Mus Numena 3: Question Mark (Patreon)

Stonebraker didn’t have an answer for Ted about the fate of the first Dynamouse Max model, but Torgensen did. The scientist was pacing back and forth slowly in the break room, vending machine styrofoam cup in hand, when Ted passed by the entrance. He ducked inside, too, grabbing a cup, putting it until the machine’s spout, and punching the brew button. As he waited for the machine to gurgle out a best effort coffee attempt, he turned to the scientist. “So.”

Torgensen nodded to him.

“It’s kind of incredible how they went from that first, uh, prototype just six months ago to commercializing the Max, huh?”

The man scoffed and shook his head. Balding, scraggly-bearded, and paunchy, Torgensen could have been youthful for a guy in his sixties or prematurely aged for a guy in his forties. “We both know that wasn’t a prototype, Mister…” He glanced at Ted’s name tag. “Bishop.”

“No.” He picked up his cup and sipped. Mmm. Awful. “Did you guys, uh, analyze her to figure out what happened?”

“We combed through all the data reported back to its control app, did an autopsy, retrieved and analyzed a direct data dump from its brain. You name it, somebody did it.”

“Autopsy? She died?”

“We euthanized it.”

Ted swallowed, feeling the blood drain from his face.

Torgensen picked up on the reaction and sighed, shrugging. “I know, it seems especially bad when they look like, well, us. We weren’t all comfortable following that protocol, but, it’s still protocol.”

“Protocol,” Ted echoed, looking into the coffee cup, watching a trace of oil shimmer on the liquid’s surface. “So you found something, at least.”

“What we found is that we could use the existing control app for the Ultras to prompt them to make that change. With the right prompt and enough mass to convert, presto change-o.”

“But—” Ted’s eyes widened. “How?”

Torgensen shrugged again. “The same way most machine learning prompts work: we have no idea. It’s literally that joke about the presentation with three steps where the second step is just a question mark and the third is ‘profit!’. Our first step is ‘write a prompt.’”

“So we just…make an Ultra and prompt it to become a Max.”

“There’s rather more to it, but in a nutshell, yes.”

“Huh.”

“Yep.” Torgensen tilted his head, looking distant, then raised his brows in a what-can-you-do kind of expression.

“Well. Thanks.” Ted nodded to him and headed toward the door, then turned around, as if just thinking of a new question. “What did you mean about knowledge transfer?”

“Hmm?”

“When you were talking to Stonebraker when I came in, you said you didn’t know how the knowledge transfer was happening.”

Torgensen shook his head, looking apologetic. “I can’t talk about that.”

“Right.” Ted nodded again, and headed out for real.

The images faded even as Ted sat bolt upright in bed with a cry, clutching his stomach. In the dream, scientists were vivisecting the mouse woman, cut into while she was alive. Somehow, as he protested he found himself bound on a table next to hers, a doctor coming toward him with a scalpel as her terrified, agonized squeals rang in his ears.

He dropped back onto the pillow, staring up at the ceiling in the darkness. No, not getting back to sleep now. Two minutes passed before he gave up and sat up again. “Siri, night light.”

The iPhone he used as an alarm clock let out a soft beep of acknowledgement, and a moment later, the bedroom lamp switched on, tinted red, at about twenty percent brightness.

Rubbing his face, he grabbed the phone and manually switched the light to its normal color. In the month and change since he’d had the conversations with Stonebraker and Torgensen, he’d woken up from a version of that three times.

Ten to six; there wasn’t much point in going back to bed for another forty minutes, especially if he fell back into the same damn dream. He stood up, turning the light to full brightness, and groggily shifted into his standard morning routine. Lately, it didn’t vary much from weekday to weekend: bathroom, brew a single cup of coffee, drink it while eating a bowl of cereal and reading the morning news on the iPad, brush the teeth, get to work. Everything had become so rote that he pulled into the office parking lot exactly forty minutes ahead of schedule. If he thought about what that said, he’d be sad, so he didn’t.

The day job’s tasks hadn’t changed much in the last month, but the experience had begun changing radically. News of the Dynamice Max model had—well, it hadn’t leaked, had it, since they’d issued press releases. But apparently not a single soul in upper management had predicted the eminently predictable firestorm set off by selling human-shaped lab mice. The crowds of protestors had thinned down to the diehards, but there’d been a shareholder lawsuit filed just three days ago—that one clearly worried the company more than the lawsuits filed by both animal rights and human trafficking groups, since none of them technically had standing to sue.

What undercut the shareholder argument about exposing the company to unprecedented risk, though, were the sales numbers. They were turning the mice out twice as fast as they’d planned to—up to over a hundred a week from fifty—and last time he’d been able to check it, the waiting list ran sixteen months. (Technically, he wasn’t entitled to any of that information, but a silver lining of working in IT was that you always knew way more about everything at the company than you should.) The bottom line for every public company was—well—the bottom line, and their valuation had blasted into the stratosphere. Thanks to stock options he’d been ignoring—five thousand shares he could choose to buy at $2.50 a pop, granted back when the company’s stock rarely rose above $6 a share—his on-paper net worth had risen by a dizzying $140K.

This early, the office building was quiet, but not empty. Most software engineers Ted had met liked coming in late and staying late, but a few favored the exact reverse, hitting the office by seven a.m. at the latest and clearing out by four. He could never manage that—at least, on days that he hadn’t woken up early due to nightmares—but, in the abstract, he got the appeal.

Things didn’t get weird until after lunch. That was when the VIPs came through the cafeteria, right as Ted was finishing his soup and sandwich (broccoli cheddar and turkey on rye, respectively).

VIP tours had always been part of the company, but they’d been in a frenzy the last month: more tours, more security, more glitz. Not merely typical clients, but politicos and the occasional actual, I-know-this-person celebrity with entourage. Ted couldn’t tell which one of those buckets this group fell into, but the young guy in the hoodie looked familiar.

Oh, wait. That was Nanolab Science’s new CEO Walter Lucas, who’d come on board a few months ago, when the Dynamice Max project was already underway. He was the first executive in that position without a biotech background, having breezed in from Tātr, a billion-dollar tech startup that had promised—and failed—to revolutionize fast food French fries.

Then his eyes widened. That guy, there, must be the VIP: late forties, early fifties, decked out in an off-the-rack grey leisure suit and no tie, surrounded by a mix of preening techbros who genuinely might not be old enough to drink yet and a few guys in tailored suits in their late fifties.

It wasn’t the VIP, the techbros, or the suits that caught Ted’s attention, though. It was the woman hanging on the VIP’s arm.

The mouse woman.

The Dynamouse Max stood about five-foot-four, Ted guessed, and was strikingly similar to the one who they’d…who he’d seen earlier. Similar, but not identical. Wider hips, longer hair with a metallic cobalt sheen to it. And clothed, in a sheer, clingy one-piece red dress. Okay, the higher-ups did not get to give him crap for joking about “sexy mice women” and then dress one in that.

The other thing that was similar was the confused, scared expression. She had no idea what was going on. Granted, neither did Ted. Exactly why were they dressing her that way?

He grabbed his drink cup and maneuvered closer, doing his best to look as if he was on the way to the refill station.

“So, Stan,” Walter Lucas said. “What do you think?”

Leisure Suit VIP—Stan?—sighed, and gently unhooked the mouse’s arm from his. “I think this is some creepy-ass sexbot shit, Walter.” Oh. Now Ted recognized him: Stan Hackett, CEO of BrickByte, a celebrated industry leader and legendarily, how might one put it, blunt.

Lucas’s expression froze. “They—they’re not bots, and they’re certainly not for sex. If we go into the personal companion market, that’s definitely going to be in the license text. ‘You cannot use it for sex’ or something. Legal will draw it up.”

Ted refilled his Coke Zero, and headed back toward his seat, coincidentally keeping pace with the VIP group.

“Uh huh. You keep saying ‘it’ when you refer to these,” Leisure Suit gestured up and down at the mouse woman, “but come on, she’s absolutely screaming female pronouns.” He pointed with both hands at her breasts. The mouse blinked, looking down at her chest, too.

“We don’t like to use pronouns,” Lucas began.

“Jesus fuck, Walter, ‘we’ is a pronoun. You have a multibillion-dollar business doing super lab animals, and yeah, I’m sure there are other markets you could find for humanoid mice. But you are not coming to grips with the reality that we’re talking about humanoid,” he waved his hands up and down grandly at the mouse woman, “miiiiiiiiiice.”

“We made them that way because it makes them superior for experimental research.”

“And if you put one in a dress and try selling her—her, Walter—everyone is going to ask why you made her look fuckable.” Stan looked at Ted. “Hey, you.” He pointed at the mouse. “Fuckable, right?”

Abruptly, everyone in the VIP group stared at Ted. Ted stared back, knowing he must look like a deer unexpectedly facing down a semi.

Lucas readjusted his hoodie self-consciously. “Don’t harass my employees, Stan.”

Ted looked at the mouse. She tilted her head at him, gaze sharpening, and brightened, blossoming into an adorably cute smile.

Hackett looked between the mouse and Ted. “Wait. Does she know you?” He put his hand on Lucas’s shoulder. “Are your employees ‘unit testing’ the mice, Walter?”

Lucas looked flustered, but narrowed his eyes at Ted.

“No! God, no! I’ve never seen this one before, and I don’t—I wouldn’t—”

He waved dismissively. “I’m giving your CEO shit.” He turned back to Lucas. “See his reaction? That’s what I’m trying to get across to you. What’s the answer?”

“The answer?”

“Walter. Listen to every word, including the fucking pronouns. Why. Did. You. Make. Them. Attractive. To. Humans.”

Lucas scratched his head. “That’s subjective, Stan.” He looked exactly like he was stalling for time. Stan crossed his arms.

Ted hastened toward the exit before he drew any more attention. That mouse had recognized him, hadn’t she? Somehow. Was that an example of the “knowledge transfer” that Torgensen couldn’t talk about? Did all the Dynamice know Ted because they recognized him as the guy who kept sneaking them treats? That made no sense.

He knew the answer to half of the VIP’s question. Nobody at the company made the Dynamice attractive to humans, at least not at first. The mice made themselves look that way.

But, as far as he could tell, nobody anywhere across all of Nanolab Sciences could answer the other half of the question: why?