And the Rat Laughed - By Nava Semel Page 0,36
is the girl that once was. This is darkness. No other exists.
I hear a scream...
Somewhere deep inside me...
Not from any recognizable part of myself...
The little-girl-who-once-was existed. The pit-that-once-was existed. Darkness. Nothing more.
And the Stefan...
Why is he the only one in the myth who bears a name?
I think I know where ... it all happened.
The pit...
The little girl...
My discovery...
I must hurry.
Before it’ll be forever buried.
I wasn’t beamed to Girl & Rat when I was a child. I didn’t have a mother who would put me to sleep with lullabies and bedtime stories about Girl & Rat. I had a perfect parental voice, made by state-of-the-art processors. And Girl & Rat weren’t part of an anthropological development plan. I have no offspring, so I didn’t have a chance to transmit the lullabies and the bedtime stories to the next generation either. But ever since I discovered them as a youngster, Girl & Rat have fascinated me as much as they’ve terrified me. The poems keep spinning through my head, over and over, almost on their own. I have no idea why they move through me so freely, or why I feel as if they possess me. They seem to be taking over every cell and every neuron...
I have a friend with a tail and he has four legs.
The Stefan also has a tail...
I’m trying to retrieve...
When did I hear it for the first...
Shuddering...
What’s this?
A glitch...
I’m trying to fix it.
Y-mee, that’s my name.
Why me?
At last, you’re responding. There was bound to be a clash between my brain and yours. Not everything operates the way it should in our perfect world.
That’s just as well...
The implachip is blipping retrievals from our previous b-mails. You often used to suggest that I undergo an external memory scan, to see if my fascination with Girl & Rat doesn’t have something to do with a hidden recess in my memory, or something that went wrong in an earlier, uncontrolled stage of my development. You hinted that simple surgery might help solve the problem and fix me for good.
I’ve got to admit that I couldn’t help feeling that way myself. Maybe there was something wrong with my brain in the first place, which is why I contacted the diagnoscope, to rule out any medical condition. I’ve been given a clean bill of health, Stash. My implachip is fine too. Otherwise, how could I have broken into your REMaker?
Once, years ago, in some private part of your past that you’ve managed to delete, I guess, you left me a personal message in my brain box. You asked me to recommend a dream. You said you’d exhausted everything in your own dreamertory.
I had nothing to lend you, Stash. The dream I call up every night, the one that’s been tailor-made for me, has always left me...
Something’s missing.
Y-mee
Why me
A little girl and the Stefan...
The other figure...
In black...
Missing...
Who is this black figure who looks like an angel?
Angels?
They do not exist, only in dreams.
***
Come with me to the last day of the year 2029. We’re in the agricultural reserve in Pan-America. The Art Corporations Festival. Thousands of artists from all over the world are scribbling away and ad-libbing scenes from the Girl & Rat poems on the giant plain. Among their props are potatoes brought in specially from the emergency supplies deep in the Antarctic. This was also the first experiment in multimind beaming, which meant that every beamer in the world, even the ones at Hybrid Space Station, were active participants.
I haven’t taken part in the live event yet, of course, and this was my first-ever retrieved cruise. Where were you then, Stash? I never did discover who paired us up...
A contemporary version...
The most up-to-date...
Billions in this world and beyond are being beamed into the game at this very moment.
The satanic little girl is going down into the pit. In the darkness, she hunts down the rat and makes it her slave. All the players use the rat to abuse the Stefan and win points every time the tormented victim cries out for help. The rat takes pity on the Stefan, and all the players are supposed to use the little girl to kill both of them.
End of game.
The players are drenched in fresh blood.
This role reversal horrifies me. The thought of the Stefan becoming an innocent victim and the little girl becoming a bloodthirsty murderer is unbearable. I need to recreate the right order and cleanse the girl’s name. You might be able to justify my voyage by pointing out that it will