The Wired Rats

From: A History of the Vischerpeople, 2065.

Introduction

Many students will be familiar with the Vischerz, a race who drill holes in trash islands to comb the ocean floor for idea chips. They then clean these up, using their advanced eyesight to detect any faults, tweaking them with tools at the ends of the upper limbs where you and I have hands and fingers, and transport these restored findings to Planet Jujj. The Jujii reward them with Ark Ma, a substance which provides momentary bliss and forgetfulness of the pandemic that has made the original home planet of the Vischerz unliveable.

The following extract outlines how a plague of Wired Rats nearly destroyed the livelihood of the Vischerz. We today live comfortably alongside the tame, timid creatures, but it was not always so.

Invasion of the Wired Rats

Unbeknownst to the Vischerz, on the morning of an expedition on 17^th Jooli 2061, a gaggle of Wired Rats had found their way on to one of the boats. Unfortunately, it was also a boat carrying a cargo of Ratalin that one of the immoral Vischerpeople was planning to do a little side hustling with. Ratalin is a performance enhancing drug, keeping the user awake all night talking about the art of what one wants to achieve rather than practising said art.

The jacked up Wired Rats escaped the ship’s hold and quickly burrowed their way through a trash island. They had ample time on their paws to look for idea chips, but they didn’t. They just talked in a language consisting more of symbols and pictures than with the alphabet as we know it, about games they liked to play, pictures they had gathered to watch on big screens, and designed quizzes to share their names and ages away from the sight of citizens of Planet Jujj, who might penalise them if they discovered the truth.

As the army of Wired Rats grew and grew, so did the long tendrils of ocean grass that rose from the cracks the Wired Rats had kicked open with the skittering feet. From the tips of the grass grew flowers rich in Ark Ma, which the Wired Rats tore open with their needle teeth and used to become bigger and faster, if not more intelligent. When they finally realised the grass grew from the disturbed soil, they danced upon the surface, all the while endlessly communicating their every thought and no longer even paying much attention to the occasional idea chip that floated by. They were hooked on Ark Ma. And Ark Ma when coming into contact with the Ratalin already coursing through their systems became a formidable substance. The synergy made the formerly gunmetal grey plates that coated their soft pink flesh gleam golden. They named the flower that had given them this glow ‘The Yellow Splotch’ and soon forgot everything else apart from pursuit of this nectar.

The leaders of Planet Jujj began to take note of the Wired Rats. They had previously accepted the rats as a harmless part of the scenery, nothing more. But the stomping of their feet caused ripples on the ocean’s surface, which then became waves, sending the Vischerz flying off the sides of their boats or ricocheting up, up through the clouds and flinging them onto distant planets, or careening directionless in cyberspace forevermore.

The Vischerz that remained started to become very, very angry. The Wired Rats were taking all the Ark Ma. It was now next to impossible to guide their clever equipment down the tunnels they had drilled and through the ocean grass to detect idea chips, many of which had fallen down the cracks made by the grass, so even further out of reach. Have you ever seen where the roots of a tree have broken through a pavement? It was like that for the Vischerz. They could no longer safely move around because the long dense grass halted their progress.  

The leader of the Wired Rats, dubbed ‘Quean’ by her army of admirers who always made up for their lack of literacy with their rodent furvor, became so because she learned how to multiply herself. She created identirats, all with her gleaming rainbow prism eyes and coat that shone a brighter yellow than that of any other rat. Displaying fearsome appetite, she sent her identirats all over the floor to harvest Ark Ma for her pleasure. She became the fattest rat of all and it was her screams of triumph, bursting through the ocean’s surface, becoming trapped in bubbles that blew away and then burst in the faces of the Jujj people, that made them realise something had gone wrong with their rewards system.

The Jujjii built cats to fight the rats. Cats armed with quills whose poisoned tips would work against the Ratalin to slow the rats down. The cats would toy with the rats and when they finally tired of playing with their prey, would bat them with paws the size of dinner plates into the chutes the Jujiii had lowered into the ocean. The chutes greedily sucked up the rats and spat them onto a planet especially created from the parts of old planets that had been tumbling through space. This is the planet we all know now as ‘Gadployurn’.

The rats soon forgot Planet Jujj, the Vischerz and the quest for Ark Ma. Their shiny gold coats returned to a dull silver, and the Quean returned to her normal size. Her identirats did not survive long in the atmosphere of Gadployurn. The Wired Rats no longer pandered to their Quean and instead recognised her as their equal.

With no rat feet constantly turning the surface of the ocean bed, the grass grew thin and shed its flowers. The Vischerz designed a special mix of powder that dissolved the remaining ocean grass, making it easier to spot the idea chips. The Jujiii rewarded the Vischerpeople who sourced the best quality chips with the most Ark Ma, while the Wired Rats played happily on Gadployurn. The only entities they worship now are storytellers J.K. Ratling and Rat Riordan.

Ratalin became an outlawed substance throughout the universe in The Controlled Substances Act of 2063. Carrying Ratalin and/or supplying it to Wired Rats can result in life imprisonment, or nine lives imprisonment if the felon is a cat.