March 14 Wearable scanner maps rat brains

The next big thing never arrives in towns like mine, buses full of city people drive in at the weekends to take photographs of us going about our daily chores. Growing up in a place like Delton makes you feel like an exhibit, a curiosity the circus had left behind.

That was why, at Greg's leaving party, we were all nervous, he was 21, like us and had won a scholarship to the big fashion school in the city. He'd even been interviewed on the radio and everything, saying how he wasn't leaving Delton, that it was like a holiday and when he returned he'd make the town proud and put us on the map, once and for all.

If you sit in the shadows for long enough the sun looks more a cancer - that was how Marnie put it. And that was how it felt - we liked our world, no matter how strange it appeared and weren't sure we wanted it to change.

Greg never made it back to Delton, sent us a drawing for a portable scanner we could wear when we went ratting, told us it would be the next big thing. We never saw him again and although the drawing looked good and all that, no one wanted to build it, why would we want to know what the rats were thinking? Wouldn't that make us the like them? Those city folk who stuck their noses where it wasn't wanted?