry network.”
“Great.” Lucas walked forward, studying the closest mouse. Save for the silvery fur, it looked like any other blissfully lowercase “m” mouse. Not a mouse person, not a mouse monster, just a mouse. “Dickerson’s already running this past the judge and he said it looks good on the legal end. After the order’s officially signed, how soon you think we can get them back in the sales channel?”
“Pretty much instantly.”
Stonebraker pointed at a different mouse. “What was that?”
Kelly turned to her. “What was what?”
“That one’s eyes just flashed white for a second.”
“Oh. Yeah, they’ve all been doing that off and on for the past hour. We’re looking into it, but I don’t think it’s a big deal.”