“Chuck!” Jillian scooped up the battered robot to add to her mouse nuzzling. “You look so fierce!”
“Being in an egg is boring!” Red Jawbreaker stood on Louise’s tablet three mules down. The Jawbreakers sounded nearly identical but Red wore a red gingham scarf. “There’s nothing to do. Nothing to listen to. I want music! Let’s drop the beat!”
Red must have opened up Louise’s music folder as the deep thumping base of Imagine Dragons’ “Believer” started to play. Red sang along with the words. “First things first, I’mma say all the words inside my head! I’m fired up and tired of the way that things have been, oh-oohh!”
“We want to race!” Green Jawbreaker scrambled up the next luggage mule down. Her scarf of green velvet was starting to fray at the ends. “We found our mice but we can’t find our mini-bikes. We want to use the luggage mules instead!”
“No, no, no, no!” Louise cried. “Don’t touch the mules! Why can’t it ever be simple?”
When Crow Boy said that he would recharge things, Louise had assumed he would stop at useful things like the luggage mules and their computers. Apparently he’d also charged up the babies’ robotic mice. How did he miss the babies’ other toys?
Louise carefully picked her way toward the pile of items that were related to magic. After they had sorted everything and come up with a plan, they pulled most of the piles apart, resulting in the floor being covered with everything that might be useful now. Anything unneeded had stayed stacked together, mostly in cardboard boxes labeled with their contents. Back when they had geared up on Earth, they had tried to stay as organized as possible. “I’ll find your…your what? Mini-bikes?”
“Chuck means the mini-hovercarts,” Nikola said.
Did they even bring those? When did the babies start calling them mini-bikes? Back at the Waldorf Astoria, they called them mini-hovercarts because the small square platforms sort of looked like little shopping carts that hovered. The plastic railing kept the robotic mice bodies from falling off. The boxy design controlled by Wi-Fi interface had been easier to build than something that looked and operated like a motorcycle.
The babies had been on tiny hoverbikes in her dream. They’d been wearing racing goggles — something requested but the twins hadn’t had time to create. In the dream, Chuck Norris had her pink scarf, there had been no war-paint-like dirt on her mouse, and its ears had been intact.
Oilcan “saw” the mice but not in a completely literal manner.
“How did you talk to Oilcan?” His real name was Orville but after seeing the world through his eyes, Louise couldn’t bring herself to use it anymore.
“I told you that Lou would see us,” Nikola said to his sisters.
“Dream walking is easy-peasy.” Chuck Norris was unrepentant as always. “It was only a little harder talking to someone who is awake than someone who is asleep. Joy came with us.”
“That explains the candy,” Louise muttered to herself. Joy had been there, literally, while the babies had only projected themselves — somehow. The question became: How did Joy carry said candy back to Haven so quickly? Louise had a hazy notion that Pittsburgh proper was somewhere miles to the southeast, but she wasn’t sure how far. She knew that Joy could phase through any solid wall, but could she teleport too?
“What are you talking about?” Jillian said.
“I told you that the girls didn’t like the names that we picked out for them,” Louise said. “They went to talk to Oilcan to champion their cause.”
“They did what?” Jillian cried. “And how did you ‘see’ them?”
“It’s another weird genetic trick that some of us got from being from two dragon bloodlines,” Louise said. “You can see magic. We both can cast domana spells. I can dream walk.”
“And so can we!” Chuck said. “Charlene is a stupid name! I want to be Chuck Norris Dufae!”
“And I want to race!” Green’s voice this time came from the luggage mule that her mouse had been sitting on. The mule unlocked its wheels.
“No!” the twins both shouted, pointing firmly at the mule just like their mother would have.
“If you try to move that, you’ll rip out the cables and damage both mules’ maintenance ports!” Louise said. “And then everyone will die! Just give me a minute! I’ll find your mini-bikes. Just don’t mess with the mules!”
“Everyone will die?” Nikola echoed.
“What is all this?” Chuck scrambled up onto the mule to examine the wiring. “What are you doing?”
“Can we help?” Nikola said.
“Of course we can help!” Chuck said. “Team Mischief! Go!”
Their trying to help would be almost as bad as their trying to race the mules.
“I don’t think you’ll understand what we’re doing,” Louise said truthfully.
Jillian, though, launched into an explanation. “We’re using the neural engines of the luggage mules to build generative adversarial networks. If you look at the data that Dufae has in the Codex, he seemed to be trying to track subatomic particles. It appears that the elves don’t have anything like Feynman diagrams or even calculators beyond a simple abacus, so Dufae was stuck crunching numbers the hard way.”
“We can grind through his data fast with the mules, but only if you don’t damage them,” Louise said.
She hadn’t seen the babies’ toys when they sorted through everything but Jillian had dealt with most of the items that used magic to function. They had come to Elfhome loaded for bear, expecting to fight their way through the wilderness. While they had things like the Tasers, the twins’ size, age, and the short time that they had to prepare meant that their most powerful weapon was their ability to combine magic and science. Using money that they had stolen from Desmarais, they had bought a hundred times what they could possibly use or carry on them, hence the fleet of luggage mules. The number of mules that they brought with them had been limited only by how many they could get drop-shipped to their Monroeville hotel.
“Can’t you use your tablets?” Green Jawbreaker, thankfully, was back in her mouse again. “Don’t they have neural engines? What about your phones?”
“Yes,” Jillian said with more patience than Louise could have had. “They both have neural engines, but they’re primitive compared to the luggage mules.”
Louise started to shift the cardboard boxes of magical supplies. “Think of what the mules have to do: follow their owner through crowds, avoiding people while balancing any load across any terrain, be it indoor or outdoor, and in any weather condition. Wet grass. Deep snow. Icy stairs. Beach sand.”
“What’s a generative adversarial network?” Nikola said.
“It’s when you set up two neural networks that ‘play against each other’ in a task.” Jillian put down the mice and joined the search. “The concept evolved from game theory. The networks are competing but they’re also learning from each other. We’re pairing up the mules, two each as a team, and then feeding them the data sets that Dufae recorded within the Codex from his experiments with shield magic. Each team is trying to find the best possible spell.”
“It’s basically what Dufae was charting out with pen and paper in the Codex,” Louise said.
“But the mules can work a zillion times faster than any normal person,” Jillian said.
Louise found a box marked “Baby Toys.” She opened it up to find everything related to the hovercarts piled on top of the broken robotic dog.
The flash of a muzzle in the darkness. The flare of pain. Tesla’s deep angry growl.