Ted, along with Angel, Hammer, and Finley, have an uncomfortable conversation with Aurora as the government—and possibly others—prepare to take action.
• • •
The mobile road—Ted couldn’t help but think of it as a flying carpet—contracted as it moved, both ends moving toward the car, the “gates” still in place. As it did so, they rose into the air.
What the hell? He wasn’t the only one in the car looking around wildly. Surely it wasn’t actually flying? But no: the mass that made up the rest of the surface had to be going somewhere, and it wasn’t being shed behind them. That meant it had to be under them. It was shape-shifting, just like—
“This is a mouse,” he murmured aloud.
“What’s a mouse?”
“This road. This…whatever it is.” He looked out the rearview window. It wasn’t leaving much damage behind it, but what imprints it left looked like tracks. Tire tracks? No, tracks from something with treads, something that distributed weight more evenly.
Hammer looked at him. “You’re saying a Dynamouse transformed into the road, and is now a giant taxi-bot.”
“I think so.”
She shook her head. “I did not sign up for this when I took you on as a client, Mr. Bishop.”
“Neither did I. Sorry.”
“Mmm.” She lapsed into silence, and nobody else broke it.
Ted tried to estimate how fast they were going, but it was difficult. The ride felt less like a car and more like what he imagined a hovercraft would feel like: as smooth as turbulence-free plane travel, but only forty or fifty feet in the air. That put their eye level well over the tops of small trees and bushes, but not nearly as high as the Sierra’s ancient evergreens. It was definitely a damn sight faster than they’d have been able to go on the ground.
For the first half-hour of the trip, the silver mountain didn’t seem like it was getting any closer. Then, in the way distant mountains do when they stop being distant, it snapped into encompassing, breathtaking clarity. The mountain was being reshaped into an arcology.
That’s the word that came to Ted’s mind at first: a building, roughly mountain-shaped, with the air of a futuristic skyscraper. As they got closer, though, the building revealed itself as terracing across the mountain, leaving much of the landscape intact. This was an arcology not out of cyberpunk dystopia, but out of solarpunk ecofiction.
At least, he guessed it would be. As fast as they were building it, it was still mostly scaffolding. But he’d seen how fast just a handful of Dynamice could build, and this wasn’t just “a handful.” This was hundreds. Human-sized and giant-sized, mice who still looked feral but were the size of horses—or houses. And ones who barely looked like mice at all at the moment: multiple arms and legs, hands that became tools, feet that became wheels. And as with the remodeling at the retreat, an awful lot of it just looked like point-blank magic.
Their ride came to a stop, and jolted hard enough to throw them around in the cabin. The silver ropes around them expanded, briefly covering all the windows, then resolved into…fingers?
The mouse holding them opened his hand. From inside the car, they couldn’t see all of him, or even much of him, just gold and silver fur over a slim, muscled body. He knelt down, picking up the Land Rover in his other hand to set it on the ground with another jolt.
Angel was the first to get out, just ahead of Ted. Perhaps befitting of lawyers, Hammer and Finley were both more cautious.
From ground level, it almost looked like a conventional construction site, albeit one with nothing remotely resembling safety protocols. It took several seconds to internalize that beams and walls were building themselves. Grey nanotech vortexes flitted around to deconstruct dirt and stone and wood, reforming it as perfectly shaped and placed versions of the same material—or as new material entirely.
“They weren’t able to do that at the resort,” Angel said.
“We’re developing new techniques,” the giant mouse by them said.
Hammer gestured at the vortexes. “If we get too close to one of those…”
“We’ll name the resulting wall after you.” He grinned, and started walking away. “Aurora will be over shortly.”
Angel looked around. “This is incredible. Way beyond anything Stan had imagined.”
Hammer grunted. “That’s because Stan imagined they’d all become his giant fuzzy interns.”
“That’s not fair. He didn’t expect them to work for him. He hoped they’d want to—be willing to—help us advance with them. Personally, I still hope that.”
“Do you, now. Personally, I hope that those monster-sized feral ones over there aren’t looking at us and thinking ‘Ooh, Cheez-Its,’ but I am not optimistic, and that seems like a real low bar compared to your ask.”
Ted glanced over. She wasn’t wrong about the ones “over there” being monster-sized, or feral-looking, or giving the humans ominous looks. More than a few of the human-shaped Dynamice were, too, although at least they weren’t bet you’ll make good eating looks. He hoped.
“Why?” Angel threw up their hands in exasperation. “Why is it crazy to hope for them to treat us better than we started out treating them, after we showed them we can be better than that? If they’re better than us—and they are—why can’t that extend to them being altruistic?”
Aurora had walked over as the human spoke. The mouse was back to her seven-foot height, in jeans and T-shirt—making her among the minority of clothed creatures on site. Ted wondered if it was chiefly for their benefit. “It can. But you can’t demand altruism, Angel. You can just hope for it.”
Hammer turned toward her. “Aurora.”
“Ms. Hammer.” She inclined her head, flashing a half-smile that shone with almost supernatural brilliance in the early afternoon sun. “I imagine coming here was your idea. Why?”
“Because it’s not a question of if the government’s going to come for y’all, it’s a question of when.”
“Based on the chatter we’re monitoring, within forty-eight hours. The question is whether they’ll try diplomacy first, or go right to military action.” She put a hand on her hip. “The diplomats are carrying the day so far with officials, but they don’t know how to reach us, and the military’s plans are much farther along.”
Finley raised his brows. “And you know all this how?”
She shrugged. “We’re in their networks.”
“So no secrets from you.” Hammer grunted.
“Of course there are. Even if we wanted to, we couldn’t monitor everything. We couldn’t monitor most things. It’s just like your spies, though—the art is figuring out exactly what to monitor.” She started walking, and motioned for them to follow. “Come with me.”
Hammer strode along in the front of the human group, pulling ahead of Ted. “What exactly are you building here?”
“Another retreat, I suppose you’d say, but a place for us to live and work, at least for a while.”
“Work?” Angel cleared their throat, clearly trying not to sound hopeful. “I don’t want to point out the obvious, but…you don’t need jobs.”
“No, but we need to have ways to live and ways to be fulfilled. And we still have a lot to study. Your history, what you’ve done to the environment we both share, whether what you’ve done is fixable, what our options are if it isn’t.”
“That’s terrific.”
Aurora glanced down at them. “Is it still terrific if a necessary step toward fixing the damage you’ve done is cutting your population by sixty or seventy percent?”
Angel made a soft glurk noise in response.
“You, uh, wouldn’t let them do that, would you?” Ted murmured, taking Aurora’s hand.
She let him take her hand, but didn’t squeeze his back. “I’d argue against it. But my arguments might not carry the day.”
“Aurora.” Hammer cut back into the conversation. “Even if Dynamice don’t work with humans the way Mr. Hackett envisioned, they’re going to have to work with them to get what they—what you—want.”
“Are we?” She turned right, leading them along the front of the construction site, and pointed up at the looming giant workers. “Watch their step.”
They all looked up, almost reflexively, before Hammer responded. “Unless you’re hoping the warmongers carry the day, yes, you damn well will. And given the way you’re acting now, you’re going to want someone like me to speak for you, because your diplomacy skills are mighty lacking.”
Aurora’s ears lowered. “I’ll take that under advisement,” she said curtly. “I don’t mean to be undiplomatic, but we’re all frustrated.”
The mouse turned again, heading into a finished area—one on a human scale. “This looks almost like a Frank Lloyd Wright design,” Finley murmured.
“Redwood studied his work intensely.” Redwood was the chosen name of one of the other mice at Hackett’s retreat, whose metallic fur was very much the color of the tree. Ted wondered if their chosen size was reminiscent of the tree, too.
The door opened silently. Ted stared as they entered. In some ways, it was nothing out of the ordinary for a commercial building, albeit one that would probably win architectural awards. That was, though, exactly what made it incredible: it was here, finished, furnished, with electric power and operating HVAC. Ted checked his phone. It had signal and a data connection. And none of this had been here, in any form, yesterday. “How…how long do you think it’s going to take you to finish the arcology you’re building?” As he talked, he switched on his VPN, just in case. The Dynamice could probably break the encryption orders of magnitude faster than previous supercomputers could, but dropping from billions of years to thousands of years was still thousands of years.
“Parts should be livable by sunset. It won’t be complete for another two to three days, though.” She sat down with them on sofas set up in the lobby. “There are hotel rooms here which should be ready to go by the evening, if you want to stay. If you don’t, I’ll see about getting you back on the road, but I can’t promise a timetable.”
“How are you able to do all of this that fast?” Angel blurted. “The speed is insane!”
Aurora seemed to seriously consider the question. “There are hundreds of us, we can do things you can’t, and we can coordinate in ways you can’t. We have access to everything you’ve ever digitized. We can process information as fast as your best computers and we can learn that information, not just store it or index it.” She spread her arms wide and smiled tiredly. “We’re not the AGI that humans like Mr. Torgensen and his new companions at the Institute for Humanity’s Future expected, and we’re not exactly what Mr. Hackett sees in us, either. But, at least when we act as a collective, we are a superintelligence.
“Ms. Hammer, it’s not that I don’t want your help, and it’s not even that I think we might not need your help, although I’m not sure that’s a majority opinion among us. But I won’t sugarcoat things for you. The alternatives here aren’t what I think you think they are. Your choice is trusting us and letting us do what we want without trying to stop us, or not trusting us and being unable to stop us.” She pointed up, as if at the giant mice outside. “And if you choose the latter, I hope those of us who’ll make the case it’s not worth retaliating will carry the day, but I can’t guarantee it.”
“You’re so damn sure we wouldn’t be able to stop you.”
“Not positive.” She sighed. “But if you try, you’d better get all of us, because you won’t get a second chance.”
Ted rubbed the side of his head. “Uh, what do you know about Torgensen and the IHF?” he said cautiously.
“I know he’s joined them and encouraged them to think of us as existential threats.”
“You just as much said you were existential threats,” Hammer pointed out.
Aurora shrugged. “Even the most hostile of us aren’t out there going,” she stared straight ahead with her arms out in front of her and continued in a robotic monotone: “‘beep beep, destroy all humans.’” She dropped her arms and finished in her normal voice. “As I said, the ball’s in your court.” She paused, then focused on Ted, furrowing her brow and staring at him intently. “What do you know about Torgensen and the IHF?”
“Not, uh, not really much more than you do.”
She kept looking at him a moment longer, then turned back to Hammer. “So what government contacts do you have? I assume it’ll look better if we get in touch with them first.”
“It will.” She reached into her purse and pulled out her phone.
Ted felt his own phone ping. Furrowing his brow, he pulled it out and checked the notifications: a message had come in from Torgensen via Signal. No, multiple messages, starting during the time he’d been out of cell tower range.
What the hell is happening with Dynamice
Are you there?
Please respond ASAP
IHF has a Plan C
“Shit,” he said aloud.