by Nava Semel
I’ve solved the enigma.
Are you following me, Stash?
Of course you are. I mean, at this very minute, my implachip is tapping every neuron and every fiber in my brain to beam Girl & Rat into your dream. The youngest myth yet. I’ve chosen the only way that’s left to force the story onto you – infusing a dream. Like it or not, Girl & Rat is being recorded in your mind right this minute.
If it’s really possible to force memory.
Two that became one. Fused. A two-bodied angel circling in an earthly maze. One body using her fingers to dig, the other using his claws, intertwined in an ever-tighter tangle. It’s the choreography of one of the best-known dances of our generation.
In your dream, you are dancing. The implachip is beaming the steps, and the electronic umbilical cord that connects us is making us both move to the beat.
You’re dancing and not dancing...
I’m not dancing...
Yet...
Maybe...
The web of the dream is holding you captive, and we circle together, a two-bodied angel emerging from the deep.
You know the rest as well as I do. Girl & Rat first appeared on the ancient internet some time towards the end of the first decade or the beginning of the second decade of the century. It was a short cycle of poems, and in one version it included a legend too. Different versions still exist, in various languages, but it’s very hard to tell which ones are “authentic” – I mean they were written and uploaded before September 2011, when the poems emerged out of the shadows of the offbeat sites and electronic mails into the cultural mainstream. Suddenly people began to realize the magnitude of it, and the connection between the different versions became clear. A great deal was done to sift through them and to tease out the original one, assuming there really was an authentic source to begin with, but it was no use. Even the attempt to determine the language of the original amounted to sheer speculation.
One popular theory, yet to be proven, says that the poems were written by a young woman, maybe a versatile artist just starting out. Why she chose to remain anonymous is not clear. Most people think she must have died, or perhaps lost her mind, shortly after putting the poems on the ancient internet. Otherwise, why wouldn’t she have tried to capitalize on her success at a time when personal achievement and immediate gratification were all the rage? Anyone who’s tried to figure out her identity has failed, because people – and that includes “surfers” as they used to be called – could easily cover their trail if they wanted to. Are the poems and legend strictly apocryphal, or are they based on some real event that the writer witnessed, or perhaps even experienced herself? Did she send out those poems as a sign of despair before taking her own life – or were they her last will and testament? These questions remain open.
As soon as the poems and the legend made their appearance in the digital domain in this century, they gave rise to a huge industry that has been taking on various shapes ever since. For more than nine decades, Girl & Rat has been told and recorded on every medium imaginable, and you even find its imprint in extraterrestrial human colonies. Each generation offered its own interpretation, whether based on ones from earlier times or introducing a meaning all its own.
It started with the poems, which became tremendously popular with teenagers. But once the Japanese comics appeared in 2013 and developed into a major industry, with interactive animation and multimedia games, Girl & Rat became a hit with younger kids too. When the pop music industry recognized the potential, many of the poems were set to music and made the charts. The mass hysteria peaked in the autumn of 2015 with Tail, which became an enormous hit and has had dozens of arrangements. One of them, a medium they used to call a “video clip”, shows a singer down on his knees, with a winged rat bursting out of a cloud of black particles and handing him a cross made of potatoes. I find it hard to believe that you don’t have a single one of these songs stored in a submemoryfolder, because until about twenty years ago, the first few notes were the signal tune for several messaging systems. The screensaver version, the one that was such a hit when we were younger, shows a little girl who grows tails from every part of her body. She catches the beamee and turns him into her personal rat.
Remember that, Stash?
Your brain couldn’t possibly have classified all of that under “irrelevant information”.
Soon afterwards, Girl & Rat became the visual image most likely to be found on diaries, calendars and PDAs, even more popular than Raphael’s angel – which was the most common visual at the turn of the century. Girl & Rat stickers are on display in a special wing of the Twenty-First Century Museum in Washington, and a notebook with the 2014 print sold last year for a record fifty million eurollars.
I was there when they beamed the auction.
If only I knew who bought that precious notebook...
Since the second decade of this century, Girl & Rat has been an icon of alternative religious movements, mostly non-mainstream ones. The poems became cult texts: they’ve been carved on tombstones, quoted in eulogies and virtual condolence books, and sung at wakes and cremations. Girl & Rat shrines have been built all over, first just at sites dedicated to extinct species, and later at rest-and-recreation sites and online shopping centres. The most popular shrine ornament is an electronic figurine of a dark, eyeless little girl with seven rat tails wrapped around her arm. It was later converted into a popular slot machine: figure out the right tail to pull – and win the jackpot.
The legend that went with the poems played an important role in the development of the Girl & Rat myth. It probably began with a rumor – an incredibly effective way of transmitting information – and soon cropped up on the ancient internet. The legend provided the narrative context in which the poems could be interpreted. New details were added from time to time, such as the tradition that identified the little girl as the daughter of a father from India and a Native American mother.
No sooner did the phenomenon take hold than an opposition formed, especially in North America and Western Asia. Almost every religious leadership took part in the effort to boycott the new fashion and to campaign against it. Politicians, educators and parents’ organizations joined the bandwagon. Some of them tried to prove that the poems and the legend were connected to the Cult of the Devil, and made them out to be a despicable incitement to killing, suicide, extreme violence and child abuse. The accusations gained widespread support initially, and I’m sure they had their effect on you, too.
But ultimately, Girl & Rat defied all its critics and assumed its place as a cultural tradition. By 2020 it was here to stay, thanks to the dramatic decision of the Board at PanEuroDisney Productions to replace Mickey Mouse with Mickey Rat and to give it wings: the black wing cast an artificial darkness, and the other one was a transparent screen through which the beamer could see his or her own reflection recast as a little girl.
I’m beaming a sequence of visuals into your dream right now, even though my implachip is already picking up your revulsion.
There’s the she-rat nursing a little girl – trademark of Hydromel Corporation, which took over the sale of subterranean water until the reservoirs became so contaminated that they could no longer be used...
And a crown presented to Elizabeth III at her coronation. It is still on exhibit at the New Age Museum in Beijing, studded with diamonds in the shape of rat-tails the first to use nanotechnological production methods...
There’s a black angel with its wings clipped. It’s struggling to fly, but it doesn’t actually take off until a little girl and a rat become its artificial wings. Together they soar, swooping down into the ground: a multidimensional commercial for subterranean residential projects...
And a rat with gills, symbol of Hasgard, the first submarine stronghold in the world...
And a pair of head-wings made of reconstructed rat cells, which was the height of fashion about a decade ago – so many young women wore it to their proms, don’t you remember?
Icons, talismans and personal feeding tubes in the shape of winged mutants, with the body of a rat and the head of a little girl. In my virtual cache I have a cheek stud like that. I always wear it during our regular beamings. You haven’t noticed.
Or maybe you have.
Ever since you became Director of the Pan-Euro Anthropological Institute, you’ve chosen to focus on the study of young extraterrestrial civilizations, and slashing our work on the old ones, including the study of how the new Girl & Rat myth came into being. Your new program, the one they dubbed Anthropology of the Future, had a clear goal, and all of the scientists at the Institute seem to be caught up with it: to break away from the darkness of times past and to focus on studying the New Man, perfectly networked and genetically repaired. The study of the past has run its course, so you declared, and whatever shreds of information have survived, whatever dwindling residues have yet to be adapted and networked, have sunk into the oblivion of a pre-digital world. Archaeology in every shape and form left nothing more to the imagination. All that remained was the present, and the only perspective for interpreting it lay not in the past but in the future. In your beamings, you tried to persuade me that the greatest danger awaiting mankind was the romantic longing for our lost origins, for roots. This infinite number of conflicting perspectives that have led us only into anarchy. We have to rid ourselves of this longing at all costs, you declare, because when we’re in the grip of the past, we relive all of the scourges that we thought we’d avoided: violence, brutality, fear and rage – everything that became sanctified in the past as “memory”.
Right from that first mind-conference, where you mentioned your Anthropology of the Future program, my implachip started blipping heretical thoughts. I thought it was precisely because of a lack of perspective based on the past that the human species was liable to be trapped in an endless cycle of horrors, with each successive generation sinking back into a terrifying void and learning nothing from experience. If only I’d had the guts to say so at the time...
Don’t worry, Stash. Memory, which you treat with such contempt, excels at the art of nullification anyway...
You have to admit though that, despite my heretical thoughts, I never questioned your authority. I publicly announced I was dropping my own research project, but still, secretly, without admitting it even to myself at first, I kept collecting information, bit by bit. I couldn’t get Girl & Rat out of my mind. It fermented within me, demanding something to latch on to. When you discovered that I was still obsessed with that “trivial hobby” of mine, you tried to persuade me that every fact that could possibly be checked or verified had already been stored, so that my research would be of no interest to the brain-beaming community. Later you tried to rationalize that even if the roots of the legend were out there waiting for me, they were hopelessly banal and couldn’t offer any new insight worth the effort. I haven’t forgotten your studies of the representation of evil in late-twentieth century computer games, the ones that you later disavowed as your scientific career progressed. Maybe that’s why you dismissed Girl & Rat with such contempt, and why you judge it as nothing more than a primordial fear of light – a final effort of civilization to make way for darkness before it completely disappears.
What is fear, Stash? My genetic card reads “Repaired”.
A hole-child
Is running out of skin
The dream...
I feel as if I’m nursing you – a rare ritual practised by only a few remote tribes on earth.
You’re not ready to give yourself over yet, but my implachip senses how your flashes of resistance are growing weaker.
I’m not trying to undermine the authority of the Anthropological Institute, Stash. On the contrary: I have great respect for the pioneers who paved the way for me. Into your dream I’m beaming a study by Professor Reiner Marcellus Schwartz, who tried to prove that the creatures in Girl & Rat are not really from the twenty-first century at all. He pointed out the pagan and Christian motifs that appear throughout the legend, and mapped out its course from its days as a popular legend towards the end of the Roman Empire until its incorporation into the Digital Age. I want to tell you about the theory of my supervisor, Professor Mammuna Shanti: she believes that the work was originally written in Gujerati, and that it contains echoes of the Great Earthquake of Gujarat in 2001. Among other things, Professor Shanti makes recourse to the literature which tried, none too successfully, to link Girl & Rat to the Temple of the Rats – the Karni Mata Temple in the town of Deshnok in Rajasthan. Even though it hasn’t been used for worship for almost seven decades, the shrine is still intact. Over the years, it has housed thousands of rats, and they’ve received the daily offerings of believers and priests. Various myths surrounding the shrine establish a clear link between a feminine, maternal divinity and rats as the reincarnation of human-cubs.
Your implachip is not responding.
You’re still fighting me.
All of the studies before mine led to a dead end. Even Professor Mammuna Shanti ultimately retracted her original theory, and in our final exchanges, she sided vehemently with your interpretation of the poem as the outpouring of a subversive entity that had been taking advantage of the electronic networks in their earlier days to gain maximum circulation within a short period.
All of the experts have dropped Girl & Rat, but I...
An amazing discovery...
Because if I stop being afraid
I’ll no longer be...
Your REMaker is trying to throw me out. Don’t fight it, Stash. It is competing against Girl & Rat and I’m spitting out broken lines. What a shame that the original collection has not been found. Jews are mentioned in only a single poem from an earlier version, a very fragmentary one.
Stuck inside the brain...
An undo command is needed...
Can’t get rid of...
A little girl is treading on the outstretched tail of a rat in the volcanic mouth of Mount Egmont in New Zealand. It was a circus act performed only once in 2024, a few months before the Great Ecological Disaster, which is why it was never documented. I have no choice but visualize it for you.
According to my genetic card, that was when the process of my conception began. That’s when my fetal cells started to link.
We are watching the circus act together now. Down below is the abyss. A total void. The little girl’s eyes are shut, and she’s moving forward slowly. The rat’s tail is sweeping wildly from side to side like in a circus...
A volcanic eruption...
She’s falling, or maybe flying.
My powers of visualization aren’t strong enough to produce the ending for you.
I remember only too well the condescending b-mail where you insisted that nobody is capable any more of separating Little Red Riding Hood from the wolf that swallowed her, or of finding out if Oedipus was really a king or just a lunatic fantasizing about sleeping with his own mother.
You were right, of course. But precisely because Girl & Rat is less than a hundred years old, we can still discover its roots.
A young myth...
A thin slough, a shell...
Precisely because a myth is an encrypted historical memory, it’s my duty to discover the truth hiding underneath it, with all the stir it’s generated. Girl & Rat has been dug out, and is part of the public domain now, a free-for-all that anyone can jostle with. I’ll break off the shell and find the nucleus of truth. I must. This is the girl that once was. This is darkness. No other exists.
I hear a scream...
Somewhere deep inside me...
Not from any recognizable part of myself...
The little-girl-who-once-was existed. The pit-that-once-was existed. Darkness. Nothing more.
And the Stefan...
Why is he the only one in the myth who bears a name?
I think I know where ... it all happened.
The pit...
The little girl...
My discovery...
I must hurry.
Before it’ll be forever buried.
I wasn’t beamed to Girl & Rat when I was a child. I didn’t have a mother who would put me to sleep with lullabies and bedtime stories about Girl & Rat. I had a perfect parental voice, made by state-of-the-art processors. And Girl & Rat weren’t part of an anthropological development plan. I have no offspring, so I didn’t have a chance to transmit the lullabies and the bedtime stories to the next generation either. But ever since I discovered them as a youngster, Girl & Rat have fascinated me as much as they’ve terrified me. The poems keep spinning through my head, over and over, almost on their own. I have no idea why they move through me so freely, or why I feel as if they possess me. They seem to be taking over every cell and every neuron...
I have a friend with a tail and he has four legs.
The Stefan also has a tail...
I’m trying to retrieve...
When did I hear it for the first...
Shuddering...
What’s this?
A glitch...
I’m trying to fix it.
Y-mee, that’s my name.
Why me?
At last, you’re responding. There was bound to be a clash between my brain and yours. Not everything operates the way it should in our perfect world.
That’s just as well...
The implachip is blipping retrievals from our previous b-mails. You often used to suggest that I undergo an external memory scan, to see if my fascination with Girl & Rat doesn’t have something to do with a hidden recess in my memory, or something that went wrong in an earlier, uncontrolled stage of my development. You hinted that simple surgery might help solve the problem and fix me for good.
I’ve got to admit that I couldn’t help feeling that way myself. Maybe there was something wrong with my brain in the first place, which is why I contacted the diagnoscope, to rule out any medical condition. I’ve been given a clean bill of health, Stash. My implachip is fine too. Otherwise, how could I have broken into your REMaker?
Once, years ago, in some private part of your past that you’ve managed to delete, I guess, you left me a personal message in my brain box. You asked me to recommend a dream. You said you’d exhausted everything in your own dreamertory.