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When Ivo was seven, he got a rat.
It was not, technically, a pet rat, but that it was a rat and it was a pet. Ergo, pet rat. He named her Marie, after Marie Curie. (At the time he’d been reading her research papers, but it was a slow process because the only French language resource he’d gotten his hands on was aimed at tourists and thus neglected most scientific terms.)
He’d found Marie in the kitchen, shivering and huddled under a burlap sack of flour. Ivo knew it was stupid; rats were disease vectors. Her mere presence probably meant they needed to sterilize the whole kitchen and dispose of all the food she and her unseen family had spoiled. And yet, he scooped her up, dropped her into his pocket, and returned to his chore of sweeping.
There were no pets allowed at the orphanage, of course, but he knew a few of the other boys had adopted a stray dog that lived in the woods at the edge of the campus. Marie was easier to hide and sneak food to. He kept her in a shoebox tucked under his bed, one of the perks of being on the bottom bunk.
Ivo loved Marie. Her little nose, always twitching and curious; her whiskers, like a silly moustache; her delicate rat feet with their tiny claws; her beady black eyes, somehow both vacant and intelligent, shining in the faintest light; her brown fur, coarse but pleasant under his fingers; even her nimble pink tail. He loved to feed her a piece of bread or a cracker and watch her hold it up as she nibbled the edge. He loved inventing little mazes and puzzles and watching her solve them. She was so smart! Not as smart as Ivo, of course, but smarter than some of the other kids. Smart enough to be his lab assistant. Ivo would bring her along when he could sneak away to the unused gardening shed he’d commandeered and talk to her about his studies, his projects, his ambitions.
He talked to her about other things, too. He didn’t mean to, but sometimes when he sat and held her, petting her warm little form, he started to talk. About the other kids, mostly, their stupid little jabs and pranks, their weird petty priorities. They didn’t like him - which was fine, because he didn’t like them either. And he didn’t need them, either, because he had Marie.
Marie lived happily in that little shoebox for four months until the day Ivo pulled the lid off to discover it empty. The lid was in place and she hadn’t chewed through the walls; someone had taken her. Ivo ran as fast as his little body could manage, but it was already too late. By the time he found the boys who’d taken her, in a tight circle cheering on their damn stray terrier, she was already gone.
Ivo’s parents had died before he was two. He knew this, much in the same way he knew there were seven continents or how to factor wind resistance and the pull of gravity into his calculations or that cows ate grass. Simple facts, with no emotional attachment. So even though he had already suffered a great loss, it was the passing of this rodent at the hands of cruel children that taught Ivo what loss felt like.
He held her lifeless corpse for only a moment before he launched himself at the nearest boy.
Two bites, three black eyes, and a broken nose later, he scooped her up again. Unfortunately the commotion had caught the attention of an adult, so he barely had seconds before someone much bigger grabbed him by the bicep and lifted him clear off the ground. From here, it was as he expected. He was punished, both for keeping a rat and for starting a fight. The orphanage wasn’t above corporal punishment to manage its charges, and he had to scrub the floors for hours on his hands and knees while still aching from physical reminders of how bad he’d been.
The one upside to Marie’s tragic demise was that no one dared mess with Ivo anymore. He‘d been upgraded from weird to crazy. With even the bullies scared to talk to him, young Ivo’s isolation got worse. He didn’t mind. In fact, he preferred it that way. It left him more time to work on important things. Permanent things. Mechanical things, that could be rebuilt and repaired. It didn’t matter if his peers looked at him like he was jinxed, or that he ate alone every day, or that he would never be adopted. He would build a better world, and in that world, there would be no one he loved who could hurt him. Only his perfect machines.
When Ivo was forty-eight, he met Agent Stone.