And The Rat Laughed (10 page)

Part Four

The Dream

Night of 31 December 2099

Stash

You’re dreaming and you’re not dreaming

I’m not dreaming, but maybe

Y-mee Prana

K-0005275-149

I’m infusing
Girl & Rat
into your dream right this minute. I had no choice but to break into your REMaker. Every legal and conventional way I tried to beam my discovery to you just didn’t work. My official brainmails were cybercepted, and you didn’t answer my private b-mails either. You were rebuffing me, with the skill of an info- screening pro. Not that I really stood a chance anyway. You made no bones about it: to you, my research is nothing but a “trivial hobby”, “prying into the dustheaps of humanity”. For someone who directs the Pan-Euro Anthropological Institute, you should have been able to see why the story of two cubs, a human one and a rat one, should interest you, or me, or anyone else at the Institute that keeps us together, shapes our life and gives it a purpose.

But now you have no choice but to dream of
Girl & Rat.

And of me too.

I must break into your Dream Machine. I have no other choice.

It’s my discovery...

I’m setting out on a voyage, Stash.

The archaic word
voyage
is very appropriate here, and it’s no metaphor. I didn’t choose it to wax poetic either. I mean it in the oldest sense – transporting the body from place to place. It’s hard to imagine that this was the natural way to do it less than a hundred years ago. I know I’m breaking the rules of research protocol, but there isn’t much time and this voyage is crucial. I’ve got to get going.

I’ve solved the enigma.

Are you following me, Stash?

Of course you are. I mean, at this very minute, my implachip is tapping every neuron and every fiber in my brain to beam
Girl & Rat
into your dream. The youngest myth yet. I’ve chosen the only way that’s left to force the story onto you – infusing a dream. Like it or not,
Girl & Rat
is being recorded in your mind right this minute.

If it’s really possible to force memory.

Two that became one. Fused. A two-bodied angel circling in an earthly maze. One body using her fingers to dig, the other using his claws, intertwined in an ever-tighter tangle. It’s the choreography of one of the best-known dances of our generation.

In your dream, you are dancing. The implachip is beaming the steps, and the electronic umbilical cord that connects us is making us both move to the beat.

You’re dancing and not dancing...

I’m not dancing...

Yet...

Maybe...

The web of the dream is holding you captive, and we circle together, a two-bodied angel emerging from the deep.

You know the rest as well as I do.
Girl & Rat
first appeared on the ancient internet some time towards the end of the first decade or the beginning of the second decade of the century. It was a short cycle of poems, and in one version it included a legend too. Different versions still exist, in various languages, but it’s very hard to tell which ones are “authentic” – I mean they were written and uploaded before September 2011, when the poems emerged out of the shadows of the offbeat sites and electronic mails into the cultural mainstream. Suddenly people began to realize the magnitude of it, and the connection between the different versions became clear. A great deal was done to sift through them and to tease out the original one, assuming there really was an authentic source to begin with, but it was no use. Even the attempt to determine the language of the original amounted to sheer speculation.

One popular theory, yet to be proven, says that the poems were written by a young woman, maybe a versatile artist just starting out. Why she chose to remain anonymous is not clear. Most people think she must have died, or perhaps lost her mind, shortly after putting the poems on the ancient internet. Otherwise, why wouldn’t she have tried to capitalize on her success at a time when personal achievement and immediate gratification were all the rage? Anyone who’s tried to figure out her identity has failed, because people – and that includes “surfers” as they used to be called – could easily cover their trail if they wanted to. Are the poems and legend strictly apocryphal, or are they based on some real event that the writer witnessed, or perhaps even experienced herself? Did she send out those poems as a sign of despair before taking her own life – or were they her last will and testament? These questions remain open.

As soon as the poems and the legend made their appearance in the digital domain in this century, they gave rise to a huge industry that has been taking on various shapes ever since. For more than nine decades,
Girl & Rat
has been told and recorded on every medium imaginable, and you even find its imprint in extraterrestrial human colonies. Each generation offered its own interpretation, whether based on ones from earlier times or introducing a meaning all its own.

It started with the poems, which became tremendously popular with teenagers. But once the Japanese comics appeared in 2013 and developed into a major industry, with interactive animation and multimedia games,
Girl & Rat
became a hit with younger kids too. When the pop music industry recognized the potential, many of the poems were set to music and made the charts. The mass hysteria peaked in the autumn of 2015 with
Tail,
which became an enormous hit and has had dozens of arrangements. One of them, a medium they used to call a “video clip”, shows a singer down on his knees, with a winged rat bursting out of a cloud of black particles and handing him a cross made of potatoes. I find it hard to believe that you don’t have a single one of these songs stored in a submemoryfolder, because until about twenty years ago, the first few notes were the signal tune for several messaging systems. The screensaver version, the one that was such a hit when we were younger, shows a little girl who grows tails from every part of her body. She catches the beamee and turns him into her personal rat.

Remember that, Stash?

Your brain couldn’t possibly have classified all of that under “irrelevant information”.

Soon afterwards,
Girl & Rat
became the visual image most likely to be found on diaries, calendars and PDAs, even more popular than Raphael’s angel – which was the most common visual at the turn of the century.
Girl & Rat
stickers are on display in a special wing of the Twenty-First Century Museum in Washington, and a notebook with the 2014 print sold last year for a record fifty million eurollars.

I was there when they beamed the auction.

If only I knew who bought that precious notebook...

Since the second decade of this century,
Girl & Rat
has been an icon of alternative religious movements, mostly non-mainstream ones. The poems became cult texts: they’ve been carved on tombstones, quoted in eulogies and virtual condolence books, and sung at wakes and cremations.
Girl & Rat
shrines have been built all over, first just at sites dedicated to extinct species, and later at rest-and-recreation sites and online shopping centres. The most popular shrine ornament is an electronic figurine of a dark, eyeless little girl with seven rat tails wrapped around her arm. It was later converted into a popular slot machine: figure out the right tail to pull – and win the jackpot.

The legend that went with the poems played an important role in the development of the
Girl & Rat
myth. It probably began with a rumor – an incredibly effective way of transmitting information – and soon cropped up on the ancient internet. The legend provided the narrative context in which the poems could be interpreted. New details were added from time to time, such as the tradition that identified the little girl as the daughter of a father from India and a Native American mother.

No sooner did the phenomenon take hold than an opposition formed, especially in North America and Western Asia. Almost every religious leadership took part in the effort to boycott the new fashion and to campaign against it. Politicians, educators and parents’ organizations joined the bandwagon. Some of them tried to prove that the poems and the legend were connected to the Cult of the Devil, and made them out to be a despicable incitement to killing, suicide, extreme violence and child abuse. The accusations gained widespread support initially, and I’m sure they had their effect on you, too.

But ultimately,
Girl & Rat
defied all its critics and assumed its place as a cultural tradition. By 2020 it was here to stay, thanks to the dramatic decision of the Board at PanEuroDisney Productions to replace Mickey Mouse with Mickey Rat and to give it wings: the black wing cast an artificial darkness, and the other one was a transparent screen through which the beamer could see his or her own reflection recast as a little girl.

I’m beaming a sequence of visuals into your dream right now, even though my implachip is already picking up your revulsion.

There’s the she-rat nursing a little girl – trademark of Hydromel Corporation, which took over the sale of subterranean water until the reservoirs became so contaminated that they could no longer be used...

And a crown presented to Elizabeth III at her coronation. It is still on exhibit at the New Age Museum in Beijing, studded with diamonds in the shape of rat-tails the first to use nanotechnological production methods...

There’s a black angel with its wings clipped. It’s struggling to fly, but it doesn’t actually take off until a little girl and a rat become its artificial wings. Together they soar, swooping down into the ground: a multidimensional commercial for subterranean residential projects...

And a rat with gills, symbol of
Hasgard,
the first submarine stronghold in the world...

And a pair of head-wings made of reconstructed rat cells, which was the height of fashion about a decade ago – so many young women wore it to their proms, don’t you remember?

Icons, talismans and personal feeding tubes in the shape of winged mutants, with the body of a rat and the head of a little girl. In my virtual cache I have a cheek stud like that. I always wear it during our regular beamings. You haven’t noticed.

Or maybe you have.

Ever since you became Director of the Pan-Euro Anthropological Institute, you’ve chosen to focus on the study of young extraterrestrial civilizations, and slashing our work on the old ones, including the study of how the new
Girl & Rat
myth came into being. Your new program, the one they dubbed
Anthropology of the Future,
had a clear goal, and all of the scientists at the Institute seem to be caught up with it: to break away from the darkness of times past and to focus on studying the New Man, perfectly networked and genetically repaired. The study of the past has run its course, so you declared, and whatever shreds of information have survived, whatever dwindling residues have yet to be adapted and networked, have sunk into the oblivion of a pre-digital world. Archaeology in every shape and form left nothing more to the imagination. All that remained was the present, and the only perspective for interpreting it lay not in the past but in the future. In your beamings, you tried to persuade me that the greatest danger awaiting mankind was the romantic longing for our lost origins, for roots. This infinite number of conflicting perspectives that have led us only into anarchy. We have to rid ourselves of this longing at all costs, you declare, because when we’re in the grip of the past, we relive all of the scourges that we thought we’d avoided: violence, brutality, fear and rage – everything that became sanctified in the past as “memory”.

Right from that first mind-conference, where you mentioned your
Anthropology of the Future
program, my implachip started blipping heretical thoughts. I thought it was precisely because of a lack of perspective based on the past that the human species was liable to be trapped in an endless cycle of horrors, with each successive generation sinking back into a terrifying void and learning nothing from experience. If only I’d had the guts to say so at the time...

Don’t worry, Stash. Memory, which you treat with such contempt, excels at the art of nullification anyway...