Free The Complete Karma Trilogy by Jude Fawley Page B

Inu how to play dead.
    Only one of the rats, Kuro, was defiantly stupid. He wouldn’t respond to his name and refused to learn to jump when told. She went so far as to lightly starve the poor thing, by insisting that he would only get food if he jumped, but for some reason beyond her comprehension he would only eat food that was easily accessible to him, no matter how hungry he was. What was most interesting about the situation, to Reiko, was that his mental partner Kiiro was his polar opposite. Kiiro learned his name the second time that she reinforced it with food. After she taught Kiiro to jump, he literally would not stop jumping whenever she was around, unless she held him on the ground with her hand. He ate all of the food that Kuro refused to try for, which she left on a little ledge in a top corner of their cage. “I’m sorry, little Kuro,” she would say, looking at his hungry little body, in stark contrast to Kiiro, who was getting plump in spite of all his jumping. “He must be sucking it all out of you. But I can’t go easy on you just because you’re stupid, ok?”
    The pair of Kiiro and Kuro led her to the conclusion that, even if their minds were in a sense shared, their very distinct personalities could be left intact. Reiko wrote into a little book she carried around, “He can see, both physically and apparently in his mind as well, the rewards of learning. And yet he defiantly chooses to be the hungriest rat in the group. It remains to be seen whether Kiiro has been holding him back, or is slowly repairing this laziness. When we group them into fours, hopefully this question can be definitively answered.”
    Reiko would let them all out of their cages, sit with her legs apart on the floor with a bag of food, and have them all roaming around in front of her. Invariably a large group was directly in front of her, eying the bag of food. She would call them all by name, one by one, and lightly knock away the ones that came to her when they weren’t supposed to. As she anticipated, the mentally paired rats had a harder time distinguishing between their two names, even though they still got it right most of the time.
    Towards the end of the first week, it occurred to her that maybe Kiiro and Kuro were a clearer example of something that was happening with all of the rats. Even though she had named and taught the control rats a few things, she had yet to use them in a scientific capacity. She spent an entire lunch—which she always took at a cafe across the street from the building—absorbed in thought, instead of eating. When she came back, she set up her first real experiment.
    At the beginning of the week, she had already divided the eight control rats into four groups of two, kept in four separate cages, trying to keep their experience as similar to that of the other rats as possible. In preparation for her experiment, she decided to spend the next two days getting them acclimated to a more regular diet, rather than to feed them treats for good behavior. She had to somewhat compress her experiment as she otherwise would have done it, since it had been decided by Mr. Okada that on her ninth day the larger experiment would be moved forward with, whether Reiko was ready or not.
    The difficulty of her experiment was that, as common an experience as hunger was, there was no real quantitative measurement of it, unless she wanted to bleed the rats out and measure the ghrelin expression she found there. She ultimately decided that she would prefer some behavioral indication of hunger.
    She inserted a divider between the two halves of the cages, keeping the rats isolated. After she had the rats adjusted to a scheduled time for eating, she began to look at the behavior they exhibited around their feeding time. They nearly universally became somewhat anxious in the minutes before a scheduled feeding, with an accuracy of time that she found outstanding. She took care to arrive at work and leave at the same times