Early in the morning, Professor Ester saw his wife off and headed to his desk. The deadline to submit his study, Rodents – The Last Species, was approaching, and the professor was running behind schedule. Ester was a bio-historian specializing in fauna, a subject of truly historical proportions. He enjoyed history as such, but since childhood, he had been fascinated by the animal world, its diversity, and its capacity to adapt. Nevertheless, human technology and lifestyle at the beginning of the 22nd century had meant their definitive extinction, as well as the extinction of their cloned alternatives.
With a practiced gesture of his right hand in the air, he activated the apartment AI. The window blinds folded away, and the room was flooded with sunlight. The professor knew well it was merely an imitation of dawn. In reality, the sun stood no chance of shining into his apartment on the 316th floor. As a ranking professor, he had been legally assigned one of the three-hundred-series apartments, above which another seven hundred floors towered. The thousand-story residential skyscrapers were crowded together in the cities, and sunlight was reserved only for the chosen few up there. He sighed bitterly. Career growth might one day lead him to a six-hundred-series floor with a bit of luck, but even there, his desire for the true sensation of sunbeams warming his skin would remain unfulfilled.
Productivity-enhancing music resonated through the apartment; the plasma air purifiers went silent. He stood before the projection wall, trying to conjure up some punchy sentences for the introductory chapter. He wanted the university leadership to be convinced by his study that his work had meaning. Sometimes he had the unsettling feeling that humanity might soon face extinction as well. After all, it is just another animal species. He thoughtfully dictated words, and they appeared in written form before him on the wall. A few hours of work, and he treated himself to a rest in the kitchen; he wasn't the youngest anymore, after all. Elbows resting on the table, he massaged his temples and pondered the composition of images in the study. His thoughts were interrupted by an unfamiliar sound coming from the study. "What, is the cooling broken again?" he muttered and went to check the room. He froze in the middle of the study, and a hitherto barely known fear rushed through him. The recyplast cup fell from his hand, and vitamin jelly splashed onto the floor. The apartment AI immediately reported a mess, but Ester ignored it completely. Cleaning was the last thing on his mind. For looking at him from the corner of the study was a beautiful, picture-perfect Rattus norvegicus. A rat, quite simply. While his mind processed the absurdity of the apparition, his suddenly dry throat felt an urgent desire to cough. The rat startled at the sound, squeaked, and ran between his legs. The professor turned quickly, but the animal was gone. "This cannot be real!" crossed his mind. He didn't even realize he had shouted the thought aloud. With a quick gesture, he activated the apartment scan, odor sensors, motion detectors, alarms. Nothing. Not a trace that anyone or anything alive besides him had been there. He kept the experience to himself, but he couldn't concentrate on work for the rest of the evening.
The next morning, he started working on the study again. He had slept well, so yesterday's experience seemed like a distant memory, that is, until he paused over sounds from the bedroom while creating chapter two. A wave of unpleasant sensations washed through his body. This time, he activated the scans in advance and moved slowly towards the bedroom. He stood rooted to the spot. Two rats were chasing each other right on his bed. Ester hoped that the cameras were recording what was happening in his room. While he attempted to rationally evaluate the situation, the rats noticed him. They ran onto the bedside table, knocked over a moonstone statuette—a gift from his son—and ran under the bed. The professor knelt quickly, and his rapid assumption became reality: empty under the bed. It didn't soothe him at all. And when he viewed the recording from the bedroom, according to which he was alone in the room and had also knocked over the statuette himself, he had to pour instant wine into his mouth. His wife found him fast asleep in the armchair. It wasn't the first time, so she left him be. She only asked him the next morning before leaving to contact the MMR, the medical mobile robot, to check on him.
Ester just nodded and waited impatiently for his wife to leave. He was curious to see if the hallucination would return. If so, he vowed to call the robot. At the same time, scientific curiosity was growing within him to find out what was actually happening. He was ready. He waited. A smile appeared on his face when something began to make noise from the kitchen. "So, it's escalating, but what is it?" he asked himself as he stared at the scene on the kitchen counter. Three rats were fighting over synthetic meat on a plate. They were so absorbed they didn't notice the slowly approaching human. Ester was already so close that all he had to do was stretch out his hand and touch the animals. It was impossible to resist this thought. The rats stopped fighting and became literally motionless. Ester expected the vision to end just like the previous ones, meaning the rats would simply flee. Instead, he shrieked in pain and surprise when they unexpectedly bit into his palm and only then fled. Where to, the professor did not investigate, because he stared in disbelief as his right hand gripped the handle of a fork stuck in his left palm. Blood gushed from the skin, and the professor screamed in pain. The apartment AI evaluated the situation and was soon opening the door for the MMR's emergency entry into the apartment. The robot was essentially a two-meter-high and meter-by-meter-wide cuboid on tracks. The professor did not deny his fondness for history and called it a press [wardrobe]; it reminded him of a cabinet. The front part opened, and Ester walked inside. The press closed. The robot started analyses, applied calming gas, and a mixture of disinfectant and healing accelerators sprayed onto his palm. After the MMR left, the professor received a message about his health status.
Before long, his frightened wife rushed in from work, as the apartment AI had sent her a notification about the incident. Subsequently, the professor was ordered to lie down and go to bed early for the evening. He didn't need to be persuaded twice; his concern over the visions was escalating. The MMR had only evaluated his condition as fatigue.
He couldn't fall asleep. When even reading his favorite book was getting on his nerves, he decided on a drink for sleep. However, a strange, powerful pressure on his chest prevented him from getting up. As if a ton of weight was crushing him. He found he couldn't move. He wanted to take a sharp breath, but it didn't work; his lungs couldn't expand. He turned his head slightly to the right. He shouldn't have done that. A rat stood on the pillow just inches from his face. The professor felt shock setting in. Before he could turn his head away, the animal bit him in the nose. The pain seemed to release him. He was able to lift himself slightly on his elbows. He shouldn't have done this either. On his body, on the bed, on the floor, rodents swarmed everywhere. He smelled a strange odor. He realized he had wet himself. Tears of despair gushed into his eyes. He didn't know if it was better not to move or try to escape. The rats seemingly showed no interest in the professor. "Why aren't you sleeping?" came his wife's voice suddenly lying beside him. The rats looked in that direction as one. "No," whispered the professor. "No, no, no...!" The last words he was screaming. The rodents hurled themselves upon him with squeaks. It was as if thousands of needles were stabbing into his body. He tried to ward off the creatures, to throw them off. He was tearing off individuals that had bitten into him, causing numerous small open wounds to himself. He was roaring like a madman and at the same time felt his strength quickly running out.
Professor Ester's wife woke to her life partner in some kind of agony, tearing pieces of skin off himself with his hands and bleeding from his entire body. The effort to stop him was in vain; he was too strong. Only massive blood loss slowed him down. The MMR came too late.
The autopsy-performing robot (the deceased professor would probably have called it a coffer) merely diagnosed a nervous breakdown. Its software could not have guessed that the professor was the first of a million victims of a new civilizational disease, later defined as madness from total isolation from nature and man's natural environment.
ns216.73.216.98da2
and then Add to home screen.