Travis ran down the
corridor, speed taking precedence before comfort. He knew the area well, so the
multiple branches and rooms didn’t confuse him. Left... right... straight...
second from the left... and then, there it was. He ran into the room and grabbed
the cheese. The race was over. He was pretty sure that he’d just gotten a new
record. Record or no, he felt really good about that run.

As a scientist picked him
up and carried him back to his cage, he enjoyed the aerial view of the maze,
and watched another human put Greg in the starting spot. Once back in his cage,
Travis ran in his wheel for a while, then laid down to wait for the humans to
put the clipboard with their results out for all to see. They ran the maze
every week, and they all vied for the fastest times. Though Garahm had
dominated the early runs, the others had started to catch up. Travis had been
training hard, and now that he almost remembered the exact path, he had high
hopes for victory.

Between the tests, and the
maze, his life was pretty full. The injections hurt, but he could still
remember having to scrounge for food to survive; he thought it was a decent
tradeoff. It’s nice to just be able to lounge about all day. With that
exercise wheel, we don’t even have to get weak to do it!

A few hours later, a man
placed the clipboard in view. Every rat knew their number by comparing the tag
on their cage with the clipboard; the clipboard always listed them with the
fastest on top, and the slowest on bottom. Looking at the top and seeing the
familiar number of Greg, Travis sighed and looked downward until he saw himself
in the third spot, behind a number he didn’t know.

“Ha! Got you again,
slowpoke!” Greg’s voice floated up from the cage next to him. “You know what
that means: I’m smarter than you are!”

“Hmph, that’s only this
week! I’ll get you next time!”

- = + = -

Dr. Shultz looked at their
progress so far, hoping that this batch would be better than the first one. His
job was to test various drugs, monitor the results, and send them back to the
lab for tweaking until they were good enough. He didn’t normally work on
development personally, but he did put a lot of work into Group B’s chemical:
it was supposed to increase mental capacity, and was intended to help people
with Down Syndrome. They should have been able to create human-norm
intelligence, which couldn’t be described any other way than a miracle. Dr.
Shultz had been working on it for several years, trying to find a cure for his
son, and this was the closest he’d come yet.

The drug worked in spurts;
areas of small improvement, followed by a huge leap, then another slow period.
It wasn’t a flat improvement, but instead more of a boost to a certain level
regardless of starting point. They’d have to make rats with human-norm
intelligence to help the mentally handicapped. The first trial had hit a
plateau at too low a level to be useful, but the lab had been unable to
determine why the serum hadn’t worked. They had gotten some new testing
equipment that they hoped would find the fault in the serum, and the newest
batch was doing fine. Just like the first time. If the rest held true to the
pilot, they were to hit the next leap very soon. He would be able to tell,
theoretically, by the sudden dip in maze times as they collectively stopped
caring.

- = + = -

“Just because you have the
fastest time doesn’t mean you’re smarter than I am, Travis.”

“That’s not what you said
last week!” It was pretty childish, Travis thought, that Greg was claiming maze
times didn’t matter now that Travis had finally won.

“Look, everyone knows the
maze by now, right? Well, that was the intelligence part. Now it just comes
down to who runs fastest. So you’re faster than me, but not smarter.” Now
that he mentions it, it seems so obvious... God, I do feel stupid.

“You don’t have any
evidence to back that up. Not the me faster thing, the your brain better
thing.”

“Ook! You is right!”

“Bah, you know what I
mean.”

“Exactly, and you don’t; that’s
why I’m smarter than you.” Greg’s laughing took the sting out, but Travis got
angry anyway. Not so much angry at Greg, but at himself. He took his
frustrations out on the newspaper coating his floor, ripping it into little
pieces just to break something. That’s when he noticed that the wall behind the
newspaper wasn’t smooth like the rest; one section had some scratches.

“Hullo, wuzzat? I’ve got
some scratched metal on the back of my cage.”

“Well, don’t cut yourself.
I’m going to sleep now.”

“’Night.” It was a little
strange, since those scratches were pretty small and below the newspaper level.
Not strange enough to lose sleep over, though, so Travis followed Greg’s
example.

Over the course of the
next week, Travis experienced a new sensation: boredom. There was depressingly
little to do in the cages. At first, he attributed it to the removal of the
maze as motivation, but that didn’t last long. While his boredom was going up,
so was his comprehension; he especially remembered one dull afternoon, watching
a scientist make coffee. He had seen it a million times before, and thought it
silly, but now he understood.

The brown powder got
dissolved in the water through the machine, and it was enclosed to keep it hot.
The slow dripping was probably to let more of the brown stuff into the water;
kind of like how open puddles tasted better than gutter dribblings, but
reversed. It seemed pretty obvious now, but the important thing was that a
month ago it would have been totally beyond him. The answer, thanks to his
newfound intelligence, was also obvious: normal rats didn’t just ‘get smarter’.
The difference between them and street rats was the injections, so the
injections were making them smarter.

They had started new
lessons recently; the scientists were showing them flash cards with black lines
under them, and saying things at the same time. Garahm had claimed that they
were being taught to read, but Travis would believe it when he learnt it. It
just didn’t make sense... why would a human teach a rat anything? They’d
have nothing to gain by it.

Two weeks later, he
believed it. It was relatively slow going, but he could now read a pretty good
assortment of words. That fact was why a meeting was happening tonight. The
scratches were, as might have been guessed, text. “They must not know.”

The cages were ridiculously
easy to escape from. Words on the handle described how to open it; they could
now come and go as they pleased, but so far they had never done so in front of
the scientists. In a few long, boring hours, the last lights were turned off
and the rats began to emerge from their cages. They clustered in a section of
floor out of view from the door, just in case.

“What does it mean?” A rat
Travis didn’t know asked the question that was on the minds of those who didn’t
think very much. To him, it was obvious. Garahm apparently agreed.

“We are not the first rats
to be held in these cages. The previous group must have written that message.
We’ve all heard the scientists talk of how the first set was a failure;
obviously, this was not so. For their own reasons, they chose to hide their
development from the humans.”

“Why all the hatred? I
know I’d leap at any chance for revenge, but I wouldn’t kill myself to do it.”
Travis shared Greg’s curiosity.

For his answer, Garahm
pointed at a group of cages over on the opposite wall. While most of the group
strolled over for a look, Garahm stayed behind. He apparently thought that
whatever was inside spoke well enough for itself. When the rats climbed the
table to see the cages, they were forced to agree. They saw a series of rats
like themselves, but in cages labeled ‘remote control’.

Notes and diagrams
illustrated the principle. Using a computer, an operator could literally steer
the rat by overriding his or her normal decision making process by stimulating
parts of the brain. Other similar experiments were also referenced... one
particularly disturbing photo showed a rat with her skull held open and
something red and lumpy poking out.

They slowly returned to
the meeting site, in quiet contemplation. For a long while, nobody said
anything; the only ones who hadn’t gone to look were the ones who’d seen it
already.

Finally, Travis broke the
silence. “I don’t see how killing ourselves through inaction would help them...
The experiments are totally unrelated.”

“We have to do something!
That’s horrible! It’s bad enough they put us in cages, but making us into
puppets?!”

“But it would mean our
deaths! They terminate unsuccessful specimens!”

“Maybe, if ours is unsuccessful,
their funding will be cut and they’ll be forced to abandon it...?”

The ‘discussion’ quickly
degenerated into a confused rabble, and nobody tried to stop it. If the humans
learned that their drug really did increase anyone’s intelligence, they’d use
it on themselves and nullify any chance a fledgling rat society would have. If
the rats hid their development, they would eventually be killed, but humanity
would be hampered. It would be a completely spiteful act, but then again,
trying to craft a free culture would be a futile one.

Eventually, the crowd
dispersed and the rats returned to their cages. Each one had to turn the
situation over in his mind... It wasn’t something you could just decide right
away. On one paw, a doomed future. On the other, revenge and no future at all.
Would spitefully thwarting the humans’ experiment only serve to drag them down
to the humans’ level? Or would escaping the NIMH be just as bad, because it had
the possibility of encouraging the heinous experiments being conducted there?
Would dying be a noble sacrifice? Or would true martyrdom be found in escape,
if only so that the scientists didn’t put more rats where they themselves were
now?

Travis had a headache, so
he decided to sleep on it. Like most of the other rats, it didn’t work out so
well for him: he got little sleep that night. What sleep he did catch was
because, at around three in the morning, he reached a decision. For all they
knew, the humans might never give up. Putting off the decision for another
group of rats was a meaningless and sadistic gesture.

Later that night, the rats
gathered to make their decision. Garahm, as always, was first to speak. “After
much thought, I believe that there is but one choice. We must not let the
earlier test groups’ sacrifices be in vain. We must not let humanity advance
their already massive lead to an insurmountable level. We must not escape the
NIMH.”

Oddly, Travis’ heart did
not make a hole when it fell straight down and through the floor below him.

Looking around, he only
felt worse. In a short time, Garahm had become the father figure for nearly
every rat in the experiment. As such, all Travis saw were nods and stoic faces.
Seeing that no one else would take up his cause for him, he decided to speak up
for himself. “To what end? If we die here, another group will be taken from
their homes. Another batch will suffer as we’ve suffered. And the cycle will
continue unbroken, until someone else does what we lacked the courage to. Let’s
break the cycle. Let’s be the ones who stand up and do something, instead of
taking the easy way out.”

From behind him, Greg
spoke out. “The easy way out? Escape is the easy way out. And the coward’s.
Don’t you see? These things,” Greg swung his arm around, “take time and energy.
Eventually, they will give up. Eventually. If we escape, we show them that
their formula works. We kill every rat on the face of the earth who isn’t
already enslaved by some of those unholy machines.”

The debate continued as
such. For every logical argument Travis raised, someone else managed to raise a
counter. Travis bowed to the will of the group, and it was decided. They would
stay here and die, no more than ordinary rats in cages. Over the next week, the
decision weighed on Travis’ mind more and more. He couldn’t help but picture
what it would be like for the next group, ripped from their homes and taken to
this horrible prison.

Then he saw a way out.

“What are you doing,
Travis?” Greg hissed from his cage when he spotted Travis climbing down.

“If I escape, you’ll have
no choice but to come. They will know as soon as one gets out, so you all will
have to follow or die so meaninglessly that even you will have to admit it!”
Travis scurried over to the heating grate, and began to remove the screws.

“I thought you might try
something like this.” Garahm stepped out from under the desk, accompanied by
two very large rats. Travis had looked around carefully before leaving, so
Garahm had to have been down there for a long time. “Travis, we are doing the
right thing. The only thing. Would you make the deaths of our predecessors
meaningless with your own selfish desire for unnatural life?”

Travis spat at the ground
in front of Garahm. “Their deaths were already meaningless, made so when they
chose to die without a fight.”

“Travis... we are
fighting. By denying them the results of the experiment, we are winning a major
battle. I’m sorry you can’t see that.” Travis didn’t try to run as Garahm’s
companions flanked and seized him. It was a small lab, and they would have caught
him eventually.

“So what? So you put me
back in my cage? I’ll just escape again. You have to sleep sometime. I will get
out. I will not have all of us die in this filthy place!”

Garahm shook his head
sadly. “No, you won’t.” He had Travis dragged over to an unplugged power cord.
The right rat forced his mouth open as the left stuffed the cable inside, and
Garahm shoved down on his skull until his teeth met metal. A string tied around
his head locked him in place as Garahm himself plugged in the cable. Death was
quick and painless, and all the scientists saw was a dead rat, presumably
escaped through an aide’s carelessness.

- = + = -

“Back
to the drawing board, eh Shultz?”

The
head scientist tapped his pen against the clipboard. “We didn’t change anything
last time. Why should we this time? It’s hopeless. Hopeless!” Dr. Shultz threw
the clipboard on the ground. “I can’t see the problem. Scratch that, there is
no problem! My formula is perfect!” He ran a hand through his thinning hair,
then sighed and picked the clipboard up. “The order calls for three tests, and
we’ll give them three, no matter how futile. We’ve already improved the formula
to the best of our skill.”

The
aide nodded. “Hey, we’ll be pretty far under budget without another lab phase.
Want to replace some of this equipment? Most of it’s getting pretty ratty.”
Shultz smacked him with the clipboard. “Hey! Just trying to cheer you up.”

“However
you state it, fact is fact. Replace all of the equipment... maze, feeding
dishes, cages, everything. May as well spend what the government deigned to
grant us.”

Image sources:

“remoterat.jpg” (left) image from Wire Heading

“roborat.jpg” (center) image from National
Geographic

“ratbot.jpg” (right) image from MSNBC