She slowly lowered her hands. "But ... William." She waved at the warmth that spread up the rock face. "None of this could be natural."
"But what kind of unnatural is it, Munchkin? Look at the picture your friend Juan just made. You can see the insides of the mouse. It's not animatronic." William ran a twitchy hand through his hair. "I think somebody in the bioscience labs hereabouts really did have an accident. Maybe these creatures aren't as smart as humans ... but they were smart enough to escape, and fool—who was it that was poking around here in January?"
"Feretti and Voss," Miri said in a small voice.
"Yes. Maybe just hiding down here when the bottom was under water was enough to fool them. I'll bet these creatures have just a little edge over ordinary lab mice. But a little edge can be enough to change the world."
And Juan realized William wasn't talking about just the mice. "I don't want to change the world," he said in a choked voice. "I just want to have my chance in it."
William nodded. "Fair enough."
Miri looked back and forth at them. What Juan could see of her expression was very solemn.
Juan shrugged. "It's okay, Miri. I think William is right. We're all alone here."
She leaned a little toward him. "Was it Bertie who got you into this?"
"Some. My mother has our family in one of the distributed framinghams. I showed my part of it to Bertie last spring, after I flunked Adaptability. Bertie shopped it around as an anonymous challenge. He came back with a custom drug. What it does—" Juan tried to laugh, but it sounded more like a rattle. "—most people would think that what it does is a joke. See," he tapped the side of his head, "it makes my memory very very good. Everyone thinks human memory doesn't count for much anymore. People say, ‘No need for eidetic memory when your clothes' data storage is a billion times bigger.' But that's not the point. Now I can remember big data blocks perfectly, and I have my wearable put hierarchial tags on all the stuff I see. So I can communicate patterns back to my wearable just by citing a few numbers. It gives me this incredible advantage in setting up problems."
"So Bertie is your great friend because you are his super tool?" Her voice was quiet and outraged, but the anger was no longer directed at Juan.
"No! I've studied the memory effect. The idea itself came from analysis of my own medical data. Even now that we have the gimmick, only one person in a thousand could be affected by it at all. There's no way Bertie could have known beforehand that I was special."
"Ah. Of course," she said, and was silent. Juan hated it when people did that, agreed with what you said and then waited for you to figure out why you had just made a fool of yourself.... Bertie is just very good with connections. He had connections everywhere, to research groups, idea markets, challenge boards. But maybe Bertie had figured out how to do even better: How many casual friends did Bertie have? How many did he offer to help with custom drug improvements? Most of that would turn out to be minor stuff, and maybe those friendships would remain casual. But sometimes, Bertie would hit the jackpot. Like with me.
"But Bertie is my best friend!" I will not blubber.
"You could find other friends, son," said William. He shrugged. "Back before I lost my marbles, I had a gift. I could make words sing. I would give almost anything to get that back. And you? Well, however you came by it, the talent you have now is a marvelous gift. You are beholden to no one other than yourself for it."
Miri said softly. "I—I don't know, Juan. Custom meds aren't illegal like twentieth century drugs—but they are off-limits for a reason. There's no way to do full testing on them. This stuff you're taking could—"
"I know. It could fry my mind." Juan put his hands to his face, and ran into the cold plastic of his goggles. For a moment, Juan's mind turned inward. All the old fear and shame rose up ... and balanced against the strange surprise that out of the whole world, this old man could understand him.
But even here, even with his eyes closed, his contacts were still on, and Juan saw the virtual gleam of the breadcrumbs. He stared passively for several seconds, and then surprise began to eat through his funk. "Miri ... they're moving."
"Huh?" She had been paying even less attention than he had. "Yes! Down the tunnels, away from us."
William moved close to the mouse hole, and pressed his ear against the stone wall. "I'll bet our little friends are taking your dungballs to wherever the first one went."
"Can you get some pictures from them, Juan?"
"...Yes. Here's one." A thermal glimpse of a glowing tunnel floor. Frothy piles of something that looked like finely shredded paper. Seconds passed, and a virtual gleam showed dimly through the rock. "There's the locator beacon of the first crumb." It was five feet deeper in the rock. "Now it has a node to forward through."
"We could lose them, too."
Juan pushed past William, and tossed two more breadcrumbs down the hole. One rolled a good three feet. The other stopped after six inches—and then began moving "on its own".
"The mice are stringing nodes for us!" All but the farthest locator beacon were glowing high-rate bright. Now there were lots of pictures, but the quality was poor. As the crumbs warmed in the hot air of the tunnels, the images showed very little detail except for the mice themselves: paws and snouts and glowing eyes. "Hey, did you see the splinter sticking out of that poor thing's paw?"
"Yes, I think that's the one I saw before. Wait, we're getting a picture from the crumb they stole to begin with." At first, the data was a jumble. Still another picture format? Not exactly. "This picture is normal vision, Miri!" He finished the transformation.
"How—?" Then she gave a sharp little gasp.
There was no scale marker, but the chamber couldn't have been more than a couple of feet across. To the eye of the breadcrumb it was a wide, high-ceilinged meeting room, crowded with dozens of white-furred mice, their dark eyes glittering by the light of a ... fire ... in the middle of the hall.
"I think you have your ‘A', Miriam," William said softly.
Miri didn't answer.
Rank upon rank of mice, crouched around the fire. Three mice stood at the center, higher up—tending the flame? It wobbled and glowed, more like a candle than a bonfire. But the mice didn't seem to be watching the fire as much as they were the breadcrumb. Bertie's little breadcrumb was the magical arrival at their meeting.
"See!" Miri hunched forward, her elbows on her knees. "Foxwarner strikes again. A slow flame in a space like that ... those ‘mice' should all be dead of carbon monoxide poisoning."
The breadcrumbs were not sending spectral data, so who could say? Juan visualized the tunnel system. There were other passages a little higher up, and he had data on the capacity of the inlets and outlets. He thought a few seconds more and gave the problem to his wearable. "No ... actually, there is enough ventilation to be safe."
Miri looked up at him. "Wow. You are fast."
"Your Epiphany outfit could do it in a instant."
"But it would've taken me five minutes to pose the problem to my Epiphany."
Another picture came in, firelight on a ceiling.
"The mice are rolling it closer to the fire."
"I think they're just poking at it."
Another picture. The crumb had been turned again, and now was looking outwards, to where three more mice had just come in from a large side entrance ... rolling another breadcrumb.
But the next picture was a blur of motion, a glimpse of a mostly empty meeting chamber, in thermal colors. The fire had been doused.