Chasing the Idea Rat with My Best Friend, Jaime

by David Phalen

Illustration by Nicholas Jainschigg

Jaime hits me hard on the arm, nods toward the rusted metal grate covering a window well of the soot-blackened brick tenement we’re passing. A thick, pinkish-brown tail, maybe ten inches long, curls out from the grate, lying on the sidewalk like a taunting smile. I step forward, but the tail slides over the pocked, gray cement and through the bars.

“You get a look at it?” I ask.

“Probably just meat,” Jaime says. He pokes the grate with the toe of his sneaker. It moves half an inch, then fells back into place, not nearly as solid as it looks.

We pull together, and the grate comes off with a groan and a snap. It clangs to the sidewalk behind us when we drop it. The window well is a three-foot drop into a muddy, trash-filled puddle. A jagged hole has been gnawed through a corner of the water-stained piece of plywood covering the window. The tail and a slick, gray-furred ass are still on our side of that hole, but only for a second before a six-clawed hind foot pushes the body the rest of the way through.

Jaime beats me in the scramble to get into the well first. We’ve finally found an Idea Rat.

Idea Rats were second only to Pinch as the cause of dropouts from the Inner-Consolidated School System, where I met Jaime. Every kid talked of knowing somebody who knew somebody who once chased an Idea Rat and almost caught it. Weak as it was, that dream offered more than anyone ever got from ICSS.

Jaime showed up at my school in fifth grade planning to drop out, but I never thought I’d leave early. Every year, I was the special project: the kid who made the teachers forget their failures because they thought they were making a difference in at least one life. I’d take whatever tests they wanted to give me, do extra homework assignments. I was never particular about favorite subjects or teaching methods—I just wanted to learn.

Whether I wanted the special treatment or not didn’t matter to the other kids. To them, I was just the teachers’ pet: not trusted, not included in any of the cliques that constantly formed, broke apart, reformed. I always wondered what it would be like to eat lunch at a table with a large group around it, to be in the middle of other kids when they played stickball on the playground. To listen to what they thought of things, find out if my ideas and experiences were the same as theirs, or at least how they were different.

All I ever did was wonder. Until Jaime came to ICSS, I didn’t have any friends.

Jaime pulls the plywood away from the window and passes it up to me. A greenish-white powder of mold dusts my hands before I drop the wood to the sidewalk, next to the grate. Jaime pushes against a glassless window, swinging it up and open. He sticks his head through into the basement beyond. After a few seconds, he pulls back out.

“Hold this up for me,” he says. I drop into the well next to him and take the window. Jaime slides through into darkness.

I look in after him, my eyes taking some time to adjust from the sunlight. The room I finally focus on is large, maybe thirty-five feet square. Two boarded-over doorways are on the wall across from the window. A smaller opening, also boarded shut; is in the middle of the wall to my left. An indeterminate pile in the corner is probably some pinchhead’s bed or final resting place. A crooked circle of broken cinder blocks in the center of the room forms a makeshift fireplace that hasn’t been used in a while. The place has the damp, musty smell pretty much universal to basements.

I drop softly to the concrete floor beneath the window. I untie the durafab bag from around my waist, pull it from my belt loops. Jaime moves quietly toward a cobwebby set of wooden stairs along the right-side wall. He holds his bag ready. As I move behind him, I see the Idea Rat on a step about halfway up. Its snout is raised, testing the air. Satisfied, it grabs the next step up and pulls itself that much nearer a closed door at the top of the stairs.

Jaime takes a deep, silent breath through his mouth. For a second, he stands frozen. Then he’s a blur of motion, diving up the steps, bag open, outstretched. He lands on the Idea Rat’s step so quickly that I’m sure he must have it, but the sound of scampering claws can only mean the impossible has happened; Jaime has missed.

The Idea Rat glides up the last couple of steps and throws itself against the door with a hollow, echoing thud. The door falls slowly into the hallway beyond, hitting the floor with a “Whap!”

The Idea Rat scoots through the opening, barely breaking stride. Jaime and I lose a second staring, but then we re after it again. When I step over the door at the top of the stairs, I notice the knob and all three hinges have been removed. Scrap scavengers are always doing stuff like that.

Most of my teachers were just out of college, putting in time at ICSS because every year they taught there canceled a year of student loans. By comparison, Mr. Rodriguez, my fifth-grade teacher, seemed ancient. His dark hair was grayed almost white in two swoops at the temples, and the deep wrinkles around his eyes had started to spread to the rest of his face, blending with a jagged, C-shaped scar on his cheek. Schoolyard legend said he got that scar in a knife fight with a student. Kids said the janitor eventually carried that student out of the building in a durafab bag.

When Mr. Rodriguez kept Jaime and me after school the Monday following our annual tests, I knew pretty much what was coming. When he turned around a student desk to sit and talk with us, I gave him an encouraging smile. Jaime didn’t.

“We scored your Academic Skills Tests over the weekend,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “You did well, both of you. Your scores are the highest of anyone at ICSS for as long as I’ve been here.”

I sat up straighter in my seat. Jaime rolled his eyes.

“These would be great scores at any school,” said Mr. Rodriguez. “Only a few kids anywhere in the country did better. For someone here to score this well is remarkable. I’m going to send your scores to the AST people and see if they’ll waive the fee on a retake to be included in the national database.” When we didn’t show any response, he explained. “It may help you get to college eventually. To get out of here.”

Mr. Rodriguez fixed his eyes on a spot somewhere just above our heads. He made a gesture with his hand, encompassing the shabbiness of the place. Three-quarters of the windows were boarded up, and most of the ones remaining displayed cracks so elaborate the glass would have Men out long ago if it hadn’t been bulletproof reinforced in the mid-’90s. Ink-stained wood showed through in huge patches on the ancient bulletin boards, their cork long since flaked off. Graying blackboards held impossible-to-erase ghost lessons, long ago taught and forgotten. When Mr. Rodriguez continued, his voice was softer, sadder. “You’ve gotten nothing from this place. These scores could only have come from inside of you.”

He shook his head and stood. “I want to show you something.” We followed him to the front of the room, through a door that led to his office. He nodded at a large table next to his cluttered desk. I think I probably gasped out loud when I saw what was on it.

Covered by a plastic sheet—opaque with time and dust—was a computer. I knew such things existed, of course, were even common in many places: but not in districts like ICSS.

“We got it with the last of our federal money,” said Mr. Rodriguez. “Over ten years ago. We can’t afford repairs, so you’ll have to be careful. You can access any of the public share libraries, but nothing with a user fee.”

The plastic cover gave a dull reflection of the fluorescent ceiling light. Jaime stood beside me, breathing short and sharp through his nose. I imagined he was thinking the same things I was, just realizing that there were answers beyond school. Answers to questions I hadn’t even thought of asking yet.

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.”

I finally chased down what Jaime was looking for—about a dozen subdirectories deep in a forgotten news group of the Internet, an old network that was one of the original attempts to link all the world’s databases. I found financial reports which showed NattCo spent over ten million dollars a year on something listed as “I.R. Retrieval.” I found a memo estimating that one in fifty Idea Rats never made its destination. I found maps showing the local offices of NattCo most likely to be the recipients of information passed through Idea Rats.

“Wait till Rodriguez sees this,” I told Jaime.

I saw the sharp flicker in Jaime’s eyes that was his way of laughing. “You’re a genius,” he told me.

I shook my head and looked away from him.

“I mean it,” he said. “I figured you for just some suck-ass the teachers liked because you did whatever they said.”

My ears and cheeks were hot. Jaime reached over and put a hand on my arm. I shrugged it away.

“I’m saying this wrong,” Jaime told me. “This is a compliment. I never would have found this stuff by myself.”

“So what?”

“So we don’t have to write a paper.”

The statement sounded so strange that I looked at him again. I couldn’t read his expression.

“We can just catch an Idea Rat.”

I felt like an idiot for not understanding sooner. “I did this research for our paper,” I told Jaime.

Jaime spoke quietly. “You think school’s going to get you out of here? When’s the last time you heard of anyone from here going to college? We’re not supposed to get out. That’s why we aren’t included in the national databases. It’s why the government cut off welfare and job-training programs. It’s why they abolished the city cops, so we can do any illegal thing we want. They’re pumping us full of Pinch, waiting for us to die.”

He paused, watching my face, his nostrils wide. “Idea Rats are the only way we have left.” It came out as a plea.

I thought of the broken-down school, of classes that got a few students smaller each year. I thought of the reports and the maps and all the little bits of information we had found about Idea Rats.

The decision was already made.

“Uhhhh-ahhhh,” says the pinch-head, maybe asking what I am doing, maybe trying to describe what he is planning to do to me. I grab onto his hand with both of mine, barely lessening the pain of hair being pulled from my scalp.

Jaime rrashes the door into my back. The force knocks me into the pinchhead and sends him sprawling, still clutching my hair. I land on top of him, and his grip finally loosens as the air is forced from his lungs.

“Under the bed!” I yell at Jaime. I sit up. The pinchhead’s breath bubbles raggedly out through his mouth. He’s not moving.

On his hands and knees, Jaime flicks his bag under the bed to force the Idea Rat out. It backs away. Then, realizing it can’t hide, it climbs the woman’s leg. She shows no reaction as it runs up her torso, one claw leaving a long scratch down her chest to a stretched-out, brown nipple. It crawls over her face to the top of her head. She stares vacantly toward the doorway as the Idea Rat hisses at us.

I lunge for it, but Jaime gets there first. He doesn’t try to scoop the Idea Rat off the woman’s head, as I was planning. Instead, he brings the open end of his bag straight down, capturing the Idea Rat along with most of the woman’s upper body. He pulls the drawstring tight.

The Idea Rat does not go gently. The thrashing lump it makes seems to be all over the bag, and its hissing blends with a high-pitched squeal as loud as the brakes on the single, rundown El that still goes through our neighborhood.

“Hit it! Hit it with something!” Jaime yells. He holds the string with both hands. Even the woman is struggling now. Frustrated, Jaime headbutts the bag twice. The woman’s body falls back onto the bed.

Jaime lets go and grabs a large black bible from a table next to the bed. The lump of the Idea Rat is moving toward the opening of the bag. Jaime swings at it, and there is a loud, sharp squeak as he connects. The bag is suddenly still, but Jaime hits it two or three more times anyway. He waits, bible cocked back over his shoulder in case he sees more movement. The bubbling breath of the man is the only sound in the room.

Jaime hands me the bible and carefully slips the bag off the woman. At a point near her shoulder he comes to a lump that must be the Idea Rat. He takes his time to make sure it stays inside the bag. There is a smear of blood on the woman’s neck, but the worst of it comes when Jaime gets the bag past her face. Her nose seems pasted on sideways. Bloody lips are curled back over a jagged-tooth smile. A long scratch opens so much flesh that her eyeball seems ready to slide out. I stare for a long time, but she doesn’t take a breath.

“She was just a pinchhead.” Jaime drops the bag to the floor between us. I see the lump of the Idea Rat inside, unmoving. Jaime waits for me to open the bag, but I’m afraid I’ll find this has been just another chase that has led to nothing. I kick it toward him.

He holds the bottom of the bag, letting the Idea Rat slide out onto the floor. Its head flops loosely. Its front paws stretch out in a final prayer. Its black eyes don’t look much different than when it was alive.

Jaime picks it up by the tail and holds it out to me. I uncurl its left hind foot, feeling the unnaturally rough skin of its sixth toe.

The birthmark is right where our research said it should be.

The logo is NattCo’s.

I didn’t miss home. Jaime always found better places to live than the room I had shared with brothers and half-brothers and cousins at my grandparent’s apartment. What I missed about my old life was school. I wondered how Mr. Rodriguez had taken our leaving. Sometimes I wondered if he would let me come back.

One of the first places we lived was an attic storage cubicle of a five-story apartment building. Nobody living in that place was dumb enough to store things outside of their own apartment, so we were never bothered by the tenants. Jaime had cracked the combination of an old padlock he found, and we used that to feel safe behind a thin, plywood door.

It was late fall by then, but enough heat seeped up from below that we never really got cold at night. A light was too dangerous, so after dark we’d sit looking at the streets below through the slits of a small vent in the side of the building. The street world at night was a lot different than during the day. When the Sun was up, kids like us ruled. Jaime and I could walk around without being bothered because other kids didn’t know how strong a gang we might belong to. The only adults out during the day had legitimate jobs to go to, so they left us alone.

At night the kids were inside, and adults ruled. As the Sun went down each night, desperate-looking men and women slithered into our line of vision from doorways, sewer drains, or thin air, carrying lanterns and flashlights and bottles and baggies. A constantly shifting party moved like something almost alive below us. People would come together in groups, passing bottles or pills, then drift apart slowly. Fights erupted without warning, generally attracting large crowds, though there were always a few who fled the possibility of stray anger splashing over onto them.

Only occasionally would voices drift up to us—a raucous laugh, a scream: nothing identifiable as human language. Often we heard a shatter of glass; gunshots coughed a couple of times a night. We were far enough above these sounds that they never seemed quite real.

What struck me most each evening was the tremendous energy of all those people. That energy had no sense of direction. I tried to imagine what they wanted, what they got out of the nightly dance they performed while Jaime and I watched. They seemed little more than sub atomic particles bouncing off of each other in completely random, totally unpredictable ways.

“Why do they act like that, you suppose?” I asked Jaime once.

“You serious?” The small amount of light that seeped through the vent wasn’t enough to allow me a good look at Jaime’s expression, and I hadn’t figured out how to read his tone of voice yet back then. Still, I knew him well enough to be on the defensive.

“What do they get out of it, I mean?”

Jaime snorted. “They get nothing. Even an idiot smart guy like you should be able to figure that one out.”

I tried not saying anything for a few seconds, but I couldn’t let him have the last word like that. “That’s what I mean. If they get nothing, why do they act like that?”

“Because that’s how they’re told to act,” said Jaime, as if speaking to the dumbest kid he’d ever met.

I watched a man talking to a woman on the other side of the street. He said something, and the woman raked her nails across his face, then kneed him in the balls. He went down hard, and a couple of people walking by kicked at him as he lay on the ground. The woman walked about ten feet away and started talking to another man. “Nobody tells them to act that way,” I said.

“When everybody’s telling you something, nobody has to tell you anything,” Jaime said, as if that made any sense at all.

With the Idea Rat in his durafab bag, Jaime leads us past crumbling tenements, boarded-over store fronts, graffitied brick and concrete walls. We pass wide-eyed derelicts who would kill us simply for the meat we carry, never knowing or caring it was worth a lot more than a meal. Jaime has a knack for finding the least-crowded streets, the safest alleys. I follow him, so confident in his ability that I don’t even pay attention to our route.

Soon, the people we pass look less desperate. The streets we walk along start to fill with traffic—plastic electric cars, bright and sleek compared to the rusting hulks that litter the curbs in our part of the city. A tunnel leads us beneath a maglev track, its trains rushing silently overhead. The buildings are taller, cleaner. They contain entire walls of unbroken glass.

We stop in front of the NattCo Building, squinting into the sun glinting off its mirrored windows. A huge revolving door gobbles in and spits out people who all look self-consciously busy, people with someplace to be. I don’t want to move any closer, can’t imagine myself as one of these purposeful people. I take a step or two back, ready to turn and run, feeling more like a little kid than I’ve ever felt in my life.

Jaime s hand on my elbow stops me. I follow weakly as he leads us toward the building, toward those huge spinning doors that will deposit us inside.

“What will it be like, do you think? If we catch one?” I asked Jaime a few months after we left school. I was gnawing the last bit of meat from the thigh of what we were eating. I was trying to make it last, delaying with great anticipation the moment when I would snap the bone and suck delicious marrow for dessert.

“We’ll be rich,” said Jaime.

“How rich?”

He paused a long time, and I thought he was probably thinking up imaginary scenarios on how we’d spend all the money some company would give us for the Idea Rat we were still sure we’d grab any day. Instead, when he answered, it was short. “Too rich to even think about this place anymore.”

I laughed. “Like we could forget all this.”

“Be surprised what you can forget when you’ve got enough money.”

“You’d know.”

He threw his bone at me and some sharp edge scraped my cheek. He got up and walked to the other side of the room.

“It was a joke,” I said, brushing my fingers over my face. I licked off the smear of blood they came away with.

“Yeah,” he said. “Funny.”

I finished eating in a shadow of silence. The marrow didn’t taste as good as I thought it would.

“I’d go back to school,” I said finally, deciding the silence was worse than whatever ridicule Jaime might throw at me.

“Crazy,” he said, his heart not really in it.

“I mean a good school,” I added quickly. “Or I’d give a bunch of money to make ICSS good, then go back there.”

He shook his head. “Waste it on a bunch of junior pinchheads. Let some scarface boss you around.”

“Why don’t you tell me what you’d do, then?”

“I told you,” he said. “I’d do whatever I wanted to.”

Inside the NattCo building, Jaime pulls me toward a large, curved counter with a dozen receptionists, each sitting behind a computer monitor. Most of them are talking to people, but Jaime walks up to one who isn’t busy and puts the bag with the Idea Rat on the counter.

“We’ve got business with I.R. Retrieval,” he says.

The receptionist frowns. She asks our names and punches them on the keyboard in front of her. She looks at her screen, then back at us. Smiling now, she indicates a yellow line of tiles set into the floor. We follow them down several hallways to a small lobby with a single desk. A man behind the desk talks into a microphone on a rod curving from his ear to his mouth.

Jaime holds the bag conspicuously. “We’ve got business.”

“Check in, please.” The man pushes a button, and a small square in the wall next to us opens. The lighted indent of a handprint is inside the square. Jaime looks at the man, then puts his hand over the print. The light fades, and Jaime quicldy pulls away. He frowns, looking at his fingertips. He opens and closes his hand a couple of times, then shrugs at me.

I put my hand in the print. As the light goes down, I feel a sensation like cool, sharp steel scraping just below my fingernails. I pull my hand out and take a look. A thin, pink line near the first knuckle of each finger is already starting to fade. The fingers tingle, slightly numb until I wiggle them.

“Have a seat.” The man motions toward a small reception area. Jaime and I sit in huge, cushioned chairs that barely sink under our weight. I listen to the buzz of activity moving through the building until the receptionist looks over at us. “That hallway,” he says, pointing to an opening behind his desk. “First door on the right.”

The door is open, and we enter a room with a large, red table. At the far end of the table, a man with skin even darker than mine is smiling at us.

“Come in, men. Sit down.” His voice is as smooth and featureless as a wet street. “My name is Calvin Natt.”

“They don’t exist,” I said to Jaime one night about six months after we left school. We were lying in the dark again, this time in a basement room Jaime had found for us when the attic got too cold. The place always felt too closed-in for me, too dark. I went to sleep there feeling like I was in a coffin, wondering if I would wake up in the morning. Most nights I baited Jaime into conversation to buy an extra few minutes of wakefulness.

“Stop talking crap,” he said.

“It’s a pinchhead’s daydream,” I told him. “Who’s ever caught one?”

In the small room, Jaime’s voice was like a whisper in my ear. “I was six when my mother left me,” he said. Then he was quiet. I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t know what to say. He had never mentioned his mother to me.

“When she put me to bed at night,” he continued after a while, “she used to sing that song about buying a mockingbird. You know the one I mean?”

“Yeah.” Most of the sound got stuck in my throat.

“She used to carry for dealers, even though she hated pinchheads, despised them for not having control over something as basic as their own lives. She did anything to keep us fed, but she was always home with me at night. She used to call me her special night-time man.

“Usually, she came home with something canned. Sometimes she’d sucker someone too far gone out of a cut of fresh meat. I don’t remember ever being hungry while she was still around. One day, she dumped her bag, and a rat fell out on the floor. She had gotten it as payment from the pinchhead she delivered to. She was supposed to take it back to the dealer, but she brought it home for me instead.

“I had never seen a whole rat like that, before it was butchered. I started to cry, but my mother laughed and hugged me. She let me sit on her lap and touch it. Its fur was soft, oily; the skin on its tail and legs felt like a sidewalk.

“When I asked my mother about the funny mark on its foot, she started to shake. She counted toes. She put the rat back in her bag and got ready to leave again. She told me to be good while she was gone. Said she might be late, so I should put myself to bed that night. She kept apologizing for that, promising that when she came back for me our lives would be wonderful.”

The room was quiet again. The blackness reminded me of Jaime’s eyes. I heard the muffled sound of a bottle breaking somewhere above us.

“I stayed up as long as I could, but she didn’t come back. Next morning, I went to a neighbor who sometimes looked after me. She let me spend a few days; then she pawned me off on a friend of hers. I got passed around like that for a couple of months, until I realized I didn’t need them. I could find better food and better places to stay on my own. After that, I stayed alone. I tried a different school every year, figuring I’d eventually find one that could make me smart enough to come up with a plan.”

In the silence that followed, I waited for Jaime to say more, but I guess he figured I knew the rest of the story. He let me fill in the gaps in that dark coffin of a room.

Jaime puts the bag on the table and sits in a large, blue chair across from Calvin Natt. I sit down, too. Calvin Natt hasn’t stopped smiling since we walked through the door.

“We’ve got something you might want back,” says Jaime.

Calvin Natt raises an eyebrow, nods at the bag. “You’ve found an Idea Rat?”

“Yes, sir,” I tell him.

“Congratulations.” Natt says this as if mildly amused.

“We came to work a deal,” says Jaime.

Calvin Natt’s happy eyes stay on me. “What do you suppose one of those things is worth?”

“We want more than money,” Jaime says.

“I didn’t offer any money.”

I look at Jaime, wondering what he’s going to say next. He licks his lips with a slow, dry tongue and gives Calvin Natt a little smile of his own. Smiling is not something Jaime has practiced often. “Five years ago, a woman came in here.”

“Your mother,” says smiling Calvin Natt. “She’ll be happy to see you.”

Calvin Natt talks as he leads us through the endless expanse of building to Jaime’s mother.

“When we picked up that you were checking out Idea Rats on various network sources,” he tells us, “we sent someone to find your test scores. Outstanding. Unfortunately, by the time we got there, you were already gone. I’ve been trying to get the testing companies to waive the database fees for places like ICSS for years. That you two could exist right under our noses is just more proof that I’m right.”

I glance over at Jaime. He looks small in the huge, colorless corridors. The bag containing the Idea Rat swings at his thigh.

“Forget your research, by the way,” says Calvin Natt. “Forget what you think you know about me, even. Who I am depends on your domain extension. For city kids, I’m from the streets. In the suburbs, I’m a misunderstood genius runaway. Near the borders, I’m an illegal who made it good.”

“You never caught an Idea Rat?” I ask him.

Calvin Natt smiles and shakes his head. “Nobody catches an Idea Rat.”

“We did,” Jaime says. He clutches his durafab bag for reassurance. “My mom had one.”

“You caught a Bait Rat, genetically programmed as a sort of final test for potential candidates. Your mother was a fortunate accident. We were going for a dealer whose street-smart reputation intrigued us. I was more surprised than anyone when her scan turned up positive.”

We reach the end of the corridor, and Calvin Natt puts a security card into a slot. An elevator door opens and we walk inside. Calvin Natt puts his card into another slot and punches a button. A feeling of extra weight tells me we’re going up.

“The privatization of schools was supposed to make education more competitive, and thus more effective,” Calvin Natt continues. “It didn’t. The abolition of patent protection was misguidedly proposed as a way to achieve wider creativity. It wasn’t. We’re falling behind the world because we’ve stopped coming up with the breakthroughs, ideas that take a science or an industry ahead a couple of generations in one step. Ideas that come from geniuses. I.R.’s are NattCo’s unique solution to the genius problem.”

The elevator stops and the door opens into a small room. The wall across from us has another door, with a sign proclaiming “TOP SF.CURITY ACCESS ONLY!” in large, red letters. Calvin Natt puts his card in a slot and the door opens into a nondescript white corridor. The door closes behind us with a noise like air escaping from a tire.

“Twenty years ago, I was working for another company—mapping the human genome—when I found a unique sequence. Our map was effectively complete by that point. This sequence hadn ’t shown up in any of the millions already in Genbank, so I figured it was superfluous. Most of the DNA molecule is. Turns out this little sequence is transcribed just like a real gene, though we still don’t know how. On a lark, I did a run on some Stephen Hawking tissue and found the same sequence in the same spot. Just for fun, I ran a check through my famous people files. Einstein matched. Lenin came up negative. Watson was negative; Crick positive. Go figure.”

Calvin Natt opens a heavy door and we walk into a large laboratory. A woman in a pale blue lab coat is pulling a needle from the thigh of a man sitting in a metal chair. The man grimaces as the needle comes out.

“How’s it going, Mary?” Calvin Natt asks. “Bill?”

“Fine, Mr. Natt.” The woman takes the syringe over to a counter, turning her back to us. The man shrugs, grunting in a way that could mean anything.

“Idea Rats are created using a particular genius sponsor, like Bill,” Calvin Natt continues. “Mary isolates sequences and sends them down to embryology, where they will be spliced into the chromosomes of our Experience Animals. Are they doing hawks this week, Mary?”

“Dolphins, I think,” she says without turning from her work.

“We’ve got high hopes for dolphins,” Calvin Natt says as he leads us from the lab. “Most of the world is under water, after all.”

He leads us down the empty corridor. “When I first isolated the genius sequence, I tested thousands of people, myself included. I didn’t find a single match. I made a standard request for more funding to research the matter further. To my surprise, the company approved a study including all employees. It turned up one match, a janitor with a tested IQ at the lower end of average. I went to the chemical-psychology division, to a doctor working on the genius problem from a different angle. She could get her subjects to a certain level, but nobody ever went beyond a clear-cut upper limit. Within six months of running that janitor through her program, though, he came up with the groundwork for the entire I.R. concept.”

We go through another door, into a room with a large window overlooking another room. In that room are a half a dozen desks. At each desk, a person sits in front of a monitor while text and diagrams flash by on the screen. The people watch with nearly frantic expressions on their faces, as if desperate to take in everything they see.

“Despite popular misconceptions, we first developed Pinch as a means to speed the learning process of our genius candidates,” Calvin Natt tells us. “It was one of our competitors that realized the dubious potential of selling it on the streets.”

I try to identify something in the blur of images on one of the screens, but it’s impossible. “With proper dosage, Pinch can enhance learning times by over 200 percent,” says Calvin Natt. “More than anything, genius is the ability to make connections between seemingly unrelated things. The wider variety of knowledge a person has, the better the chance that some connection will be made, given the proper stimulus.”

We leave the observation room through a different door, walking into a hallway with plants and paintings and other superficial decorator touches. The wooden doors in this hallway are less widely spaced.

“The nature of genius is to make unpredictable connections. We can’t just feed a set routine of stimuli to someone with the genius gene and hope he comes up with something new. Who knows what insight will finally kick a genius over into a breakthrough discovery? Our experience animals let us safely expose our geniuses to as many different stimuli as possible. Here we are.”

We stop at a door that looks like every other we’ve passed. Calvin Natt knocks, then puts his card into a slot. The room we enter is twice as large as any place I’ve ever lived, and doors on each of the walls tell me there are other rooms beyond this one. The carpet pushes back on my feet as I walk.

Sitting in a chair at the center of the room is a small woman with short-cropped dark hair. Her features are sharp, nearly rodent-like. She stares straight at us, and I notice her eyes, so dark they seem black, with a tiny glint of hidden intelligence not quite held back. Suddenly she jerks, her expression one of strange, detached terror. She moves a little, and I see the wires hanging from the back of her head.

“She’s running the experiences of her latest E.A.” Calvin Natt smiles at her proudly. “She’ll be through in a couple of minutes.”

Jaime stands frozen. “What have you done to her?”

“You should be very proud,” says Calvin Natt. “In the time she’s been with us, she’s come up with five genius breakthroughs, not including two symphonies which some music critics are calling the wave of the future. Her spent-fuel disposal program may be effective enough to get a steady energy supply back to the inner cities. With proper funding, her suggestions for the maglev system will mean a huge expansion in public transportation options.”

“What are the wires?” Jaime has spent years practicing his self-control. So little anger seeps into his voice that Calvin Natt doesn’t even notice.

“When an E.A. returns, all of its experiences are scanned. These impressions are encoded into software that can be transferred directly into the mind of the genius whose gene was originally used in the creation of that particular E.A. All of the experiences of the E.A. effectively become the experiences of the genius.”

I look at Jaime’s mother. She squirms in her chair and lets out a small squeak.

“Why?” I ask Calvin Natt.

He looks surprised at the question. “Through this process, one woman has produced more breakthroughs in five years than all of humanity might have given us in a century. How can anyone who has lived where you have doubt the need for breakthroughs right now?”

Jaime’s mother makes a loud, high-pitched noise, like a baby either crying or laughing. She reaches up and pulls the wires from her head with a grimace. Then she blinks a couple of times and notices us.

“We finally found him,” Calvin Natt tells her.

She looks at Jaime with eyes dull as a rat’s. the eyes open wide and her mouth moves soundlessly as she tries to say something. “Jaime?” she finally croaks out.

Whatever has kept Jaime stuck in place lets him go. He runs to her chair, and her thin arms wrap around him. “My night-time man,” she says. “Oh, my special night-time man.”

Calvin Natt smiles proudly at the reunion. We watch the two of them for a few seconds, then he motions me toward the door.

“We look forward to having you here,” he tells me in the hallway.

“What?”

“The genius gene is incredibly rare. So far we’ve discovered it in only a couple of dozen people. Of course, our hands are tied by the Barker Act. Maybe you’ll come up with the breakthrough that will let us identify more people like you without further risk of public exposure.”

I remember the tingling in my fingers when my hand was on the sensor. I look down, but the pink lines have disappeared.

“It will take about six months before the first Experience Animals with your genetic imprint can be grown and sent out,” Calvin Natt says. “In the meantime, we need to catch you up on your schoolwork’’ He frowns, shaking his head. “If districts like ICSS don’t validate a need for the work we’re doing here, I don’t know what does.”

I nod my head but it doesn’t mean anything. I’ve caught up with the thing I was chasing, only to find I don’t really know what it is.

Jaime comes out of his mother’s room. His eyes have a red-rimmed, after-crying look, but his voice is steady. He still holds the bag containing the Idea Rat, gripped so tightly his fingers are white.

“What happens now?” he asks.

Calvin Natt smiles, of course. “Now, you’re part of our team.”

Jaime stands next to me, his shoulder touching mine. “We need to get our things,” he says. “There’s some stuff hidden in a place we’ve got booby-trapped.”

“We have what you need here.” Calvin Natt looks at us like a man who has been through this conversation many times before.

Jaime looks at me. “What if we say no?” I tense a little, seeing now how it’s going to be.

Calvin Natt gives Jaime a puzzled look. “What do you have to go back to?”

Then Jaime does something I’ve never seen him do before. He releases a long breath and lets his shoulders slouch forward in defeat. “Maybe you should take us where we’re going, then.”

Calvin Natt smiles again and turns to lead us down the hallway. Jaime swings his bag, connecting hard at the wide place between Calvin Natt’s shoulder blades. Natt falls forward, knees hitting first, upper body following. The dull thump his face makes as it connects with the floor and the muffled whoof of air escaping his lungs are the only sounds that come from him.

Jaime strikes Natt’s body again, so hard that a hole pops open in his bag. At the third blow, the stiff, broken Idea Rat comes flying out. Jaime stands over Calvin Natt, breathing hard. When he finally looks up at me, his face is expressionless.

“You coming?” he asks me.

I imagine Bill’s grimace, the dazed expression of the people in front of their monitors, the not-quite-human squeal that came from Jaime’s mother.

Calvin Natt rolls over just enough for Jaime to take his security card. He groans softly as I jump over him and follow Jaime.

Natt’s card in hand, Jaime leads us through a maze of hallways that all look alike to me. When we leave the Top Security area, we start to pass more and more people. A few give us strange looks, but nobody tries to stop us. They are busy going about their own jobs.

We are on the ground floor when the alarm goes off. As we run past the small reception area, the man behind the desk stands and says something into his microphone. By the time we have followed the yellow tiles back to the main lobby, NattCo policemen are moving into place. A few dozen people who have no idea what’s going on help to slow down the cops, but there’s only one way out, so all of the uniforms are moving toward the revolving door.

One cop has already taken up a position in front of the door. His hand on the holster holding his stun gun, he stands wide-legged, confident. I move to the left, while Jaime drifts slightly right, but the cop holds his position, knowing he needs to slow us for only a couple of seconds to allow the others to arrive in time to take us.

Jaime slows down, trying to figure an angle that doesn’t exist. My first instinct is to do the same, but in less than the time it takes me to put one foot down and lift the other, what I have to do comes to me. It is a moment that reminds me of difficult test questions back in school, when a sudden answer would pop into my head. Rarely even close to an answer I expected, its correctness was always so apparent that I never hesitated to follow my instincts and write it down.

I bolt ahead of Jaime, straight for the cop. He pulls out his stun gun to keep me from getting around him, but he has misread my intentions. I run into him as hard as I can. Streaks of light flash inside my head as I hit him. I wrap my arms and legs around him as we fall. He struggles to get up, but I’m dead weight and he has no leverage.

Jaime runs past, through the revolving doors, back into the city. A few cops follow half-heartedly, knowing they’re already too late. He will lose himself again in the dance of the people he despises, the losers and castoffs without hope that their lives might ever get better.

As the cop struggles beneath me, I think of those people. Surely, there must be some breakthrough that can help them. Some moment of unexpected insight from someone, somewhere, that will change things for them.

I wonder what it will feel like as some Idea Rat’s experiences seep into my mind. I hope it’s like those times with the difficult test questions. I would chase the solution half a dozen different ways. Then, sometimes even after I had given up and gone on to another question, the answer would be there, full-blown and obvious in my head. I used to love those moments, that feeling that something had crawled out from a place hidden inside of me.

Maybe chasing the Idea Rat has led me to a life full of such moments.

Content

Chasing the Idea Rat with My Best Friend, Jaime
by David Phalen