Fly Me to the Island of Giant Rats

Fly Me to the Island of Giant Rats

Departure

My son wanted to run around the departure lounge before we got on the plane, and it wasn’t like I could say, Now we must sit in our seats and wait and wait. He was too little for that. So I followed him as he ran around, making sure he didn’t cause trouble. We were on our way to visit his grandparents, who lived so far away we could only get there by plane. Or cargo ship. But I could not imagine chasing him around a cargo ship for several days as we crossed the ocean. And what if it sank? Then we would be in a lifeboat. Maybe even one of those round or hexagonal ones that auto-inflate during an emergency. How long would we sit in our lifeboat, bobbing on the waves, awaiting rescue? What if rescue never came? How long before my son grew restless? Started crying? At first, he might enjoy the strange new experience, even though everyone else in the boat was clearly not enjoying it. Children are remarkably adaptable (or so I’ve heard said, many times, in those exact words). But what if the man sitting next to us became hostile when my son started crying? Would I have to fight him? Would I know how to fight a man in an inflatable lifeboat? And who would look after my son while I was fighting? Parenting does not come with a manual. Friends give you parenting books, but you don’t read them. You refer to them. But only when something bad has already happened. Would there be a chapter covering emergency situations in cramped lifeboats? What if there was a cat in the lifeboat and my son wanted to pet the cat but the cat belonged to the hostile man? Perhaps we could use the cat as a way of avoiding fighting, of smoothing things over. But what if the cat was vicious and scratched my son? Then what? And of course any number of things could happen. We could starve to death. Military drones might come along and bomb us. A pod of adolescent orcas could attempt to overturn our craft. They would have a hard time, though, if it was one of those round ones. But orcas are intelligent. They problem-solve and work together to kill seals. One of them would come up with the idea of biting the craft in order to deflate it, and the rest would immediately see the merit in this. They would all begin to bite the craft until we were pitched into open water. But perhaps some dolphins would be standing by to save us from the orcas, which are pretty much just giant black-and-white dolphins. Dolphins probably don’t think much of orcas. For them orcas are probably like huge dumb trolls. For the orcas the dolphins are like elves. Confusingly nimble, supercilious, kind of mean. The dolphins probably delight in making them feel stupid. So they would no doubt step in and save us from the orcas and ferry us to an uninhabited isle. They would know where one was the same way you know where lakes are. I suppose the cat would not do well in this scenario. Even if a dolphin tried to help the cat, the cat would panic and end up with its claws out. You can’t blame the cat, though. That’s just how they’re wired. Anyway, things probably wouldn’t get that far. Dolphins almost never interact with cats, and so a cat would probably look pretty alarming to them. A dolphin would be like, No, I’m not going anywhere near that fucking thing. Perhaps the hostile man could stuff it into a waterproof sack and do his best to make sure it didn’t suffocate while a dolphin zoomed them to safety. That’s about the only way I can see the cat getting out of there. My son would probably be all right, though. The dolphins would see he was little more than a baby. He would be their top priority—pretty much the opposite situation as the cat. They would make sure he got to the uninhabited isle. Hopefully he wouldn’t be the only one to make it, though. That would suck. As much as they might want to, the dolphins wouldn’t be able to wriggle out of the water and prepare meals for him until he was old enough to take care of himself. Then again, maybe the isle would have some kind of helpful animal living on it. Calm, thoughtful, nurturing monkeys. Or maybe a lost species of humanoid which had managed to evolve there without us knowing about it, perhaps because the dolphins had misdirected our ships, making sure we never landed there and massacred them. These humanoids would be small, because that’s what happens when your species evolves in isolation on an island. It’s called insular dwarfism. Islands have limited resources, so you end up getting smaller over time. Unless you’re small to begin with, like rats, and then you end up getting larger. Which is exactly what happened on that island in Indonesia where homo floresiensis lived for 700,000 years. So my son might find himself on an island with small humanoids who hunt giant rodents or maybe even saddle them up and ride them around. The rodents would be bigger than the cat, if the cat made it ashore. Who knows? Maybe the hostile man, just before he was torn apart by orcas, managed to toss it onto a piece of flotsam. The humanoids wouldn’t know what to make of it. My son, however, would pick it up, or try to, which would require a measure of patience on the cat’s part, and the humanoids would be amazed. So my son would live on the island with the cat and the humanoids, learning their customs and language. Why wouldn’t they have a language? As he grew, feasting on giant rats, horrifying insects, and the fruit that grew all over the island, he would eventually tower over everyone else even though he wouldn’t be all that tall by homo sapiens standards. How would the diminutive islanders react to this? With aplomb? Not if they’re anything like us! So my son would have to deal with the height issue as he got older, but by then he would know these people well and hopefully be able to come up with something. He wouldn’t remember me or the rest of us, so it would be tough to explain, but I have confidence in him. He is an intelligent toddler so why wouldn’t he be an intelligent adolescent—which is when the height thing would really start to become an issue. Hopefully the humanoids won’t be as fractious as us. If dolphins or the equivalent of dolphins in space (space dolphins) brought us a strange being that had been shipwrecked out there, saving its life, and it grew up among us here on Earth and had some weird physical characteristics but otherwise behaved like us, you can be sure that two schools of thought would emerge. Some of us would be all right with him as long as he was all right with us, while others would want to kill the thing. It would probably be a little more complicated than that, but that’s pretty much how it would break down. Hopefully most of the humanoids aren’t of the second mindset. I bet they’re pretty chill, though. They don’t have to work a hundred hours a week. They don’t have social media or guns. They don’t have to deal with robots calling them on the phone and instructing them to please stand by. They never have to peer into a camera while a truculent police officer photographs their retinas. Not on the island. Giant rats would be the worst of it. But I am getting ahead of myself! We are still in the airport departure lounge. My son is still just a toddler. I’m tagging along behind him, making sure he doesn’t cause trouble. And just as they announce our flight is boarding and families with small children have priority—well, after the active duty service members; we all have to stand there and clap for the active duty service members, toddlers included—he runs up to one of those one-way doors you only find in airports, funhouses, and the International Space Station. It opens. Before I can stop him he barrels through, and the door swishes shut behind him. Now he is trapped in the airlock between the two doors. If I can just get over there before he . . . but no, he’s already done it. He barrels through the second door. He is outta here. If I go after him, I will miss my plane. If I don’t go after him, I will lose my son. Checkmate! And exactly the kind of conundrum you would never have to deal with on that magical, rat-trodden isle.