Ted meets with Dr. Torgensen, and they talk about their concerns. Later, Aurora and Ted make up, after a fashion…
The Vineyard turned out to be an Italian restaurant just off of California 99, the main highway through California’s Central Valley before I-5 took over. Dr. Torgensen looked about the same as Ted remembered, if perhaps a little more gaunt and with a deeper frown. Hackett would have been waiting at a table, cocktail already in hand; Torgensen paced in the restaurant’s foyer.
When he saw Ted, he brightened, albeit just marginally. “Mr. Bishop.”
“Hi.”
Torgensen nodded to the hostess, who’d already picked up two menus. “Right this way,” she said cheerfully.
After the waitress brought them their drinks and took their food order, Ted cut to the chase. “So, you’re worried the mice will overhear us, so we’re meeting here. Why aren’t you worried that they’re tapping our phones?”
“I was worried about them recognizing me. For them to be actively surveilling us would mean they were already suspicious of one or both of us. Are they?”
“Not that I know of. So did you leave Nanolab Sciences, or were you pushed out?”
Torgensen looked nonplussed a moment, then sat back, looking resigned to a few moments of small talk. “The latter. My concerns about putting the Dynamice back on the market were…not appreciated by high-level management.”
“Mmm.” Ted took a sip of his drink. It wasn’t a bad amaretto sour, but it didn’t hold a candle to the one at the retreat. “So the mice are building something.”
Torgensen lifted both brows. “Building.”
“The moment we got them here, Hackett started trying to find ways to re-enable all their nanotech and connections after whatever you—well, Nanolab—did to them. Finally they did, and they also did, uh, something else. Aurora said she could retrain her own model now, or words to that effect.”
His brows dropped into a deep furrow. “They gave her developer access to her own systems.”
“I take it that’s bad.”
He tilted his head, looking distant. “If it were you or I with such access, it might not be, but she and the other Dynamice have their own goals and motivations, yes?”
“Yes, I guess they do.” He took another sip and thought a few seconds. “I know why you’re worried about them being existential threats, believe me. But I’m not convinced they have bad intentions toward us. Also, they’re individuals, not a hive mind.”
“It might be just one with, as you say, bad intentions toward us. How much damage could that one do, hmm? And would the other Dynamice stop them?”
“A lot. But yes. I think so. I hope so.”
The waitress came by with their pasta dishes. After she dropped them off, Torgensen looked intently at Ted again. “Go back to ‘building.’”
“The mice are…I don’t know. They’re remodeling part of the retreat. It used to be a Best Western and I guess they want to upgrade.”
Torgensen didn’t crack a smile.
Ted cleared his throat and went on. “Anyway, they’re not being very chatty about what they’re doing. But, you know, maybe they’re just tired of relying on us.”
“That is concerning.”
“Is it surprising?” He absently twirled his linguine. “One of the ones I didn’t know had a talk with me the other night. She said she didn’t particularly like humans, because she understood why we created her.” He ate the bite of food, then waved the fork between Torgensen and himself. “Let’s be honest. What we’re worried about here is that the Dynamice are going to treat us the way we treated them. That Nanolab Sciences has given them a model for how you treat inferior beings.”
Torgensen’s voice rose archly. “You think we are inferior beings to them?”
“Well, I mean…” He ran through a few possible ways to complete that sentence, rejected them each in turn, and finally just arched a brow. “You don’t?”
The scientist frowned, seeming to deflate in his chair as he looked down at his plate. “I cannot say,” he muttered at length. “But I think we should avoid encouraging them to think of themselves that way.”
“Peter—it’s Peter, right? I don’t think they need encouragement to figure that out, Peter.” He grunted, taking a big swig of the so-so sour. “Besides, that’s what Hackett’s all about.”
“He is encouraging the mice to think of themselves as superior?”
“Not in so many words, but he’s encouraging them to…stretch themselves.”
“Hmm. I wonder if he, too, is an accelerationist.” Torgensen tapped his fork against his plate, thinking.
“Aren’t those, like, white supremacists trying to get us into a race war?”
“It means pushing social and cultural changes forward so fast that society cannot keep up with them, and the social order breaks down. In the context of artificial intelligence and artificial superintelligence, it focuses on technological changes, the idea that AI will bring us to a glorious new future we can barely conceive of—or, if we lose control if it and it does not have our best interests in mind, destroy us utterly.” He paused to attack his spaghetti, finally. “I should say ‘when’ we lose control of it, if there is any truth to that line of reasoning.”
“Hackett doesn’t strike me as either a utopian or an anarchist.” Ted shook his head, then frowned. “I think it might be…I don’t know. I think he really does care about animal rights. The Dynamice are like what you’d get if you combined animals and humans and cutting-edge technology, but we’ve treated them in one of the worst ways we treat animals, right? So this is the biggest damn animal rights case in history.”
“But they are not animals, not in the way we normally use the term. That is the crux of the problem. If Mr. Hackett’s agenda was merely to protect the mice from humans, then he would have no reason to restore their most dangerous abilities, let alone increase them.”
Ted sighed. “So what do you think he’s trying to do, actively work against the human race?”
“I would not accuse him of that, no. But I might accuse him of, hmm, playing fast and loose, as they say, with the future of humanity.” Torgensen sat up straighter and gave Ted one of his intent stares again. “Mr. Bishop—Ted—I know that if you were not worried about what you’ve been seeing, you would not be here. What do we intend to do about it?”
That called for another big swallow of the amaretto sour, down to the point where Ted was sucking the ice dry. Then he set down the glass with a sharp bang and took a deep breath. “You know more about the Dynamice than anyone else outside Nanolabs, and maybe more than anyone left inside at this point. But I saw what Aurora could do before we unlocked admin mode or whatever the hell it is, so I know…enough. I don’t want to sound like an AI doomer, especially because they aren’t AI, but if they start thinking of humans in a ‘them or us’ way, the future of humanity gets pretty fucking grim pretty fucking fast. So I don’t know what we can do about it, but it seems to me like Job Number One is keeping them from thinking that way.”
“So then, two questions. How do we keep them from thinking that way, and what do we do if we cannot?”
The waiter came by. “Another amaretto sour?”
“Make it a bourbon sour this time, please.”
After the waiter whisked the empty glass away, Ted shook his head. “We’re all trying to be good…I guess ‘role models’ isn’t the right phrase. Good models for human-Dynamouse interactions. I don’t know what else we can do, Peter, beyond proving that our two kinds can get along without us trying to exploit them. Assuming Hackett doesn’t want to, which…I haven’t seen any explicit sign of, but neither you nor Laurel seem to trust his intentions.”
“Laurel?”
“The Dynamouse who doesn’t like humans.” As he said it, he couldn’t help silently add, the one who was forthright about it. Probably most of the other ones didn’t like humans, either. Possibly including Aurora.
“Ah.” Torgensen gave another slight, thoughtful frown, and took a deep, slow breath. “And the second question?”
“You’re dancing around asking how we go to war against the Dynamice and win. I don’t know, man. Get Nanolabs to throw the kill switch again.”
Torgensen grunted. “It will be all but impossible to get them to do that on my say-so, Ted. They would have to be convinced of the threat level themselves. Ms. Stonebraker could be, given that her life was threatened by one. The other executives know that, but Mr. Lucas and Ms. Lambert are…” He trailed off, waving a hand.
“Fucking idiots,” Ted supplied.
“That is not the phrase I was looking for, but it will do.” Torgensen drained the rest of his wine. “But, as difficult as that might be as a Plan B, it will be superior to whatever Plan C would have to entail.”
“Which is what? Should I even ask?”
“Stopping them in some other way.”
“Right, of course. That’s not ominous at all.” Ted realized the waiter had dropped off his new drink at some point, and took a big swig. “Peter, I don’t—I don’t think I can sign up for an anti-mouse conspiracy movement, even as dangerous as they potentially are. I’ve seen the other side of them, too. That they can be friendly, loving, curious. As far as I’m concerned, proper ‘alignment’ means giving them reasons to stay that way.”
“Mmm.” Torgensen nodded, and looked into his empty glass with a slightly sad air. “Ted, all I would ask of you is to let us know if and when, in your estimation, your Plan A is failing, and we need to consider those Plan Bs and Plan Cs.” He leaned forward and pointed at Ted. “It is precisely because you do care so much about the Dynamice, because you so much do want the relationship between them and humanity to succeed, that you will be a good judge of when that relationship has passed the point of no return.”
Ted swallowed. Finally, he nodded back.
• • •
Sometimes when you drive into a town, you think, there are a lot of police around here, even though I don’t see anything going on. Ted had that thought driving through town when he got back to Oakhurst. Did it have something to do with the mice? It had to, surely—but there was no visible sign of commotion, other than the police. No roads closed off, no fires, definitely no giant rodents.
As he turned onto the road that lead up to the retreat, he stopped, leaning out the window toward a cop car parked in the road’s median. Usually, he didn’t talk to cops unless he had to (and that was before his arrest), but this seemed like a special case.
The cop rolled down his window, too. “Sir?”
“Hey. Is there something going on I should know about?”
“There’s just some unusual activity near the town lately we’re keeping an eye on. Nothing to worry about.”
He resisted cracking a joke about rodent problems, and just nodded. “Okay, thanks. Uh, carry on.”
The cop rolled his window up, and Ted drove on.
While the sun had set by the time he parked, he could tell the mice had finished. Not only were there no giants outside, the building looked—complete. It looked like it had always had the new wing. It didn’t even look as ominous as it had earlier.
The lobby and its bar/restaurant had only humans in it, and they all looked subdued, even more than they had been in the last few days. He could see Hackett there, talking with Angel, but he didn’t feel like joining them. He just headed back to his room.
When he got in, he saw Aurora sitting on the edge of the bed, her hands folded in her lap. “Hi,” she said, her voice small. She looked…upset?
“Hi.” He closed the door and crossed over to her, sitting in a chair rather than next to her.
“I was looking for you earlier. Have you had dinner?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh.” She looked down, then back up. “Ted, I’m sorry. I’ve been—I think the word is ‘asshole.’”
He shook his head. “Aurora, you don’t have anything to—”
“Yes, I do.” She held up a hand. “I’ve been so consumed by the changes in me, in all of us, and so…frustrated that there’s no good way to talk about them with you or any other human. I don’t think I was wrong when I said I shouldn’t expect you to understand, but I shouldn’t treat you like…” She shook her head. “Like something less.”
He nodded, then bit his lip. “Am I?”
“Are you…?”
“Something less.”
Her ears folded down, and her tone grew miserable. “Ted, I really want to apologize. Please don’t make this a fight.”
Sighing, Ted reached his hand out, palm up. After a moment, she took it with both of her larger ones, and offered a tentative smile.
“I’m…I guess I shouldn’t say I haven’t been upset at how you’ve made me feel lately, Aurora. But I know that part of it isn’t…well, I guess it is you, but not in the way you think.”
She didn’t let go of his hand, but her expression grew more confused as he spoke.
“Aurora, you are more than human, let alone more than mouse. You always were. And now…I don’t know what you’re becoming. But I think you’re going to leave us all behind. That includes me.”
She shook her head. “I won’t. Not you.”
“At some point, doesn’t the gap get…I mean…less girlfriend and boyfriend than owner and pet?”
Aurora blinked twice at that, falling silent for several increasingly uncomfortable seconds. Then she said, keeping her face perfectly straight, “I promise I’ll get you the most beautiful collar ever.”
“That’s not funny.”
She touched his nose with a finger. “I can tell you’re trying not to smile.”
He felt his cheeks grow warm. “It’s not funny,” he repeated, trying to sound stern.
Aurora leaned forward. “Maybe it’s sexy. I know what kind of images you were looking at on that furry website, you know.”
“I was not—that isn’t—” He leaned back, sure he was blushing profusely now. “And stop making me think that!”
She leaned with him, a mischievous grin on her muzzle. “Do you mean ‘stop making me think that, mistress’?”
“It is absolutely not fair that you’ve turned your apology for making me feel like you’re becoming a scary superbeing into making me feel that it’s hot you’re becoming a scary superbeing.”
Aurora’s grin grew.
“U-uh,” he stammered, “while I’ve already had d-dinner, we can go out for dessert?”
She stood, and lifted him up into her arms effortlessly. “We’re staying in for dessert, pet.”