Wrath

RATTUS

NORVEGICUS

1

The San Jose Civic seats 3,036. With stage lights at max wattage, just as he directed, Noah Goff can’t see but shadows of the assembled. This is how he likes it. To view the crowd as 3,036 individuals, each with the power to deride or heckle, is to fall into a trap. It’s a trap Noah learned to skirt as a child, the weird, brainy dork in rural Iowa. Lots of pain in those traps, lots of humiliation.

No, it’s safer to think of the crowd as a herd.

In the dark, they watch. They sniff. They chatter.

Noah exhales and nods at Sienna—who looks queasy—and strides for the stage.

Lights blast on in sync with a melodramatic boom from the Civic’s subwoofers. It’s like an army of pest controllers blasting flashlights down a manhole. Noah sees the twitching of thousands of heads as the herd watches him arrive. They lift their noses to sniff for treats. They squeak, too: their shoes against the floor as they stand to clap their paws.

Noah hits center stage. A table. A black sheet. A covered object. The spotlight is as hot as oil. He nods humbly but not too humbly. Fans expect a little swagger. Noah paces a circle and pumps a fist. He wears boutique jeans tailored to fit, a crisp pink hoodie, and the ultra-rare Nike x MSCHF Air Max 97 Jesus Shoes, the soles filled with holy water from the Jordan River—he’s literally walking on water. Finally, there’s his frayed, six-year-old baseball cap with the EditedPets logo—the letters EP within the outline of a nondescript mammalian head. The cap sends a message: I’m a regular guy too.

He’s not, though. Noah has never considered himself regular.

Behind him, a gargantuan screen radiates the company slogan:

pets, reinvented.

Noah adjusts his head mic. It’s like affixing a grin.

Good morning.

Two words amplified a million-fold. The resonance is godlike.

More applause as the company slogan cedes to a live shot. Five-foot-six Noah Goff becomes a fifty-six-foot kaiju. Noah gestures for the herd to sit, and after a while it does. Their energy, however, doesn’t abate. Noah plugs into it, the best sensation he’s felt in his thirty-six years of life.

I’m Noah. No surname among friends. For those of you who don’t know me but somehow managed to end up at a ticketed event at nine in the morning,—pause for chuckles—I’m the founder and CEO of a biotech company called EditedPets. We use patented RNA-guided DNA-nicking INTR—shrewdly pronounced Enter—technology to control how, when, and where genes are activated in order to revolutionize our relationship with our animal companions. He smiles. A lot of acronyms. Let me explain what they mean for you.

Noah holds a clicker. If all goes well, and it sure the fuck better, a flex of his thumb will advance the screen behind him. He tries it—click—and knows it worked from the 4K glow. The screen shifts to a faux-naïve animation of the EP logo, waddling like a puppy across a white void. The herd laughs. On June 29, 2007, Apple released the iPhone. Data tells us that three out of four of you here today have an iPhone in your pocket. Turned off, I’m sure, per our polite request.

More chuckling. Good. Now, shift the tone. Noah quits pacing and employs a gesture to project sincerity.

"There’s no question Apple revolutionized human communication. But humans only make up thirty-six percent of mammals and only zero-point-zero-one percent of all animals. Our mission at EditedPets is to evolve our relationship with the other ninety-nine-point-ninety-nine percent of us. Beginning with the animals we already love—our pets."

Click. The scene scintillates with waves that suggest a flashback. We meet a cartoon caveman by a fire and a wolf pacing the periphery. "We first befriended the wolf 14,500 years ago. Call it what you like. A one-in-a-million chance? A cosmic fluke? But when your planet has nearly nine million species, the odds of such flukes get a little bit better. So how’d it happen? Let’s watch."

Click. The animation swoops closer. Man and wolf blink big Disney eyes at each other.

Wolves aren’t big on eye contact. They communicate via sound and scents. But this wolf here has got a genetic quirk that compels him to maintain eye contact with our caveman—and that’s all it takes. Flash forward 150 centuries and what do we get?

Click. A YouTube video. Designer-bred puppies rush the camera, a downy tumble of big eyes, stubby snouts, recessed chins, severe underbites, and hilarious hairdos. They lick the lens. The herd squirms. The cuteness is painful.

"You get Cockapoos. You get Puggles, Schnoodles, Pomskies, Cavachons, Chiweenies, Pitskies, and Chugs. In a sense, they’re all edited pets—and we wouldn’t have them any other way. But their modifications took fifty, a hundred, two hundred years. In an iPhone world, that’s a flip-phone speed."

Click. A new animation depicts an object rocking beneath a black sheet—a mirror of the hidden object on the stage. EditedPets fans sense the big reveal edging close. Shoes scuffle, chairs creak, breaths are drawn. No Jobs, Bezos, Dorsey, Gates, Musk, or Zuckerberg have ever heard such sounds of naked yearning. Nothing they can do with plastic and ceramic-glass will ever supplant flesh and blood.

Noah experiences an unexpected rush of grateful tears before tamping it down. If they could see him now: the high school bullies, the college naysayers, the scientists who said it couldn’t or shouldn’t be done, the investors who said, neat idea, kid, but you’re nuts. Actually, they can see him now. They are at home, watching the livestream. Some are right here in the Civic, hanging on his every word.

He’s got them right where he fucking wants them.

Click.

"FireFish—how many of you had one? How many of you had two? Two dozen?"

Even puking into a garbage can backstage, Sienna Aguirre notices Noah’s tense: had, not have. Her boss may be cocky, but he can read a sales report. Those fish are yesterday’s Actinopterygil.

She wipes her lips with the back of her hand, then looks for something to wipe the back of her hand with. She’s got a half-finished origami frog in her pocket, folded from the event program, but it won’t clean much. Instead, she grabs one of the black curtains masking the stage wings. A pebble of knowledge from a college theater class dislodges from her neocortex. This curtain is called a tormentor.

How perfect. She ought to rip it down, wear it as a cloak.

Sienna shuffles away from Noah in search of bottled water. But she can’t escape his high-decibel rehash of EditedPets’s first success. FireFish are six years old now; in tech, that makes them as nostalgic as an Atari. Right now the crowd is reliving the awe they felt the first time they plunked down $7.99 for a FireFish, turned off their living room lights, and watched its thirty-one bioluminescent scales go incandescent, its pulse somehow mistakable for that of God.

Even Sienna had felt it—and she’d been the one to engineer it! Noah failed hourly at basic niceties but excelled at showy gifts, and to celebrate EditedPets’s first success, he’d delivered to Sienna’s Nolita apartment a deluxe seventy-five-gallon aquarium and fifty FireFish, and reupped the fish each year on her birthday. The school produced an amorphous, bubbling glow for a couple years, and it did, for a while, inspire her.

But pets, even edited ones, are a risky addition to the lifestyle of a woman who works twelve-hour days and often sleeps at the lab. After her fertility issues and Isaiah leaving, her FireFish began to go belly-up at disturbing rates. It’s become her ritual of shame: arrive at home, pour a shot, slug it down, trudge to the tank, and see how many little miracles she’s managed to murder.

Dead, they neither glow nor inspire. They are cold, slimy, disposable.

Like me, Sienna thinks. Cold, for sure. Maybe slimy, too, if I take a hard look.

Six years ago we were the first company to produce and patent a genetically modified pet, Noah says from the stage. "We started small. Very small: an inch and a half. But the effect wasn’t small, was it?"

Sienna finds the table of waters, grabs one, and twists the lid with a hard crack, the sound of a lab animal’s snapped neck. She drinks to wash away the vomit tang. She was at this morning’s rehearsal and knows what’s next on the monitor: eight animated FireFish morphing into a number:

18,134,000

Over eighteen million FireFish sold in our first twelve months, Noah declares. You liked them so much, we couldn’t keep up!

Hoots and clapping, all for Noah. Sienna doesn’t mind. She’s the tall, ink-haired, thirty-seven-year-old geneticist who rifles through DNA code and cuts-and-pastes physical and behavioral traits. But a genius product sells better when associated with one genius, not two, and certainly not a whole team. When FireFish took off, and Noah Goff was on every cable news show, above the fold in the New York Times, and on the cover of Newsweek, each dollar in the EditedPets coffers said that he, and he alone, was the seer he’d always believed.

Sienna finishes the water, chucks the bottle. The glory days were glorious. Running prime editing genetic experiments at their first lab, a cramped rental space in a tech park off the Long Island Expressway. Noah popping in between fundraising jaunts to urge her to fail faster. Perfecting INTR to optimize the insertion of firefly genes into fertilized goldfish eggs. Breaking her four-year sobriety to celebrate with champagne, which begat wine, which begat liquor, which begat the end of her marriage.

Noah helped her by being Noah, always pushing, always demanding. Work offered Sienna handholds from her drunken, divorced crevasse. She might be sick with anxiety today, but she was upright, wasn’t she?

Shit to do: it has reliably been what has saved her.

And Noah Goff always has shit for her to do.

One year later, EditedPets released the groundbreaking ChattyBird.

Noah braces for a modest response. While an entire generation has a reflex love for FireFish, there’s less so for ChattyBird. Noah thumbs the clicker. Let’s get through these slides quick.

The modest sales of ChattyBird still sting. All those nights free-associating with Sienna about how to get the ZNF541, EBF3, and RSPH3 genes of African Parrots to play nice inside a plump and cheaper little budgie body. All the days ginning up investors while Sienna made the science work. From a genetic standpoint, the triumph was indisputable: ChattyBird trebled a budgie’s proficiency at replicating human speech and, at $175, at a small fraction of the cost.

But what had Stephen Colbert said the day of ChattyBird’s debut?

Never has driving your family up the freaking wall been easier on the wallet.

Gags like that hardened the narrative before EditedPets could redirect it. ChattyBird was a nifty trick, reviewers said, but lacked the soul of FireFish. It didn’t enhance gatherings of family and friends, it was the gathering, and that got old faster than ChattyBird’s warranted lifetime of seven to ten years.

Noah laughed along to the joke on CNBC; on Fox Business, he compared ChattyBird to talkative relatives—you still loved them, right? When the interview replayed later in Noah’s SoHo penthouse loft, he selected the five-iron from the seventy-thousand-dollar set of Honma Five Star Golf Clubs he’d never used and bashed in the screen of his eighty-five-inch Samsung Smart 8K.

Click, click, click. Noah rapidly moves through marvels.

A year after that, the acclaimed EasyPony.

The third EditedPets launch in three years. Sienna argued against it. Too much, too fast, too expensive, she said, a reaction that disappointed Noah. Had Jobs ever said too much? Does Musk ever say too fast?

Sienna and a stripped-down staff delivered EasyPony on time. The idea was to insert a mutated DMRT3 gene into the embryo cells of a Shetland pony, bequeathing the Shetland with the storied Tölt gait, a four-beat lateral amble found only in Icelandic horses. Noah recalls persuading Sienna to climb atop the prototype EasyPony. She’d never touched a saddle in her life, but in seconds it was like she’d been riding her whole life. If Noah’s ex-shrink, Dr. Clive, had still been around, he’d tell Noah to celebrate Sienna’s smile—that was what was important in life.

But Dr. Clive doesn’t have a budget of $125 million to manage and a twelve-person board to appease.

At a price point of $2,500, EasyPony was intended to be EditedPets’s scale offering. If they even did five percent of their FireFish business, they’d clear a nice profit. But upscale buyers proved stubborn. Equestrians had a streak of cowboy pride, and publicly ridiculed EasyPony.

Noah felt bereft, betrayed. EasyPony was a $125 million flop. Once knighted by Forbes as the fastest-growing billion dollar plus consumer deliverable biotech, EditedPets began to hemorrhage money. The NASDAQ listing dropped from $475 per share to under twenty-five bucks. It drove Noah into the office of Dr. Clive, who urged him to accept the word flop, repeat it, take a bath in it. Three weeks later, Noah swore off therapy for good. A palliative for the pathetic. Not him. Noah Goff was no flop.

EditedPets retains tremendous goodwill from FireFish. Ninety seconds more of his speech and the product under the sheet will be revealed. It will save EditedPets. It will save him.

Sienna has nearly finished the origami frog by the time she peeks from the stage-left wing. It’s a hobby she picked up from Dr. Suzuki Mika, her PhD supervisor at Columbia, who always left a trail of paper animals and flowers. Hoping to squash phone addiction, Sienna picked it up. Now she can complete her favorite patterns via muscle memory. A few reverse folds and the frog will be finished.

She peeks past the tormentor curtains. Noah gestures to the shape under the sheet. Seats creak as the crowd leans in. What sort of pet will it be?

For a while, Noah and Sienna hadn’t been sure either.

A series of disasters had forced their hand. First, there was the outbreak of users flushing FireFish down toilets. By the time EasyPony launched, huge glowing carp were being spotted in the Hudson River—after EditedPets had promised the EPA that all their products were sterile. A federal probe led to EditedPets being fined fifteen million. A small sum given their degree of negligence. They were lucky not to have been shut down. Next came the global #FreeChatty trend of users letting their verbose pets take wing in the countryside. Now rumors of budgies replicating human speech are everywhere. It’s a chilling notion: Sienna imagines quiet neighborhoods and parks ruined by babbling nonsense from the trees. The final insult was a string of viral photos of EasyPonies gone obese. The pet had proven so docile that users had quit exercising them.

Sienna got the message: EditedPets’s next launch had to change the narrative.

Noah steps to the edge of the stage. He frowns in faux confusion. In real life, the look isn’t in his repertoire.

And then what happened? Where the heck did EditedPets go for three years?

Light laughter. Good tactic, Sienna thinks. But hurry up already.

"The truth is, you know what happened, Noah says. A little bug called Covid-19 changed everything. EditedPets shut its doors, same as everyone. But the instant we were able to put safety protocols into place, a select team of scientists returned to our labs."

Statements like these make Sienna reach for invisible highballs. Covid-19 had shit-all to do with the EditedPets slowdown. Noah had nasopharyngeal kits before most hospitals.

The lawsuits slowed them, plain and simple. Privately, Sienna was glad for the space to breathe, even if it meant daily innuendos of laziness from Noah. He could suck a dick. Pasteur, Jenner, Lister, Salk—none of them had accomplished so much in such a short span of time. And none of them had had to match the shifting proclivities of public appetite fueled by social media.

Noah had scores of investors to woo and wounds to lick. Sienna did her own licking: the bottoms of tumblers when her bottles ran dry. She wasn’t proud. She just needed to keep a nice buzz going so she could get enough sleep to tackle the Big One. The product that would shoot EditedPets into the stratosphere of Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google—or bury it in the boneyard alongside Palm, Quibi, Betamax, and Edsel.

Noah reaches for the black sheet.

We have, of course, put out refreshed product. During Covid, we knew you’d want to show off new styles of FireFish; and by intermingling jellyfish genes, we were able to offer you the FireFish Hope line, in pink, yellow, red, purple, and limited-edition gold—and I gotta say, they looked great on your Zooms.

Sienna engineered the Hope line with as little trouble as the origami frog. Novelty acts to keep EditedPets in the news. What people really wanted was clear from the market research.

They wanted a pet that was smart. Who was smart—they wanted a pet they can think of as a who, a companion capable of engaging with them at a whole new level.

Noah’s fingers pinch the black sheet. He glances left and locks eyes with Sienna. Her breath leaves her. It’s nothing romantic. She’s seen Noah in too many states of petulance, irritability, indignation, self-pity, and furor to ever find him attractive. But to be the sole recipient of his attention while thousands hold their breath—it still does something to her.

Sienna smiles back. Fake, until it isn’t.

Ladies and gentlemen, Noah announces, I’d like you to meet . . . Sammy.

It’s a rat.

But not like any rat Leonard Przybyszewski has chased off, trapped, clubbed, squashed, impaled, starved, poisoned, or gassed. Or seen up-close at EditedPets either. As the company’s security guy, he’s permitted in the lab, but is content to relax in his security cubby across the hall. Unlike every other piece of equipment Noah buys, the security cameras suck. Probably on purpose. Through those hunks of junk, Prez can barely make out humans, much less anything specific about lab rats.

Noah Goff goes double-volume.

"In the thousands of years since our caveman pal met that friendly wolf, there hasn’t been a single significant advance in the human–animal relationship. That all changes with Sammy—the first pet to be designed, at a molecular level, with human intelligence genes."

The crowd gasps, then claps, then whoops, then pops jerkily to their feet as if pulled by marionette strings. The noise complicates—squeals, stomps, screams—then evolves into the bombination of a swarm of bees. Somehow the crowd knows this is what they have waited for, their whole lives.

Prez, though, isn’t so sure.

He’s not even sure what he’s doing here. Right now, he’s standing and clapping to keep his undercover status secret. Mr. Goff stationed him here in the front row in case something went wrong. But what could go wrong besides the little fella getting nervous and scurrying into the crowd? He didn’t bother asking Mr. Goff. He’s come to recognize when the boss man is in no mood to get specific.

Back when EditedPets had put out their glowy fish, blabby bird, and hobby horse, Prez had been working at Przybyszewski & Sons Pest Control, the small business he’d inherited from his white Polish adopted dad. Now he’s in year three of handling lab security for EditedPets. The first nine-to-five hours he’s worked in his life. About time, too. He’s fifty-six. Forty-five pounds overweight. Needs to piss every two goddamn hours. Bunch a plaque crudding up his arteries, if Doc Kowalski is to be believed. Then there’s the bellowing bitches of his knees; major-league catchers have nothin’ on ratters, Pop used to say.

Mr. Goff quiets the crowd, but no one’s sitting. That means Prez, too, has to stay on his sore feet and throbbing knees. Truth be told, he’s as rapt as anyone. Is the boss man pulling everyone’s legs here?

Now let’s get this out of the way, Noah Goff laughs. What you see inside this pen here is a rat. Yep, you heard me right—one of those sneaky little guys that inspired movie gangsters to say stuff like, ‘You dirty rat.’ But I ask you. Does this fella look sneaky? Does he look creepy? Does he look dirty?

Anyone who’s watched Prez kiss Smog, his Jack Russell Terrier, right on the mouth knows he’s not immune to cuteness. He just never dreamed he’d feel such an instinct toward a rat.

Whether you’re looking at a box of puppies or perusing cats at a local shelter, first impressions matter. Don’t feel bad about it—the features we find endearing are hardwired into our brains. So we genetically adjusted Sammy to ensure that your instant response to him is one of joy and love. Noah Goff grins. Worked, didn’t it?

Prez estimates he’s met fifty thousand rats in his life. In New York, that means Rattus norvegicus, also known by a bevy of criminal aliases: Brown Rat, Street Rat, Sewer Rat, Wharf Rat, Common Rat, or, in the hoods Prez used to work, That Giant Motherfucking Rat Right There. And every single one of these rats had an identical physical profile.

First off, a wedge-shaped head that melts into its body, all the better with which to push through the smallest holes. Sammy’s head, though, better resembles a kitten’s: domed, definably necked. Where Rattus norvegicus’s nose is mercilessly aquiline, Sammy’s nose is a plump button atop a pudgy muzzle. In public like this, the beady eyes of a typical Rattus norvegicus would be jerking wildly. Sammy’s eyes are big and round, and he blinks curiously at the crowd. When he stands on his hind legs for a better look, showing off a rounded back and fuzzy haunches, the audience makes a sound that Prez, one minute ago, never would have believed.

Awwww.

He feels a squeeze. The woman next to him has clutched his forearm and doesn’t seem to realize it. Prez likes to call this the Lenny syndrome, after the gentle giant in Of Mice and Men, who liked soft animals so much he hugged them to death.

Prez doesn’t like rats. But he respects the hell out of them. Ask him and he’ll tell you that rats have gotten the best of him for forty years, no matter how many he’s slain. But Sammy is the most inviting rat Prez has ever seen. He wonders if he’s feeling Lenny Syndrome too. When Sammy cocks his head, Prez cocks his own.

But his hands act on muscle memory. They instinctively reach for traps, bait, a bludgeon: the ratting gear he gave up three years back.

Until this second, Noah has controlled the drama: clicker in palm, rat in cage. Now the dynamic must change. A bead of sweat rolls down the center of his back, shockingly cold. He used to sweat like this as an adolescent, sitting in class, praying he wouldn’t be called or, god forbid, be asked to stand in front of the class, where everyone would see his wet pits and mock his mortified pallor.

Part of it is nerves. But part of it is that Noah hates rats. Hates them. Working in labs, where rodents are the commonest test subjects, Noah has forced himself to power through his revulsion, or get someone else to handle those squirming, flexing bodies. He’s come a long way but knows the loathing will never subside. How could it? He was only nine years old when Grammy—

Stop, he orders himself. Don’t think of it, not right now.

This is his classroom. He’s in charge.

Click.

What you’re looking at here is the Sammy PlayPen. It’s got everything you need. Safety ramps. Comfort shelves. Hammocks. A spiral slide. Optional wheels. Effortless to clean. Available in both Wow Fluorescent for the playroom and Dusty Rose for the office. It’s great fun for you, the user, and a cozy place for Sammy. But it’s sold separately. Why do I mention that specifically?

With a practiced flip of both thumbs, Noah undoes the PlayPen’s dual locks, spins his hands, and lifts off the lid. Scattered cheers. But also a second bead of sweat. Him, handling a rat, in front of all these people? Awful close to standing in front of a classroom.

"Because you’re not required to have a PlayPen. Unlike a pet gerbil, hamster, mouse, chinchilla, or ferret, Sammy doesn’t need, and doesn’t want, to be treated like a prisoner. He should be treated like . . . a friend."

Here we go, he thinks.

Noah extends his arm into the open cage. No risk of harm, he knows this. Yet he still feels what a lion tamer must feel when putting his head into a set of jaws. He thinks he knows what will happen—but he doesn’t truly know, does he? Ugly memories flicker. Grammy—the squeaking—the chittering.

Sammy twitches his nose at Noah’s arm. Tilts his head. Locks his eyes with Noah’s.

None of the rat eyes Noah has seen in his life do what Sammy’s do. It’s hard to put it into words. There’s a certain weight, a certain piercing. Human eyes are weaponized with want. Not just for food and shelter, but connection. Sammy’s eyes want something too.

Noah makes a kiss-kiss. Sammy’s whiskers perk and his cubby ears flatten, then he hops onto Noah’s hand and rushes up the ramp of his arm. It’s never pleasant when rats go rogue in the lab. Their feet are five-digited but otherwise resemble those of a chicken: too long, roughly rippled, dagger-clawed. But this rat’s feet are soft as velvet.

Sammy perches on Noah’s shoulder. He’s six inches long, three-quarters the length of the average brown rat, with a tail only three inches in length, giving it the bobtail charm of a Corgi. Static electricity from the PlayPen emphasizes the softness of Sammy’s teddy-bear fur; backlit by stage lights, it stands cutely askew. Sammy pops onto his haunches and touches his nose to Noah’s lips: a kiss.

To Sammy: Thanks, Sammy. To everyone: Sammy wasn’t trained to do that, folks. He did it because I asked. Because he understands the English language.

The crowd struggles to verbalize their emotions. They make airy noses, like breath through an open saxophone, before breaking into inchoate squeals, shapeless yawps, bodily motions that look short-circuited. There is no comparing this to the reaction to FireFish, ChattyBird, or EasyPony. Their need to touch Sammy feels almost dangerous.

Maybe we set the price point too low, Noah thinks.

Relief crashes over Sienna. She sees a plastic crate, drags it over, dumps herself atop it, drops the origami frog. Her legs judder. Her fingers and toes are numb. Her chest prickles, the release of anxious blood.

We fucking did it, she says.

She hears the teary hitch in her own voice. She laughs at it. She doesn’t give a shit about backstage signage demanding silence. She cups her face in her hands and lets laughter jag forth. A month ago, she’d asked Noah to delay the launch. Two weeks ago, she’d begged him. Five days ago, she’d gotten down on her knees, a disgusting scene in front of her techs.

But Noah had been right.

Thirty seconds outside the PlayPen and already the rat is a star.

Sienna lifts her face to watch. Noah paces comfortably. Sammy stays on his shoulder, bobbing his head, eager for a better look at the crowd.

Everyone here instinctively understands the health benefits of pets, Noah says. "But let me tell you what science says. Having a pet lowers blood pressure, emboldens