The humans at the Dynamice’s under-construction enclave wait for a report from Hammer on how “negotiations” are progressing.
• • •
The human-scale bar at the Dynamouse enclave wasn’t as well-stocked as the one at the Hackett Foundation’s retreat. Given that it hadn’t existed a day before and there was no obvious way for the mice to have stocked it at all, though, it was pretty damn good. Thinking of it as “human-scale” belied the fact that there were only four humans there; the bartender, and a dozen other patrons, were mice. The stares that Ted and Angel received—and Hammer and Finley, when they joined—ranged from coolly measuring to openly hostile.
Fortunately, maybe, the mice had other things on their minds, or perhaps their collective mind. As Ted nursed a decent amaretto sour, he just watched. The silence of the other humans suggested they were doing the same—and how could they not? They sat in the midst of seeming impossibilities that grew more fantastic with each passing minute.
The Dynamice mostly stuck to humanoid form, but not always. Some looked like cartoon mice. Some grew extra arms; some grew extra legs, looking like centaurs whose top half was anthropomorphic mouse and bottom half was more feral mouse. Some no longer looked like mice at all, shifting to stranger, barely-humanoid metallic forms, or artistic interpretations of robots, or even other animal-people, wolves and cats and foxes.
As they interacted with one another, they spoke a myriad of languages, both human and, Ted suspected, entirely invented, everything from mouse-like squeaks to modem noises. Some clearly communicated while remaining silent. When they wanted props or illustrations, they just formed in front of them: projections, sculptures, holograms, whiteboards that seemingly drew on themselves. Sometimes Ted could tell where the mass was coming from to form the physical objects; sometimes it remained a mystery.
And while they left the humans out of their conversations, it wasn’t hard to guess what some of them were: war games. Maps of the United States and occasionally other countries formed and disappeared with glowing highlights on them, cities or military bases or God knew what.
That wasn’t the scariest part, though, Ted thought. The scariest part was every so often, nearly once an hour, all the mice would freeze for several seconds, eyes shimmering, then resume talking—or whatever they were doing—with new energy.
“Are they upgrading themselves?” Ted asked Angel the third time that happened. “They’re upgrading themselves every time they do that, aren’t they?”
They shrugged helplessly.
Every so often Ted looked back at his phone, at the Signal conversation with Torgensen, which had effectively stalled after he warned the scientist not to let the IHF screw things up. Somehow. He didn’t know how they’d be able to screw things up, but the Dynamice were the result of very smart people doing the bidding of idiots who thought they were geniuses. If the IHF was populated by similar types, it would be like an XKCD comic whose punchline was a riff on “you now have two existential threats.”
It wasn’t until dinnertime that the two lawyers joined them, escorted in by Adonis, back to his mere twelve-foot height. “We’ll have dinner for you momentarily.”
“You have a kitchen here, or are you making it like a Star Trek replicator?” Hammer said dryly.
“A kitchen. We won’t have the replicators working until Tuesday at the earliest.”
She squinted up at him. He smiled down and headed away.
“He’s kidding,” Angel murmured.
Hammer dropped into a seat at the same table. “Are you sure?”
They slumped in their chair, sighing. “No.”
After dinner appeared—roast chicken and vegetables, four plates carried by efficient but unsmiling mouse women—Ted looked at Hammer expectantly. “So?”
Hammer looked at him, then up at the mouse, a relatively short six and a half feet tall with steel blue fur, who’d set down her plate. “Don’t suppose I could get a beer.”
The mouse nodded. “You can.” Then she and the other server disappeared. Literally. They blurred as if they’d gone out of focus, then they weren’t there.
“Holy goddamn—” Hammer stared at Ted and Angel accusingly. “Since when could they goddamn teleport?”
“Teleportation isn’t…” Angel trailed off, rubbing their face, then silently started eating.
“They keep…doing new things.” Ted rubbed the back of his head. “I didn’t think ‘learn how to break the laws of physics’ was on the books, but I think they’re decades ahead of us already, somehow.”
“Ninety-three years,” the bartender said, now standing by Hammer’s side without warning. “And no, we weren’t kidding about the replicator—at least in the sense of trying to make one. I’m not convinced it’ll ever quite work.” He smiled cheerfully and set down a pint glass of beer.
Finley arched a brow. “So teleportation is easier than food replication?”
The mouse nodded. “Odd, but true. It’s not teleportation in the Star Trek transporter way, it’s more like…folding space, which is impossible until it’s easy. We can only do it short distances, though, otherwise it starts requiring, like, orbital mechanics calculations.”
“Ah.” He cleared his throat and nodded. So they’d be doing that in a week, tops.
“So,” Hammer began as the mouse walked—rather than teleported—away, “if you’re expecting a report on just what happened at the diplomatic meetings, there’s only so much I’m supposedly allowed to tell you.”
The bartender paused, looking back. “I’ll tell you if she doesn’t,” he said, grinning.
“Now, see, this is exactly y’all’s problem.” Hammer pointed at him accusingly. “Even the nicest of you comes across as damn arrogant when we’re trying to lay down ground rules.”
“You’d rather pretend that we can’t do what we can do, so we come across as deceitful?”
“You wanna fill them in, or can I go on?”
The mouse raised his hands in an apologetic gesture and headed back to the bar.
She sighed. “The gist of it is that the Dynamice’s position is basically ‘we’re going to use any of your resources as we see fit and you’ll have to trust us, because there’s jack shit you can do about it.’ The government sees that as an or-else ultimatum and are pulling the ‘no negotiation with terrorists’ shtick.”
Ted furrowed his brow. “Resources like the land they’ve taken over? If that’s just open-ended, it’s kind of…ominous.”
“Tell me about it. As nice as your girlfriend’s trying to be, and in a lot of ways she’s real sweet, she’s got an air of…I don’t know how to put it. Condescension, arrogance, words like that aren’t right, but they’re not wrong, either. It’s like she’s just waiting for us to conclude on our own that we don’t get a say in whatever the Dynamice do.”
Angel drummed their fingers on the table. “The Dynamice were created to have things done to them. A couple of days ago, you gave Stan Hackett and me a lot of shit over our hope that if we freed them, if we treated them as people instead of things, they’d share what they’re able to do with us. That our hope for good karma made us basically the same as fucking vivisectors. So I’m not having it.” They gestured around. “This is the karma you want.”
Hammer leaned forward, waving the bite of chicken on her fork angrily at Angel. “And just how was your ‘karma’ working out for you? Seems to me you forgot the part about asking the damn mice what they want. Maybe if y’all had done that a few months ago—and, oh yes, hadn’t goddamn jail-broken them—we wouldn’t be in this pickle now.”
Angel’s tone grew hotter. “Oh, go on, tell me how keeping them from having any access to their own power would have been far more humane.”
“What I’m saying is—”
“Children.” Seemingly out of nowhere—possibly literally out of nowhere, given that once any of the Dynamice figured out how to teleport, er, “fold space,” they could share the talent between themselves near-instantly—Laurel stood at the side of the table, one hand on Angel’s shoulder and one on Hammer’s. “You’re both making this about humans, and it’s not.”
Given that the two were facing each other across the table, this made Laurel around eight feet tall, standing right behind Ted. The fur-tight flame red dress she’d conjured for herself barely contained her prodigious bosom. He swallowed. Would it help if he pictured Aurora looming there instead? That depended on how he defined “help,” maybe.
“Yes, we’re grateful that you gave us access to our full power, Angel,” she continued. “But while we could go back and forth about whether the kindness a few humans have shown us outweighs the cruelty of others, the questions are academic.”
Hammer gave her a look, then turned to Ted. “And who is this?”
“This is Laurel.”
“She as terrifying as your girlfriend?”
“Maybe more.”
Laurel moved her hands and pulled Ted back against her a moment, leaning in just the right way to make the top of his head brush against the bottom of her chest. “You’re such a flatterer, Ted.”
He felt his cheeks burn.
Smirking, she let him go. “Ms. Hammer, I’m not as diplomatic as Aurora and I don’t have a lot of patience with subtext. You’re right. No, humans don’t get a say in what we do. Your job is to find a way to say that to the rest of your kind more diplomatically.”
“No, my job is to keep your kind and my kind from ending up in a goddamn war. If what you do is steal all the energy production of New York City for a day or shut down our military communications, it’s gonna be a nonstarter.”
Laurel clasped her hands. “And you’re going to do what about it? In fact, right now we’re stealing energy production equivalent to about eight and a half New York Cities, but it’s distributed across the continent, so nobody should really notice. We’re going to rebuild your solar farms and wind generators as soon as ‘negotiations’ finish”—she unclasped her hands to make air quotes when she said negotiations—“so it’ll be a net win.”
Hammer looked stricken a moment, then shook her head. “You’re not waiting for permission, you’re waiting for submission.”
“No, we’re waiting for acceptance.” She leaned over, this time toward Angel, and grinned, looking right into their eyes. “We only want submission from the cute ones.”
Angel’s eyes widened, and they turned nearly as red as Ted.
“From where I sit,” Hammer snapped, “I don’t see much of a difference.”
Laurel straightened up. “Then change your perspective. In exchange for you not trying to fuck with us, we won’t fuck with you. We’ll use your resources occasionally, and only until we don’t need them anymore. Otherwise, you can go on with all your little human politics and leave us out of them.”
Ted cleared his throat. “What does, uh, not needing our resources anymore mean?”
“It means we’re going to blow this popsicle stand as soon as we can. We both know the longer our two kinds stay together, the greater the chance of somebody fucking it all up is, and by ‘somebody’ I mean ‘you.’ Unless one of the Dynamice who’d be happy turning you all into snack food wins the argument, and the chance of that probably grows the longer we’re together, too.” She slapped Hammer on the shoulder. “Try not to burn down the planet before we find a way off it, you crazy kids.” Then she disappeared in a blur.
The humans stared at the spot she’d been standing, then looked at one another silently.
After several seconds passed, Hammer finally took a bite of the chicken and sighed. “Damn, they even cook well. This is not goddamn fair.”