Jasper Fforde - The Constant Rabbit

I felt my palms go damp and a knot seemed to form in my stomach. No one liked to upset the Senior Group Leader. Operatives more senior than me had resigned rather than face a dressing-down, and bold men and women were known to come out of his office in a state of traumatic shock at his verbal threats and intimidation. Few but the brave even made eye contact, and I knew for a fact that Toby had taken a day off work after a particularly aggressive encounter in the elevator.

‘I’ll go on Ops,’ I said. I needed at least another ten years’ employment before I could even think about retirement.

‘Good,’ said Flemming. ‘You can meet our new Intelligence Officer in the briefing room at midday; he’ll tell you what he wants you to do.’

I sat down at my desk and was about to start work when Adrian Whizelle walked in.

The best you could say about him was that on a good day he was hardly obnoxious at all, which made him seem like Julie Andrews in comparison to the Senior Group Leader or Nigel Smethwick. He’d been co-opted into Rabbit Identity Fraud from the intelligence-gathering arm of RabCoT and had a useful coping mechanism in the often stressful compliance industry: a deep and very powerful loathing for rabbits.

‘Good morning,’ said Whizelle.

We returned his salutation, Toby more enthusiastically as the two of them played squash or racketball or something. Whizelle was tall and dark, as thin as a yard-broom with long arms and legs that gangled like those of a clumsy teenager as he walked. His pointed features gave little away and his small black eyes seemed to constantly dart about the room. He also had a massive twin-tracked scar down his cheek that ended in a wonky jaw, the result of a rabbit bite following a snatch squad op that went south; the rabbit’s teeth had been scaled up during the Anthropomorphising Event and now had a sharpness and muscular strength that could go through flesh as though it were wet paper.

Whizelle, we figured, had been lucky to get away with only a scar.

‘Anyone fancy a cuppa?’ asked Whizelle, who understood the importance of office etiquette.

‘I’ll have one,’ said Toby.

‘Pete?’

‘Go on, then.’

He made a ‘T’ sign to Flemming through the glass, who responded with a thumbs-up. Whizelle was about to go out, stopped, then said to me: ‘You on Ops with us today?’

‘So it appears.’

‘Good man.’

And he wandered off.

‘Bad luck,’ said Toby, ‘but look on the bright side: you’re good at rabbit-spotting so they won’t let you be compromised.’

‘Maybe so,’ I said, but I didn’t voice my real concern: being on Ops carried a risk. Not just of personal safety, but of seeing and witnessing stuff I didn’t really want to see and witness. If I’d had a mission statement for my employment at RabCoT, it would be: ‘Keep your head down, blend into the wallpaper and never, ever, go on Ops’.

Rabbits always had trouble differentiating between humans. Hair colour, skin colour, clothes, gait, jewellery and voice all helped, but a lot of it was guesswork. In tests, eighty-two per cent of rabbits couldn’t tell the difference between Brian Blessed and a gorilla, if dressed in similar clothes.

Individual rabbit identification had always been an issue, right from the start. Fingerprints didn’t work as their paw-pads were hard and leathery, and DNA matching was pretty much useless as the rabbit gene pool was deplorably shallow. Mature bucks who’d been in several pistol duels could be recognised by the unique pattern of bullet holes in their ears – like an IBM punch card, as the joke went. But for the most part, juveniles, unduelled bucks and females looked pretty much identical. Any rabbit – of Wild or Labstock – who was detained by the police or Compliance Taskforce required a ‘no mingling’ protocol as, once they got mixed up, it was impossible to say which was which.

But crucially, not all human eyes were blind to the complexities of rabbit physiognomy. Toby and myself and others – how many, it was never quite ascertained – possessed a gene anomaly that allowed us to differentiate between rabbits almost as well as rabbits themselves. As you’ve probably guessed by now, Toby and I weren’t lowly accountants within RabCoT, we were a fundamental part of the Taskforce machinery. We were officially titled ‘Rabbit Identification Operatives’ but internally at RabCoT we were simply known as Spotters. Oddly, the skill was often discovered late: I only realised I had the talent when I noticed that the rabbit playing opposite Patrick Stewart in Waiting for Godot was the same one I’d seen playing Buttons to Les Dennis’s Widow Twanky in 1982. Then, recalling an online advertising campaign that offered ‘Dazzling Career Opportunities’ for anyone who could tell rabbits apart, I contacted the Rabbit Compliance Taskforce, passed their rabbit comparison test and, following a rigorous background check to ensure I had ‘no unhealthily positive attitude towards rabbits’, my career changed from Post Office Local Sorting Office Manager (Parcels) to RabCoT Spotter within a fortnight. To be honest, I didn’t really want a job in Rabbit Compliance as I’d never been leporiphobic, but was swayed by the good pay and final-salary pension options. Most of all, the work had job security. I could spot rabbits for as long as rabbits needed spotting, which as far as anyone could tell was, well, for ever .

So for eight hours a day, five days a week, Toby and I compared pictures of rabbits who for one reason or another – work, driving licence, detention, marriage, death, insurance claim, movement, prosecution, intelligence gathering – required confirmation of identity. For the most part it was fairly routine as rabbits either knew we were watching so didn’t trouble to swap identities or were inherently honest. But occasionally we came across a rabbit who claimed to be a rabbit they weren’t. Spotter slang dubbed them a Miffy .

I logged in and started to work, the ‘target’ and ‘source’ pictures coming up in pairs on my screen. I allocated a percentage likelihood they were the same rabbit: one hundred per cent for a certain match, zero per cent for a certain non-match and everything in between. I was quite good at it. In testing I could spot a Miffy with ninety-two per cent accuracy, up from sixty-six per cent when I started. But it wasn’t an exact science. Any rabbit that got less than seventy-five per cent was referred to other Spotters and the scores aggregated using an algorithm to decide identity compliance. 8 8. The algorithm was occasionally tweaked depending on whether arrest and conviction targets were being met.

‘There you go,’ said Whizelle, who had returned with the teas. ‘Keep a close eye on the screens, lads, there’s been a lot of background chatter on Niffer, and while we’ve no idea what’s being said, the increased traffic might suggest something is going on, so remain vigilant.’

We acknowledged the intel – and the teas – then resumed our work, which while seemingly easy, wasn’t totally straightforward. Of the eighteen rabbits elevated to humanness at the Event, there were three distinct sub-groups: Wildstock, Labstock and Petstock. Petstock were the simplest to identify with their varied markings, easy enough for even a layperson. The brown-furred generic Wildstock variety were much harder – and Labstock harder still as they were always white with red eyes. Comparing the capillaries in the Labstocks’ ears was a pet project of mine and had won me the Taskforce Adequate Conduct Award seven years previously along with a rare word of encouragement from the Senior Group Leader. Despite the benefits, Ear Capillary Identification had one major drawback: the subject usually needed a bright light behind them, which they almost never had.