Mus Numena 2: Emergent Behavior (Patreon)

They went back to work the next day. No explanation was offered beyond a terse “we’re still preparing a statement” email, followed by an even more terse “remember you all signed NDAs.” Stonebraker never asked Ted more questions, and if they ever finished preparing said statement, it wasn’t shared with employees. The laboratory level was now off-limits to IT (and everyone else) without explicit clearance, but people he’d never seen at the company before, ones who matched the Mysterious Agents in Black stereotype to disquieting perfection, set up offices there. Anyone with any answers to basic questions Ted had—did they figure out how that mouse transformed, and did any other mice do it, for starters—was kept away from him. Or maybe they kept him away from them.

Ted missed his occasional unofficial visits with the mice, and suspected that signified his social life had atrophied even more post-breakup than he’d feared. In his head, he’d told everyone that for the first time in three years—half of the relationship he’d had with Lucy—he felt free, able to do anything, able to go anywhere. But just who had “everyone” been? He’d moved up here to live with her, giving up the apartment and the job and the few friends he’d had in SoCal. After the move, his social circle was her social circle. When they broke up, that circle stayed with her. He didn’t have any of his own friends within five hundred miles.

Briefly, he toyed with getting a pet mouse of his own, but—no. He didn’t want the responsibility of a pet; he had enough trouble being responsible for himself these days. And a pet mouse wouldn’t be a pet Dynamouse. They were smarter, almost scarily so, and that made them more interesting. He couldn’t afford one even if the company would sell them to individuals.

Also, that made his mind drift to thoughts of her, of the mouse woman. What did they do with her? She was, legally speaking, the company’s property. Was it even correct to think of her as a “mouse woman,” or just as a mouse that looked human?

(“Just”?)

One night, when he couldn’t shake the image of her, he browsed mouse art on Fur Affinity, looking for anything reminiscent of her. Nothing was quite similar, but he could find countless images mostly similar, and if he let them, they led to highly inappropriate thoughts. As far as he knew, she couldn’t pass, oh, what did the fans call it? She couldn’t pass the Harkness Test—the ability to understand and express consent for, uh, oh my God she’s a mouse Ted stop thinking that way.

He didn’t go back to that website.

It was over six months later when the company sent out not a statement, but a press release, emailed to employees about an hour before it hit the public company news.

Nanolab Science takes our futuristic biomedical subjects to the next level: introducing Dynamice Max!

Ted’s mouth fell open as he scanned the release, with accompanying photographs of male, female, and seemingly sexless versions of the humanoid silver mice. “Are they insane?”

Dan, two seats down along the open office table, looked over from his screen. “Huh?”

“They’re selling these just like—just like the other lab rats? For experiments?”

Dan furrowed his brow and shrugged. “It’s literally the business we’re in. These will be incredible when scientists need human subjects, but can’t use actual humans because of ethics guidelines and other shit like that. I wonder how they hell they did it, though, and that fast. I mean, we only started selling the Ultra line three months ago, and they were, you know…” He held his hands a few inches apart. “Just mice.”

“They didn’t do it.” Ted pushed back from the desk angrily. “The mice did.”

Dan looked blank. “What?”

“The—” He lowered his voice. “Remember when they kept everyone in the lobby after some ‘incident,’ but that security director grabbed me and took me upstairs?”

“Yeah.”

“That morning, somebody had come into the lab that I’d been in the night before and found one of these mice-people just…standing there. They wanted to know if I’d had anything to do with it, as if I could enter a few commands in the dashboard to create a sexy mouse woman or something.”

Dan lifted a brow. “Sexy mouse woman.”

“Am I wrong? What I’m telling you is that nobody at this company did this intentionally. They’re taking advantage of something the mice did that nobody knew they could.”

Dan lifted the other brow, too. “Oh. Wait. Are you back on your ‘emergent behavior’ hobbyhorse?”

“If the horse fits.”

“That’s not an expression.” Dan sighed. “I don’t know what you saw, but it couldn’t have been that, okay? Do you honestly think the company would see that and go, ‘Oh, we don’t understand how this happened, but we’re going to commercialize it pronto?’ That would be incredibly irresponsible.”

“Do you have another explanation?”

“No, but I’m not a scientist, and your explanation is stupid, Ted. Are they intelligent?”

“I think so.”

“I mean, human intelligent, not smart animal intelligent.”

His musings about the Harkness Test a few months ago came back unbidden, and he tried not to blush. “I assume not. I mean, not individually. If they network with one another the way other Dynamice do, though, who knows what the limit is?”

Dan stared up at the ceiling. “We’ve been over this, Ted. They network with us, not with each other.” He raised a hand to forestall the rebuttal. “Yes, okay, they act as local mesh networks, but so do all the network access points in this office building.”

“Ubiquiti routers don’t have independent brains.”

“Neither do mice.”

“Mice have brains!”

“You know what I mean.”

“These mice, on their own initiative, changed themselves to look like humans. So are you dead certain about how smart they are? I’m sure not.”

Dan opened his mouth, closed it, looked to the side, and shook his head. “Ted, you’re gonna have to pull your head out of whatever sci-fi fantasy world you’ve shoved it in. Nanolab is selling genetically engineered research animals. You get that, don’t you? Animals. They’re meant to be experimented on. You’re not against research, right? Against science?”

“Of course not.”

“And animal experimentation is important in that, right?”

“Sometimes, sure.” He wasn’t, truth to tell, absolutely, positively, one-hundred-percent sure; a lot of animal experimentation he’d learned about seemed like it could be done without using animals at all.

“What Nanolab does cuts down on how many normal animals scientists need for experiments, right?”

Ted sighed.

“Right?” Dan prompted, voice rising aggressively.

He raised his hands in capitulation. “Right.”

“So, this,” he pointed at Ted’s screen where the email remained open, “helps even more. These just look more like humans because it makes them better subjects.”

Ted nodded. He didn’t find Dan’s argument compelling—it was more or less a repetition of the marketing copy from the press release—but they were going around in circles, and he didn’t need to piss off his boss.

Dan squinted at him a few more seconds. “Are you dating yet?”

“What?”

“After whatshername left you. Are you dating yet? It’s been almost a year.”

“Lucy, and no. Wait. You think I wouldn’t worry about the company crossing ethical boundaries if I had a girlfriend?”

“I think you wouldn’t be talking about sexy mouse women.” Dan shrugged, turning back to his computer. “There’s a new conference room to set up today, and since Jackson’s out, I’m re-assigning the ticket to you.”

“Fine.” Ted opened the ticket queue, scanning the buildout requirements. Pretty run-of-the-mill—except it was on the third floor. He glanced over at Dan. “We’re allowed on the third floor again?”

Dan didn’t look over. “Just follow the instructions in the ticket.”

He scrolled up until he found it. He had to email the security office for clearance, referencing the Jira ticket number, and wait for an escort. Great. After he sent the message, it took over an hour for an escort to arrive, a bored-looking rent-a-cop who motioned Ted to follow him to the elevator bank.

Even though the floor didn’t look wildly different than it had on his last visit, it felt different, suffused with a new and slightly foreboding energy. The men in black still had a presence here, and more corporate executives strode in twos and threes up and down the hallway, talking animatedly with each other. The scientists looked more harried and nervous than he remembered, too.

When he passed by one open door, he caught sight of what had to be a Dynamouse Max model—a huge, Adonis-like sculpted male, all silver but for deep green eyes. His body reflected light as if he were fully made of metal. At first, it looked like he stood a head taller than the two human scientists hovering around him, attaching electrodes. When Ted realized the mouse sat cross-legged on the floor, though, his step faltered.

The misstep caught the Dynamouse’s attention, and he tilted his head at Ted, as if thinking, Do I recognize you? One of the scientists turned, too, and quickly slammed the door shut.

“Up ahead,” the security guy said, looking impatient.

Ted quickened his step to catch up. “He was—that mouse would have stood twelve feet high!”

“What mouse?”

Ted gave him an incredulous look. “You didn’t—”

The man eyed him, and said very deliberately, “What. Mouse.”

Ted cleared his throat, taking the hint.

But, good lord. Wasn’t that approaching the limits of the square-cube law? Maybe not for the Dynamouse Maxes, which…raised even more disturbing questions. Exactly what kind of experiment was that good for? Were they testing Dynamouse soldiers?

He ran a hand through his thinning hair. If they weren’t much more intelligent than normal mice—at least normal Dynamice?—then surely not. Unless they pitched them as brute force weapons, which raised its own questions. (Also, the idea that a mouse would be deployed against your platoon would sound hilarious, until a twelve-foot tall metallic mouse god bore down on you.)

The rent-a-cop motioned him toward a conference room, and Ted nodded again. “Thanks.” He walked in, mostly seeing what he expected: a wide-screen monitor mounted on the wall, a long table, a pile of equipment and cables on the table. What he didn’t expect to see was Stonebraker, chatting with a scientist.

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. We can’t explain the knowledge transfer,” the scientist was saying.

“There’s a lot you can’t explain, and I don’t like it.” She turned, and spoke more loudly. “Mr. Bishop.” The scientist visibly jumped. He was one of the ones who’d been there the first night, but not the accusatory one.

“I’m here from IT.” He pointed at the equipment on the table.

“We’ll continue this later, Dr. Torgensen.” She nodded at the scientist, who cleared his throat and left the room.

As Ted walked over to the stack of cables, Stonebraker said, “It’s a coincidence seeing you on this floor, today of all days.”

“In fact, it is. The tech who’d been assigned to this buildout is on sick leave. I didn’t know about the Dynamice Max ‘project’ until this morning. I won’t pretend I’m not curious as to how they—we—commercialized her. But I’m not up here to fish for information you probably don’t have and wouldn’t give me even if you did.” He flashed an insincere smile and started plugging in cables.

She pursed her lips, drumming her fingers on her thigh. “I’m curious, too,” she said at length. “Do you know what happened to that file cabinet Dr. Nelson improbably accused you of stealing?”

“Nope.”

“That mouse that first night ate it. They found traces of it in its stomach.”

Ted stared. “She ate the file cabinet?”

“Apparently the Dynamice Ultras—and Maxes—can eat nearly anything, and turn it directly into mass. That fast.”

“So the twelve-foot one that I passed by earlier today…”

“God knows what they’ve been feeding it.”

Ted shook his head, returning his attention to the room’s patch panel. Then he went over her words in his head again. They found traces in her—

He turned, a chill running down his spine. “How do they know what was in her stomach?”