Chapter 1

Sandy Wilson looked at the rat in frustration. The aluminum foil electrode he had glued to Ms. Piggy's head had come loose again, and she had rubbed the spot where it had been attached until the skin had broken, making it useless for his purposes. He'd have to find another place to attach an electrode, and that meant another hour of carefully shaving the rat's tiny head. Still, he hadn't got a good EEG tracing from the spot on top, so he probably was better searching for another, maybe farther back on the cortex...

He sighed and lifted the plump warm animal, cupping her in his hand. Ms. Piggy didn't seem to mind the shaving, because he worked carefully and fed her slivers of moist cat treats while he worked. Eating was her favorite pastime, which was how she earned her name. That and the fact that she chased Mr. Ed, the male mouse, around the cage, nipping at him until he huddled in a corner. Unless she was in heat. Then she let him mount her, but immediately afterwards began biting him again. Mr. Ed seemed resigned to this peculiar form of courtship, taking what he could get when he could get it. But otherwise he avoided the female rat completely. Sandy had carefully charted her menstrual cycles and knew she still days away from any friendly interest in Mr. Ed. He knew better than to toy with her during her single-minded pursuit of the male animal. She should be safe to handle today. As always, he talked to her while working the fingernail clippers, then shaved the stubble carefully with a scalpel held in a metal jig...

Finally a round quarter inch spot was clean. He took an alcohol swab and touched it to the area. She flinched at the cool swab, but didn't squeal. He lifted a pre-pasted dot of foil and pressed it onto her scalp, then deftly attached the electrode, sliding it into the small copper tube he'd soldered onto the foil... He the rat her into the recording box, small enough so she couldn't turn around or reach the electrode. Ms. Piggy smelled the lettuce cuttings in the box and immediately began stuffing them into her mouth, eyeing him while she chewed the leaves. Sandy turned on the recording equipment, watching in satisfaction as the scope showed brain wave tracings. He had apparently stumbled on a good spot, for he was getting clean sharp waves of brain activity.

This was his junior science fair project, building on his sophomore project, which was chemical analysis of hormones from rat urine. He was charting the changes in brain waves against the rat's chemical changes, looking for correlations. His previous female subject, Stinky, was Miss Piggy's mother. She had gotten him all the way to the State Science Fair, where he won Honorable Mention. This year, he wanted to take First Place, and was determined that the methods he used were meticulously scientific. He noted with pleasure that Miss Piggy was pissing in the box, a conditioned response he'd trained into her since her infancy. The yellow fluid collected in a test tube fitted to the hole in the bottom of the box. He'd have to start all over again, measuring the hormone level in the rat's urine and comparing it with the tracings from the new location on her head. He'd long gotten over his distaste for the sharp smell of the rat urine, but still wore latex gloves whenever he worked with it, hating to get the yellow fluid on his hands.

The electrode was his own device. He'd built it using a tiny Hall effect junction removed from an airplane navigation system, lifting it out of its plastic case with tweezers and gluing it to a FET which he'd pried from its own case, wrapping the pair carefully with speaker wire to form a tiny tuned inductor, highly sensitive to the smallest changes in an electric fields when excited by an oscillator, and he'd build a bank of active filters, run into an analog neural network constructed from capacitive diode junctions to remove unwanted electrical signals. He checked that the tracing he wanted was complete enough to analyze. Ms. Piggy was still toying with the last of the lettuce. He didn't want to disturb her, so he fiddled with the tuning of the oscillator, varying the frequency while watching the amplitude of the brain waves reflected on the oscilloscope. He was getting nothing but noise now, and was trying to decide how to better shield the leads to simplify the filtering. He noticed that every time he moved his hands the tracing would change. The device was behaving like an ultra-sensitive proximity detector, not like a brain-wave monitor. He increased the amount of 60 cycle current into the neural net inhibitors, hoping to suppress the effect. Suddenly Ms. Piggy's body quivered and she let out a tiny squeal. He turned off the power immediately, afraid he'd somehow given her a shock, then realized that the ultra-thin speaker coil wire he was using for the electrodes could hardly carry enough current to hurt her without burning through. He turned the oscillator back on, trying to remember the settings he'd run through, and watched the animal carefully. Again she quivered and squealed, then unconcernedly returned to nibbling at the lettuce. He checked the pen recorder tracings, and noticed two sharp sets of spikes.

Sandy thought carefully. He wondered if he had somehow induced a brain wave in the small white furry animal. This was unexpected, at the least. Perhaps, he thought, the tracing reflected some design flaw in his equipment. Maybe he'd started an oscillation that quickly built up a large current at some fundamental frequency he hadn't filtered. He carefully removed the electrode from the piece of foil, then tried the oscillator sequence again. No spikes appeared. Maybe Ms. Piggy's body was necessary for the proper currents, like a load on the coil. He picked up another piece of foil and stuck it on the naked skin of her tail, using the same glue. Again he ran the oscillator cycle. Again he got the spikes, and a shiver from that rat. But both were much smaller. He returned the device to the foil on her head. This time he programmed the sequence of oscillator frequencies into his computer, having wired it long ago to excite the coil with variable waveforms to get the greatest sensitivity from his sensor. Ms. Piggy didn't seem to mind, her body only shaking slightly at his touch. He tried again, and again he got the strange spikes and the same quiver and squeal. He pasted another electrode on the scar tissue, hoping it wouldn't hurt her when he peeled it off later, and tried again. The same squeal, and the same strange tracings.

He thought a while, realizing that his new amplifier was obviously involved in this effect. He looked at the tracings carefully, noticing that the waves showed some sort of feedback effect, from the rat's faint brain waves through the excited coil and magnetic junction, then amplified back through the device.

Sandy knew the electronic characteristics of his device quite well. He returned the mouse to her cage and lifted another sensing device out of its box, quickly wrapping a larger coil around a pencil, cutting the fine speaker wire on the device and soldering the new, larger coil into place. He cussed as the fine wires curled away from the soldering iron, the head too intense for the thread of copper. He wrapped another coil, then soldered it more carefully, this time succeeding. He lowered it into Miss Piggy's cage, holding it a few inches over her head. The rat didn't seem concerned. She was used to strange devices by now. He tried to reach the computer keyboard but the rat wandered out from under the coil before he could begin the sweep. He typed the required command sequence, programming it to repeat every second, then held the coil over her head. Again he saw the familiar shivers. She walked directly to Mr. Ed and Sandy knew she was going to begin her familiar ritual of torturing the male animal. Sighing, he reached to take her out of the cage. He wasn't finished with her yet.

To his amazement, however, as soon as she reached the male animal she presented herself for coitus, front paws spread and her rump up... Mr. Ed took immediate advantage of the opportunity, sniffing her in confusion, then mounting her from behind, pushing his cock into her and pumping hard... Sandy marked the urine sample, wondering if he'd missed something in her estrus cycle. He watched the rats go at it for a few seconds, then lifted Smurfette from the cage, thinking he would try another animal to get the strange feedback effect. He put the young female rat in the lettuce box and lowered the coil. Smurfette was Miss Piggy's daughter. He started the equipment and was pleasantly surprised to find that this animal responded the same as her mother, without the squeal, her sexual arousal obvious as her little body quivered... He reached toward the box, and Smurfette bit him. This was unexpected, too, but the bite didn't hurt. Sandy dabbed his finger with antiseptic from the bottle he kept near the rats' cages, thought about writing the results of this experiment in his lab notebook, and decided he'd wait to see if the effect could be repeated. He lifted the coil, but the fine wires broke. He tried several times to solder a new coil, but couldn't get it right. Frustrated, he switched off the equipment and went upstairs...

The next day Sandy built several new electrodes... This time he didn't have any problem soldering the thin wires. Somehow his hands seemed steadier. He found he could replicate the effect at will, holding the thin coil over the rats' heads with tweezers. The coil seemed not to affect male rats much, but it had a decided and immediate effect on female rats, causing an immediate sexual arousal. He was playing with the coil, trying it on all his rats at once, two male-female pairs and his two extra females. The two females, isolated from any males, were the most interesting. One of the females would assume the male position, trying to mount the other while both of them squealed excitedly. The next several days he repeated the experiment, trying various combinations of oscillators and filters, and tuning the circuits to maximize the effect. He found that by using more loops on the coil he could make the rats fuck from several feet away, by having two separate coils, one which seemed to act as a receiver and one which acted as a transmitter. The rats didn't even have to be between them, as long as they were close.

He was spending more and more time in the basement, unable to pull himself away from the experiments. About a week later, he was still working on his project. He had built a bigger capacitive diode array, hoping to expand the work to other appetites than sex, but wasn't getting any results, except faster sexual reactions. He turned sharply as he heard his older sister Samantha coming down the basement stairs. He realized that he was embarrassed to be caught watching the three pairs of mice fucking madly away in the glass cage. His sister was a year older than he, and about the most prudish person he knew. He thought that if she weren't his sister, it would be a terrible waste. She was a year older than him, just turned seventeen and one of the prettiest girl in school. She had a pretty face, even beautiful in an all American way, and a well developed body with full firm breasts and a narrow waist leading to nicely shaped hips and long shapely legs. He knew that some of the boys thought she was an awful tease, but that wasn't it. It was just that she didn't seem interested in sex, or even to really understand that sex was a part of every teenage boy's interest in girls. Sammy complained to him sometimes about boys, but Sandy always avoided the conversations, embarrassed...

Samantha, whom everyone called Sammy, wasn't half the student he was, but her athletic ability had won her a gymnastic scholarship to a good college. She was serious about schoolwork, but never really got into it. She didn't share his interest in science, preferring to study sports, and was looking forward to the end of her senior year. She'd been on the Tri-County gymnastic team, and had almost made the State finals, losing out last year to a potential Olympic contender. She'd also been a cheerleader for three years, and was captain of the team. Most of the really pretty girls that Sandy had dated had met him through her. He was regarded as nice by her friends, he supposed, but sort of dull.

"What's so interesting?" she asked, walking over. She still had on her cheerleading outfit, carrying the bag with her sweater and pom poms.

"These rats," Sandy replied, covering the cage with a cloth. "They're not doing what I expected."

"Ugh! They're so gross anyway. You can keep that cover on the cage, thank you very much. What are they doing that's not expected?"

"Uh, they're not eating the cat food pellets," Sandy lied. "They've always liked them before."

"Maybe you should try rat food like everybody else," she said. Sandy couldn't tell whether she was serious or making a joke.

"Maybe," Sandy said. "Look at the new device I'm building."

Sammy leaned over and looked at the larger coil of wire. "What's it do?"

"It oscillates," he explained. "In a funny way."

"OK, but what does it DO?"

Sandy turned on the equipment as his sister leaned over the coil, looking at it closely. "It's bigger than the little things you've been building before."

She reached out to it up as he started the playback device.

"Don't touch it," he warned. "It's set to oscillate by itself."

"Is it dangerous?" she asked, pulling her finger quickly away.

"No, no. It just won't work the same if you're touching it. It picks up body currents."

The oscilloscope tracing jumped as Sammy quickly inhaled, shivering. "Oh!" she exclaimed, backing away. "Did it just give me a shock? I just got a really funny tingle. And I, well, I don't know. I think it gave me a shock!"

"No, it can't do that. I think it just picked up your shiver. If anything moves fast, then the electric field changes, and it's really sensitive to that. It's cold down here, and that's probably what caused the shiver."

"Probably," she said, looking a little doubtful. "Are you sure that thing's safe?"

"Oh yeah," he said. "It carries current only in the milliamp range. Watch, it's about to cycle again."