Vinnie the Wonder Rodent: Or, Why I Should've Been a Lit. Major

By Genevieve Fowler

I was twelve years old and scared stupid when Sr. Timothy told me to go down to the principal's office. I figured that they had finally connected the forged hall pass and the cherry bomb incident and I'd finally earned my ticket to public school. Instead, they had other news for me-congratulations, you're a freak. Well, that's how it came off. Actually, what they said was, the results from my second IQ test showed an irregularity-they more or less confirmed the first one. That was not expected. However, what it told them was that I'd be much better off if they fast-tracked me from there into some classes a bit more "appropriate" to my abilities. In the course of a half-hour, I went from "juvenile delinquent" to "misunderstood genius." And that's pretty much been the speed of things for me ever since.

I'm giving you this little trip down my own personal memory lane to try and explain myself-I've always been a little restless. My mind doesn't work like other people's. If you can picture the Cherry Bomb Kid being thrown into her first college-level chem lab and being told that "Blow-ups happen"-well, I fell in love with the possibilities of the sciences. Somewhere in there, amidst the beakers and Bunsen burners, microscopes and methodologies, I found the kind of respect from adults I could only get from people my own age by kicking their butts in the playground. But, while all the encouragement I got was a good thing, there was a side effect: I think big. And when that unfortunate mishap occurred in an Alexandria hotel room to spark my Immortality, well, my two worlds (girl genius and hopeless wreck) unfortunately collided.

One of the things it led to was a very nasty virus-but I don't want to tell that story. The other thing it led to was Vinnie the Wonder Rodent. That story, I don't mind telling. He's still out there-somewhere. Unless, I guess, he got his head caught in a trap…and…well, you know.

It was the summer of '93. I was still so wet behind the ears, I hadn't even been challenged yet. The only other person like me I'd even seen was Kronos-suffice it to say he told me jack about "Your Immortality and You." But, I was a scientist (okay…that was what my all of twenty-one and brick-dumb ego told me), and I told myself I would figure out what I'd become. And so, the experiments began. At first, I only did a few experiments on myself to see what my threshold was like for taking a licking and continuing to tick. But once I realized how seriously high that threshold was-I started thinking about the possible benefits to others I could bring about if I could only figure out a way to make my condition communicable, so to speak.

Enter Vinnie.

Vinnie is what you could call one of your Rattus norvegicus, also known as a brown rat. I named him after a boyfriend I had in high school, to whom he bore a striking resemblance. He was the product of three generations of surprisingly long-lived Muridae who were specially bred for…well, their tendency to live a surprisingly long time. He was four when I appropriated him-which is no spring chick in rat years. But he was still doing all his favorite rat things. Eating. Sniffing at stuff. Making little baby rats-yep, unlike me, he had no troubles in that department. I, on the other hand, had found out in unorthodox fashion what my problem was when I did a little in vitro experiment. I may be the only Immortal who has ever found out that way. But what I did find, through reading some studies, checking out what had been recorded about Vinnie's family and their interesting genes, and checking out my own chromosomes-was a few similar mutations (Sn P's…or single nucleotide polymorphisms, mine in the twelfth chromosome pair, Vinnie's…elsewhere. U of P actually holds the patent on Vinnie., so I can't really go into detail, there. But I was able to confirm that the quirk was specific to Immortals when I checked it against blood samples from some of my…late Immortal acquaintances. Ghoulish, no?)

But despite a few cellular similarities, the actual results were different. He was merely long-lived. I, on the other hand, seemed just about indestructible. He had offspring (you bet I isolated those females). I wouldn't. And I had made reasonably sure that a male Immortal probably couldn't either (No, * that * is ghoulish.)

But that was about to change.

****

By now, some of you must know about my unfortunate brainstorm in re: gene therapy. It's even a kind of tricky procedure when done by people who know what they're doing-right now, for example, the method I used has been successfully utilized in the treatment of certain genetic diseases, with varying results. When it goes well, it can be miraculous-imagine a young child with progressive muscular dystrophy going into sudden remission. When it goes wrong-well, picture the same kid going into anaphylactic shock. Forget nuclear fission, people-you want some deadly stuff at your fingertips-check your fingertips. Fiddling around with DNA is some tricky business. But see if you internalize all that when you're young and newly Immortal.

I didn't. It seemed like a great idea after all, using my own RNA to inoculate humanity against mortality-very post-Modern Jonas Salk. So I took a sample of common rhinovirus and…

Well, very bad things happened. See, people don't die of the common cold, or at least, not frequently. The virus was supposed to be relatively inert. It wasn't like I was mixing it up with a little polio, you know? I didn't decide on the spur of the moment that it would spread more quickly if I tried, oh hanta…hanta would have been good for that. Airborne. Respiratory. Short incubation period…the mind reels. The intention was to make the * host * stronger-not the bug.

I blew it.

What you might not realize is that every time you get sick, it changes you a little bit. Your immune system develops antibodies, for example. The way gene therapy ideally works is that the serum developed * changes * the body, giving it something it doesn't have. I used my first sample on a group of white rabbits. It changed their immune system, all right. Long story short, those bunnies did not have to worry about catching anything, ever again. They had already caught the big one. It gave them something they didn't have-a rather nasty death.

And I made another discovery-I really suck when it comes to keeping things sterile. One batch of my serum was * not * inert. Very not inert. As in…well…

The fire marshal still had his doubts about the accident that burned down the Byrd building. I have no doubts about what happened. I never looked back as I left the wreckage-I just hoped that I had kept my fingerprints off anything that could be used against me. And tried to look dazed and confused when I was questioned about it later. And tried to play it cool when one of my professors got unpleasant about it all (that's another interesting story-but that's for another day.)

I thought nothing could survive the explosion-after all, gasoline is messy but thorough. And yet, they did find a terribly battered cage in the wreckage. Dented, mangled, black with soot. But strangely enough, the rat inside was alive and unharmed. And bore a striking resemblance to my high school boyfriend.

Vinnie had survived.

I was thrilled-and concerned. On one hand…his being alive was comforting. You know, rats can be very companionable. And he was smarter than your average rat. He could jump through a hoop. Of course, the hoop had to be held down really low. And you had to wave food at the other end of it, and push him from behind a little. But on the other hand, he was a potential carrier of the virus, and that would never do. So it was necessary for me to-re-appropriate him. You know, before lots of people died. See, the firefighter who had found him was in full gear-never really * touched * the little guy. And the poor lonely thing was being kept in virtual lock-down at a local veterinary hospital-apparently, surviving a major fire can even make a rat a celeb. But it struck me that he eventually would get in some degree of close contact with *someone *, and that could mean disaster.

And so, I found myself ready to don a cat-burglar-esque black outfit to rescue the world from a rat.

No, really. Stuff like that happens to me all the time.

****

It turned out, though, on second thought, that I really wouldn't need to go that far. Which was a relief.

I've probably mentioned, at one time or another, that I have done some extra-legal things in my time. Sure, being Immortal and engaging in occasional duels to the death would tend to put killing at the top of that unsavory list. But I have also engaged in illegal behaviors ranging from solicitation to grand larceny, and of these bad things I have done-I would venture to say breaking and entering would be the one thing I've honestly liked the least. Mostly because I don't think I'm any good at it. Sure, I can work my way into any automobile in an amount of time your professional auto thief would not find too shabby-but I'm in no way fit to take up the time-honored art of lifting residential booty. However, veterinary hospitals are not Fort Knox. People take sick animals to them all the time. So I checked amongst my relatives to see if I could find something to use as a "cover".

(I mean, borrowing a pet, not actually employing one of my relatives. Although that makes an interesting picture. "Excuse me, but I'm really concerned about my Aunt Violet, over here. I think she needs wormed." It's funnier if you've actually * met * my Aunt Violet. She makes an impression.)

So I eventually acquired my cousin Lydia's pet cockatoo, which she got from my Uncle Tony when he passed on, which, if you're interested, is named "Beretta". Cute, huh? But anyway, the bird really didn't look so hot. It's had this problem with biting off it's own feathers since Uncle Tony went-I think it's a nervous condition, actually, not that I'm an expert on avian psychology. But birds…for the record, are sensitive. They know things, that's why they look at people the way they do. And this bird looked at me during the whole drive down to the veterinary hospital. I'd have felt guilty if I wasn't trying to head off a plague.

In any case, I went in there with the bird, and tried to explain the loss of its feathers in as unsubtle a way as I could. I can * be * unsubtle, if I have to. The receptionist speculated that it looked like some kind of fungus-and I became incensed. A fungus! I keep a clean bird, mind you.

Now, I don't want any bird owners to get me wrong about this. This is not a slight, this is merely an observation. I could be totally out of line for this-but I have the impression, mostly from knowing bird owners, that some people with birds are…eccentric. Well, my Uncle Tony was a complete eccentric. Most of the time, while he lived, he went around, and everything he said was a quote from a movie. And my cousin Lydia...well, this could just be in my family. But I played at being an eccentric bird owner. And it worked right up until I need to use the facilities-and to take my bird with me.

This met with some concern. With you. Into the lavatory. But I persisted, and made my escape down the hall, with the bird in its' cage. I never actually used the facilities, having gone before I even started out. That was what counts with me as "devious subterfuge." I left the building through a fire exit with the bald bird, the cage-and my little brown buddy in a black bag. I thought it was strange how I knew-just * knew *--what room he was in, but shrugged it off. And, in the interest of causing no problems to the nice people in my apartment building, I, after dropping the bird back with Lydia, took Vinnie to a motel.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Isn't this always the way? You meet a rat. You give it a pet name. You experiment with it a little, and the next thing you know, you're in a motel room with it. Story of my life.

****

Luckily, the rat was clean. I found out when I gave it the opportunity to play with some other rats that I brought, just to see if he was contagious. I think he enjoyed his homecoming party, but something had changed with him. How did I know?

Number one-I could sense him. Not in a strong way-but in a little-bitty, "hmm, what Immortal where…oh it's the rat" kind of way. And number two?

No baby rats. The thing with rats is-they are fertile. A female rat can drop five litters in the course of one year. I put him in with four females-nada. Zip. Not even after three months. When I finally caught up with what was going on and looked at his sperm under a microscope, I discovered that even his sex cells had changed. Something drastic had happened-but believe me, I knew this was the same rat. I mean, you get to know a rodent if you spend enough quality time with it. And the one of the changes seemed to be the result of being infected with the virus. That was the change in his cells. But something else had happened. Something peculiar.

I found out when I was letting him get a little exercise. Like I said, he was smart and could do tricks. I had him run a little makeshift maze that I built out of textbooks. You'd think lab animals wouldn't like mazes, since they see them enough, but Vinnie enjoyed them well enough. I think it was the challenge he appreciated. Anyway, he was having a great time, just doing his maze thing, but then, he bumped into one of the books, and he got clobbered. One book fell, and, in some kind of "domino-theory-be-damned" kind of way, the book just on the other side fell "in" as well. He as smushed under two thick textbooks, and when I lifted them, I expected the worst. He survives a plague, an explosion, and bites it just because I'm a lousy maze architect? There was a thought I nearly couldn't handle.

It was just about as bad as I expected. He was flat. I looked about for a shoe box or something I could put him in, my eyes forming hot little tears, but by the time I had one ready-he was back up.

Vinnie was Immortal.

I considered running some experiments on him, but realized he'd been through enough. For awhile, I simply kept him as a pet, thinking it was kind of cool-having a pet as Immortal as me-although I wondered who would take care of him if I shouldn't come back some day. And I never did figure out why it worked-why the rabbits and a few other animals died from the virus, but Vinnie actually became Immortal. Maybe it was because he was already a bit mutated to begin with. Or maybe it was just because he was a rat. I've given up my experiments, so I may never find out. And I'll never find out from Vinnie.

Yeah, right, you're thinking-he'll never tell. Well, truth is, he never will. My cousin Lydia's snot-nosed little brat got into the cage one day and let him lose. He ran away, and after all he'd seen, I can't blame him. I'd have probably bolted, too.

But I just want any other Immortals to know-you want to talk about there being only One? Well, make it two. The last man-and Vinnie. Because I'm pretty sure he's still out there. And he's pretty smart.

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