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rotten-whispers · 17 days

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They Run in Circles

The lab mice have begun to show unusual behaviors...

TW for mouse body horror and light gore

Rodents love to run in wheels.

Laboratories around the world have established that they prefer the little contraptions over almost all else. Some never stop running, at the expense of sleep, food, self-preservation… One might call it an addiction.

Nobody quite understands why animals love to run in wheels. I’ve seen cat-wheels in my local cat-cafes, trending videos of armadillos running on wheels. One researcher even left a wheel outside and videotaped wild mice and even slugs using it. Animals seem to be obsessed with the idea of running and running but never quite getting anywhere. Chasing an endless circle.

Human hamster wheels haven’t quite taken off yet, but I’m sure we are approaching that point. Treadmills just aren’t the same, because they give the illusion that you might end up somewhere. If you’re running in a circle, then you should understand that you’ll never reach anything. Surely even animals would be smart enough to understand this.

I study the neurological condition of laboratory mice. Because they are nocturnal, I am often watching them for long hours in the night, running on their little wheels. They are docile, chubby things. With an endless supply of food and water and wheel-based entertainment. Nothing at all in their eyes other than the comfort of a worriless existence.

Most of them love to run. They will sleep, run, sleep, eat, run, repeat. For hours upon hours. It can get a little unsettling, trying to make out their little white bodies in the dark, under a red-light headlamp, to avoid disturbing their circadian rhythm with white light.

Sometimes my eyes play tricks on me in the dark, wandering to a corner of the pitch-black room, as a white creature rushes past. Always in the corner of my eye, like an escaped mouse, like a ghost.

I have an overactive imagination. It does give me trouble on these long nights, but my quick grasp of my surroundings has allowed me to capture many a-runaway mouse. Usually the little creatures will just sit outside their cage once they escape. Dumbly surveying the environment without a care in the world, as though uncertain of why they chose to leave, or how they can return to the only life that they have ever known.

Of course, some of the little bastards bite you and immediately scurry under the door and into the hallway, but those are not the ones that I like to think about.

My mind often returns to why they run.

Sometimes a mouse will find that its wheel is stuck and doesn’t spin. Sometimes those mice will gnaw at the wheel, as though somehow instinctively knowing that it should spin, chasing the allure of the circle without even knowing that it exists.

Of course, this is ridiculous and would get me kicked out of a scientific conference, but I sometimes find myself wondering if there is something more to the mice than what we can see. Or can even comprehend.

Some of them don’t run in the wheels at all.

These are the odder cases. Sure, some of them don’t run very often, or avoid what they perceive as a threatening object. But these aren’t the… mice that I am talking about.

They run in circles.

The first time that I saw it, I thought that I was tired, or that there was something wrong with the wheel. But everything – the mouse, the wheel, the food – everything was fine. With the exception of this new, odd behavior.

They would run in a perfect circle, as though chasing their tail, like a dog. Wearing little circles into the bedding. Some of them would run in circles on the wheels, perfect circles that didn’t actually move the wheel. Loose circles, encompassing the entirety of their cage, or tight circles that barely allowed the mouse the opportunity to turn its entire body. Some of them even climbed their cage and moved in little circles on the lids.

It was… definitely odd. Unnatural.

When animals do behaviors that are “unnatural” or not displayed in the wild, they’re called “stereotypic behaviors”. Some view them as a sign of stress, like a tiger pacing in the zoo. Others view them as a sign that the environment needs to be changed, or an artifact of domestication. Most don’t understand them at all.

But why circles? Why the dog chasing its tail, around and around and around in an endless circle?

The mice that run in circles don’t run on the wheels, I noticed one day. They seem to have gotten over this addiction to spinning, replacing it with the more thrilling urge to transform their own bodies into circles. To scratch the same itch, the same desire.

Is it the running? Or is it the circle?

I became a bit obsessed with the question. It was the long hours, the late nights. The mice spinning in little circles on their wheels.

Out of 200 mice, maybe only half a dozen would even do the circles. It was a rare occurrence, enough to make me wonder if it was a sign of mental illness. Stimming, like in a human with Autism? An Obsessive Compulsive tic? But the mice showed no signs of any human mental health disorders. They just ran in circles.

An inner ear problem, a colleague offered. Something wrong with their balance.

No dice there either. It remained a mystery.

Are the wheels causing the circling? I wondered. Or are the wheels just satisfying a primal urge to run in circles?

How ridiculous. Why would an animal want to run in a circle?

So my brain went, over and over in circles.

I watched the circling mice. Their eyes completely blank, their mouths unmoving. Like little glass toys, scrabbling against the floors of their cages, the bedding worn away in little mouse crop-circles. Unblinking, hardly seeming alive.

What is the point of a circle?

To humans, circles are often used to create protective barriers in rituals. A wall that an evil spirit, demon, or entity cannot cross. Ancient Sumerians drew circles with flour to purify and repel evil in sacred spaces. Pentagrams are done inside a circle. Signs of aliens are often attributed to strange markings or behaviors, such as the questionably legitimate crop circles.

Circles also don’t make sense, logically. The circumference of a circle is two multiplied by the diameter, multiplied by an endless number. Pi – often shortened to 3.14 – has been calculated to 105 trillion decimal places by a supercomputer. But likely contains an infinite number.

The rationality of math often escapes me, but the idea of a tangible object being determined by a number that doesn’t really end is a baffling concept. Like the reality of your life being determined by a fleeting dream.

The Fibonacci sequence, another baffling concept in math, forms a never-ending spiral. Such a spiral outlines a circle, does it not? A circle disappearing endlessly into the distance, or even into itself, like Ouroboros, the snake devouring its own tail. Endless destruction and rebirth. Even our own universe is a spiral, our own world a circle.

Essentially circles represent life and death. Likely due to the shape of the sun, burning its place in human society, life, religion, and natural world. Circles are organic, despite their odd, smooth appearance. Uranus is a real planet, although it looks as though it were rendered in Blender.

But the mice know none of this. They just know that they have to circle.

Some runners prefer to run in circles because it completely blanks out the mind, creating a dull, monotonous state. A paranoid person could argue that such a blank slate is prime for possession by something else, an easy target for something that could be summoned – say, by the creation of a ritualistic circle.

My evening has gone on too long, I’m becoming ridiculous.

With a sigh, I pull myself away from the circles in my mind, to focus on the mice. Mouse #602 is eating, check. Mouse #603 is sleeping, check. Mouse #604 is running in circles.

Hmm… This is odd.

Sometimes the mice that circle do so since birth, genetically predisposed to whatever behavior, defect, stressor, or mental condition is causing the circling. But this mouse showed no odd behavior until tonight.

“Are you alright, little buddy?” I murmur, crouching in front of his cage and peering inside. Tapping his water first and checking that he still has food. “Did you hurt your head?”

The mouse is fine – nothing at all wrong, save for the strange circling behavior. I head home for a night of fretful rest, but return bright and early for my morning shift, of more clipboards and more circling mice.

More of my tired eyes scanning the mice.

#602, sleeping. #603, drinking water. #604, running circles.

My stomach drops.

The same mouse from last night is still running. He hasn’t stopped, while most of the other mice have bedded down for the day.

“…Buddy?”

There is red on the cage.

I crouch down again, my heart thudding desperately in my chest.

The mouse skitters in those tight, tight circles. His feet are red, raw. His eyes are empty, cavernous holes, leaking candy-red blood almost too bright to be real. And still he runs, over and over and over and over again.

I didn’t sleep at all that night. My mind – brain – heart beating in an endless circle of panic.

We had to euthanize the mouse. An infectious eye disease, the vivarium veterinarian said. Likely the same one that has been going around the lab. The mouse scratched its eyes out.

It’s odd how much the eye can bleed. But orbital blood collection is common with mice, when large quantities of the fluid are needed. The eye is a circle of blood, after all.

Our lab spent the remainder of the day disinfecting and treating the other mice, to ensure that none of them caught the same affliction. However, the following day, the mice were declared disease-free, and yet they continued to run. Some normally, some in circles.

How simple an infection would have been. A disease, a parasite.

The world’s smallest animals are parasites. Of the Myxozoans, Myxobolus cerebralis is a parasite that causes whirling disease in freshwater salmonids. A terrifying sight to any fish farmer or hobby aquarist, due to its horrifically infectious manner, with the end result almost always leading to death. Even a surviving fish would continue to spread the disease.

A fish infected by the parasite will gain neurological damage and physical deformities, causing it to spin like a whirling torpedo through the water. The infection is spread through consumption of dead fish, but if spores are released into the water, even a single drop can infect equipment, destroying tanks and causing horrific financial ruin to fish farmers.

An endless cycle of spinning fish.

Brainworm, or moose sickness (Parelaphostrongylus tenuis),is a parasitic nematode of moose that causes them to pace in circles, unable to rip themselves out of the cycle. It too, is almost entirely fatal.

I wished that this mouse disease could be explained away as a parasite. At least then, I would have a rational explanation for why they were running in circles.

But there was no rationale that made sense.

“Hey,” My coworker nudges me. “Did we forget to put bedding in #46’s cage?”

“What?” I barely notice that she spoke, lost in thought under the cacophony of squeaking wheels.

“Look, there’s no bedding in the cage.”

I glance over at wheel 46. The mouse’s home cage is indeed bare, the creature running circles on the empty plastic.

“No, there was bedding in there this morning. Where did it go?”

Frantic with confusion, I search around the wheel.

“Wait, there’s a lot of bedding by the cage. Did the mouse move the bedding?”

We glance at each other. This is nonsensical – the mouse would have needed to carry every tiny piece of bedding to the side of the cage and push it through the bars. Repeat a million times, ad infinitum. Until the cage was completely bare and prepped for – more running in circles?

“Why would he do that?” I ask, hoping that my coworker has an answer that I cannot think of.

But she looks as puzzled as I am. “I have no idea. It’s like the bedding teleported out of the cage.”

The mouse’s dark eyes continue to stare at nothing – or perhaps, something that we cannot see. An elusive goal that it desperately, frantically is trying to reach, as it increases speed and tightens the circle into a vice.

And, although it may have been my imagination, the squeaking suddenly seems to have stopped altogether. I glance around the room, quickly, and notice that all the other mice have stopped running on their wheels.

“Bedtime, I guess.” My coworker grabs her clipboard. “Let’s go upstairs, I’m hungry.”

“Me too,” I murmur. But something feels very, very wrong about the sudden silence, like an impossible coincidence.

On the way out, I scan the room again just to make sure that I am not losing my mind, and that’s when I notice that none of the mice were running on their wheels. Instead, they are all watching the spinning mouse.

Two hundred pairs of unblinking eyes, united in one pure moment of silent concentration.

Ad then – a second later – the moment is gone, buried amidst squeaking wheels and the pitter patter of little feet once more.

The situation is getting worse. As though learning from each other, the behavior increases. Every day that they spend on the wheels, the circling becomes faster, more frantic, more often.

Some scientists claim that wheel access causes an increase in circling behavior once the wheels are removed. But why then, do they circle instead of run? An arcane ritual that only the mice understand, conducted alone in the darkness.

I think about more circles, what the shape means. Why does such a simple shape have so many meanings? Protections, rituals, doors to and from other worlds. Life, death, neurological decay. Impossible mathematical principles and alien hoaxes. All the same simple shape – a perfect sphere made of an infinite array of points, each themselves a circle.

Fairy rings are an entrance to the world of the Fae. You’re not supposed to step into them – those rings of mushrooms that sometimes appear, in marshes and forests. Supposedly due to nutrient allocation in the soil, but still not properly understood. Stepping into a fairy ring invites the Fae. Leaving something in a fairy ring tempts the Fae, and the Fae are unpredictable, temperamental creatures.

Obviously, the mice are not trying to summon aliens, and I doubt that their circling is the result of a ritualistic barrier to the supernatural, but what does it all have in common? That damnable shape.

With no beginning and no end.

Except there will be an end, I think, because the wheels are being removed tomorrow. They can circle all they want, but without the stimulus of a wheel, I expected their behavior to cease. No more exploding eyes, no more impossibly empty cages, no more horrific silences – this would all be over.

Just have to hold out until tomorrow.

Just have to hold out until midnight, actually.

I was teetering outside the door, clipboard in hand, terrified to return and complete my last shift of observations. Would they all be waiting, staring at me the moment that I opened the door? And why did nobody else ever seem to notice that something was wrong?

Was I just going crazy?

Obviously, everybody has the urge to run in a circle now and then, right? Give a strange little turn, do a little pace, rub circles on an object for comfort. That doesn’t make you crazy, of course not. Tics, stimming – these are fine and normal behaviors.

I affix the red headlight and suck in a breath.

The room is normal. Dark, except for the grim shadow of red, barely casting enough light to see the clipboard and the little white creatures running. Their eyes gleaming in the darkness, the room silent except for the squeaking wheels and scrabbling of dozens of paws.

But all of them are behaving normally.

I breath in a sigh of relief.

You’re overthinking it. Lab mice enact stereotypic behaviors all the time. Some of those are weird, like removing bedding. But it could happen, the mouse could have moved all the pieces, one by one, in its mouth. Not impossible. And eyes explode sometimes, it happens. Just a disease, nothing more.

The minutes tick closer to midnight.

I think about minutes all the time, actually. If decimal points are endless, then time cannot really exist. Think about it – 11:59pm and one millisecond. 1.1. 1.1111111111111111 – when does 12pm ever actually begin? Are you trapped in a forever number like Pi, the clock frozen in its impossible existence?

11:55pm. Just a few more minutes.

A mouse does acrobatics on its wheel, another climbs into its food hopper and makes a nest out of its crumbs. Cute.

11:58pm. A mouse sleeps, lazy for a nocturnal creature. Another runs so quickly that its body becomes a white blur on the wheel.

All normal and good behaviors.

11:59pm. A mouse circles. I give it a cursory glance and turn away, not wanting to spend the last minute of my shift running around in my own thoughts. Just, for once, I want a break from the circle of dread.

Its footsteps scrabble, like a gunshot in the quiet room.

Quiet? When did the room become quiet? The squeaking of wheels has once again ceased.

No, I’m not turning around, I think. Just one more minute.

The mice are looking at me again. Unnerving, their eyes trained in an unblinking, glassy stare.

I finish my rounds and am forced to return to the other side of the room, where the circling mouse scrabbles in the darkness. Its body is a perfect sphere, tail to mouth like Ouroboros. Almost as though trying to bite its tail, a Sisyphean task in the darkness.

11:59pm. The last minute is dragging by, as it always does. Just when you want to go home the most.

I try not to watch the time, instead training on the mouse. Running, circles, circles, circles. Everything seems to disappear, blur away in the silent, dark room.

I don’t know how long it is until I snap out of my trance, but my legs are suddenly aching, my mouth and eyes painfully dry. Trapped by the mesmerizing, rodentine cycle.

Hypnosis can be a circle, I think. How much time did I lose?

The blood drains from my face when I glance at the time.

11:59pm.

This is insane. My watch must be broken, there is no other explanation. In any case, taking off one minute early is not going to get me fired. At the very least, the mice won’t tell.

So I stand up and get ready to leave.

-Except my legs don’t move. They are leaden, as though molded into the concrete floor. Stiffly upright, my body won’t turn away from the spinning mouse.

Terror crawls at the corner of my mind, threatening to encompass me in panic.

11:59pm.

The mouse isn’t strewn in darkness anymore. A strange white glow is emanating from beside the cage, like the dim remnants of a star in the back of your eyes.

11:59pm.

A loud cacophony of noise brews in my head – seemingly coming from nowhere at all. A horrifically violent explosion, like an aneurism, like planetary destruction. I cannot move, I cannot breathe.

11:59pm.

The mouse continues to run amidst the eternally loud interference.

Belly-up, unblinking, with foggy white eyes like a dead fish. The corpse-like creature runs upside down, as though his abdomen had been broken and removed, legs glued onto a rotting back. Legs that glide the corpse through the darkness, in circles and circles and circles.

The terror and noise are greater than anything that I have ever heard.

Beside the cage, the white dust no longer resembles a distant star – it is bright, bright enough to hurt, swelling spirals in the back of my unblinking eyes. Figures, symbols that I don’t understand, sequences that make no sense.

11:59pm.

The mouse continues to run – a fixed action pattern with no beginning or end, and no purpose in sight. Except there is a purpose, I realize, as the white circle continues to envelop the cage.

I can see everything, and this is not the work of a demon. No alien or otherworldly creature has come to play, nothing monstrous has risen from the darkness.

11:59999999999999pm

No, this is the work of our world, unveiled and bare to the eye. The coding of a biological machine, encased by atomic 1’s and 0’s, golden numbers and impossible sequences in twain.

This is reality skinned, reflected in the last moments of every dying being, etched into the DNA of every beating organism.

This is Us.

This Is Me.

The explosion of noise reaches a crescendo. A lightning-clap, and everything falls silent in my head. My body clatters to the floor, inoperable and limp. The light is fading, disappearing back into the ether.

The last remnants of my own vision are fading, disappearing.

12:00am.

Everything is gone.

In the room, the mouse continues to run.

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