Lawyer Janet Hammer arrives at the Hackett Foundation’s retreat at the same time Dynamice start converging on a mysterious new site in the mountains, and she is not amused.
The other Dynamice didn’t march to Oakhurst, not in any conventional sense of “march.” Some of them turned themselves into vehicles, carrying others in high-speed wagon trains—literal trains when train tracks went in the right direction, off-road oddities at other times. Collisions only happened the few times police or self-appointed vigilantes tried to block their path, and those weren’t collisions as much as utterly one-sided destruction; the mice didn’t even slow down.
The destruction at Nanolab Sciences and a half-dozen customer sites had hit the wires and video feeds before the migration began. Round-the-clock reporting on their movements and apparent destination alternated with “explainer” stories about their origin, Aurora’s earlier fifteen minutes of fame, and the Hackett Foundation. Notably absent was any plan authorities had for how to respond to them, beyond platitudes about monitoring the situation and keeping citizens out of harm’s way.
While reporters inevitably nosed around the Hackett Foundation’s retreat, new security gates and fencing had been installed—more aptly, created—overnight. When anyone who wasn’t recognized by the system tried to approach, warning lasers shot rapid bursts in front of them until they backed off. It wasn’t clear how the system recognized anyone, or how it had (so far) managed to shoot so precisely that no one was so much as singed, or even where the lasers fired from.
The Dynamice themselves weren’t inside the retreat, though, even in their new wing. Most of the humans were gathered in the lobby lounge, watching news on the TV screens or on their phones. Or just drinking.
Or, in Hackett’s case, pacing around furiously. “There’s got to be some way to get to them,” he muttered under his breath for the seventh or eighth time in the last three hours. At this point, Ted couldn’t tell if the them was the Dynamice at the retreat, the Dynamice army marching toward them, or the general public being treated to a cavalcade of ROBOT MOUSE WAR? stories. “This isn’t how it was supposed to happen.”
“How was it supposed to happen, and just what goddamn ‘it’ are we talking about?”
Ted, who’d joined the “just drinking” crowd about two hours ago, looked over at that familiar voice to see Janet Hammer striding toward the lounge area, Finley in tow.
Hackett looked over, too, and flashed one of his typical roguish smiles, although it had a haggard edge to it this time. “Can I plead the fifth?”
“I’m not a judge, Mr. Hackett, I’m your lawyer. Assuming I don’t fire you as a client at the end of this conversation, an assumption I advise you not to rely on. Now start explaining.”
“You want an explanation? Fine.” He spread his arms wide. “The computer industry came up with a great technology, machine learning. They applied it to language and came up with another great technology, large language models, and used that to build another great technology, generative pretrained transformers. The thing is, each of those gets narrower in its application, not broader, but making just a bazillion dollars isn’t enough for Wall Street, so everyone’s pushing it everywhere.”
Hammer had crossed her arms. “I read business news, Mr. Hackett. I’ve also had to deal with lawyers trying to use AI in briefs. It does not go well.”
“Of course it doesn’t. It’s ‘A’, but not ‘I’. Artificial, but not intelligent. You have hucksters and wackos in my field who believe—or pretend—that GPTs are the next big thing and that they’re gonna give us superintelligent computers right out of the movies, facing off with people who are ready to burn it all down to the ground because they don’t see any of the good stuff.”
“I don’t see any of the good stuff.” Her tone had a clear get to the point edge to it.
“The mice are the good stuff. The Dynamice.” He pointed at Ted. “While everyone else is building chatbots that spit out seven-fingered Jesus paintings and recipes for poisonous mushroom pizza, his company accidentally made the goddamn superintelligent computers. And they’re fucking mice. Fuckable mice. Fucking fuckable—”
“Mr. Hackett.”
“The point is that what I wanted to see happen was the mice working for us. What they can do—I mean, we don’t know what they can do. We can’t know. We literally can’t. Cure cancer? Stop global warming? Fix health care? They’ll see what we missed, see what we didn’t even know to look for. And that’s before you even get to the nanotech of it all. Each of them is a manufacturing plant from next century. They can build things we’ve never dreamed of.” He turned and waved toward the mountains behind the resort. “They’re doing it right now.”
“So you skirted around the court order releasing the Dynamice into your care so you could find a way to exploit them.”
“I’m not sending them out to have cosmetics companies shove lipstick down their throat.” Hackett leaned toward Hammer’s face angrily. “I gave them back their power and more, and I didn’t ask a fucking thing.”
“So you hoped they’d just naturally be so grateful they’d come to you and say, ‘Please tell us, Mr. Hackett, what huge problems are facing humans that we can solve?’”
He narrowed his eyes, but he was the one who turned away, muttering under his breath.
“Now walk me from turning the nanotech in these Dynamice back on to having a giant murderous mouse mob converging on the Sierras.” When Hackett didn’t make any response for a few seconds, she looked around the room. “Anyone? Even a wild guess?”
Ted cleared his throat. “Aurora.”
“What about Aurora?”
“When Mr. Hackett and Angel, the hacker, jailbroke Aurora, she did the same to the rest of the Dynamice here. I think she must have done the same for the others. Somehow.”
“Somehow,” she echoed. “And is this the result she wanted?”
No, it surely wasn’t. Well, freeing the rest of the mice was, obviously. And maybe getting them all to come here? But not the violence. “I’m sure…I’m almost positive the rampage part wasn’t.”
“Almost positive. Great. See, here I was worrying y’all might be deliberately trying to start the apocalypse, but it’s just monumental techbro hubris coupled with less foresight than God gave a fucking purple yam.”
“The mice aren’t going to start an apocalypse,” Angel protested. They’d been so silent that Ted hadn’t realized they were even there.
“One, you’re assuming facts not in evidence,” Finley responded. “The mice aren’t communicating their intentions yet beyond breaking free of human control, and the circumstantial evidence certainly suggests they wanted to inflict damage and death beyond what they needed to.”
Hackett spread his arms. “Wouldn’t you, if you were subject to what they’ve been subject to? Do you expect them to be better than us?”
“You just gave us a speech about how you expect them to be better than us,” Hammer snapped. “And they’d damn well better be, or we’re back to Apocalypse Bingo.”
“Two,” Finley continued, “the Dynamice may not be the ones who start it. From the government’s perspective, a likely hostile new superpower is quickly moving to occupy part of California.”
Ted raised a hand tentatively.
Hammer side-eyed him. “What?”
“That’s, uh, that’s what the mice are expecting. Kind of. I mean, they’re gathering here because they’re expecting the government to come after them. I guess it’s, you know, safety in numbers as the operating theory, rather than stay separate so we can’t get them all at once.”
“And how do you know this? Aurora told you?”
He nodded.
“Anything else she told you that you haven’t thought to mention yet?”
He paused to review the earlier conversation in his head. Laurel referred to them as new gods, Aurora only said that wasn’t literal which made it sound like she was comfortable thinking of them as metaphorical gods, and they were trying to give him new fetishes. “No.”
“They didn’t tell you what they’re building?”
“They just said they were taking over the open space in the mountains behind the retreat.”
“How much?” Angel said.
He shrugged helplessly. “As much as they want.”
“They do realize that all of that land belongs to somebody.” Hammer rubbed her face. “All right. Is there a way to get in touch with the mice short of sending somebody out into the backcountry with a Jeep?”
Ted shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“Then take me to your Jeep, Mr. Bishop. We’re going mountaineering.”
“I don’t have a Jeep.”
Angel raised their hand. “I do.”
As it turned out, Angel didn’t have a Jeep. They had a Land Rover Defender, one of the newish models that seemed suspiciously plush for a vehicle that made its name traversing African savannas. The mud splashes that reached the SUV’s roof suggested Angel wasn’t shy about putting its off-road capability to the test, though.
They set out with Ted in the passenger seat, Hammer and Finley in the middle row. “Where do we go?”
“North up into the national forest. I have no idea how far they’ve gone, but hopefully we’ll see signs.”
Finley made a thoughtful noise. “Like a caravan of Dynamice of all sizes and shapes, with fantastic silver vehicles rolling at freeway speeds through the mountains.”
“For instance.” Ted furrowed his brow, twisting around in his seat to look at Finley. “Where’d you get those binoculars?”
“They’re mine,” Angel said. “They were in the back seat. You’re seriously seeing that?”
“I am seriously seeing that. They’re heading northeast. If we can head northwest out of out town, we might intersect them.”
“Nothing can go wrong with that idea,” Hammer muttered.
Angel nodded. “Okay.” They checked the GPS. “Probably the best way to do that is to get onto 49 heading up toward Ahwahnee, then take forest roads.”
It was a stereotypically scenic route for about fifteen minutes. By the time they hit Ahwahnee, the “caravan” was easily visible to the naked eye. So were the military-looking helicopters trailing the mice, and so was the blockade the local sheriff had set up about a half-mile ahead.
“Okay, time to get bumpy,” Angel muttered, taking a left down a side street. The pavement quality immediately dropped, the road narrowing to about a lane and a half width as it wound its way through fenced-off, dry grass meadows dotted with trees. The Land Rover turned onto another road climbing up into the mountains, and Angel hit the accelerator. Eventually the pavement gave out entirely, and the road continued on as dirt.
The Dynamice, however, had been making better time on their route than the humans had on theirs. They’d reached what Ted had to assume was their destination, still miles distant—a silver mountain, not metaphorically silver but glittering with blinding metallic brightness.
“Whoa.” Angel squinted. “That’s going to take a while to get to. Like, most of the rest of the day.”
Hammer shook her head. “How’d they get there so fast without leaving either a shit-ton of mess and maybe a new freeway in their wake? They’re not magic.”
“They’re not far off,” Ted murmured. “And they’re getting closer.”
Hammer glowered at him, but didn’t offer a contradiction.
The drive moved from dirt road to no road at all back to dirt road, winding through meadows and forests and ranch land, the altitude slowly rising. They saw a lot of deer, a few elk, and a couple of coyotes, but no sign of the metallic mice or their passing. Then, after the dirt road they’d been following crested a tree-topped hill, Angel slowed down, staring. “Maybe they did leave a freeway.”
“Or a silver brick road,” Hammer grunted.
What the forest road turned into wasn’t brick, but it was slick metal. It looked like it only ran about a football field’s length, but both ends were blocked off by futuristic-looking metal fences.
Angel slowly pulled up to the fence on the near end and stopped. “So now what?” They looked at Ted. “I could go around.”
He considered. Why would they leave a fence, let alone a road, here, by itself? Because they’d caught sight of the Land Rover and concluded it was probably following them. “No. This has to be meant for us. But I don’t know…” He rubbed his chin.
Wait, of course.
He opened the door and got out.
“Is that advisable, Mr. Bishop?” Finley said, leaning toward him.
“They know we’re here, but they don’t know who we are. They don’t know Angel drives a Land Rover any more than we did.” He walked up to the fence. “Hello?” he called.
Nothing happened.
Hammer sounded wary and exasperated. “Just what are you expecting?”
“I don’t know,” he murmured. Then he raised his voice again. “This is Ted. Aurora’s, uh, significant other? I’m here with people Aurora knows. We need to talk. Is that okay?”
Wind rustled in the trees. Somewhere, a coyote barked.
After a half-minute passed, Hammer sighed. “This isn’t getting us anywhere, Mr.—”
The fence in front of them lowered into the ground like a gate.
Ted got back into the SUV. “You were saying?”
“Don’t be smug.”
“Drive?” Angel said.
Ted nodded. “Slow.”
Swallowing, they eased the car onto the silver road.
About a hundred feet along, the word STOP lit up in red on the silver in front of them.
“Oookay.” Angel brought the Land Rover to a halt and put it in park.
The gate behind them rose again, along with guard rails along the side of the road. The vehicle rocked back and forth as three silver ropes flowed over the hood and the roof, tying it down.
Then the whole road started moving forward, picking up speed rapidly, bringing the car along with it.
“Holy shit,” Finley murmured.