“Well, okay, I transferred here, I mentioned that originally I was from UMass Amherst, but it wasn’t really my scene. So there I was, like, someone who worked in the biology building, like a work-study job. Well, I also ordered things for professors, and they’d be just like, hey, I want some primers from this company, here are the numbers, and I’d be like, what are primers, you know? But they’d give me like, these order numbers and the professors would just come to pick it up. Anyways, I’d been there like, a few weeks and I order this thing for this professor, I don’t know what it is, it’s just from this company. A couple days later I’m alone in the office and I sign for it and it’s got like, air-holes, which like, okay, I didn’t know we’d be ordering live animals, so I open up the box, and inside are just these little white rats, which as babies are like, really cute, and they’re all moving about in this straw stuffing stuff. And you can like, enter the order number, and so I’m reading about what they are and what they are used for, and I read that what they did was that they, the researchers at this company, had injected them with some genes, like a virus with genes in it or something, when the rats were like, embryos, and these are genes from humans that grow human neurons. So these rats are like, rats, on the outside, but on the inside, their neurons are all human neurons, like actual human neurons inside these rat bodies, and I swear, one of them was like, standing on his hind legs and sniffing up at me, just watching like, making real eye contact with those red eyes. And I just freaked, I couldn’t like, understand what this meant and it was like, a million degrees outside, like so incredibly hot even in the office and I just couldn’t deal so I like, plastered up the box again with packing tape and just took it outside and just like, ran around with it for a while. And no one stopped me or anything, I was just outside on this brutally hot day with this incredible low sky, just so menacing and hot, and there’s this pond in the middle of the UMass campus and I was down by the pond just walking around holding the box under my arm, and everyone is just walking around so nonchalantly, so normally, and I’m holding these rats with human neurons and I can’t stop thinking about what the researchers there are going to do to them, like implant them with those skullcaps and stuff, but then also I’m like, holding an invasive species you know, like what if these rats are supersmart and can outcompete all the other rats? The sun was reflecting off everything, the water, the tall buildings, getting me in the eyes, it was just so hot, and I’m standing on this little bridge right in the middle of the pond with people walking by and I drop the box into the water.”