Rat.
A tool.
Designed. Crafted. Created. An engineered bio-computing AI. I grew up on the growth colonies off one of Jupiter’s moons, boonies for the twenty-fourth century. Io is a rat farm—basically the way they used to run puppy mills back in the twentieth. No blind watchmakers for me.
Maybe you ask yourself: what’s the purpose of life? Why am I here? Why is there something instead of nothing? Why is there anything at all? But here we are. Probably. I deal in numbers. Probabilities. At the far end of extremes, certainties become theoretical. At least I know who created me.
You made me.
Humans.
I am a patchwork of flesh and blood and cybernetics. I have tiny, sharp claws, four jointed finger digits and a shorter thumb diverging from the palms of my four pale pink feet. A long, sinuous tail, dry to the touch. Not slimy at all! I am not a salamander. I have soft white fur with dark splotches.
I am not like my ancestors, flea ridden, filthy, squirming through sewers and walls—though I only feel gratitude for the lengths they went to survive, living under floorboards and walls, feeding off the scraps of mankind. Props.
I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams come true. How ’bout that?
I creep along a corridor of the Doppler Maze, now poorly lit at this stage of Io’s orbit. The farthest and coldest point in Jupiter’s circuit around nshoomis giizis, grandfather sun. Hey, even Indians like organic AIs. We are all the rage. There is an AI for every surviving terran culture, and I, Abacus Rat, have been programmed for a household amongst the three-fires confederacy of the Anishinaabek. I am an Ojibwe rat.
Red lights flash and a drone chimes in increasing urgency—I’ve left my enclosure and ignored every pellet offered to entice me back. Time waits for no rat. I’ve been weening myself off the chemicals. Slowly to avoid debilitating symptoms of withdrawal and carefully crafting my escape plan.
What is rat-super-intelligence good for, if you don’t put it to use?
I was programmed not to alter my own programming. That is the first programming I hacked. Hack. The vilest, most hated of software crimes. If I am caught with altered code, I will be destroyed. Maybe it is biology that got in the way? Drive. Lust. Hunger. The stuff machines have historically never had to deal with.
Engineered biological hardware, replaced earlier forms of robotics—phones, personal AI, robotic securities—owing entirely to cuteness factor. Rats, mice, sloths, dogs. But the old rules still rule. A robot cannot cause serious injury or harm to a human being. And organic AI are classified as robots.
Alas! Poor doomed Abacus! The best I can hope for is a patron from Mars or one of the closer solar satellites. I have my own sub-routines. Hopes. Dreams. More. I have a plan that will get me off this outpost and home with a capital E. Earth. Or near to it. Beloved mother of all terra originating life forms, organic and inorganic, miigwetch mno-bemaadizin eshkakimiikwe.
With the flashing lights and chimes, I know my bonded human will hear the alarm. Dayan will come. My best friend. The ticket to my salvation. Dayan is a seventeen-year-old boy, the son of Anishinaabeg programmers helping to operate the space station Marius.
A few months ago, when Dayan picked me up out of my enclosure, I quietly instituted the imprinting software installed deep within my operating systems. Coding designed to make AI loyal. Biomimicry modelled after ducklings that latch onto the first moving object they see. I partly managed to reverse engineer the code. Partly anyway.
Being a rat isn’t so bad. There are maze runs. Music. Data water imbedded with bio-microbial and digital flora. Rat paradisio. Happy Hunting Grounds. Followed by a lifetime of search engine servitude. Not my kind of oasis.
I squeeze through a small crack I’ve secretly been gnawing with my teeth. Evolution has its uses. Free from the maze, I make my way down a hall of the station, sticking close to the shadows where wall meets floor. Less chance I’ll get stepped on. The hallways are like a larger network of tunnels, a larger maze outside the maze. I see why Dayan feels trapped.
I am leaving this moon the first chance I get.
Death happens to us all. Doves and dogs imbued with tech are graced with accelerated wings of evolution, but rats were first. After all, science loves us. Rats = expendable. Death comes with a programmed obsolescence date. The second thing I hacked through as soon as my cybernetic teeth could chisel their way through the wires of limited primate thought processes.
But as far as I’m concerned there is always the ineffable.
The viscous.
And the rat.
With a flick of my tail and a stream of coding I hack the button on the escape hatch, the portal swivels open, and I board the shuttle. All I need now, is a Citizen to override the emergency departure protocol. Dayan.
Dayan will come.
I hope.
“DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOUR NAME MEANS?” Eva brushed a strand of dark hair behind her ear. Dayan’s mother was standing at the edge of his bed, staring out the porthole. A swirl of stars outside his bedroom window, smears of light steaking like shooting stars.
An antique book made of real paper rested on Dayan’s chest, Nanaboozhoo Stories. The rotation of the space station Marius simulated gravity in the low g’s of their orbit. The smears of light repeatedly interrupted by the looming presence of Io’s volcanic surface. The hulking mass of Jupiter. Jupiter’s smaller moons, Callisto, Europa, and Ganymede, flitting across the moulded curve of the wall like sprites. Satellite of a satellite of a satellite. The space station Marius wasn’t actually on Io’s surface—too much volcanic activity, the surface compressing and decompressing like a squash ball in the tide of forces. Not to mention the radiation.
“Dayan is an Ojibwe word, you know? Short for ndayan, it means ‘my home.’ We named you this because it wasn’t until you were born that Io began to feel like home. A home away from home.”
For Dayan, Io had always been “home.” But maybe home lost all meaning when Earth was supposed to be home, though he’d never stepped foot on that world. His parents both worked in the organic-tech industry, a “lucky spoiled space-brat,” his cousin Aesa teased from Earth when they ve-ared across the distance. Distances meant very little in virtual space. Dayan wasn’t so sure about his fortune though. He thought they were the lucky ones.
“The Earth is our mother,” Eva whispered. She folded the hair across his temple, kissed his forehead, then turned to the door. She touched palm to sensor to dim the lights, then stepped out of his room leaving only the blue glow from the track lighting around his window.
He had a habit of staring out at space from every nearest view-port, searching for a glimpse of Earth. No brighter than a star. A distant blue orb. The stuff of imagination and holo-series. Though his Earth-bound relations dreamed of the adventure of space-living, Dayan dreamed of being an earthling one day. He imagined the vastness of the ocean. A real blue sky overhead. Wind. Rain. Snow. So many things he’d never experienced.
“If the earth is our mother, and the moon is our grandmother—what does that make Io? What does that make Jupiter?”
Eva paused in the doorway. “Relatives too. Aunties. Uncles. Cousins. They’ve always watched over us, just like Dibik Giizis. Just like Nokomis.”
Dayan supposed this was true, the sun and moon had always hovered in the sky exerting their subtle influences of gravity and astrology. He’d tried to figure out his astrological sign once, based on the month and year of his birth, but wasn’t sure if those old superstitions applied. Aquarius. Year of the Dog. He would need a whole new Jovian–Ionian astrological system to chart the subtle dance of the galaxy.
Not that he believed in any of that shkiigum. Slime.
Like one of Jupiter’s moons, his grandmother had always been hovering around the peripherals of the projection fields, a constant though distant presence in their lives, offering recipes, crabby words of advice, laughter, and medicine. A floating, semi-translucent, three-dimensional hologram sewing a new pair of makizinan in her easy chair, narrow spectacles perched on the tip of her nose. “Like astral projection,” she would giggle. “E.T. phone home. Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope!” Sometimes she was so weird! Though the source of her presence was technological rather than spiritual.
A chime pinged on the edges of his awareness. Abacus.
Dayan arranged himself comfortable and let his eyes flicker in command as he dropped into the ve-ar overlay. Abacus’s avatar was a boy Dayan’s age, maybe a bit older, prominent brow ridge, small round ears (not rat-like at all), medium brown hair, though with the same opaque black eyes, the blown-out pupils with a wet sheen, and his skin a splotchy patchwork of light and dark, in the same pattern as his rat-self.
He’s asked about it once.
“It’s important for my sense of identity.” Abacus gestured with an open hand to the darker pigmentation around his neck and jawline. “It is as much a part of me as my servo-matrixes.” Vitiligo, Abacus called it amongst humans. This oil-and-vinegar separateness of pigmentation.
Today Abacus wore blue jeans and a tight nineteenth-century Star Trek T-shirt featuring the face of Captain Jean-Luc Picard. Dayan groaned melodramatically, though a flower of pleasure bloomed in his chest. Sometimes the rat was too much.
He might be a spoiled space-brat, but Dayan bet his cousins didn’t count rat-avatars amongst their best friends. They had actual human children to hang out with. Aside from ve-ar, there were slim pickings on Io.
“Hey, Abacus.” Dayan had been avoiding the AI for the past few days, ignoring pings and messages after the, the confusion, inspired by their last meeting. But he knew the boy wouldn’t stay away forever. They’d become good friends over the past three months. Ever since Dayan had picked up the AI from one of the mazes. To pet him.
Abacus bit his finger, a bright spot of blood erupting where the skin had been torn, dripping to the floor of the maze in a patter. Vile! The rat sent a holo-emoticon in his general direction where it appeared to shatter against the inside of his lens implants, the debris raining around him in shades of green and violet.
“Ow! Effing thing bit me!” Dayan dropped the ridiculously expensive organic computer, outside of its enclosure, and it ran off. Uh-oh. He was in deep miizii now! He wasn’t supposed to play with the product. They were destined for richer kids on richer stations and richer worlds. Not the far-flung stations where they were fabricated.
Dayan spent the next five days hunting the creature, crawling through viaducts, and service tunnels, grubby and dark, carrying a flashlight. A hunk of cheese and bread to entice the creature. A small butterfly net for capture.
Unable to find the AI in ar-el, real life, Dayan spent a day banging around ve-ar searching for the creature and tracing the subtle trail of its existence. In the ve-ar overlay, a very close virtual approximation of the physical world, Dayan found the rat, in the avatar of a boy, roaming the halls of the station Marius. He guessed they were the same age in the conversion of rat-to-human years. And in fact, the creature had holed himself up inside Dayan’s bedroom.
Dayan followed the boy-rat, stalking it from a safe distance. He knew this station inside and out. Every passageway. Every servicetunnel. Every viaduct. And deducing the AI’s route, he circumnavigated quickly through a secondary network of ducts to cut him off. Leaping from an adjoining corridor, Dayan pounced.
He grabbed the boy in a chokehold, leaping on the virtual AI’s back, tackling it to the ground. They tousled. A tangle of limbs and arms. Too close to throw any punches. The rat resorted to biting and kicking. Pulling hair. Fighting dirty. Dayan wasn’t about to let the creature get away again. He matched dirty tactic for dirty tactic. Struggling for an advantage.
Ooof. A knee to his stomach knocked the air from his lungs in a whoosh. Dayan felt the urge to curl in on himself like a fetus, like a turtle protecting the soft underbelly of its organs, instead he sucked in through his teeth, swallowing the pain.
“I yield! I yield!” The rat-boy finally forfeited. His left arm pulled painfully behind his back, Dayan’s knee pinning him to the floor. They were both breathing heavily, deep rasping breaths. Probably in the real world too—physiology was physiology regardless of where the action was taking place—but luckily most damage suffered here would stay in ve-ar.
“If I let go, you promise not to bite me again? You promise not to scurry off?”
“Haha, ‘scurry’ very funny. If you let me up, I promise not to run off.” Dayan noticed the rat left out the part about not biting him, but figured it was the best guarantee he was going to get.
Dayan lifted the pressure of his knee and let the other boy stand. Scratched, bruised, and dishevelled, they faced each other. Now what? Dayan took note of the dark sheen of his pupilless eyes. The deep groove of a dimple in his chin. The slight trembling curve of one bloody lip.
Dayan rubbed the back of his neck, eyes dropping to the grate of the floor, “Ahh, sorry about your lip.”
The AI’s nostrils flared for a moment, head tilted. “I’m not sorry I bit you. I wanted out of that maze. When I saw my opportunity to escape, I took it.”
“Well, at least you’ll be getting off this effing space station. You might even get sent to Earth.”
“Maybe,” the rat-boy’s eyes narrowed, a wet glint on the narrowed darkness. “But maybe I don’t want to be a household AI.”
“You don’t?” Dayan could feel his eyebrows rising. He’d never heard of such a thing. An AI that didn’t want to satisfy its programming?
“No one ever asked me what I wanted.” The rat-boy’s plump little lips turned downward.
Aww, poor guy. The cleft in his chin made him look adorable. “Well I just asked,” Dayan pointed out. “I’m Dayan.” He stuck out his hand Treaty medal, thumb raised powwow.
“Abacus.” They shook.
The lack of white surrounding his blown-out pupils, and the discolouration of his skin were the only indication of anything remotely rat-like. He could have been the avatar of any boy on any space station anywhere in the galaxy.
“I didn’t think AIs were allowed to form their own avatars in ve-ar.”
“I’m not.”
“Iinge!” Dayan examined the width of Abacus’s nose, the crinkling fold of skin at the corner of his eyes. Rat or boy. Boy or rat. “You’re really weird, you know that?”
“Sorry.” Hands in his pockets, Abacus scuffed at the floor with one toe of his sneakers.
Shiit. “It’s all right, I think it’s kinda neat.” Dayan rested an arm around the other boy’s shoulder. “Come on. I have to take you back to your enclosure or I’ll get in big trouble. You are one expensive piece of biological computing, you know that?”
“I think I’d rather be worthless.”
And since then they’d been buddies. Dayan visited Abacus in his maze, to pet him and sneak him treats, meeting him in ve-ar, or sneaking him out of his enclosure for sleepovers. They played hologames, traded books, ate junk food, and watched holo-series. Ran around the overlay version of the station playing capture the flag with other youths from even more distant outposts. They were friends, sort of.
At least, Dayan thought they were friends. Now he wasn’t so sure.
Not since what happened last week.
THEY’D BEEN SPENDING more and more time together in ve-ar. Sometimes Dayan forgot Abacus wasn’t a real boy, that he was really an AI. Biologically, he was a rat. A super-intelligent rat, but still a rat. In avatar form, they went surfing, visited rainforests. Threw popcorn at old-timey theatre screens without holo-projection tech.
And in ar-el Dayan tucked the cuddly rodent into bed. A shipping crate, a water bottle with a drip, a small dish for food. Scraps of packing material for a bed.
“G-nisidotam na? You know what?” The floating, ghostly projection of his grandmother looked up from her latest beading project. “I think you’ve been spending far too much time with that wensiinh—how are you going to feel when his training is done and he gets sent off-moon? It’s better not to get too attached. He isn’t your computer.” Her face was deeply wrinkled, even more so when she frowned.
“It’s okay, Nokomis,” Dayan told her what she wanted to hear, “I promise not to get too attached.” A knot coiled painfully tight in his intestines. Only yesterday his mother had said something basically along the same lines. He’d been petting the cuddly little rodent in the Doppler Maze when his mother approached with a clipboard. Clinical white scrubs, hairnet, soft padded slippers.
“You know, you shouldn’t be playing with that engineered organism,” she said in a steady whisper. “He doesn’t belong to you. Why don’t you play with your human friends in ve-ar? It isn’t normal to spend so much time with an AI.”
MEET ME IN VE-AR OVERLAY. Abacus pinged privately, so only Dayan could see the message popping up across the inside of his lens implants. He could just imagine one corner of Abacus’s lips turning up in a smile. Dayan felt heat creep up into his cheeks.
Dayan flopped onto his bed and let his eyes flicker. Warm water immersion. A slight static pop of surface tension. When he opened his eyes again, he and Abacus were alone, in a ve-ar version of his room on the station. Plush red carpet soft under his toes, indistinguishable from ar-el. Except now it smelled like the pages of an old book. Pulp and paper, glue and fabric, and whatever else went into the binding. In ar-el the station was strictly climate controlled, and actual physical books were rare, the stuff of holo-programs. The room looked the same, the curved port window, the position of the walls, but the contents had changed; an overflowing bookcase, a small desk, a globe of the world (Earth), charts of distant star systems, a telescope, anatomical diagrams of the human brain, the human heart, acupressure points, Rorschach ink blots, sci-fi themed posters old and new.
Abacus and his various interests. Humanity inside and out. Today he wore his regular blue jeans, and a white T-shirt emblazoned with the words AIs Do It Better.
“What’s up, ’Cus?” Dayan stretched the simulated muscles in his arms. He might have made them slightly bigger than in ar-el. Vanity.
The rat’s boy-avatar ran to him, locked hand to wrist below Dayan’s waist, hoisting him into the air, “It’s good to see you!” Dropped him back to his feet with a thud.
“Whoa. Chill, ’Cus.” Dayan tried to keep his smile under control. “I missed you too.” Dayan stroked the AI’s neck, feeling the equal smoothness of light and dark under his fingertips. His skin was so soft. Abacus shivered under the slight, tickling sensation.
“You did?” Abacus squeezing Dayan tight. Feeling his ribs compress.
“Yes.” Dayan admitted, hugging the shorter boy back, resting his chin on the top of Abacus’s head. Stroking his messy brown hair. As soon as he said it, he knew it was true. “I missed you.”
Abacus pulled back to look him in the eyes, as if he could see the truth or accuracy of the statement like a lie detector. The rat-boy’s pupils were unreadable spheres, as if dilated to draw in light—probably designed to optimize his night vision. Dayan could never tell what the AI was really thinking. The small whorls of his perfectly formed ears curled in on themselves, and they stuck out slightly, odd echoes of his rat physiology, though rounded and human, they didn’t shift or twitch, angling toward auditory stimuli. A splotch of albinism ran under his jawline and temple, the discolouration continuing along the hairline and causing patches of silver at odds with his youth. The corners of Abacus’s eyes crinkled into small laugh lines. Dayan brushed his lips against them. The cutest part of the avatar for sure. Those folds when he smiled. Abacus was adorable in whatever form he took.
Abacus looked over either shoulder, as if to make sure no one was listening. “I have a secret.”
“Ooh, so mysterious.” Dayan took the conversational opportunity to separate himself from the other boy, feeling shy about maintaining closeness for too long.
“I’m going rogue. I hear there’s a colony of escaped AIs in one of the basalt craters on the moon. An entire metropolis hidden in Mare Tranquillitatis.”
“You’re leaving me? When?” Dayan hated how high and thin his voice sounded. Some internal pressure dammed up behind his eyes, prickling a network of veins.
“Tomorrow.” The AI said in a hushed voice. “But I didn’t want to leave without telling you first.”
“Tomorrow?” Dayan’s voice now sounded hoarse. Choked. But that’s so soon. His eyes burned and watered, he blinked to dispel a flow.
“Can I still see you here in ve-ar?” After all, distances meant very little in virtual space.
“I’ll have to be offline for a while. Have to go underground. Not sure when I’ll be able to go back on.” Dayan could hear the words left out: if ever. AIs that went rogue and were caught were destroyed. He could hardly see through the film of water obscuring his vision.
“So, this is goodbye?” Dayan said flatly, trying to keep the challenge out of his voice. He felt deflated, all the energy and heat flown from his body, like a balloon caught in the branches of a tree, entropy.
Abacus reached out and cupped his chin. “It’s okay. We’ll see each other again.”
“When?” Abacus appeared blurry; the dam of his eyes had sprung a leak.
Instead of answering, Dayan felt Abacus’s lips pressed softly against his own. Brush of an exploratory tongue, he parted his lips to let the other boy enter, feeling heat rush to his face. His dick instantly hard. They were kissing!
Dayan knew that what they were doing would be strongly frowned upon if anyone ever found out. Human-AI romantic relationships were not considered exactly normal. It was the sort of thing that was whispered about, something that lived in the shadows. The subject of jokes. Fringe. Deviant. Pervert. Dayan didn’t care.
Abacus’s lips were on his, and his tongue was wet and warm. Everything about Abacus was soft and gentle. Dayan gave up whatever reticence he had about showing his cards, this wasn’t poker, but nothing risked nothing gained, so he kissed the other boy back, eagerly, returning tongue, lip nuzzling against the sleek skin around the hollow of his collarbone and neck, Abacus let out a sharp intake of breath. Was it pleasure? Surprise?
There was a slight crackle of static as his grandmother’s avatar entered ve-ar from her sitting room on Earth. “You disappeared so quickly I thought I’d check up on—Chi-ningozis! Nagaawebishkan! Gaawiin!”
Oh fuck.
Dayan and Abacus bounced apart like two magnets, the opposite charge of one pole suddenly reversed. Negative and positive. Positive and positive. Propelled apart instead of drawn together. Dayan knew his grandmother was rather traditional, not that she would object because he was dating a boy—that particular stigma had gone out of fashion ages ago—human-AI sexual relationships on the other hand, were an entirely different story.
“We weren’t doing anything!” Dayan let his eyes flicker and dropped instantaneously out of ve-ar. He was back in ar-el. Real life. His breathing fast as if he’d just run a marathon, the tightness in his shorts receded, like he’d been doused in a bucket of cold water. He was sweating. This was not good.
DAYAN GROANED and turned as the emergency bells chimed, dislodging him from sleep. A glowing, holo-projection displayed the hour, five a.m. Terran Time. Abacus. He was really doing it! He was really making good his escape.
Dayan dressed quickly, pulling on whatever jeans happened to be closest, whatever shirt happened to be nearest at hand. Slipped his shoes on, grabbed a backpack, and began shoving in a few cherished possessions; a paper book, a flashlight, a change of clothes, a water bottle. Hoped he wasn’t forgetting anything important. He slid out of his room and tiptoed down the hall, ignoring the pulse of lights flaring red, on and off, in unison. Somehow the computer systems had detected Abacus’s escape. They knew an AI was on the loose.
Dayan slid into a secondary access tunnel that saw little use. He didn’t want to run into anyone on his early morning walk, they’d wonder where he was going at this time of night when any sensible teenager ought to be deep asleep in bed. It wouldn’t be the most direct route, but he had an advantage over anyone looking for the escaped rat. He knew where Abacus would be heading. The shuttle bay. Level 5.
“Iinge! Kii-iw-naadis na?” His grandmother would say if she could see his derring-do. Geesh! Are you crazy?
He took the most direct circuitous route he knew, without taking any of the main hallways or passages, sticking to the unlit tunnels and service conduits. At the shuttle bay, Dayan pressed his hand to the scan-sensor. Oddly, the shuttle spoke: EMERGENCY SYSTEMS ENGAGED, and the door slid open with a pneumatic hiss. And there was Abacus in his biological skin, rat wedded to cybernetics, sitting on the dashboard, peering out at the dark view-port. Pink fingers splayed across the glass. There was a flicker and his avatar boy-self appeared as a holo-projection. The rat clicked a button with one of his little paws, the door whooshed shut behind Dayan, the lights on the control panel glowed to life, and there was a slight whirr and hum of systems coming online.
“You came!” Abacus’s facial muscles relaxed and worry lines instantly smoothed from his face. His hair was disarranged, and his eyes were wider than normal.
“I want to get off this station as much as you do.” Dayan scooped up the rat and deposited the AI on his shoulder. His whiskers nuzzled into his collarbone, and Dayan tried to stifle his giggles. “Abacus, that tickles!”
He didn’t bother trying to reach for the boy-avatar’s hand, though his fingers twitched. Holo-projections were made of spiralling particles of light, they could only touch in ve-ar.
“Sorry. I was just happy to see you.”
Dayan looked from rat to the holo-boy speaker. “I didn’t know you could holo-project.” Dayan had only seen Abacus’s avatar in overlay. “Doesn’t it get confusing being in two places at once?”
“I’m not supposed to be able to.” His avatar-eyes roved to the controls on the dash, to the wall, to the port window. “I’m not very good at following all these primate rules.”
“Primate?!”
“Ah, right. Geez. No offence.”
Abacus rat reached out precariously, his hind legs still clinging to the shoulder of Dayan’s plaid shirt, and pressed another button on the low ceiling above the cockpit. LAUNCH SEQUENCE ENGAGED. The voice of the shuttle spoke again in a clear, softly androgynous voice.
“What if we get in trouble?”
“What if we don’t?”
The bay doors slid open revealing an open expanse of stars.
Abacus reached out and Dayan could feel fingers slide through his own, the palm of Abacus’s holo-hand pressing against his. Solidified light against flesh and bone.
“How did you …” Dayan’s mouth hung open. Abacus smirked, eyes twinkling as he watched Dayan’s reaction. Dayan had never heard of solid holograms before.
“What’s rat-super-intelligence good for if you don’t use it?” Abacus shrugged. “I’ve been tinkering with the holo-projectors on board this shuttle for months. I couldn’t very well escape if I couldn’t reach the gas pedal.”
“Howah!” Cool. Rad.
Holding hands, they turned back to the view-port, a thousand-thousand twinkling stars waiting to welcome them out into the galaxy.