Harvest

by Olga Werby

  “I see.” The major noticed that he still sounded irritated. He was always irritated when visiting civilian-run labs—Dr. Crowe’s facility in particular. The man was so touchy. It was so much easier to conduct research when he could just issue orders. He hated cajoling. He wasn’t a babysitter.

  But he had to admit that Dr. Crowe’s work on direct neural interfaces was the most promising he’d seen so far. The BBI developed in his lab allowed humans to govern the rat’s movements—direction, speed, and agility—and even more impressively, Dr. Crowe thought human controllers would soon be able to get partial sensory data from the rat’s eyes and ears. Human brain-controlled rats, or brats for short, were a true breakthrough. This was computer-mediated control of an animal with the potential for complete sensory immersion. Thanks to Dr. Crowe’s work, the military would one day be able to send little ratty spies into dangerous or humanly impenetrable areas. This technology would be invaluable in search and rescue operations—collapsed buildings, tunnels, mine shafts—as well as more “delicate” assignments run by some of the covert military units. Human-controlled rats would be the most advanced mini robots on the planet.

  “Here, Ruffy,” said the girl, petting the rat. “See? It feels good, doesn’t it?”

  “Can she feel what the rat is feeling?” asked Sergeant Martinez—one of Major Watson’s people.

  “It looks like she can,” said Dr. Crowe.

  “Find out for sure,” Watson said.

  “Okay.” Dr. Crowe practically ran out of the observation center.

  “I want this recorded,” ordered Major Watson as the professor carefully opened the door to the lab, obviously not wanting to spook either the rat or his little girl.

  The lieutenant behind the camera nodded. Everything was being recorded.

  “Hey, Toby,” Dr. Crowe called softly. His voice carried easily into the observation room via a set of speakers.

  “Hi, Dad!” Toby greeted her father in the high-pitched voice of an excited eight-year-old girl. She was holding the fluffy black-and-white animal in one hand and using the other to scratch behind its brain implant, located just at the back of the animal’s head. She gently giggled at the motion. To Watson, it looked like the girl was able to sense the touch of her own finger on the fur of the rat. In essence, she seemed to be tickling herself.

  “Can you feel that?” Dr. Crowe asked.

  Toby nodded. “And I can see you too,” she said.

  Her back was to her dad, but Rufus was looking directly at Dr. Crowe, tracking the man’s motion across the lab as he approached his daughter. Interesting, Watson thought. If Toby could see anything at all through the animal’s visual perception, it would represent enormous progress.

  “How many fingers do I have up?” Dr. Crowe asked quickly, sticking his thumb up in the air and leaning in close—rats had poor eyesight.

  “None!” Toby laughed. Watson and his men behind the mirrored wall held their collective breath before Toby added, “It’s a thumb, silly!”

  Dr. Crowe glanced into the one-way mirror, at the unseen observers. “What else can you do with Ruffy? Can you show me?”

  Toby put the rat on the floor and let him loose. The professor looked back at the door to the lab that he’d carelessly left open.

  “Don’t worry, Dad. Ruffy won’t escape. He likes it here,” Toby said.

  “Okay. So what tricks can you do with Ruffy?” Dr. Crowe asked.

  “I can tell Ruffy where you keep the treats and have him get them,” the girl said.

  “I keep the animal treats locked.”

  “You showed me already,” Toby said.

  The rat quickly ran over to the professor’s desk, scampered up on top, and used its mouth to grab the key to the cabinet that held the rat snacks. Watson watched with amazement as the rat dropped the key to the floor, climbed down, and grabbed the key again. It then ran over to the cabinet.

  But the lock was too high up. So Toby walked over and gave Rufus a lift to the second drawer from the top.

  “Don’t help him,” Dr. Crowe said.

  Both Toby and the rat, in unison, turned their heads toward him. “Dad! Ruffy is too small to get up this high by himself.”

  “Okay. But let him unlock the drawer by himself,” Dr. Crowe said.

  Toby extended her hand and the rat put the key into the lock and turned it. With a soft click, the drawer opened.

  As the rat reached into the drawer toward the snack container, Toby’s nose twitched. “It smells good and bad,” she complained.

  “You can smell the rodent snacks?”

  “I can smell how much Ruffy likes them. But to me, it smells bad. It’s like it’s yummy and disgusting all at the same time.”

  Major Watson was genuinely impressed. The Brats project was further along than he could have hoped. He left the observation room and walked into the rat lab. Stepping right up to Toby, he asked, “What else can you feel?”

  “I can hear you all walk around the lab with Ruffy’s ears. And I can taste what Ruffy eats,” Toby said. She frowned. “Daddy, I hate the taste of Ruffy’s snacks.” She started to rip the BBI cap off her head.

  “Wait, honey, let me help you with that.” Dr. Crowe rushed over to help remove the prototype from her head. The handmade BBI cap was quite delicate, with wires dangling inside and out.

  Without Toby to mediate the rat’s behavior, the little animal dove for the back of the snack drawer, where it tried to hide away from the bright lights and loud noises of the lab.

  “How do you feel?” the professor asked his daughter.

  “It was fun, but Ruffy sure likes to eat bad things. And it’s weird to be so small,” Toby said.

  Major Watson looked over at Dr. Crowe. Vision, hearing, taste, smell, feel, and even proprioception—a complete sensory experience immersion. This had turned out to be a surprisingly effective demonstration of the BBI technology.

  And it was surprising in another way too. As far as the major knew, no one in Dr. Crowe’s lab could exercise as much control, or feel so fully absorbed in the animal subject’s perception, as the researcher’s daughter had just exhibited. She’d even displayed some of the rat’s mannerisms—synchronous nose twitching and darting eye movements. Can’t fake that.

  “That was excellent work, Toby,” he said approvingly, squatting down to be face to face with the little girl. “I am Major Watson, and I work with your dad…and Rufus.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Toby said, extending her small hand.

  He smiled and formally shook the girl’s hand. “How would you like to come and help us work with Rufus?”

  “Major—” Crowe began.

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Toby?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Major—” Dr. Crowe tried again.

  Watson cut him off. “Why don’t you take your daughter home, Professor? We will discuss the arrangements this evening.”

  He turned to go, but then walked back to the feed drawer and looked at the rat hiding in there, gorging on the snacks. “You might want to put Rufus back in his case before he gets sick.” Then he left the lab, signaling for his people in the observation room to follow.

  “I really liked playing with Ruffy,” he heard Toby say behind him. “It’s like a video game, only much, much better.”

  Dr. Crowe replied, but the major didn’t hear the words.

  This had turned out to be a great surprise inspection after all.

  “You can’t ask me to experiment on my own child.”

  Will had been arguing with the major for hours, back in his home office, in the apartment he shared with his wife and daughter. With each exchange, he felt like his grasp on the situation was dissolving. The major could be very convincing.

  “Toby was very impressive,” the major said.

  Will knew
that he tended to fold under repeated questioning from the major, eventually adopting the major’s reasoning as his own. And yet he, too, was stunned by his daughter’s accomplishment and wondered what else she could do with a bit of training. If only she weren’t so young. If only she wasn’t his daughter. Will knew that he was about to agree to everything the major wanted. Just one more push…

  “What did she tell you?” Major Watson asked again.

  Will replayed his daughter’s interaction with the rat in his mind. What Toby had done was nothing short of amazing. A miracle, really.

  “She could even sense physical boundaries with the rat’s whiskers!” he said. “There’s no human equivalent to that, not really. I thought with time we’d be able to physically control the animal, but I had no idea we could ever achieve so much integration with its perceptual system. Toby is just a natural at brain-to-brain-interface command. Who knew?”

  Will’s excitement over Toby’s achievement in his lab was coloring his emotions, making him more pliable to the major’s arguments. He knew it, but still he couldn’t control his pride and enthusiasm. Everything he hoped for was happening…just not how he had planned.

  “Did your daughter ever try the BBI before?”

  “The cap? No, never! She’s watched us do it plenty of times. With Dalla being so sick…I mean—”

  “It’s fine, Will. You don’t mind me calling you Will?”

  “Of course not. And Major, I know the project is classified, but Toby is just a third grader, you know? It didn’t seem…” Will trailed off. It was hard to justify his daughter’s presence in the top-secret military-sponsored lab just because he couldn’t find a babysitter.

  “I don’t mind you taking your daughter to the lab,” Major Watson said. “We’ll just make it official—retroactively. We’ll give your daughter a special research status and all the difficulties will go away.” The major stressed the word “difficulties.” It was clearly a veiled threat.

  “But she’s only eight,” Will said.

  “Clearance isn’t dependent on the maturity of the researcher.” The major let the ambiguity of whom he was talking about hang in the air.

  A sustained coughing fit sounded from an upstairs bedroom and both men glanced up at the ceiling. Will’s wife, Dalla, had cystic fibrosis and her lungs were drowning in gelatinous mucus. She was bedridden most of the time now—too weak to walk, gasping for air. It was only a matter of time before Toby would lose her mother.

  Worse still, Toby had inherited her mother’s genetic fault. Toby’s lungs were still strong, but with each bout of cold or flu, the girl developed more lesions and risked making her condition worse.

  Will felt like he was losing control. The world just seemed so…overwhelming. The only bright spot in all of this was Toby’s remarkable abilities to control the rat.

  “Toby Crowe will join the team of researchers in your lab officially,” the major said. “She will be named in the grant and will help you develop your BBI prototype further. And of course she will be bound by the same confidentiality clause as you and your research team. Since she is a minor, the responsibility for her compliance will naturally fall on you.”

  Will stared at the tall, dark-featured, crisply dressed man. He felt dazed by the interaction.

  “So I expect to see you and your daughter in the lab tomorrow.” The major stood to leave.

  “But Toby has school,” Will protested.

  “I’ll make sure her education won’t suffer. I’ll personally assign a full-time early childhood development expert to your team.”

  “What?”

  “We’ll get someone very qualified. Would a full PhD do?”

  “For Toby’s teacher?” It was amazing how easily the major swept aside all of Will’s objections.

  “Just imagine your daughter freed from a lowest-common-denominator curriculum. The girl is a born scientist! And if she’s not in an elementary school germ factory, she won’t get so sick all the time.”

  That was true. Being sick was bad for Toby’s condition. It was also bad for Dalla. When Toby got sick, Dalla couldn’t even be around her, as exposure to even the most common cold could be disastrous. So whenever there was a sniffles outbreak at school—which was often—they tried to keep Toby home. It was the primary reason Toby had spent so much time at Will’s lab—they didn’t want her getting sick at school and Dalla was too sick to take care of her at home. Toby was a quiet, self-sufficient kid, and quite happy at the lab, but Will recognized that her school absences were interfering with her education.

  “I guess that could work,” Will heard himself saying.

  Not only was Major Watson getting everything he wanted, but, Will realized, he had somehow made Will want it too. Will was actually excited about the prospect of working with his daughter and developing her surprising BBI talent.

  “Wonderful! I’ll personally oversee all the paperwork. And of course, I’ll make sure that Toby’s teacher’s salary won’t come out of your research budget. You don’t have to worry about a thing. Please give my best to your wife.” He shook Will’s hand and strode from the Crowe home.

  In his mind, Will reviewed their conversation. He tried to understand what he had just agreed to. How would he explain this to Dalla?

  After the major had left, Toby came into Will’s office and slipped onto his lap.

  “I’d like to go to work in the lab with you and Ruffy,” she said.

  “You heard?” Will asked, gently rubbing the girl’s back.

  “School is boring,” Toby said. “And I like playing with Rufus,” she added. She was convincing herself as much as him, Will noted.

  Toby didn’t say she’d miss playing with the other kids. Friendships needed plenty of time and some freedom. She was so restricted with her interactions and she missed so much school, she hadn’t gotten to make friends. Will felt the weight of responsibility. Could he keep his little girl happy? Was this the right thing for her?

  “You’ll get a lot of time to play with Rufus,” he said. “But maybe you’ll get bored hanging around with us and all those lab rats.”

  “There’s just Ruffy, Dad!”

  “There will be more soon. Now that we had a breakthrough, I’m sure we’ll get more animals, more different kinds of animals. But we’ll take it slow. I’ll make sure no one pushes you to do things you don’t want to do. I promise.”

  “Don’t worry, Dad,” Toby said. “I loved being Ruffy.”

  Will hugged his daughter and he felt how fast her heart was beating. Almost as fast as Ruffy’s.

  “Tell me about the girl.” Major Evans had a no-nonsense style. Technically, he was George Watson’s superior, even if he didn’t outrank him. George was mainly an operations man. Major Evans tended to be in the middle of the action, regardless of personal risk. Their roles in the army dictated their working relationship.

  “The kid was remarkable,” George said, talking at his computer screen.

  “Will Dr. Crowe allow her to participate in the research?”

  “Yes. Absolutely.”

  “A drone indistinguishable from a pest,” Evans mused. “Not likely to get shot down by the locals. Trapped, perhaps, or exterminated. But not shot.”

  “Yes, sir. But with human intelligence driving it, we would likely avoid any pedestrian traps,” George said.

  “Keep me informed, please.”

  Two: +18 Months

  Vikka read the text message on her phone. “They’re almost ready for you,” she said. “Can I help you with the cap?”

  “I can do it,” Toby said. She’d used the BBI cap hundreds of times and didn’t need assistance putting it on. This newer model was even easier to use; it internalized some of the wires, reducing the entanglement problem. Toby had already put her messy light-brown hair up into braids—she called them her “rat tails”—to keep them o
ut of the way of all the external connectors linking the cap with the brain implant in Rufus’s head.

  Today, she was going to ride Rufus in a new experiment. The Brats conference room, which bristled with cameras, had been converted into a home for a large tabletop maze. The maze had movable partitions so it could be easily reconfigured. Toby had never seen the current maze layout and the plan was for her to experience the new maze space just through Rufus’s senses via the BBI link.

  As Toby fit her cap on, she looked over at Vikka. Dr. Vikka Shapiro was in her early thirties, with big, frizzy black hair and kind eyes. She was a psychologist and an early childhood education specialist, hired by Major Watson—which meant the major was her boss. Everyone else at the lab reported to Toby’s dad. Major Watson also happened to be Vikka’s uncle; she was his sister’s daughter.

  Vikka was Toby’s teacher, but over these past eighteen months she had become much more: a mother surrogate and a friend—or as much of a friend as an adult can be to a ten-year-old kid. Toby knew that this wasn’t a normal friendship, but she cherished it. Aside from Ruffy and her parents, Toby’s social life was Vikka. There just wasn’t anyone else.

  Yesterday, Toby had overheard Vikka on the phone telling her uncle about the upcoming experiment—and, today, he had arrived for a surprise visit. That made Toby a little nervous. She knew there was pressure on her dad and that he would be judged by how well she performed. She was determined to do well.

  Toby was seated on the kid-sized blue sofa in “her office.” Major Watson had insisted the room be devoted exclusively to Toby’s needs. It was really just a small, drab, gray university room, but it had been transformed into Toby’s version of paradise. A large window behind the desk provided a view of the university’s campus. One wall, floor to ceiling, was filled up entirely with a white magnetic board, the bottom four feet of which was covered with Toby’s colorful marker drawings—of Rufus, Toby’s dad, and other members of the Brats research team. Above that were animal posters, along with some of Toby’s pencil drawings, attached to the board with bright magnetic clips shaped like carbon-based molecules.