And the Rat Laughed - By Nava Semel Page 0,34

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...

You have to admit though that, despite my heretical thoughts, I never questioned your authority. I publicly announced I was dropping my own research project, but still, secretly, without admitting it even to myself at first, I kept collecting information, bit by bit. I couldn’t get Girl & Rat out of my mind. It fermented within me, demanding something to latch on to. When you discovered that I was still obsessed with that “trivial hobby” of mine, you tried to persuade me that every fact that could possibly be checked or verified had already been stored, so that my research would be of no interest to the brain-beaming community. Later you tried to rationalize that even if the roots of the legend were out there waiting for me, they were hopelessly banal and couldn’t offer any new insight worth the effort. I haven’t forgotten your studies of the representation of evil in late-twentieth century computer games, the ones that you