by Olga Werby
They stood and watched the spasms of Dalla’s body as she tried to get enough air.
“That’s what she wanted,” her dad said softly.
Toby released her dad’s hand and walked over to stand right beside her mother’s head. She tried to memorize what her mother looked liked. Vikka had taught her that childhood memories weren’t very strong—that it was easy to forget things. Toby wanted to force herself to remember her mom’s face.
They stayed in the room until midnight, not really talking, just watching her breathe. Toby counted over one thousand gasps in the three hours she and her dad were in the room. It didn’t seem like enough. For every one of her mother’s breaths, Toby took at least three.
Finally, her dad bent down and kissed her mom’s cheek. “It’s time to go,” he said to Toby.
Toby turned and left the room without kissing her mom. She was scared to. In the last hour or so, the woman on that bed had stopped looking like her mother. Toby didn’t want to touch her. She won’t feel like Mom.
It was the middle of the night when the phone rang. Toby’s dad was still downstairs—he had never gone to bed. Toby knew because she had crept into her parents’ room and had crawled into their bed, where she sniffed her mother’s scent. She wanted to remember it—and she wasn’t sure how long it would linger without her mom there to make more.
She heard her dad’s voice from downstairs and she could tell he was very upset. She tried to listen through the floor, but she couldn’t make out any of the words. Her dad walked about his office—getting ready to leave, she guessed—and then he called someone. She heard pacing footsteps and, a while later, a car squealed to a stop and a door slammed. Dad let someone in. Toby listened carefully—Vikka.
Toby stayed in her parents’ bed until she heard her dad leave. Then she got up and went downstairs to talk to Vikka.
“I didn’t know you were up,” Vikka said. She was wearing jeans and a white shirt. Her hair was sticking out in a giant halo around her head. At the lab, she was always very professionally coiffed. Toby guessed she had been sleeping.
Toby walked over and gave her teacher a hug.
Vikka hugged her back. “I’m sorry,” she said.
Toby just pressed her tighter. Vikka rubbed her back. It felt good. Rufus likes it too, she thought.
After a while, Toby pulled out of the hug. She looked up at Vikka. “My mom?”
“I’m so sorry, Toby,” Vikka said. “Your dad is at the hospital right now. But it’s really not my place to tell. Your dad…let’s just wait until morning, okay?”
Toby knew then that her mother had died.
“We can sit down here on the sofa and watch a movie or something,” Vikka said. “You can sleep, if you like.” She was obviously miserable, though she was trying to sound upbeat.
Toby didn’t want to sit on the sofa and watch a movie. She didn’t want to sleep. She didn’t want to be here at all. She looked at Vikka and said, “I need to be Ruffy right now. Please?”
“What?”
“Please,” Toby said again. “Just take me to the lab. I need to be Ruffy. I don’t want to think; I just want to be. Please, Vikka? Take me to Ruffy.”
Vikka hesitated, but only for a moment. “Okay,” she said.
The sky wasn’t pitch black any more; it was the edge of dawn. Rufus greeted them at the habitat’s door.
Vikka had seen the video footage of Rufus’s stress when left alone at night in the lab; he clearly didn’t like it. Now that Toby’s mom had passed away, she wondered if they would let Toby take Rufus home after work. It would be good for both Toby and the animal. She vowed to remember to ask Will.
That reminded her to send Will a text to let him know she had taken Toby to the lab. She didn’t want him to freak out if he came back to an empty home.
Toby took Rufus from his cage and rubbed his back in a circular pattern, just the way he liked it. Vikka could almost see the tension melt away from his little ratty body. “There now,” Toby said quietly. “Feel better?”
Vikka observed the two of them together. The rat and the girl each relaxed in the other’s presence, at each other’s touch.
Vikka was a fully trained child psychologist, but her training didn’t cover human-rat emotional bonding. Her focus had been mostly on education and special needs kids. That was why when Uncle Geo first asked her to take on this assignment she turned him down. Minding a little girl wasn’t the career she had in mind. But Uncle Geo insisted and Vikka never once regretted working with Toby and the Brats project.
Still, she didn’t feel qualified to deal with a child whose mother had just died—especially given that Dalla’s fate was probably a mirror of Toby’s own future. She just hoped Toby’s disease would progress slowly. Very slowly. Vikka had really grown to care for this little girl.
“Do you want to put on the BBI cap?” she asked.
Toby nodded.
“Okay.” Vikka pulled out the equipment and woke up the computers. She had never done the whole setup alone before, but she had been part of the procedure often enough to know all the steps.
“Can we go out into the botanical garden?” Toby asked.
“What? You want to go outside?”
“I want to run free,” Toby explained. “Rufus doesn’t think the way we do. He’s…” She struggled with words. “He’s in the now. He doesn’t dwell on what will happen tomorrow. He can plan, of course. He stashes food to eat later. I caught him hiding cookies in the couch once. But he doesn’t think about death. Or life, for that matter. He thinks about how it feels right now.”
“I think I understand,” Vikka said. “If you ride Rufus, you won’t think about your mom.”
“I know it’s wrong. I should be grieving,” Toby said in a small voice. “But it hurts too much.”
“Oh, honey.” Vikka hugged the girl. She was so small and vulnerable and too young to have to deal with her mother’s mortality. “Let’s see what we can do. But the botanical garden is too far. I can’t get all this stuff out of here.” She pointed to rows of computers and miles of wires. “How about just running here in the lab?”
“Outside the maze?” Toby asked hopefully.
“Yes, outside the maze. You’ll be able to control Rufus, right? He won’t escape?”
“No. He won’t go anywhere I don’t want him to,” Toby assured her.
“All right then. Let’s get you wired up.” Vikka finished setting up the BBI system and helped Toby plug into Rufus.
As soon as the connection was made, Toby and the rat both looked up at Vikka in exactly the same way, at exactly the same time. Looking into Rufus’s eyes was eerily like looking into Toby’s. Vikka could never get used to such a complete blending of souls.
She took Rufus from Toby’s arms—his brain implant was blinking a soft blue—and put him on the floor. The rat sniffed at her, then took off.
Vikka felt her own heart rate spike in anxiety. What the hell am I doing? This was completely out of protocol. Uncle Geo would give her hell for it…if he found out. Of course he’ll find out! she scolded herself. Oh well. She flashed an encouraging smile just for herself and watched as Rufus scurried out the door.
Rufus ran along the wall in the dim hallway. Toby rode him lightly—she just wanted to experience the world through his perceptions and his reactions. It was such a relief not to have to think in words. Rufus could tell she was upset and his way of managing anxiety was to run and look for happy smells, or to hide in a dark enclosed space and take a nap. Toby gave a gentle push toward the former—she didn’t want to nap. Sleeping would allow her human emotions and grief to take over. She just wanted to flood her senses with Rufus’s experiences and feelings. She needed simple ratty feelings and desires.
“Dalla Crowe is dead,” Major Watson reported.
“How is Toby?”
“Her symptoms are more severe than Dalla’s were at her age. She probably only has a decade or so.”
“Let’s make those years cou
nt,” Major Evans said.
George decided there was more than one way of interpreting that order.
Five: +36 Months
It was four in the morning when a massive explosion, caused by a gas leak, destroyed one of the bio facilities not far from Brats headquarters. The building was small, just two stories, mostly labs plus a few offices. It had been designed to be a space for university alumni to bio-tinker, with supervision. Fortunately no researchers were inside when it blew up, as the building was under renovation at the time and, as no toxic chemicals were stored there, there was no environmental hazard.
To the Brats team, this presented an opportunity. The collapsed building might be the perfect spot to run a safe test in an uncontrolled environment. Brats had been experimenting with going portable for quite a while, but it had all been very controlled. They’d allowed Toby and Rufus to run the hallways of the lab and even to go out into the building’s courtyard. Rufus had scurried around, smelling flowers and grass, even eating some potato chip crumbs found under a bench. It all went very well. But it was far from the real-world rescue scenario their military sponsors craved.
By seven, the team had been assembled. The university police had secured the area and notified the campus that the gas leak had been capped. After notifying Major Watson about their plans and getting approval, Will gave the go-ahead to let Rufus, with Toby riding, explore the site of the blast.
In the Brats control room, Vikka watched Toby. The girl sat in an office chair, biting her nails. Usually, Toby stayed in her office when they ran experiments, freeing the researchers in the control room to interact normally. But today, with only Lilly at the controls, it was better for them all to be together.
Will and Ben were at the crumbled building. Ben had a camera trained on Rufus and the view was streamed to a monitor in front of Vikka. The rat had been running, but it had now stopped. It was sitting on a shattered bit of concrete, gnawing on something—a mirror image of the girl.
Vikka turned to Lilly. “What’s going on? Did we lose the connection?”
They’d boosted the antenna gain and Ben was carrying signal relay hardware. But it was possible the BBI connection had degraded somehow, which would mean Toby wouldn’t have as much control over Rufus as they’d hoped.
“It could be interference,” Lilly said, looking at the graph of the data traffic between the BBI cap and the rat’s receiver.
Vikka kneeled next to Toby. She took Toby’s hands into her own and pulled them away from the girl’s mouth. “Toby? What’s wrong, honey?”
“Ruffy is scared,” Toby said in a small voice.
“What’s he scared of?”
“I don’t know. It smells bad.” Toby tried to twist her hands back into her face.
“Can you describe the smell?” Vikka asked. She looked over at Lilly, who pointed at the monitor. A huge spike of brain activity echoed between Toby and Rufus. “Does it smell like chemicals? Like gas? Like fire?”
“Like burned meat,” Toby said with a sob.
They weren’t ready for this. It was worrisome enough taking the rat outside, but if Toby were to discover something violent in the rubble…
“We should stop,” Vikka said to Lilly in a low voice.
On the video feed, Rufus twitched in the early morning sunlight. Sunlight! Rufus and Toby must really be spooked to stay out in the open like that.
“Will is there. He and Ben can see Rufus’s discomfort,” Lilly argued. “Let’s just wait a bit.”
Vikka disagreed, but didn’t say anything. She watched Toby’s face, trying to spot danger before it was too late.
Toby cried a little, but shook it off. Rufus started to climb down into the rubble. Hop, hop, jump, and Rufus was running among the chunks of plaster and broken glass.
“Toby, honey? What happened to the bad smell?” Vikka asked. She spoke quietly, as they had found that loud noises made Toby lose her concentration.
“We’re going to investigate it,” Toby said in a whisper. “Rufus thinks it might be Ben’s food.”
“What?” Lilly and Vikka asked together.
“Ben always eats those giant meat burritos,” Toby said.
Lilly and Vikka exchanged a look. There was no one in the collapsed building. And there shouldn’t be any food.
Toby was deep inside the rat’s brain, riding a wave of raw emotions and sensory input. She liked navigating the tight spaces between the fallen walls. It was a lot more fun than running in the sterile lab, or doing the maze puzzles over and over again, or even playing in the tiny courtyard. Everything about the Brats facility was controlled and analyzed to death, but this…this felt like true freedom of movement—real freedom.
Her little feet tapped out a beat on the uneven surface of the torn concrete. Her nose smelled smoke, and dust, and paint, and that other strange odor that was making Ruffy so uncomfortable. But after the initial olfactory shock, Toby was curious. Unlike Rufus, Toby knew that there was nothing bad in the building. Her dad told her so and he wouldn’t have let her explore inside if it were dangerous. She found it was easy to override Ruffy’s fear and focus his thinking on how pleasurable it was to run free in the dark.
Toby/Rufus jumped across a gap. It was a long, dangerous jump—the kind that wasn’t permitted back at the lab. Rufus just barely grabbed the slab on the other side of the gap, scrambling to get his body up. Toby felt herself smile with pleasure. Her human body, twisted by cystic fibrosis, wasn’t very athletic, but Rufus was a very competent rat. She spiked his dopamine level in reward; dopamine acted on the pleasure center of his brain. The first time, she had done it by accident, but now that she knew how it worked, she regularly rewarded Rufus with happy brain chemicals.
The strange smell was overwhelming here, permeating the air around them. Their whiskers brushed the walls as they ran toward its source, scanning the dents and bumps in the surface of the concrete around them. Toby could see the route they had taken in her head, because Ruffy saw it in his; he formed a map of his surroundings in his mind. He knew which way they had gone and how to retrace their steps. He knew the shape and smell of the path, even the way his little feet echoed at different points along it. He was present in a way that Toby found incredibly compelling. Thrilling, even.
“The brainwaves are totally in synch again,” Lilly said.
Vikka split her attention between Toby’s face and the control room monitors. Toby’s face and body had gone completely flaccid, but the monitors showed her mind was racing. Rufus had disappeared into the rubble, so Ben’s video feed just showed a shot of the spot where he had vanished.
“Did you see how she spiked the dopamine?” Lilly asked.
Vikka just nodded.
“I think she’s also dampening his corticosteroid levels. I didn’t think she knew how to do that.”
“I think that’s new,” Vikka agreed. Corticosteroids were stress hormones, the body’s way of giving itself a boost in “fight or flight” situations. Clearly, Rufus was very stressed. If not for Toby’s dominance over his hormones, the rat would have panicked and been completely out of control.
A giant spike in adrenaline levels threw Toby’s and Rufus’s graphs off the scale.
“What just happened?” Vikka cried out.
Toby jerked, her body going rigid, her eyes bugging out.
“Her heart rate is through the roof!” Lilly gasped. “Two hundred beats per minute! We need to pull her out of it!”
“You’ll shock her,” Vikka said. “Just give her a second to control it. She’s been doing a good job of it so far.”
“She must have found it,” Lilly said.
“Found what?”
“The smell. She found the source of the smell.”
Vikka opened her comm channel. “Ben, get Rufus out of there!”
Toby felt herself losing it. It had the odor of roasted meat, but it also smelled human.
She ran along its edge. It was large, but only a portion of it was available for inspecti
on. Rufus wanted to bolt away. He knew it was wrong, but he didn’t have words to explain; he didn’t think the way Toby did and his memories were rat memories. Toby was getting better at deciphering his thoughts, but this was too raw, too immediate.
She felt overwhelmed with Rufus’s negative emotions. She felt his fear and wanted to run away. But she also wanted to understand what Rufus was seeing—or sensing. Most of Rufus’s “vision” came from touch; his whiskers and other body hairs were very sensitive. With those, she could “see” shapes quite well even in complete darkness.
She tried to control Rufus’s panic. She told him there was nothing to fear, then she tried to visualize calmness—as Rufus didn’t understand her when she talked to him.
He liked being scratched behind his ears and around the implant, so Toby tried to remind him of that feeling. It helped a bit, but she knew she had very little time. Rufus was too distressed—she was having trouble managing him through the BBI connection. She needed to get him out of there in a controlled way. If she didn’t, he might run away in panic and hide among the rubble. Toby didn’t want to lose him.
She moved slowly, trying to understand what they had found. She heard something, but it was very faint. She paid close attention to the materials around her. There was something wrapped in cloth. The rest was all stone and wood and pipes and wires. But this was good nesting material…if it didn’t reek of death.
Death!
Toby’s heart rate went up. She felt panic and Rufus felt panic. And as she fell into the emotional storm, Rufus was free to run.
He bolted.
“There!” Vikka pointed. Ben’s camera had caught sight of Rufus again. The rat was running full speed toward Ben and Will. “Get him!” she cried to the screen.
