Becoming Animals

by Olga Werby

  “Rats are among the species that don’t pass the mirror test,” she continued. “If Rufus sees his own reflection, he may assume there is another rat in the maze—a stranger. His stress level will escalate—we’ve tested that already; he doesn’t react well to animals he doesn’t know. But Toby should easily identify that this is Rufus’s reflection in the mirror. She’ll know that it’s not another rat.”

  “So you’re trying to measure how much control Toby has over the rat’s emotional response to a stressful situation?”

  “Precisely!” Lilly looked pleased with how easily Major Watson had picked up on their…well, it had really been her idea. That’s why she was so excited about it. And it was an interesting experiment.

  Will couldn’t blame her for her enthusiasm. He just hated doing it in front of the major. But this man paid the bills.

  “So the rat knows the maze and is comfortable, but then it sees another rat…” The major trailed off.

  Will had seen the major use this information-gathering technique before. The major posed open-ended questions or made unfinished statements as a way to fish for information—and it worked really well on Lilly and Ben. If Will was honest with himself, it worked on him as well.

  Lilly took the hook. “So Rufus gets stressed, fearing a confrontation with a strange animal. It’s only a visual input though—he can’t smell another rat—so it could be confusing to him.” Lilly spoke quickly and Will could tell the major made her nervous. The major made everyone nervous.

  But Watson merely smiled, encouraging Lilly to go on.

  “Toby, we hope, will be able to override Rufus’s stress response,” Lilly continued. “Toby knows what Rufus looks like and she knows about mirrors. But she doesn’t know the layout of the maze, whereas Rufus does. If she takes over completely, her maze running time will suffer. It’s a careful balance.”

  “So Toby needs to calm the rat enough to do the task, but she has to avoid dominating the animal too much—because she needs to use its prior experience with the maze layout to get to the prize,” the major summarized.

  Will could see the major’s interest was piqued. This was exactly the data the major had asked for. He had said that he needed the human Brats controllers to be able to quickly switch from dampening animals’ emotional responses to providing solutions to complex problems beyond the animals’ cognitive capacity.

  “Well, now that everyone’s up to speed, shall we begin?” Will said.

  “Hi, honey. We’re ready for you.” Dr. Crowe’s voice came over the computer speakers on Toby’s desk.

  Vikka glanced over at Toby. The girl was short for her age and very thin; she looked fragile, like an antique porcelain doll. Although she’d put her hair up in braids, a few wisps always hung down over her big brown eyes or dangled into her mouth. She had the bad habit of chewing on them. But Vikka knew that while Toby’s body was small and fragile, her mind was sharp and keen. She was an amazing child.

  When Toby gave a nod, Vikka flipped the contact switch that would plunge Toby into Rufus’s perceptions.

  Toby’s expression froze, her eyes opened wide. It was as though she was concentrating very hard on something that wasn’t there.

  Will and the others watched the monitors. On one, Toby was sitting in her office; on several others, Rufus was poised at the start of the maze. They wore identical expressions—to the extent this was possible for a rat and a human girl. It made Will uncomfortable and he looked away, busying himself with a few final checks of the equipment.

  “They look ready,” the major said. Did he, too, notice the similarity in Toby’s and Rufus’s expressions?

  At Will’s direction, Ben started the countdown. On zero, he pressed the button that raised the maze door. Rufus was free to run and get his treat.

  The rat didn’t move.

  After a few long seconds, the major said, “Is there a problem?”

  Ben flipped through several micro camera views of the inside the maze. The food reward was in place at the end of the maze. There were no barriers to the prize, just the maze. Rufus could surely smell the treat and he knew the layout very well. “I don’t see anything…” Ben said.

  Will looked at the monitor showing his daughter. She was still staring into space. “Toby?” he said into the microphone. “We’re ready. You can start any time.”

  “Honey?”

  Toby heard her dad trying to get her attention again.

  “Vikka?” his voice said over the speaker. “Is Toby plugged in okay?”

  “I think so,” Vikka said, double-checking the connecting wires. “What is Rufus doing?”

  “He’s just sitting at the start of the maze, staring into space.”

  Toby heard all the words clearly, but it took time for her to register their meaning. Rufus didn’t understand human speech and, with their brains connected, Toby had a delay in understanding it too.

  “Toby is staring into space as well,” Vikka said. “Toby? Can you hear me?”

  Toby felt the woman’s hand gently touch her cheek. She twitched, forced her eyes to focus on Vikka’s face, and smiled.

  “Ready to find the prize?” Vikka asked.

  Toby felt the anticipation and she smiled even wider. She was salivating. She had complained to her dad about the yucky taste of the prizes they made Rufus find, so he had switched the treat to something both of them liked: peanut butter cookies. She had smelled them as soon as the door to the maze had slid open.

  It won’t be long now. Her nose twitched in perfect timing with Rufus’s.

  And the rat started to run. At each of the first few decision nodes in the maze, he paused briefly before taking the correct turn.

  “She’s letting the rat pick the way,” Lilly said in a hushed voice.

  “Did you expect the pauses?” Major Watson asked.

  “No,” Will said. “I imagined the rat would run the maze smoothly until the mirror. Then Toby would…” He didn’t finish.

  They watched as the rat haltingly made its way through the maze. This was very different from the smooth, continuous run Rufus had made in the last trial.

  “So Toby has taken a great deal of control from the very start?” the major said.

  “Apparently,” Will said.

  “Is that what she usually does?”

  “No,” Lilly said. “She usually lets Rufus go. But this is a completely new setup.”

  Will glanced at the computer monitor that showed two brainwave patterns: the rat’s and the girl’s. Both patterns were in high-range beta waves, above forty cycles a second—the super-alert, hyper-learning state of cognitive processing. The waveforms were remarkably similar, matching almost beat for beat.

  Two brains, one thought.

  The maze was dimly lit and consisted of tightly spaced corridors and hairpin turns. The rat’s whiskers spanned the width of the passages, touching both walls at once. Bright lights made Rufus anxious, as did wide open spaces.

  In contrast, Toby found the maze constricting. Her office was bright and open, well lit with morning sunlight streaming through the big window. Light versus shadow, open versus constricted—contradictory senses superimposed and Rufus froze with uncertainty.

  Toby had run mazes with Rufus many times before. Sometimes Toby was in the same room as the maze and could see the solution from above—a perspective unavailable to Rufus. It was easy then. At other times, they explored a new maze together—Toby sitting in her office and Rufus running in another room, connected to her via the BBI computer link. They looked for the best way to get to the prize as a team.

  This time, Toby felt a difference. The maze was new to her, but Rufus seemed to already know where to run. Toby didn’t like surprises like this, especially when the major visited. She liked everything to be predictable. She knew Major Watson made her dad nervous, which made it important that she perform perfectly. Usually it was easy. But this…this felt different. She was being tested. And no one had told her.

  Her sto
mach grumbled. She could really go for some peanut butter cookies right now. She ran faster.

  “Did you see that spike?” Lilly pointed to the brainwave graphs.

  “She made a decision,” Will said.

  Toby ran through the maze. She let go of thinking and just followed her gut; it was telling her which way to turn. Left, right, right, another right, and then left again. There was a strange rhythm to the way her feet moved. Left, right, right, left. She felt the sun on her cheek and tried to shake it off. Ruffy didn’t like the sun.

  She paid careful attention to the walls and floor of the maze, but viewing it with Ruffy’s eyes was a bit disorienting; it always took time to get used to seeing like that. It wasn’t so much the size difference, it was that Rufus experienced the world so very differently from Toby. When she was riding Rufus, she had to shake off the human way of perceiving. Colors, sounds, smells, even touch had to become “ratty.”

  She could tell that Ruffy had run this maze before—probably many times—by the smudges and paw prints on some of the surfaces. Toby knew those marks. If she peed a little and smudged some of the rat urine on her fur, then she could make a smudge trail in the maze. The first time that happened had been an accident; humans don’t accidentally pee on themselves, but rats don’t mind. When Toby, as a human, had looked down at the maze from above, she could see the rat droppings just fine, but she couldn’t see the pee marks. But when she ran as Rufus, the pee-covered paw prints practically jumped out at her.

  Toby had mentioned the invisible impressions to her dad. He’d explained that rat pee had an ultraviolet hue—which was easy to spot with a rat’s eyes. Rats had blurry dichromatic vision—they couldn’t see orange or red, or even green, really. But they could see far into the blue spectrum, including UV light. When her dad used a black light lamp to show Toby the urine prints, her human eyes could see that the whole maze was covered in them. Since then, Lilly had taking to wiping the lab with ammonia—no cheating!

  Rufus was a slob of a rat. No wonder her mother had insisted that Toby wash her hands all the time after playing with Rufus.

  “Coming up on the mirror,” Ben announced.

  Will felt his gut clench. He was experimenting on his own daughter—not with her, as the major kept insisting. He felt the difference keenly.

  A bright object blinded Toby momentarily. She felt a spike of anxiety and the next thing she knew she was running fast down one of the corridors, away from something that had scared her. She tried to understand what just happened. Her heart was beating very fast.

  Toby shook her head, trying to break the panic. She wasn’t afraid; it was Rufus who had got spooked by something. She tried to reassert control over the rat. Rufus slowed down, but didn’t stop.

  “It didn’t work,” the major said as the rat dashed away from the mirror.

  Lilly pointed to the Toby’s cam feed. “Look at Toby’s expression. She looks confused.”

  The monitor showing the girl’s vitals blinked an alarm. Her heart rate was abnormally elevated.

  “Toby?” Will called to his daughter over the microphone. “Honey? Are you okay?”

  On the monitor, he saw Vikka gently stroke Toby’s cheek, moving the stray hairs behind the girl’s left ear and tucking them under the cap. “Toby?” she asked. “Can you hear me?”

  The rat stopped and scratched its left ear.

  “Sorry!” Toby looked up at Vikka. “Are we trying to make Ruffy do something different?”

  “No. We are still running the maze. But you seemed upset,” Vikka said, patting Toby gently on the back.

  “Toby?” Will said again into the microphone.

  “Dad? What happened?” Toby asked. “Ruffy got scared of something.”

  “We saw, honey. But there’s nothing scary in the maze. Can you try running Rufus through it again?”

  Toby didn’t seem to have registered the mirror at all—or Rufus’s perception of its own reflection as another rat. Will was tempted to abort the experiment—but he knew that if he didn’t ask his daughter to do it again now, the major would just insist. He might allow them to take a short break, but he wouldn’t permit the test to be postponed for long.

  “Ruffy gets silly sometimes,” Toby said. “We’ll go again. Don’t worry, Dad!”

  Toby concentrated and tried to slip back into Rufus. She felt a sort of a brain synch with the little animal. She reached up and pulled the stray hairs from behind her ears—her whiskers were long and sensitive, more sensitive than her fingertips. She was brushing the walls of the maze gently on either side and she felt every irregularity in the surface. She spotted a slight slant in one wall. Ben must have forced this wall in too hard, she noted to herself.

  She ran back toward the place where the panic attack had started. A sense of dread tried to flow into her from the rat. Rufus was remembering something bad and he was feeling nervous. Toby stifled his anxiety. Dad had said there was nothing scary in the maze.

  She turned the corner and saw it—there was another rat in the maze with her. Her heart rate spiked again, but this time she suppressed the urge to run away. She moved in closer.

  There was no smell coming from the stranger. That was wrong. When they studied rat biology, Vikka had told her that more than one percent of the rat’s DNA was devoted solely to olfactory processing; as a result, rats were at least twice as sensitive to smell as people. And Toby had experienced that superior sense of smell first-hand. When she was Ruffy, she would often have been perfectly able to run a maze by smell alone, although it wouldn’t have been as much fun.

  She advanced slowly. Rufus was no longer resisting her, so it was easy to focus on just investigating the intruder. But as she got really close, Rufus tried to stall. It was like moving through a force field.

  “She’s doing it!” Lilly said excitedly.

  They watched Rufus cautiously advance toward the mirror. An inch away from its own reflection, the rat stopped. It sat back on its hind legs, grabbed its whiskers in one paw, and pushed them into its mouth.

  “He’s chewing on them!” Ben said.

  “Look at Toby,” Lilly said.

  Toby was chewing on her hair too.

  “Full mirroring,” Lilly said.

  “Mirroring?” the major asked.

  “It’s like they’re one organism,” Ben explained.

  “But Toby is still in control, right?” the major asked.

  “Obviously,” Lilly said.

  Toby and the rat were matching each other move for move. Their brainwaves were completely synchronized. Their heart rates were aligned. Rufus’s resting heart rate was fast by human standards—as a small animal, his metabolism ran high—and right now, it was exactly 372 beats per minute. Toby’s was 93 beats per minute—normal for a girl her age. So Rufus’s heart rate was exactly four times Toby’s. Every fourth beat for Rufus, their hearts beat together.

  “Remarkable,” said Lilly and Ben in unison.

  And then their heart rates split as Toby spoke in her office. “Dad! It’s me in the mirror! I mean Ruffy. It’s a mirror! Ruffy was scared of a mirror!”

  “That’s right, honey,” Will said.

  The rat turned a few times in front of the mirror, inspecting its own reflection. Then it reached out and touched the smooth surface, first with its nose and then with its paws. After a few more pokes, it stopped paying attention to the mirror. According to the monitors, both Toby and the rat were completely relaxed now.

  “Should I finish the maze?” Toby asked.

  “Yes please,” the major ordered.

  Toby started to run the maze again. This time, there were no pauses. The rat made all the right turns and reached the peanut butter cookie in just a few seconds. It held the cookie in its front paws and munched. Toby’s face spread into a wide smile of satisfaction. Her jaw moved slightly in time with the rat’s chewing.

  “The tests are very promising,” Major Watson reported.

  “Full control even under duress?” ask
ed Major Evans.

  “Even under duress. Will is using a new BBI control and there are still a lot of adjustments and fine-tuning to be made. But overall, very promising.”

  “Push to expand the project as soon as it becomes viable to do so. Dr. Crowe seems to prefer to slow things down. It’s been two years since we started funding this thing. I want this technology expedited and expanded.”

  “Understood.”

  Three: +30 Months

  “Will, you worry too much,” said the major dismissively. He stirred the tomato sauce for the pasta dish they were making in Crowe’s home kitchen. It smelled good—garlicky and herby.

  Over the last two years, the major had become a close friend of the Crowe family. Toby called him Uncle Geo, short for George. Dalla called him Geo too. But Will had insisted on continuing to call him “Major Watson”—that was how he thought of him in his head. For the first year of their professional relationship, Will hadn’t even registered that the man had a first name. Still, for the sake of Dalla and Toby, Will was trying to call the man “George” when the major visited them at home.

  “Did Ben show you Toby’s brain scans?” Will asked as he chopped the vegetables for the salad.