“Your friend has unfortunately had a life-suspending event,” she told the OilCorps execs. “Total bliss can be taxing on the system. But as you know, he had – excuse me, he has a contract with CryoJeenyus – full-body, not head-only – so all is well. I’m so sorry for your temporary loss.”
“I didn’t know that,” said one of the execs. “About the contract. I thought you wore a CryoJeenyus bracelet or something; I never saw his.”
“Some gentlemen prefer not to advertise the possibility of life suspension,” said Katrina smoothly. “They choose the tattoo option, which is applied in a concealed and very private location. Of course, at this enterprise we become aware of all such tattoos, as a casual business acquaintance might not.” One more thing to admire about her, thought Zeb, trying not to peer down the front of her apples: she was a tip-top liar. He couldn’t have done better himself.
“Makes sense,” said the dominant exec.
“In any case, we did discover this fact in time,” said Katrina, “and, as you know, the procedure has to be carried out immediately in order to be effective. Luckily we have a fast-track Premium Platinum-level agreement with CryoJeenyus, and their trained operatives are always on call. Your friend is already in a Frasket, and will be on his way to the central CryoJeenyus facility on the east coast almost at once.”
“We can’t see him?” said the second exec.
“Once the Frasket is sealed and vacuumized – as it now is – it would defeat the purpose to open it,” Katrina said, smiling. “I can provide a certificate of authentication from CryoJeenyus. Would you like another frozen daiquiri?”
“Shit,” said the third exec. “What do we tell that nutbar church of his? Fell over getting fracked in a moppet shop won’t go down too well.”
“I agree,” said Katrina, a little more coldly. She felt Scales was much more than a moppet shop: it was a total aesthetic experience, ran the blurb on the website. “But Scales and Tails is well known for its discretion in such matters. That is why it is the number-one choice among discerning gentlemen such as yourselves. With us, you do get what you pay for, and more; and that includes a good cover story.”
“Any bright ideas?” said the second exec. He had eaten all the NeverNetted Shrimps and was starting on the scallops. Death made some people hungry.
“Contracted viral pneumonia while working with disadvantaged children in the deeper pleeblands, would be my first suggestion,” said Katrina. “That would be a popular choice. But we have our own trained PR personnel to assist you.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” said the third exec, watching her through narrowed and slightly reddened eyes. “You’ve been very helpful.”
“My pleasure,” said Katrina, smiling graciously and leaning forward to let her hand be shaken and then her fingertips kissed while disclosing enough but not too much of her upper torso real-estate. “Anytime. We’re here for you.”
“What a gal,” says Zeb. “She could have run any of the top Corps with one thumb, no problem.”
Toby feels the familiar snarly tendrils of jealousy knotting round her heart. “So did you ever?” she asks.
“Ever what, babe?”
“Ever get into her scaly underthings.”
“It’s one of my life-span regrets,” says Zeb, “but no. I didn’t even give it a try. Hands stayed in the pockets, firmly clenched. Jaw clenched likewise. It was an effort to restrain myself, but that’s the bare-naked truth: I didn’t give it a single grope. Not even a wink.”
“Because?”
“One, she was my boss when I was working at Scales. It’s not a smart move to roll around on the floor with a woman boss. It confuses them.”
“Oh please,” says Toby. “That’s so twentieth century!”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m a sexist-wexist pig and so forth, but that happens to be accurate. Hormone overdrive craps up efficiency. I’ve watched it in action – women bosses getting all coy and weird about issuing orders to some bullet-headed stud who’s just erased their rational faculties and blown off the top of their heads and made them growl like a rakunk in heat and scream like a dying rabbit. It alters the power hierarchy. ‘Take me, take me, write my speech, get me a coffee, you’re fired.’ So there’s that.” He pauses. “Plus.”
“Plus what?” She’s hoping for some revolting feature on the part of Katrina WooWoo, whom, granted, she has never seen, and who is 99.999 per cent likely to be dead; but envy crosses all borders. Maybe she was knock-kneed, or had halitosis or hopeless taste in music. Even a pimple would have been some comfort.
“Plus,” says Zeb, “Adam loved her. No doubt of it. I’d never poach in his goldfish pond. He was – he’s my brother. He’s my family. There’s limits.”
“You’re kidding!” says Toby. “Adam One? In love? With Katrina WooWoo?”
“She was Eve One,” says Zeb.
The Train to CryoJeenyus
“That’s hard to believe,” says Toby. “How do you know?”
Zeb is silent. Will this be a painful story? It’s likely: most stories about the past have an element of pain in them, now that the past has been ruptured so violently, so irreparably.
But not, surely, for the first time in human history. How many others have stood in this place? Left behind, with all gone, all swept away. The dead bodies evaporating like slow smoke; their loved and carefully tended homes crumbling away like deserted anthills. Their bones reverting to calcium; night predators hunting their dispersed flesh, transformed now into grasshoppers and mice.
There’s a moon now, almost full. Good luck for owls; bad luck for rabbits, who often choose to cavort riskily but sexily in the moonlight, their brains buzzing with pheromones. There’s a couple of them down there now, jumping about in the meadow, glowing with a faint greenish light. Some used to think there was a giant rabbit up there on the moon: they could clearly make out its ears. Others thought there was a smiling face, yet others an old woman with a basket. What will the Crakers decide about that when they get around to astrology, in a hundred years, or ten, or one? As they will, or will not.
But is the moon waxing or waning? Her moontime sense isn’t as sharp as it used to be in the days of the Gardeners. How many times had she watched over Vigils when the moon was full? Wondering, from time to time, why there was an Adam One but no Eve One, nor ever any mention of such. Now she’ll find out.
“Picture it,” says Zeb. “Adam and me were on the sealed bullet train together for three days. I’d only seen him twice since we cleared out the Rev’s bank account and went our separate ways: in the Happicuppa joint, in the back room at Scales. No time to dig down. So naturally I asked him stuff.”
Zeb had to sacrifice his face waffle, of which he’d become moderately fond despite the meticulous upkeep, what with those stubbly mini-squares to sculpt. He clear-cut the thing with a shaver: all that remained of it was a goatee. He had some new head growth – an unconvincing Mo’Hair glue-on from the early days of that Corp – in a shade of glossy pimp-oil brown.
Luckily he could cover up some of the more fraudulent effects with the dorky hat that was part of the CryoJeenyus outfit for the position that would have once been called “undertaker’s assistant,” though CryoJeenyus used the label Temporary Inertness Caretaker instead. The hat was a modified turban, referencing both magicians and genies. It was reddish in colour and had a flame design on the front.
“Ever-burning flame of life, right?” says Zeb. “When they showed that third-rate magic-show headrag to me, I said, ‘You can’t be fucking serious! I’m not wearing a boiled tomato on my head!’ But then I saw the beauty of it. With it, and with the rest of the ensemble – a purple thing like pyjamas, or maybe a karate concept, with the CryoJeenyus logo plastered across the front – no one could mistake me for anything but an overgrown dim bulb who couldn’t get any other job. Frasketsitting on a train – how pathetic was that? ‘If you’re where no one expects you to be,’ old Slaight of Hand used to say, ‘you’re invisible.’ ”
Adam had the same uniform, and he looked even stupider in it than Zeb did. So that was some comfort. Anyway, who was going to see them? They were locked into the special CryoJeenyus car with the Frasket plugged into its own separate generator to keep it subzero inside. CryoJeenyus prided itself on being extra secure: DNA theft, not to mention the pilfering of other, larger body parts, was a worry among those who were in love with their own carbon structures: in those circles, the theft of Einstein’s brain had not been forgotten.
Thus an armed guard travelled with all Frasket-sitters, riding shotgun near the door. On bona fide CryoJeenyus missions, this individual would have been a member of the consolidated and ever-expanding CorpSeCorps and would have been armed with a spraygun. But since everything about this particular caper was bogus, the role was played by a Scales manager named Mordis. He looked the part: tough, bright eyes like a shiny black beetle, smile impartial as a falling rock.
His weaponry wasn’t real, however: the cryptic team could imitate clothing, but they couldn’t reproduce that kind of triple-security moving-part tech. So the spraygun was a cunning plastic and painted-foam imitation, which wouldn’t matter at all unless someone got close enough to be hit with a fist.
But why would they? As far as anyone else was concerned, this was just a routine dead-run. Or rather, a ferrying of the subject of a life-suspending event from the shore of life on a round trip back to the shore of life. It was a mouthful, but CryoJeenyus went in for that kind of evasive crapspeak. They had to, considering the business they were in: their two best sales aids being gullibility and unfounded hope.
“It was the most bizarre trip I ever took,” says Zeb. “Dressed up like Aladdin, sitting in a locked train compartment with my brother, who was wearing half a squashed pumpkin on his head, and between us a Frasket containing our dad in the form of soup stock. Though we did put the bones and teeth in there, as well. Those didn’t dissolve. There was some discussion at Scales about the osseous materials – you could get a good price for human bones in the deeper pleeblands, where carved artisanal human-products jewellery was a fashion: Bone Bling, it was called. But the cooler heads of Adam and Katrina and, I have to say, your humble self overruled the enthusiasts, because even if you boiled those things there was no telling what microbes might remain. As yet, we knew nothing about them.”
A tisket, a tasket, a green and yellow Frasket, Zeb sang.
Adam took out a little notebook and a pencil and wrote: Watch what you say. We’re most likely bugged.
After showing it to Zeb under cover of his hand, he erased it, and wrote: And please do not sing. It is very irritating.
Zeb motioned for the little notebook. After a slight hesitation, Adam handed it over. Zeb wrote: FU+PO. Then he wrote, underneath them: Fuck You and Piss Off. Then: You manage to get yourself laid yet?
Adam read this and blushed. Watching him blush was a novelty: Zeb had never witnessed such a thing before. Adam was so pale you could almost see his capillaries. He wrote: None of your business.
Zeb wrote: Haha, was it K and did you pay? Since he had long suspected which way the wind of Adam was blowing.
Adam wrote: I refuse to have that lady spoken about in such a manner. She has been a devoted furtherer of our efforts.
Zeb should have written: What efforts? Then he would have known more. Instead he wrote, Haha, hole in one for my score, so to speak :D!! At least you’re not gay! :D :D
Adam wrote: You are beneath vulgar.
Zeb wrote: That would be me! Never mind, I respect true love. He drew a heart, then a flower. He almost added, Even if she is running a fancypants blowjob emporium, but he thought better of it: Adam was getting very huffy, and he might forget himself and take a swipe at Zeb for just about the first time in his life. Then there would be an unseemly scuffle over the remains of their liquefied parent that would not end well for Zeb because he could never bear to deck Adam, not really; so he’d just have to let the pallid little weenie beat him up.
Adam looked mollified – maybe it was the heart and the flower – but still ruffled. He crumpled up all the notebook pages they’d been writing on, then tore them into pieces and went to the can, where – Zeb assumed – he flushed them onto the tracks. Even if some nosy spyster managed to gather them up and stick them together they’d hardly learn anything of interest. Just a bunch of low-calorie dirty talk, of the kind a Frasket-sitter might be expected to employ while killing time out of the hearing of the paying customers.
The rest of the trip passed in silence, Adam with arms folded and a frowny but sanctimonious expression on his face, Zeb humming under his breath while the continent zipped past outside the window.
At the east coast end, the CryoJeenyus dedicated carriage was met by Pilar, posing as a concerned relative of the stiff – or, rather, of the temporarily life-suspended client – and three members from, Zeb assumed, the cryptic team.
“You know two of them,” says Zeb. “Katuro and Manatee. The third was a gal we lost during Crake’s scoop of the MaddAddamites, when he was designing the Crakers and gathering up the brainslaves for his Paradice Project. She tried to run, and I can only assume she went over an overpass and got turned into car tire mush. But none of that had happened yet.”
Pilar shed a few croc tears into a hanky just in case there were any mini-drones or spyware installations around. Then she supervised discreetly as the Frasket was loaded into a long vehicle. CryoJeenyus did not call those vehicles “hearses”: they were “Life2Life Shuttles.” They were boiled tomato colour and had the perky ever-burning flame of life on the doors: nothing dark to spoil the festive mood.
So into the L2Ls went the Rev in his Frasket, headed for an extreme security biosampling unit – not at CryoJeenyus, they weren’t equipped for that, but at HelthWyzer Central. Pilar got in as well, and also Zeb. Mordis would change his outfit and head to the local Scales and Tails, where they needed a tougher manager.
Adam would change into his increasingly bizarre streetwear and shuffle off to do whatever it was that Adam did, out there in the deep pleebs. He gave the white bishop to Pilar, having extracted it from the salty cavity of the girl salt shaker: the cryptic team wanted to take a close look at the contents of those pills, and they thought they finally had the equipment to do so without exposing themselves to contagion.
Zeb was slated for yet another identity, which Pilar had already prepared for him: he was to be embedded right inside HelthWyzer Central.
“Do me a favour,” said Zeb to Pilar, once she had assured them that the L2Ls had been thoroughly swept for spyware. “Run a DNA comparison for me. On the Rev. The guy in the Frasket.” He’d never shaken his childhood notion that the Rev was not his real father, and this was surely his last chance to find out.
Pilar said it would be no problem. He handed over a cheek swab sample of himself, improvised on a piece of tissue, and she tucked it carefully inside a small plastic envelope that contained what looked like a dried-up elf ear, wrinkly in appearance, yellow in colour.
“What’s that?” he asked her. He wanted to say, “What the fuck’s that,” but proximity to Pilar did not encourage swearing. “Gremlin from outer space?”
“It’s a chanterelle,” she said. “A mushroom. An edible variety, not to be confused with the false chanterelle.”
“So, will I come out with the DNA of a fungus?”
Pilar laughed. “There’s not much chance of that,” she said.
“Good,” said Zeb. “Tell Adam.”
Only problem was, he thought later that night, when drifting off to sleep in his Spartan but acceptable HelthWyzer accommodations – only problem was that if Pilar ran the DNA comparison and the Rev wasn’t his dad, then Adam wouldn’t be his brother. Adam would be no relation to him at all. No blood relation.
Thus:
Fenella + the Rev = Adam.
Trudy + Unknown Semen Donor = Zeb.
= No shared DNA.
If that was the truth, did he really want to know it?
Lumiroses
Zeb’s new title at HelthWyzer Central was that of Disinfector, First Rank. He got a pair of lurid green overalls with the HelthWyzer logo and a big luminous orange D on the front; he got a hairnet to keep his own shed follicle-ware from littering the desk spaces of his betters; he got a nose filter cone that made him look like a cartoon pig; he got an endless supply of protective liquid-repelling nanobioform-impermeable gloves and shoes; and, most importantly, he got a passkey.
Only for the bureaucratic offices, however: not for the labs. Those were in another building. But you never could tell what sort of intel a nimble-fingered robinhooder with a few lines of entry code slipped to him by underground cryptics might be able to scoop off an untended computer, late at night, when all good citizens were sound asleep in other people’s beds. HelthWyzer was somewhat porous in the spouse department.
Once upon a time Zeb’s Disinfector position would have been called “cleaner,” and before that “janitor,” and before that “charwoman”; but this was the twenty-first century and they’d added some nanobioform consciousness to the title. To deserve that title Zeb was supposed to have passed a rigid security check, for what hostile Corp – possibly from a foreign clime – wouldn’t think of disguising one of their keyboard pirates as a minor functionary and ordering him to grab whatever he could find?
To qualify as a Disinfector, Zeb was also supposed to have taken a training course replete with updated modern babble about where germs might lurk and how to render them unconscious. Needless to say, he hadn’t taken it; but Pilar had given him the condensed version before he started.
Germs were said to hang out on the usual toilet seats, floors, sinks, and doorknobs, of course. But also on elevator buttons, on telephone receivers, and on computer keyboards. So he had to wipe down all of these with antimicrobial cloths and zap them with death rays, in addition to the floor-washing in hallways and such, and the dust-sucking on the carpets in the plushier offices to pick up anything the daily robots might have missed. Those things were always rolling to and fro, backing up to wall outlets to plug themselves in and replenish their battery power, then scuttling away again, emitting beeping sounds so you wouldn’t trip over them. It was like navigating a beach littered with giant crabs. When he was alone on a floor he used to kick them into corners or turn them over on their backs, just to see how fast they could recover.
The MaddAddam Trilogy Page 99