by Olga Werby
“Does Ruffy feel bad about any of the people in your Dad’s lab?” Dalla asked, trying to keep the worry out of her voice. Is someone hurting my baby?
“He likes Uncle Geo,” Toby said evasively. “Geo is always nice to him and scratches him in a good way and carries him around on his shoulder. But that’s not what I wanted to tell you. What I wanted to tell you is that…sometimes I dream the way Ruffy experiences the world.”
“Does that bother you?” Was there somebody at the lab that Toby was scared of? Was something making her feel wrong? Dalla wanted to help…if only she knew how.
“No. It’s just different, that’s all. Forget I said anything.” Toby burrowed deeper into her mother’s shoulder. “I think I’ll sleep now.”
“Okay, honey.”
Dalla gently rubbed her daughter’s back until she heard soft snoring.
“Rats are very social animals,” Will said to George. “You leave a rat alone for a long time and it goes crazy.”
“Same with humans,” George noted.
“True. But rats don’t have the intellectual capacity to cope with loneliness, so psychological unraveling happens faster for them. But even for humans, I think, solitary confinement is a form of torture,” Will added.
“Uh-huh.” George nodded ambiguously. The truth was, he agreed with Will, but the US government didn’t—and George worked for the government. “Rufus has spent a lot of time connected to Toby. Do you think that’s increased his ability to tolerate isolation?”
“Perhaps,” Will said. “We haven’t studied that yet. There’s so much to do. And taking the whole thing out of the lab…”
“It’ll be fine, Will,” George said reassuringly. “Think of everything you’ll learn. And it’ll be good for Toby. We’ll run some real world scenarios—”
“What are you thinking about?” Will sounded nervous again.
“We were always aiming at search-and-rescue operations. The field rats won’t ever be alone—each animal will always have a human partner,” George said. “Rufus and Toby will be naturals at that.”
“That’s probably true,” Will said thoughtfully.
When Will went up to bed, Dalla told him about the strange conversation she’d had with Toby.
“Rat dreams?” Will said.
“It was all jumbled up—magic and Harry Potter and running tunnels like a happy rat…”
“Harry Potter? You mean Wormtail? She dreams herself as that Peter Pettigrew character? The bad wizard?”
Toby and Vikka had been reading the Harry Potter books together and Toby really liked the series. Will thought it was a bit too violent for her—and some of the themes in those books were very dark—but Vikka insisted she was up to it.
“I don’t know who that is,” Dalla said. “You know I never got to read the Potter books. I was kind of saving myself for Toby and then…it just never happened.” Her voice broke.
Will pulled his wife close. There were a lot of things they had both hoped to do as a family—things that simply hadn’t been possible. “Toby knows you’re interested in what she’s reading. That’s why she came to you with this.”
Dalla wiped her eyes. “No. I don’t think it was about Harry Potter at all.”
“Then what?”
“It’s something about rat feelings. When she dreams, Toby experiences the world as a rat. At least that’s what I understood. I’m not sure it’s bad…”
“But it is very…different,” Will said.
“Yes. And just in case something in the lab…oh, I don’t know, Will. Just keep an eye on her. Please?”
“Of course! I always do.”
Dalla took a turn for the worse. She had to keep going back and forth to the hospital and her prognosis was grim. Will and Toby were spending a lot of time in the hospital as well, to be with Dalla as much as they could. The Crowe family knew they were in the midst of a long goodbye.
In the lab, the mood was dark. The Brats team was close and Dalla’s illness felt personal to everyone. The major stuck around, ostensibly to inspect the latest BBI developments, but really because he wanted to be nearby if the inevitable happened sooner rather than later. It was just a matter of time and he was worried how Dalla’s death would affect his project.
Ben and Lilly took George through the facilities to show him the new upgrades. Vikka tagged along as well; with Toby absent, there wasn’t much for her to do. Everyone seemed to be checking their phones compulsively, waiting for bad news.
The conversation meandered, but George encouraged the group to keep talking. Sometimes he heard something surprising in these informational tangents. He also encouraged familiarity and, though it had taken awhile, he’d gotten everyone in the lab to now call him George. People were wired for trust—he’d studied enough neuroscience to know that. And it’s hard to keep secrets from friends.
“Have you heard of the cortical homunculus, George?” Ben said.
“I’ve heard a little,” said George. “But explain it to me.”
Rufus was on George’s shoulder, standing up on his hind legs and holding on to his human ride’s ear. The team was taking turns being affectionate with the rat while Toby was away. Rufus didn’t like being all by himself.
They gathered in the control room with its one-way mirror and wall of computer monitors. Ben started to speak as if he were addressing a class. George got the feeling Ben had given this speech before.
“A cortical homunculus is just a representation of the physical structure of a person, or an animal, inside the brain. It’s like a map of the portions of the brain devoted to different parts of the body. There are two types of homunculi. The sensory one maps what we feel through our senses and the motor one maps body movements.”
“Why is it called a homunculus?” George asked.
Lilly jumped in. “There were these comical illustrations of what a human would look like based on the amount of brain resources allocated to a particular body part. It has spindly little legs—kneecaps are tiny. But hands, eyes, ears, nose, and tongue are giant.” Lilly used her hands to mime the giant body parts.
“I bet,” George said. His mind turned to other body parts that would probably be well represented in the sensory processing areas of the mammalian brain.
“But it’s not all comical,” Ben said. “People who lose their legs sometimes still feel pain in them. It’s called the phantom limb syndrome.”
“It’s bad enough to lose your legs, but to also have to suffer imaginary pain? Seems particularly unfair,” George said.
“True. But without phantom limb proprioception, prosthetics would be useless.”
“Proprioception?” George asked.
“It’s the mind’s knowledge of the position and motion of parts of the body. And people who’ve had a leg amputated can extend that sense of their body to include the artificial limb. It can become part of them. Actually, proprioception can extend even further than that. Drivers, for instance, often incorporate the boundaries of their car. Watch someone wince when they back into a parked car—it’s almost like pain.”
“Student drivers don’t have that yet,” George said. “They have a hard time feeling the vehicles they drive.”
“Exactly!” Lilly jumped in.
“I’ve heard drone operators have a hard time in the beginning too,” Ben said.
Major Watson saw Lilly give him a furtive look to see how he’d react. While they all knew there was a lot of military potential for the Brats project, it just wasn’t discussed. Not here at their lab.
Ben continued on, oblivious. “But after a little while, they can put themselves into the drone’s dimensions and acquire the feeling—”
“Do all animals have body image perception?” the major asked. He had no interest in discussing drones with this team.
“That’s a very interesting question! Will’s been lo
oking into that,” Lilly said. “After all those brain scans of Toby…”
She stopped. The look on her face told George that she didn’t know what was okay to discuss with him. Which meant they were keeping secrets from him.
“Will told me about Toby’s fMRI scans,” the major said. Will had mentioned the scans some months ago and now he wanted to learn more—especially now that he knew Lilly was holding back.
“Oh, great!” Lilly looked relieved. “Toby’s scans are extraordinary.”
“So Will said,” George said, nodding.
“After thirty months of linking up with Rufus’s brain, Toby’s body image is…evolving,” Ben said.
“So her homunculus is changing?” the major asked. That was interesting.
“Homunculi, plural,” Ben said. “Both her motor and her sensory processing maps are drastically different from when we first started. It’s an amazing result.”
“Can you show me?”
“Absolutely.” Ben went to his computer and pulled up two brain scans—the before and after images. “See? It’s very different. Here and here.” He jabbed at the screen with his finger. “It’s like Toby is developing areas in her brain devoted to sensory information from Rufus’s whiskers.”
“And look here,” Lilly said. She pointed to the screen and George and Vikka leaned in. “Rats navigate the world by smell and Toby’s brain is allocating more space to process Rufus’s olfactory inputs.”
“Can Toby smell better when she’s not connected to Rufus?” George asked. That could be a useful training tool—soldiers with a super sense of smell. George’s mind was quick to see the applications.
“Hard to tell,” Ben said. “Rats will always have better olfactory hardware than humans. So, regardless of what her brain does, Toby will always be limited to what she can perceive with her human senses. But when she’s hooked up to Rufus, it’s a completely different ball game.”
“Let me show you the changes over time,” Lilly said. Now that they were all discussing these changes openly, she seemed excited to share the results of the research. She sat at her station next to Ben’s and pulled up an animation. It showed the evolution of Toby’s brain scans over time, ever since the girl started working in the lab. “See? It’s simply incredible.”
They watched the animation over and over again, in a loop. Toby’s brain was definitely changing. The major wondered what this meant about her humanity.
“And the rat?” Vikka asked. “Is Rufus changing too? Do you have his scans as well?” It was the first she’d spoken in a while. George had tasked her with observing, taking note of Ben’s and Lilly’s interaction with him. He would debrief her later.
“We weren’t focusing on Rufus as much,” Ben said, “so we didn’t take as many scans. With Toby, we wanted to be able to spot any problems from using the BBIs. However Will has a theory that Rufus is getting more visually oriented due to his connection to Toby.”
“Let’s gather that data going forward,” the major said. “When we add a new animal to the study, I want brain scans at least every few days.” This was the first time he had ordered a specific procedure in the lab, but neither Ben or Lilly batted an eye. They had probably planned on doing it anyway. “If Toby is changing, it stands to reason that Rufus and the other animals she rides will change too.”
“Would you like to see the sensory homunculus we put together for Toby?” Lilly asked. “It’s a representation of a combination of a rat’s and a human’s somatosensory cortex—a hybrid, if you will. It’s just hypothetical, of course…”
“Yes. I’d be very interested,” George said.
“So this is how Toby’s brain maps to her body now,” Lilly said. She pulled up an image of Toby and Rufus combined.
It was a bizarre picture, pulled and squeezed—a point-for-point correspondence of each area of the girl’s and rat’s combined bodies to specific points within Toby’s central nervous system. The feet were huge and so were the hands—or were they feet too? The lips were ballooned to 1.5 times the size of the whole head, and the tongue, drawn poking out of the mouth, was almost the same size as the lips. But it was hard to see either the lips or tongue behind the giant set of rat’s incisors—were those teeth really that sensitive? The ears stuck out of the sides of the head like dinner plates. The nose tip was swollen to the size of a beach ball and was surrounded by giant hairs. Whiskers, the major thought. The eyes were about three times normal size. The whole face seemed to be crowded with gigantic caricatures of the rat-girl’s facial features. More rat than girl, really. There was even a small tail. It was comical and grotesque at the same time.
“This is how Toby sees herself?” George asked.
“Not exactly,” Lilly said. “Our mental picture of ourselves doesn’t match our homunculus. Instead, think of it as how Toby’s brain sees her.”
“Is she still human?” Major Evans asked.
“Legally speaking, she’ll always be human,” George replied. “But she’s definitely changing.”
“And how does Dr. Crowe feel about it?”
“I think the man is in denial.”
“Good. Keep it that way,” Major Evans said.
“I’m trying.”
“And how is she holding up?”
“Well, her mother is dying.”
“Must be scary for a little girl.”
“Vikka has been good for her. Before Dalla went into the hospital, Toby was spending a lot less time with her mom. That should help.”
“Yes, that was great thinking, George.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“What about Toby’s health?”
“She’s weaker than she was two years ago. She gets tired more easily. But she’s very smart and she’s got spunk.”
“I know you’ve become very fond of her—”
“She’s a good kid, sir. And an amazing rider.”
“Well, keep me informed.”
“Always do, sir.”
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