We are both stopped, at least for the moment. There is enough brain left in me to know that I don’t want to get permanently caught in this small, uncomfortable space with my elbows wedged against my rib cage. I see the space partially through heat and movement, but also through the bioenhancements given me via EI. EI dogs can see in almost no light, one of many ways I am superior to a normal dog.
So I can see the rat unstick itself from the tiny crack and turn around. It checks its panic, as I have paused my own mindless pursuit. It takes a step toward me, sits up on its haunches, and stares. For all the world, it looks as though it is considering me. Thinking.
The bodydrone driver gathering information. This rat is like a live thing, but it isn’t. It looks so very much like an animal, but there is someone else driving it. It’s a drone, and yet it moves exactly like a rat.
The hair on my back stands up, and because I am stuck it makes me want to get unstuck, to get out and away from this eerie thing. My hind claws scrabble at the brutal metal flooring, and the grating drags at the hair on my belly. My breath comes faster. I am stuck.
“Sera?” I hear, muffled, from the hallway. “What the hell are you—” Carol has reached me. Her voice helps me stop my writhing. “Ah, shit.”
The bodydrone takes another step. I can make out its eyes in the dark. Its rodent face is surprisingly expressive. Our eyes meet. It hesitates toward me.
It smells wrong. It smells like a rat. I know that this is my target because it doesn’t smell like a wild rat. It smells like a lab rat, a domestic rat. But it doesn’t smell like a drone. There’s something else, something familiar, to it.
I see thought behind its eyes.
The thing darts forward—I crush myself backward as far as I can—and a hot spike of pain scorches my nose. I yelp and the rat is gone and my limbs go stiff.
Spine goes stiff hair stiff
Rushing tingle in my neck in my bones I am downloading no don’t
My back legs kick out from under me, twitching.
“Sera!”
Don’t want
Hands on harness tugging against my shoulders, tight squeezing my elbows scraping out in front of me shoulders aching as I drag along the grating. Carol pulls me out of the bulkhead.
“Sera,” she says again. “Hey, hey. Shit. What’s wrong?”
My hind legs spasm. I shudder under Carol’s stroking hands.
“Sera,” she says again and again. “Sera, what’s wrong? Oh my god.”
My body jolts one final time as the information packet finishes forcing its way through me. Panting, I go limp.
“Sera,” Carol says. She tries her radio. “Shit. Sera.”
I am not convulsing anymore, just trembling. Trembling from what that rat transferred to me when it bit me.
I know something that I am not supposed to know. I know something I don’t want to know.
“Does anyone copy? Anders? Anyone? Shit, shit, shit.”
Carol stands over me. I lie on my side, trying to slow my breathing. Objectively I know I’ve had a panic attack in addition to experiencing mild neurological trauma, but understanding this doesn’t help me recover. My eyes would like to remain closed, my mouth slack. I know I am coming back to myself only when I move to a more comfortable position. Moments ago, I wouldn’t have noticed discomfort.
As soon as I can think, I have to govern my thoughts.
Carol crouches to rest a hand on my neck. The touch jerks me upright to rest on my elbows.
“Hey, shh.”
I am not helpless. I am a working EI SAR dog and I have a job. I can work, I ping. Carol looks at her DAT, then back at me. She stands up slowly.
“Your nose is bleeding,” she says.
It bit me. I am already opening the MFA building schematics to track where the target has gone. It’s in the ventilation system. I rise, take a few slow steps in the target’s most likely direction. When those steps are steady enough, I continue. My legs don’t give out.
We are near a fan unit. The target has only one direction to go. Unless there are additional faults in the ventilation shafts similar to the one by which it accessed the system, in which case it could slip out anywhere.
This is more than I usually speak, but speaking slows my thoughts. I focus on doing the job that I was very literally created to do.
It is like when you squint intensely at an item in the near distance, and the rest of your vision goes blurry. That is what I am hoping for. Is Like.
From behind me, Carol says, “What just happened?” She follows as I trot back down the passageway in the direction we came. I don’t answer.
My body feels wrong. I hope it wasn’t the download. A virus, parts of my body and brain buzzing haywire like the drones and elevators in the MFA. If I had access to Modanet I could do more research on the physical aftereffects of panic attacks. Exhaustion and disorientation make sense, but is it normal to have these rapid, anxious thoughts? To feel so… distant from myself?
A virus. I am almost certain the rat didn’t bite me only to transfer the unwanted information I am ignoring. I must do my work quickly before whatever it has infected me with begins its work. Still, I have some time.
I can sense the thing the rat told me, though, nagging at the edges of my attention.
I compare the ventilation system with the Department of Homeland Security dossier’s hierarchy of targets vs. outcomes and create a most likely scenario.
Then I pause. I actually stop, the thought catches me so hard. The thing I am not thinking about.
The most likely scenario for a bodydrone driven by the outside forces quantified in the dossier is one thing. The most likely scenario for the thing I am not thinking about is… I don’t know.
This is exactly the quandary my target intended to force. I don’t want to examine the information I have been confronted with because it will almost certainly interfere with my ability to do my job. But in order to do my job I must put that information to use.
Carol catches up to me. I had left her behind, my pace easily outstripping hers as my mind worked. Now she sighs as she looks at me and sets her jaw.
And Carol. Who wants to feel connection.
This is a complicated situation. My primary objective has always been to do the best job possible as an EI SAR dog. However, I have personal objectives as well. The tenuous connection Carol and I have begun to build down here, where I need her in order to do my work, is the only thing making that job possible.
Carol watches me, waiting. She has admirable patience, for a human. I move forward again at a more inclusive pace.
Anders gave me the DHS dossier, because Carol didn’t have access to all of the information. I am keeping some secrets from her, but they are nothing she would want to know. But now I have an additional secret that she might want to hear. It’s possible the DHS already knew the information that’s now been forced into my brain, but it kept it from me. Whether Anders knew or not isn’t relevant.
I was to keep the dossier private. But this new information wasn’t in the dossier. Therefore I have no obligation to keep it private from Carol.
However, this will involve speaking to Carol in a manner that exposes the parts of myself that make humans most uncomfortable about EI. Carol expressed discomfort when I shared those things before. I think of the moment in the crawl space, eye to eye with the rat, and wonder if Carol feels like that when she looks into my eyes.