“You promised never to touch the stuff,” I said. “And he knew I’d never go along with it.”
He nodded. “So we have to find him.”
“All right,” I said. “Tomorrow afternoon, at the Peninsula Hotel in Manhattan, I’m going to march into Edo’s room, hold a gun to his head, and make him confess to organizing the murder of a couple of dopeheads, as well as illegally manufacturing NME One-Ten.”
“What?!”
“A metaphorical gun,” I said. “But still.”
Dr. Gloria, if she were in the car, would have scowled at me for being so blunt. But I couldn’t help it; even after ten years, I still enjoyed shocking the Rat Boy.
THE PARABLE OF
the Man Who Sacrificed Rats
Once there was a shy young man who needed a job. He was twenty-one years old, and among his few possessions were a smile that a classmate once called disarming, a mountain of debt, and a freshly minted yet completely unmarketable bachelor’s degree in neuropathology. A BS in any neuroscience without a master’s or PhD was a three-legged dog of a degree: pitiable, kind of adorable, and capable of inspiring applause when it did anything for you at all. When the two women who ran the biotech startup chose him to become their unpaid intern, he told them he felt very lucky, and tried not to think of the monthly payments on his educational loan.
Every lab needs a rat wrangler; that is what the young man became. Though unsalaried, he took his job seriously. He ordered the rats online, unpacked them when they arrived, and set them in their plastic cages along the metal racks. He fed and watered them and monitored them for seizures, blindness, difficulty in walking, or any other signs of neurological damage. And every day at 2 p.m. he selected one rat and killed it.
Lab people use the term “sacrifice,” which appealed to the Wrangler. Was not the rat giving his life in the name of science, humanity, and an eventual patent? One of these animals would make them all rich.
He was as meticulous in administering death as he was at maintaining life. He gently placed the rat’s head inside the clear plastic funnel and waited patiently for the CO2 to do its work. Once the rat had stopped breathing, he placed its body into the stereotaxic frame, a metal contraption that would have looked at home in any woodshop. The rat’s chin and nose went into the little stirrup, and two rods extended to press against the bones just in front of the rat’s ear, holding its skull in place. The Rat Brain Atlas lay open on the table, with its many pages of diagrams, each important location annotated with its three-axis coordinates. Soon he barely consulted the atlas, having come to know the tiny lobes and crevasses of the rat’s brain as if they were the streets of his home neighborhood. Rovil was on patrol, alert for aneurysms, stroke effects, and tumors. He filed careful reports assessing the damage.
He came to know the humans at the company with more difficulty, but he attacked the problem scientifically. As was his habit since he was a boy, the Wrangler assigned the humans scores in three categories:
The system, he realized now, was a three-coordinate matrix much like the stereotaxic coordinates in the Rat Brain Atlas. Rat brains, however, were easier to understand than human ones. Why did Lyda, the red-headed woman who seemed too fond of low-cut tops, always bring up sex? She talked constantly about who was getting fucked, whether Mikala was going to fuck her, and whether Rovil—for that was the Wrangler’s name—would ever get fucked if he didn’t stop dressing that way. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. No one else seemed to take offense, and Gil especially seemed to find Lyda hilarious. He was a nearly spherical man who, the Wrangler guessed, did not get fucked very often. Perhaps that was why he so often lost his temper: He behaved as if every piece of equipment in the lab belonged to him personally, and when someone did not clean an instrument to his standards or failed to return it to its Gil-designated space, he would shout like a madman. In the first two months his target was most often the Wrangler, but the young man took some comfort when Gil occasionally yelled at Lyda or Mikala.
It was Mikala who showed him the most kindness. Yes, she was intellectually intimidating, and could ask him questions that could freeze his tongue, but she often defended him when Lyda embarrassed him or Gil yelled at him. And it was Mikala who came to him after he’d been on the job for six months to tell him that he’d been doing a great job, and they’d like to keep him on. The Little Sprout partners hired him as an actual employee with a salary of $24,000 a year, which in the year 2015 allowed him enough money for a grubby apartment on the south side of Chicago, as long as he shared it with two other people.
The fourth partner was Edo Anderssen Vik (PA 5, K 5, I 4). Vik dropped in every couple weeks to check on his investment, and when he arrived he seemed to take up all the space in the building. He liked to put an arm over the Wrangler’s shoulders and shake him like a dog. Rovil would laugh good-naturedly and then escape to the rat room. He suspected that Edo did not enjoy people as much as he appeared, but that would not change his score: The matrix only assessed perceived attributes. Kindness was as much an act of presentation as physical beauty. Even intelligence could be faked, for a time.
The Wrangler’s goal was to raise his own scores as perceived by his coworkers. He could do little about his attractiveness (though with more money he might someday be able to correct some of his flaws, such as his spotty skin and his crooked right canine tooth), but at every opportunity he tried to demonstrate that he was a caring person who could also contribute ideas. He took on more responsibilities, especially the onerous ones, such as cleaning the bioreactor, a large stainless steel vat on wheels that Gil called “the Dalek.”
The Dalek grew tumors. Rat tumors, to be precise, steaming batches of pheochromocytoma, whose cells Mikala then injected with genetically modified plasmids, which in turn prompted the cells to generate an array of neurotrophins, which, when injected into the rats, spurred their brains to grow new neurons … and occasionally, when things went wrong, new tumors.
“The circle of death,” Mikala told him.
It was Mikala that the Wrangler most wanted to impress; she was clearly the brightest person in the company. She had designed the genetically engineered plasmids herself, using open-source molecular CAD software. True, Gil had rewritten the software almost from scratch, which caused Rovil to raise the man’s intelligence score by a point. And Lyda was the schizophrenia expert who had come up with the idea that led to the creation of Little Sprout. But it was Mikala who would make the idea work, down among the amino acids.
The Wrangler made it his mission to become a better chemist, and he studied the New Molecular Entities that Mikala had created, even going so far as to copy Gil’s CAD program so he could run it at home. More than anything the young man wanted to contribute his ideas to Little Sprout, and his opportunity came at a time when he was feeling the most stupid and the most helpless.
His rats were dying. Something in NME 109, the latest batch, was causing them to drastically lose weight. After a few days the animals stopped drinking water, stopped eating, and retreated to the corners of their cages, where eventually they died. A dozen brain examinations revealed nothing: no tumors, no strokes. Then, even though he had not been told to do so, he began working overtime to do full dissections. He examined each organ, comparing it to the healthy rats still in his population. He found nothing.
He began reading more and more online, and took home books from Mikala’s shelf. He studied all the neurotrophins that Mikala’s modified cells produced—BDNF, VGF, NGF, CREB—an alphabet of proteins that kept neurons growing and dividing and forming new connections. Schizophrenics didn’t develop all the connections that normal children did, and even as adults their blood contained smaller amounts of neurotrophins. Lyda’s original idea, and Little Sprout’s goal, was to find a way to boost levels of neurotrophins and make the brain plastic again.