I was right in some ways; Jaime was thinking about answers. But he already knew the questions he wanted to ask.
The public bulbs in the tenement building are gone—broken or stolen long ago. The only light is a shadowy gray that comes through a dusty window at the far end of the narrow hallway. Jaime moves ahead of me, past doors I imagine must hide people waiting to snatch our prize away before we can catch it. Jaime moves straight ahead, eyes scanning only for the Idea Rat; but I can’t help glancing from side to side at every door I pass, sure someone is crouching, waiting.
I freeze when I spot a streak of light coming through the crack of a slightly opened door. I brace myself for someone to leap out at me. After a couple of seconds, I hear the low moan of a pinchhead from the other side of the door Then a slight movement takes my eyes to the floor; and I see the wide, round rear end of the Idea Rat slipping through into the room behind the door.
“We don’t exist in a vacuum.”
Mr. Rodriguez had taken us through a basic tutorial and shown us how to access the most common nets and webs. As he spoke, I couldn’t stop looking at the black-on-white keyboard, the shiny face of the monitor. “We are the sum of the elements in our backgrounds. I want you to write a research report on one of the elements that shapes your world. Something that has worked in some way to make you who you are.”
Possibilities raced through my mind, things I had always wondered about, questions I had asked my mother when she was still around, my grandparents after she took off.
Mr. Rodriguez smiled, catching a hint of this in my eyes.
“Anything?” said Jaime.
Mr. Rodriguez nodded, prepared to leave and go back to his other students. “Choose something that interests you both, because I want you to work together.”
I frowned.
“This is bullshit,” Jaime said.
Mr. Rodriguez paused, one hand on the knob of the door leading back to the classroom. A slight smile crossed his face. “Learning to work together is an important lesson all by itself.” He left us looking at each other.
“School Deregulation,” I said, testing the waters.
“Idea Rats,” said Jaime.
“The Urban Guerrilla Wars,” I tried.
“Idea Rats,” said Jaime.
I squirmed a little in my seat. “The privatization of police forces.”
“Idea Rats,” said Jaime.
Pushing the apartment door open just wide enough to slip through takes a long time. I crouch low, hoping what worked for the Idea Rat might work for me. I hold my breath and slide into a small alcove of a single-room apartment.
Even in the glow of morning light through the tattered curtains covering the room’s only window, the naked woman sitting on the corner of a sagging, gray bed along the far wall is not beautiful. Her shoulders slouch forward; her breasts hang loose and narrow. Limp black hair drapes down over a head impossibly large for her wasted body. Vacant eyes stare in my direction, but if she sees anything, it’s not in this room.
The man standing next to the bed wears a yellowed sleeveless T-shirt, but no pants. His mouth moves behind closed lips. Words struggle to get out, but only a low moan escapes. People who haven’t been around pinchheads think their moaning shows some type of retardation. The opposite is closer to the truth. Pinch actually enhances neural transmissions to the point that speech becomes impossible. So much is going through a pinchhead’s mind, at such a rapid rate, that the overtaxed speech centers just freeze up.
The intensity of the man’s moan rises. He clenches his hand into a fist and punches the woman in the face. Her head snaps back, but only for a moment. Then she stares forward again. In the final stage of Pinch addiction, the sensory centers of the brain are so fried that pinchheads don’t react to any stimuli unless they’re high.
A trickle of blood seeps from one nostril, perching for a second on the woman’s lower lip before dropping off. It splatters on the floor in front of the Idea Rat, which watches me from the shadows beneath the bed. Its nose twitches; its white teeth seem to glow. A glimmer in its eyes looks like laughter.
Too late, I see the man’s bruised legs in front of me. I look up, past the blue veins of his erection, over his scrawny ribs and chest, into his drooling smile. He grabs my hair and pulls me up off the floor.
The ShareLibes were far from conclusive about anything having to do with Idea Rats. The most respected sources made no mention of them. The ragbanks carried self-contradicting data.
Most sources that said anything traced the history of Idea Rats to the Barker Act, which abolished patent and copyright protection so that new ideas could be more cheaply and widely converted into viable technologies. In the fight to keep corporate competitors from legally using new ideas, advances in electronic piracy led businesses back to old-fashioned couriers. When too many couriers turned up dead, corporations began using Idea Rats.
By the early 1990s, artificial chromosomes made it possible to control the blueprints of developing organisms, introducing completely new genetic material into edible plants like tomatoes. The next step allowed chromosomes to be encoded to deliver even non-organic information directly into the gene strings of higher-level creatures. For Idea Rats, according to the sources we found, organic changes included a sixth toe on the left hind foot and a birthmark of the company logo for identification purposes. Top-secret company ideas were encoded as non-organic information, which could be decoded by anyone who knew or could find its precise location on the gene chain.
After two days spent tracking down sketchy, inconsistent reports, I told Jaime I wanted to switch to another subject. He shook his head, the glow of the monitor shining off his face as he searched through another databank. “Not until we find something on Natt.”
Calvin Natt was a street legend. Just another kid on his way toward Pinch until he killed a rat with six toes and a corporate logo. He took that rat into an uptown office building, hoping for a reward. No one from the streets ever saw him again.
Everybody talked about him, though. According to folks from our neighborhood, Natt’s reward for returning that rat was nothing compared to the money he made when he told a rival company everything he could remember about it. Then he went to the press. By the time Calvin Natt sold his story to everyone he could think of, he had enough money to start NattCo, one of the nation’s hottest new companies.
Mr. Rodriguez frowned when we told him our subject. He nodded at the computer. “I give you all the information in the world. You give me some pinchhead’s daydream?”
I looked at Jaime, but he wouldn’t look back at me.
“I don’t want to read some bedtime story your mother tells you.” The frosted glass in the door leading to the classroom rattled when Mr. Rodriguez slammed it shut behind him on his way out of the room. It was the first and only time a teacher ever got mad at me.
“We’re switching topics,” I told Jaime.
He typed in a few commands on the keyboard, clicked on something with the mouse, his eyes glued to the monitor screen.
I walked over and tried to push him away from the computer. He grabbed my hand.
“Don’t,” he said.
I took a step back. “You heard what he said.”
He typed some more. “He said we could do anything.”
“We’ll get a bad grade.”
He looked at me then, his face still expressionless, but his eyes bright. He pushed his chair back away from the computer, held his hand out for me to take over. “You want to make the grade, you better find us some facts.”