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...
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 later disavowed as your scientific career progressed. Maybe that’s why you dismissed Girl & Rat with such contempt, and why you judge it as nothing more than a primordial fear of light – a final effort of civilization to make way for darkness before it completely disappears.
What is fear, Stash? My genetic card reads “Repaired”.
A hole-child
Is running out of skin
The dream...
I feel as if I’m nursing you – a rare ritual practised by only a few remote tribes on earth.
You’re not ready to give yourself over yet, but my implachip senses how your flashes of resistance are growing weaker.
I’m not trying to undermine the authority of the Anthropological Institute, Stash. On the contrary: I have great respect for the pioneers who paved the way for me. Into your dream I’m beaming a study by Professor Reiner Marcellus Schwartz, who tried to prove that the creatures in Girl & Rat are not really from the twenty-first century at all. He pointed out the pagan and Christian motifs that appear throughout the legend, and mapped out its course from its days as a popular legend towards the end of the Roman Empire until its incorporation into the Digital Age. I want to tell you about the theory of my supervisor, Professor Mammuna Shanti: she believes that the work was originally written in Gujerati, and that it contains echoes of the Great Earthquake of Gujarat in 2001. Among other things, Professor Shanti makes recourse to the literature which tried, none too successfully, to link Girl & Rat to the Temple of the Rats – the Karni Mata Temple in the town of Deshnok in Rajasthan. Even though it hasn’t been used for worship for almost seven decades, the shrine is still intact. Over the years, it has housed thousands of rats, and they’ve received the daily offerings of believers and priests. Various myths surrounding the shrine establish a clear link between a feminine, maternal divinity and rats as the reincarnation of human-cubs.
Your implachip is not responding.
You’re still fighting me.
All of the studies before mine led to a dead end. Even Professor Mammuna Shanti ultimately retracted her original theory, and in our final exchanges, she sided vehemently with your interpretation of the poem as the outpouring of a subversive entity that had been taking advantage of the electronic networks in their earlier days to gain maximum circulation within a short period.
All of the experts have dropped Girl & Rat, but I...
An amazing discovery...
Because if I stop being afraid
I’ll no longer be...
Your REMaker is trying to throw me out. Don’t fight it, Stash. It is competing against Girl & Rat and I’m spitting out broken lines. What a shame that the original collection has not been found. Jews are mentioned in only a single poem from an earlier version, a very fragmentary one.
Stuck inside the brain...
An undo command is needed...
Can’t get rid of...
A little girl is treading on the outstretched tail of a rat in the volcanic mouth of Mount Egmont in New Zealand. It was a circus act performed only once in 2024, a few months before the Great Ecological Disaster, which is why it was never documented. I have no choice but visualize it for you.
According to my genetic card, that was when the process of my conception began. That’s when my fetal cells started to link.
We are watching the circus act together now. Down below is the abyss. A total void. The little girl’s eyes are shut, and she’s moving forward slowly. The rat’s tail is sweeping wildly from side to side like in a circus...
A volcanic eruption...
She’s falling, or maybe flying.
My powers of visualization aren’t strong enough to produce the ending for you.
I remember only too well the condescending b-mail where you insisted that nobody is capable any more of separating Little Red Riding Hood from the wolf that swallowed her, or of finding out if Oedipus was really a king or just a lunatic fantasizing about sleeping with his own mother.
You were right, of course. But precisely because Girl & Rat is less than a hundred years old, we can still discover its roots.
A young myth...
A thin slough, a shell...
Precisely because a myth is an encrypted historical memory, it’s my duty to discover the truth hiding underneath it, with all the stir it’s generated. Girl & Rat has been dug out, and is part of the public domain now, a free-for-all that anyone can jostle with. I’ll break off the shell and find the nucleus of truth. I must. This 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 put an end to Girl & Rat once and for all. Or I may decide that forgetfulness is the preferred human condition, and then the two cubs will quietly disappear behind the curtains, and so will I.
Without a trace.
This voyage...
I must return to the pit...
Need to go deep down.
Two weeks ago, I went over my findings again, the way I do every night. I activated the location search engine. The implachip probes put me in Eastern Europe, and the database crossed me with the ruins of a forgotten church that was uncovered only recently, when laser micro-excavators were extending a subterranean residential habitat. After the protests of the Christian Preservation Society, the developers agreed not to touch the vestiges of the church, and to allow the construction of a tourist simulator site. In one of the side niches, behind the altar, was a scene from the Last Judgment Day, drawn with something solid, possibly a piece of charcoal. In the center was the Madonna cradling a gaping-mouthed rat. Next to her, the earth had opened wide and a long procession of people was emerging, led by a little girl, her face a blur.
Such strange iconography...
My implachip was deactivated for a long time.
Into your dream I beam the Madonna of the Rat Church, located where there used to be a small village before it was completely wiped out in the Great Ecological Disaster. The foundations remain, along with some fragments of tombstones in the nearby cemetery. Relics from the turn of the century indicate that the site was a Catholic farming village. Its inhabitants lived off their crops of potatoes and grain, which of course provide a natural habitat for rats.
That animal, which neither of us ever saw because it does not exist any more, is jabbing its teeth and claws into you right now.
Biting into your dream.
The rat comes from semi-arid open fields in Asia. It later wandered to Europe with the spread of farming, and became man’s most faithful companion. Wherever man went, the rat followed too – invariably sharing man’s bread and water, linked to man with chains more powerful than any digital web.
Or maybe not.
In your dream, you now stroke the grayish back of the rat, and its lumpy underbelly. Its torso is covered with a thin fur, and only its tail is hairless. You touch its claws, four on each front foot, five on each back one. Its digestive system was originally meant for seeds, but for some unknown reason, it began biting into human flesh, too. The female rat had up to a thousand young each year, using her sense of smell to tell them apart.
I haven’t been able to beam the mother to you. Or her offspring either, all of them born blind and naked.
The rat in your dream is completely real, gnawing and thrashing between your legs, but the real rats have disappeared from the face of the earth.
Following the Great Ecological Disaster, this species was suspected of being a carrier of lethal viruses. Stowaway rats were discovered on spaceships. They gnawed through cables, cut off information supplies and created digital chaos. As you remember, the Warsaw Conference adopted a unanimous decision to exterminate rats, and the de-infestation was completed in 2037, just before my own fetal cells were conceived. The archive at the Anthropological Institute still has an ancient silicon trap connected to a transmitter that activated a poison syringe as soon as a rat was detected.
This is not the dream you were expecting, I know. The effort it takes for the brain to forget is far greater than the effort it requires to remember.
Sometimes I think I am...
Who am I?
Y mee?
In the great wave of nostalgia that swept over us in the fifties, exactly when people were again caught up in Girl & Rat, the rodent lost some of its demonic overtones. Its persistent search for food and shelter is perceived as a heroic fight for survival, worthy of compassion and empathy. Over the past few years, there have been many attempts, in all the leading genetic laboratories, to clone foolproof rats, but no scientist has succeeded in creating one that will function as a proper pet in a beamed environment.
Madonna of the Rat...
The implachip is so rattled that it discharged. I wasn’t sure at first, but soon the idea caught up with me. I was facing the earliest evidence of the myth: sixty-five years before it first appeared on the ancient internet.
You dream – I give birth to your dream.
The punishment imposed on trespassers of consciousness...
I’m ready to pay the price.
Unless there’s a malfunction, you’ll feel almost nothing when you wake up. Just a few slivers. Even an internal memory scan will show nothing but an obscure, incomprehensible nightmare, and you’ll cancel it out, the way you defuse the stress of heavy responsibility in a job like yours. But when you finally realize that the slivers of the dream add up to something real, when you’re told that I no longer belong to any corporation, and when you see sufficient proof that I’ve set out on a voyage into No-Net-Land, the Bohu – an unknown world beyond the net – Girl & Rat will begin to cruise through your bloodstream, to be absorbed spontaneously into every cell and every neuron of your being.
Stash in the conch of sleep.
The girl in the dark...
If only I knew what really happened in the pit.
I need to make you understand why my body needs to be included in the imminent voyage. If you do, maybe you’ll try to make your peace with the dream I imposed on you, instead of eradicating it.
The visit to the Madonna of the Rat Church site shook me so hard, not only because of the incredible discovery, but because it was my very first experience with the limits of remote perception. An invisible barrier between me and my sensations. I just couldn’t cross it. I fingered objects, yet I couldn’t touch them. I focused my gaze, and the sight decomposed into an illusion. I stomped my feet, but there didn’t seem to be a connection between my stomping and the sound waves from the floor. I sank my teeth into the potatoes, but there was no sensation of taste.
Even the smells...
My nostrils dilated...
I was so desperate to...
A kind of revelation grabbed me in that church.
What is a revelation?
Shutting down, turning out the lights – that’s a familiar activity...
The most routine one of all.
My REMaker is unsettled. Who is dreaming whom? I really don’t know, any more.
Your attempts to shut down my tyrannical consciousness won’t work.
I didn’t give in right away to the urge to cut myself free of the net and to move into No-Net-Land.
At first, I tried to use more conventional research methods like the one you distrust so much – the New Séance technology. The discovery of a possible physical source to the myth thrilled me. A breakthrough. I truly believed that now I’ll be able to communicate with the dead at the Madonna of the Rat Church, and solve the enigma. I had been hoping to reach some remainders of consciousness in whoever had been living in that forgotten site. But all my efforts failed.
Once, though, something did flicker. I found myself inside a sealed space, not much different from my usual environment. For a moment everything grew completely dim, and I dove through the darkness, but I couldn’t decide whether it was just a glitch or whether it really meant something. My implachip picked up some strange signals and I had a feeling that they were words in an unfamiliar language, but the automatic interpreter could not even recognize what it was.
I’ve reached an impasse, Stash. The only way out is to go on a physical voyage. I know it’s an impulse that doesn’t seem to make any sense, and that choosing an ordeal that nobody has taken for years may cost me my life.
Exile in The Bohu of No-Net-Land...
I’m ready to pay the price.
I am hocking this dream in the pawnshop in your head, in the hope that some night you will redeem the flicker of that ancient memory...
Why me?
K-0005275-149...
Forever in a pit...
Stash, never again will you be able to pretend that you “do not know”.
You are my future, Stash. Maybe this argument will convince you to let me go. Something is waiting at the end of the voyage.
If not for me, then maybe for you.
***
Ten days ago, following another unsuccessful séance, I paid my last b-visit to the Church. On the neck of the painted Madonna I recognized something. For a moment I thought it was nothing more than a digital hoax. Why hadn’t I noticed it before?
A tiny object stuck to the wall. I could feel it with all of my senses, but I wasn’t able to touch it.
The implachip analyzed the materials. Extra-fine pegs. Twigs of birch. Dating: a hundred and fifty-five years old.
You’re fingering the object now. I visualize how soft your fingers are. Do you recognize the object, Stash?
It’s a Star of David, symbol of the Jews.
Theologians claim this is a people that has succeeded in refining memory into the ultimate means of spiritual survival, by systematically handing down hundreds of commandments and prohibitions through the chain of the generations.
You can’t imagine how relieved I was to discover a new and legal direction for continuing my research.
Using ultra-refined sensors to move in all directions...
My mind crosses borders...
Believe me, Stash, I too wanted this voyage not to be necessary.
I beamed myself to The Israel – a tiny political entity along the Mediterranean Sea that still insists on retaining its sovereignty. I couldn’t find any traces of the source of Girl & Rat there. The local guards greeted me warmly and allowed me free access to all the mindline libraries, except one that they insisted on classifying as secret.
It was surprisingly easy for me to break into it. I have no idea what the secret is.
My findings in TheIsrael puzzled me. We have at least one version of Girl & Rat in Hebrew that’s considered authentic, and it’s dated to early 2011. But even though TheIsrael is the only society that still speaks some Hebrew – that ancient Semitic language written in Latin characters – this version is not mentioned in any of the local libraries that I had access to. The local anthropologists couldn’t track it down either. Whatever versions of Girl & Rat that I found were all later adaptations or translations from English or from Arabic, mostly from the past twenty years.
Following a quick mythological mapping of all the b-data, I realized that the repudiation of the ancient Hebrew version was no coincidence. It reflected a basic position that rules out any link to tradition.
I know you’re categorically opposed to any study of societies that still insist on retaining their sovereignty, Stash, but if you ever do decide to be beamed to TheIsrael you can look forward to a fascinating anthropological adventure that could shed new light on your Anthropology of the Future project. I’m convinced you’d like the people there, Stash. It’s a society addicted to the present, alienated from anything that preceded its establishment as a sovereign state and determined to focus exclusively on whatever will serve to justify its future existence. You’ll have to admit that this society’s selective memory has led to an amazingly vibrant culture. They change values and icons at a dizzying pace and they always prefer the new to the old, or the not-quite-yet-old. You’ll be glad to know that TheIsrael became caught up in the digital revolution with near-theological fervor, maybe because of how it filled the void left when they obliterated their past, including their Zionist ideology and Jewish religion. But it seems like the obliteration of the past has led to a pathological distortion in the way they perceive the future: almost every mythological representation of the future is short-term, and includes a cataclysm. This misperception of time is one that people in TheIsrael refuse to acknowledge, and every one of the local anthropologists became impatient, almost hostile, when I mentioned my theories.
After that wild goose chase in TheIsrael I instructed the implachip to beam me to Ju-Ideah. It’s a separatist self-contained entity, a network of autonomous religious enclaves spread over the geographical area surrounding the sovereignties of TheIsrael and ThePalestine, among others.
At first, I was optimistic. In complete contrast to TheIsrael, Ju-Ideah does not obliterate the past. In fact, it regards the past as sacrosanct. Their motivation for separatism isn’t that they want to forget, but rather that they’re intent on avoiding anything that’s new or different. It’s really surprising to discover such a striking contrast between two entities with the same historical parents. Even the way they dress in Ju-Ideah is old-fashioned, and my quick investigation revealed that it originated in seventeenth-century Poland – the same geographical space where the Madonna of the Rat Church is located.
The digital guards instructed me to extinguish every trace of physical presence and to cover everything but my eyes. They directed me to two of the community elders who agreed to tell me some nostalgic legends and gave me free access to some of the libraries where these legends are kept. To my delight, I discovered that many of the stories took place in Europe in recent centuries, but I found no trace of any Girl & Rat motif.
Still, I honestly believed that Ju-Ideah of all places was bound to offer some mythological representation of that little Jewish girl from the past, but it soon turned out that all of the mythical heroes are male spiritual shepherds known as rabbis, and that most of the mythological material I found centered on their graves. They’re the ones who are assumed to bestow immediate remedy to every distress. One of the elders was convinced that the true reason for my query was my desire to use one of these graves to be blessed with a mate and with offspring, and he insisted on referring me to the grave of a famous rabbi, Nachman, from the village of Uman in a place once called the Ukraine. When he discovered that I am not family-programmed, he referred me to a grave in North Africa, and promised that if I visited there I would be blessed with longevity.
Just to give you an idea of the type of ritual practiced in Ju-Ideah, I’m sending you an object for your simulatorium. Think of it as my farewell gift. It’s a lucky charm they’ve been nailing to the doorposts of their homes for thousands of years. It contains a tiny piece of parchment with an ancient secret inscription that they would not show me because I admitted that I didn’t believe in any particular religion. Some say that the technique used for inscribing the parchment, an ancient craft known as handwriting, is also used to spell out a mysterious ancient name.
For a moment I thought...
The little girl...
She doesn’t have a name in any other version either.
When I recounted the Girl & Rat legend, the idea of some link between a Polish-born Jewish girl and the Christian faith was categorically rejected, and the JuIdeah elders’ initial politeness suddenly disappeared. The beaming was interrupted, and my access to the public sources of information was blocked. My apologies were rejected. When I tried to break into the blocked data stores, I discovered that, despite its longstanding separatism, or perhaps precisely because of it, their data security technology is state-of-the-art. It may even be more advanced than ours. I would never have succeeded in breaking into their REMaker – if they even use REMakers there...
The exile of memory...
What submemoryfolder did they banish the little girl to?
Trapped somewhere...
The implachip is working at full capacity now.
Unbearable...
Have to break loose...
No. You don’t have to. I hear your voice clearly, Stash. Let go. Y-mee Prana. Your thought is crashing against my implachip. You’re hurting me.
Resign yourself to it, K-0005275-149: human memory doesn’t have the capacity to contain ... And yet...
Like the tailbone...
Who has a tail?...
Stash, you’ve been through every genetic repair, and you’re disappointed that the bone is still lodged in the lower part of the spine. According to your plan, man was destined to be rid of this reminder. A reminder of what?
Once upon a time we were...
The Stefan.
Perhaps the body remembers what the soul refuses.
As a final resort, I beamed a “Who Remembers?” message all over the mindnet. The answers pointed to children who had been stashed away in closed places, and identified so many perpetrators by name that I thought I may really have found a lead. But the fact that there was no rat mentioned ruled out a connection.
My brain box picked up a message from someone who identified himself as Stash. For a moment I thought...
Then I heard a kind of thundering voice, rolling...
Was this laughter?
I must confess, Stash, last night I decided, for the first time in my life, to disconnect from my REMaker. I know that a spontaneous dream is the kind of childish prank you’d expect of rebellious adolescents, and few of those who have been through the experience would consider repeating it. Instead of selecting a cool item from my dreamertory, I turned off my implachip and let my brain take over.
In the dark...
Tell someone
That the little girl...
I ... never had...
A mother...
Or a...
Suddenly my eyes opened wide. This was not the soft and fuzzy awakening that we all experience. I couldn’t control my tremors without tranquillizers. Only then did I understand why I’d felt such a strong urge to break away from the REMaker. As soon as I set out on my voyage, after all, I’ll have nothing but spontaneous dreams. I was paralyzed with fear. I cannot bear the thought that every time I will shut my eyes I’ll be forsaking myself to the unbridled tyranny of my brain. It will wreak havoc with the strata of consciousness, like a child in need of genetic repair. My implachip signaled concern about my sanity, and instructed me to cancel my plans for the voyage immediately.
You and I should be forever grateful for living after the invention of the REMaker.
For hours I lay awake, overwhelmed by this strange, unfamiliar feeling. Despair, Stash. If ever you’ve been trapped in despair, you never shared it with me.
And then it struck me...
The nightmare that I woke into was much worse than the spontaneous dream that I’d forced on myself.
For the rest of my life...
In the bubble of the net...
Always trapped.
A programmed dream.
I want to wake up...
There...
In No-Net-Land...
In the Bohu...
All I remember of that dream is splinters of a story. No clear sequence of events or circumstances.
Just a sensation...
Fists beating and a strange sound...
Laughter...
Me banging against a solid mass...
A wall...
Closing in...
I think I was dreaming in black-and-white... More black than white...
Suddenly I was completely awake. My body struck me in all its tangibility.
Liquids poured out of me...
Forgive me, Stash. I didn’t mean to upset you.
I’ll spare you the rest.
If the little girl had been living in our time, with our readily accessible technology for healing after horror, we would have taken her to one of the clinics for Memory Excision – a safe and simple operation – on an outpatient basis. Once it is over, the patient resumes normal life, and the memory gap – this black hole they used to refer to as trauma – is completely eradicated.
I pull you back to the first experimental uses of memory excision, performed on adults who had witnessed a murder. Even back then, the results were impressive. The patients lost all traces of the violent episode and regained a normal continual memory.
First, the surgeons would perform a memory bypass procedure, and then they would excise the irrelevant information. Once the traumatic experience had been severed from its carrier, it was deflected to a dedicated submemoryfolder which could only be accessed by special court order.
Surprisingly, the operation is never successful in the case of children, and the younger the person, the lower their chances of full recovery.
The little girl, whoever she may have been...
How did she survive?
If indeed she survived...
Death seems preferable to a life with such a memory.
That rat...
That little girl who once was...
The Stefan...
The dream is beginning to decompose. I must hurry. My time is near.
***
A creature leans over me, forming a sign on my forehead. His lips are moving, but he makes no sound. Who is he? Maybe the REMaker has malfunctioned, and it is converting only sights, not sounds.
As if the creature is telling us both something.
What will you do with my dream, Stash?
I’ve turned you into one of the Remembearers, one of those who have the traumatic event registered in their consciousness without actually having experienced it themselves: the second circle of witnesses to the violent experience. The commonest problem among patients being treated with memory excision is linked to the fact that the event itself can’t be excised from the memory of the other carriers.
I’m your Remembearer, Stash.
I’ll give off a stench.
That’s what
I can
Promise...
Only recently, the legal world was all worked up. Some victims had pressed charges, and were demanding full restoration of their missing memory link. The petitioners argued that the excision violated their right to determine their own fate, and that without the missing event, no matter how unsettling or horrible, they were not what they were supposed to be. The parties have reached a settlement though: the petitioners have withdrawn their claim, and a procedure has been launched for developing and testing a technology of controlled memory imprinting. It will allow memory stores to be mended without having to excise any “irrelevant information”.
Stash, have you heard about the guy who wanted to have a false experience imprinted in his brain? He said that he was under no obligation to actually experience it. When he entered an offer on the net to acquire traumatic experiences, his implachip was jammed with bids.
Look for him, Stash. He’s the ideal subject for your Anthropology of the Future project.
Why me?
Y-mee.
K-0005275-149.
I’m being retrieved 150 years back. The eastern side of Pan-Euro. A flashing Star of David...
Stash, we’re in a haze of thick info-clouds, enveloped by a dense and shapeless fog that the human mind cannot contain. Our only means of protecting ourselves from the torrents of information is to minimize it and package it so that it allows access on demand only. That’s what the separate, dedicated submemoryfolders are for. The research convention establishes that our individual implachips will be beamed exclusively to our own programmed submemoryfolders, to ensure that we derive as much as possible from whatever information is needed. But even so, we don’t stand a chance of accessing all of the information programmed into our 130-year lifespan.
Stash, let me plant a question in your dream. What do you think of the statement that all of human memory is visible to us? Isn’t it a kind of self-deception, aimed at making us think that since the information is out there somewhere we don’t have to look for it any more?
A braid of tails...
When I hop to the right, you hop to the left.
You’re in front and I’m in back.
The tails are intertwined between my legs.
I’m falling.
You hold out your...
I can’t grab it.
I know I’ve disobeyed the rules, but I couldn’t help using insights I gained in my attempts to break through the defenses of Ju-Ideah. Of course, legal permission to be beamed to other dedicated submemoryfolders is beyond brainability. Only people whose brains have been preselected or who have been programmed to withstand conditions of information overflow have that opportunity, and their brain operates under continual supervision, to avoid collapsing. I’m not one of the pre-selected ones. My brain is defined as normal.
What’s this strange part inside me? Something that is not a chemical conductor, or an electrical one, or an electro-biological one...
Carrying some secret information, with no name and no shape...
Sorry, Stash. A glitch in the control mechanism. My mind is throwing up...
Y-mee Prana. Is that really my name?
What’s happening...
Chaos. Tohu...
Like the day before the Creation.
Furthest down
Children
Of Jews...
I beam you to The Holocaust, a huge submemoryfolder. Yet only a handful of people are allowed to enter, and even fewer take an interest in it.
The Stefan...
Who is the Stefan...
Are there many more Stefans?
I’ll spare you the polemic about the Holocaust. It started during the lifetime of those who actually experienced it. A large part of the submemoryfolder is devoted to question marks, casting doubt on the many testimonies within. Most of the films are presented as reenactments, and many of the documents as forgeries or misrepresentations. With the gradual disappearance of the survivors and the dwindling of the Remembearers, the controversy surrounding the authenticity of these testimonies has died down.
Stash, the last documented interview with a Holocaust survivor took place in TheIsrael in 2039. The man was over one hundred years old and he is referred to as “the last witness”. You would naturally expect a human wreck, someone ignited by hatred and revenge. But you will be surprised, Stash.
It’s an unusual recording. For some reason, nobody has bothered to make it beam-enabled, so that I’ve had to use an external apparatus to decipher the sights and sounds step by step. The smells could not be reconstructed though.
I am retrieving the deciphered version for you.
The old camera is shaky, and the imaging is uneven. The hands holding the primitive instrument are the hands of the last witness’s granddaughter recording her elderly grandfather. At some point, the camera swerves towards his three great-grandchildren and nine great-great-grandchildren. They’re sitting motionless at his feet, listening to his testimony face to face. Towards the end, he says: “You will never understand”, and performs an obstruction. If they’d been using modern technology, he wouldn’t be able to do that.
It’s just as well...
The eyes of the last witness... like black holes...
Lucky I was watching this man through the digital shield.
Stash, at last, I found the courage to plant my heretical thoughts into your dream, those I didn’t dare mention during our first mind-conference; if we were to excise all the horrific events from human consciousness, what would our memory consist of?
Yes, we would be trapped in a never-ending loop of murder, hatred and fear, with each generation starting the terrible cycle anew, having learned no lesson whatsoever.
True, a historical scar does not guarantee that the horrific events will never happen again, but the very existence of memory – the detritus at the bottom of our pit – might still leave us some room for hope.
I’m so tired, Stash. I would never have imagined that dreaming for another consciousness demands such an effort. Your eyelids are moving. You’re struggling to wake up. And me, I’m using every ounce of strength in me to stop you from awakening. The dream-time is running out.
A canopy of angels is circling over you, hovering above with their colorful wings. This is the most popular dream. Billions choose it every night. Years ago, I instructed the REMaker to tailor the dream to me, and it replaced the angels with a black-cloaked creature wallowing in dirt. I was never able to see its face.
When I woke, I instructed the REMaker to restore the colors, but the machine disobeyed me.
Night after night...
Always black.
Now there’s no need to send the REMaker in to be fixed.
Extra-hypnagogical thoughts pour out of me.
My insignificant research.
Ferreting through discards of history.
I’ve turned into the sum-total of this myth. Always a little girl, always a rat. Just not the Stefan.
Please, just not him. Explain to me, Stash, with all our technological advancement, why is it that the only gene we have not succeeded in correcting – the only one that has remained intact – is the gene of brutality?
Even if I wanted to, I would no longer be able to block the dream filtering through you and exploding the net.
Memory...
You don’t want
To know...
It isn’t part of the Anthropology of the Future project.
A never-ending cycle of murder, hatred and fears...
Your own clean future is my own filthy past.
Has my memory...
Been excised too...
When the Stefan climbs down
I bang my head and hope
There’s a child on the other side with a...
A recopied voice...
Where can I find my Remembearers?
Will they agree to Remembear for me?
I beam a recording of a rare theatrical performance from the twenties. The rat hardly stops laughing the whole time. The little girl returns to the pit to exterminate him. Before he dies, the rat asks why she is killing him, and the little girl answers: Laughter is not something that’s given out for nothing.
***
Laughter
Like crying.
A strange experience.
I sensed it only through...
Will I ever cry?
Or laugh?
A little girl gives birth to a rat. The Stefan offers her his flesh in a dish adorned with crosses. A little girl eats a rat. The Stefan eats a little girl.
I had not intended to beam this ancient horror film. Where did it come from? The entire system is collapsing and the dream is pouring out through the cracks. The audience in the theater is in an uproar.
There is no little girl.
There is no rat.
End of story.
I see people holding on to their stomachs, their faces contorted. It looks like pain...
But it’s...
I’ll unlog in a minute. With my very own hands, I’ll pull out the implachip.
K-0005275...
And it isn’t enough to be dead
Because even when I am dead
It won’t be over.
You’re in a frenzy, Stash. Every part of your body is fighting to get rid of the dream. All I have left is a tiny particle of time in which to entrust you with my discovery. Not only in your brain, but in your heart. In every single part of your body.
I won’t get another chance.
You’re my stowaway. Sooner or later you’ll wake up. I’m afraid of that split-second just before the final awakening. The realization. When you discover that the dream is not really yours. You won’t be able to bury Girl & Rat, and even though you decide to try...
You’ll have a tail too–
In the dark, which for you is light.
Who knows, maybe one of these days you’ll thank me for Girl & Rat. You may even pass it on to your offspring.
To be a parent.
If I were given that chance...
With my very own womb...
As soon as you regain consciousness, I’ll break through the electronic wall. I’ll set out into the unknown, holding my genetic card between my fingers. It was all I had when I came into this world, and it’s all I’ll have when I leave too.
Feel free to use this dream to prove to the mindnet authorities that you’ve done all you could to stop me from going on my crazy mission, and to absolve yourself of guilt.
Final separation. We won’t see each other again.
When we feel a longing for people, it doesn’t come from the brain ... I know now where it comes from.
Stash...
A name that I will keep retrieving myself towards again and again...
I will remember.
This promise I’ll keep.
Stash, my love, if only we could meet, body to body. Maybe some day you’ll see me in a spontaneous dream of your own making. You’ll follow me to No-Net-Land. Y-mee Prana is walking about, bodily. Her muscles, her tendons, her joints, her arms and legs. A womb. Internal organs that I’ve wandered through virtually so many times...
“Because in all your voyages you accompany yourself.” The implachip flashes the words of Socrates through the memory of Seneca.
Memory – a long convoy of amputees fighting for implants.
Children of the little girl, grandchildren of the little girl, children of the grandchildren...
Of the little girl.
All of the Stefans
Somewhere
Waiting for me too.
The Madonna of the Rat Church. I’m so close. Come with me, Stash, to the No-Net-Land. My hand digs through the dirt, leafs through a packet of dusty pages, but whenever I try to work out the writing, the pages crumble and the imaging dies out.
The pages are still there. I’m sure of it. I must touch them. I need to read those ancient pages with my very own eyes.
Over the past two days, I’ve crammed into my brain as much as I could from the submemoryfolders in Polish, Latin, Yiddish and Hebrew. They used to write that language from right to left. The implachip lost no time switching the lobes.
This struggle to cope with the overload is tearing my brain apart. Some of all this just has to remain with you.
The pages I’ll have to take in without the help of an implachip.
With my very own eyes I’ll read the ancient writing. Word by word. Slowly, slowly.
Bless me...
For I have sinned...
That little girl must have had something to remember if she was struggling so hard to forget.
And maybe I do too...
And I don’t even know what.
With my very own soul. I will remember.
Stash, I already know that you’re engaged in a top-secret mission at the Institute’s biotechnological lab to create a new body-part.
I had to break into your REMaker in order to get the password.
That is the most significant part of your future program, and you’re already in the process of screening transplant candidates. At the lowest level, in a tightly sealed container, it is ready – the prototype of the soulorgan.
From the deepest folds of the body... Rising...
Outwards...
There in the dark...
Someone is laughing. I can hear it clearly.
And I hope to put down my own discovery in writing too, just as the ancients used to do. My fingers will grasp the ancient writing implement, a pencil or a pen, and my other hand will hold the paper. Slowly, slowly.
Even without the implachip I can picture your lips twitching. Stash is smirking...
Maybe I am–
She
And you are–
Who?
If only I could understand that sense of humor.
Stash, if I write to you in my own handwriting, will you read it?
A page with words on it, stained with the involuntary drippings of the body. Perspiration, saliva, urine, blood, tears...
I’ve never cried. That was the first genetic repair they did on me. It’s imprinted on my card.
I want so much to cry.
***
I’ll sleep under the open skies.
Closeness
A body touching
A hand stroking – a hand hitting
I’m leaving.
Good-bye Stash.
It hurts so much...
My entire being is torn apart.
There will be light there. There will be darkness.
I pray to be able to tell the difference.
Pray?
What is praying?
If the little girl was laughing, then so can I...
Awakening