Oryx and Crake

by Margaret Atwood

  Crake had nose cones for them too, the latest model, not just to filter microbes but also to skim out particulate. The air was worse in the pleeblands, he said. More junk blowing in the wind, fewer whirlpool purifying towers dotted around.

  Jimmy had never been to the pleeblands before, he'd only looked over the wall. He was excited to finally be there, though he wasn't prepared for so many people so close to one another, walking, talking, hurrying somewhere. Spitting on the sidewalk was a feature he personally could skip. Rich pleeblanders in luxury cars, poor ones on solarbikes, hookers in fluorescent Spandex, or in short shorts, or - more athletically, showing off their firm thighs - on scooters, weaving in and out of traffic. All skin colours, all sizes. Not all prices though, said Crake: this was the low end. So Jimmy could window-shop, but he shouldn't purchase. He should save that for later.

  The pleebland inhabitants didn't look like the mental deficients the Compounders were fond of depicting, or most of them didn't. After a while Jimmy began to relax, enjoy the experience. There was so much to see - so much being hawked, so much being offered. Neon slogans, billboards, ads everywhere. And there were real tramps, real beggar women, just as in old DVD musicals: Jimmy kept expecting them to kick up their battered bootsoles, break into song. Real musicians on the street corners, real bands of street urchins. Asymmetries, deformities: the faces here were a far cry from the regularity of the Compounds. There were even bad teeth. He was gawking.

  "Watch your wallet," said Crake. "Not that you'll need cash."

  "Why not?"

  "My treat," said Crake.

  "I can't let you do that."

  "Your turn next time."

  "Fair enough," said Jimmy.

  "Here we are - this is what they call the Street of Dreams."

  The shops here were mid-to-high end, the displays elaborate. Blue Genes Day? Jimmy read. Try SnipNFix! Herediseases Removed. Why Be Short? Go Goliath! Dreamkidlets. Heal Your Helix. Cribfillers Ltd. Weenie Weenie? Longfellow's the Fellow!

  "So this is where our stuff turns to gold," said Crake.

  "Our stuff?"

  "What we're turning out at Rejoov. Us, and the other body-oriented Compounds."

  "Does all of it work?" Jimmy was impressed, not so much by the promises as by the slogans: minds like his had passed this way. His dank mood of that morning had vanished, he was feeling quite cheerful. There was so much coming at him, so much information; it took up all of his headroom.

  "Quite a lot of it," said Crake. "Of course, nothing's perfect. But the competition's ferocious, especially what the Russians are doing, and the Japanese, and the Germans, of course. And the Swedes. We're holding our own though, we have a reputation for dependable product. People come here from all over the world - they shop around. Gender, sexual orientation, height, colour of skin and eyes - it's all on order, it can all be done or redone. You have no idea how much money changes hands on this one street alone."

  "Let's get a drink," said Jimmy. He was thinking about his hypothetical brother, the one that wasn't born yet. Was this where his father and Ramona had gone shopping?

  They had a drink, then something to eat - real oysters, said Crake, real Japanese beef, rare as diamonds. It must have cost a fortune. Then they went to a couple of other places and ended up in a bar featuring oral sex on trapezes, and Jimmy drank something orange that glowed in the dark, and then a couple more of the same. Then he was telling Crake the story of his life - no, the story of his mother's life - in one long garbled sentence, like a string of chewing gum that just kept coming out of his mouth. Then they were somewhere else, on an endless green satin bed, being worked over by two girls covered from head to toe in sequins that were glued onto their skin and shimmered like the scales of a virtual fish. Jimmy had never known a girl who could twist and twine to such advantage.

  Was it there, or at one of the bars, earlier, that the subject of the job had come up? The next morning he couldn't remember. Crake had said, Job, You, Rejoov, and Jimmy had said, Doing what, cleaning the toilets, and Crake had laughed and said, Better than that. Jimmy couldn't remember saying yes, but he must have. He would have taken any job, no matter what it was. He wanted to move, move on. He was ready for a whole new chapter.

  BlyssPluss

  ~

  On the Monday morning after his weekend with Crake, Jimmy turned up at AnooYoo for another day of word-mongering. He felt pretty wasted, but hoped it didn't show. Though it encouraged all kinds of chemical experiments by its paying clientele, AnooYoo frowned upon anything similar amongst the hired help. It figured, Jimmy thought: in the olden days, bootleggers had seldom been drunks. Or so he'd read.

  Before going to his desk he visited the Men's, checked himself in the mirror: he looked like a regurgitated pizza. Plus he was late, but for once nobody noticed. All of a sudden there was his boss, and some other functionaries so elevated that Jimmy had never seen them before. Jimmy's hand was being shaken, his back gently slapped, a glass of champagne look-alike pressed into his hand. Oh good! Hair of the dog! Glug-glug-glug, went Jimmy's voice balloon, but he took care to merely sip.

  Then he was being told what a pleasure it had been to have him with AnooYoo, and what an asset he'd proved to be, and how many warm wishes would accompany him where he was going, and by the way, many, many congratulations! His severance package would be deposited immediately to his Corpsbank account. It would be a generous one, more generous than his length of service warranted, because, let's be frank, his friends at AnooYoo wanted Jimmy to remember them in a positive manner, in his terrific new position.

  Whatever that may be, thought Jimmy, as he sat in the sealed bullet train. The train had been arranged for him, and so had the move - a team would arrive, they'd pack up everything, they were professionals, never fear. He barely had time to contact his various lovers, and when he did he discovered that each one of them had already been discreetly informed by Crake personally, who - it appeared - had long tentacles. How had he known about them? Maybe he'd been hacking into Jimmy's e-mail, easy for him. But why bother?

  I'll miss you Jimmy, said an e-message from one.

  Oh Jimmy, you were so funny, said another.

  Were was a creep-out. It wasn't as if he'd died or anything.

  Jimmy spent his first night in RejoovenEsense at the VIP guest hotel. He poured himself a drink from the minibar, straight Scotch, as real as it came, then spent a while looking out the picture window at the view, not that he could make out very much except lights. He could see the Paradice dome, an immense half-circle in the distance, floodlit from below, but he didn't yet know what it was. He thought it was a skating rink.

  Next morning Crake took him for a preliminary tour of the RejoovenEsense Compound in his souped-up electric golf cart. It was, Jimmy had to admit, spectacular in all ways. Everything was sparkling clean, landscaped, ecologically pristine, and very expensive. The air was particulate-free, due to the many solar whirlpool purifying towers, discreetly placed and disguised as modern art. Rockulators took care of the microclimate, butterflies as big as plates drifted among the vividly coloured shrubs. It made all the other Compounds Jimmy had ever been in, Watson-Crick included, look shabby and retro.

  "What pays for all this?" he asked Crake, as they passed the state-of-the-art Luxuries Mall - marble everywhere, colonnades, cafes, ferns, takeout booths, roller-skating path, juice bars, a self-energizing gym where running on the treadmill kept the light bulbs going, Roman-look fountains with nymphs and sea-gods.

  "Grief in the face of inevitable death," said Crake. "The wish to stop time. The human condition."

  Which was not very informative, said Jimmy.

  "You'll see," said Crake.

  They had lunch at one of the five-star Rejoov restaurants, on an air-conditioned pseudobalcony overlooking the main Compound organic-botanics greenhouse. Crake had the kanga-lamb, a new Australian splice that combined the placid character and highprotein yield of the sheep with the kangaroo's resistance to disease and
absence of methane-producing, ozone-destroying flatulence. Jimmy ordered the raisin-stuffed capon - real free-range capon, real sun-dried raisins, Crake assured him. Jimmy was so used to ChickieNobs by now, to their bland tofulike consistency and their inoffensive flavour, that the capon tasted quite wild.

  "My unit's called Paradice," said Crake, over the soy-banana flambe. "What we're working on is immortality."

  "So is everyone else," said Jimmy. "They've kind of done it in rats."

  "Kind of is crucial," said Crake.

  "What about the cryogenics guys?" said Jimmy. "Freeze your head, get your body reconstituted once they've figured out how? They're doing a brisk business, their stock's high."

  "Sure, and a couple of years later they toss you out the back door and tell your relatives there was a power failure. Anyway, we're cutting out the deep-freeze."

  "How do you mean?"

  "With us," said Crake, "you wouldn't have to die first."

  "You've really done it?"

  "Not yet," said Crake. "But think of the R&D budget."

  "Millions?"

  "Mega-millions," said Crake.

  "Can I have another drink?" said Jimmy. This was a lot to take in.

  "No. I need you to listen."

  "I can listen and drink too."

  "Not very well."

  "Try me," said Jimmy.

  Within Paradice, said Crake - and they'd visit the facility after lunch - there were two major initiatives going forward. The first - the BlyssPluss Pill - was prophylactic in nature, and the logic behind it was simple: eliminate the external causes of death and you were halfway there.

  "External causes?" said Jimmy.

  "War, which is to say misplaced sexual energy, which we consider to be a larger factor than the economic, racial, and religious causes often cited. Contagious diseases, especially sexually transmitted ones. Overpopulation, leading - as we've seen in spades - to environmental degradation and poor nutrition."

  Jimmy said it sounded like a tall order: so much had been tried in those areas, so much had failed. Crake smiled. "If at first you don't succeed, read the instructions," he said.

  "Meaning?"

  "The proper study of Mankind is Man."

  "Meaning?"

  "You've got to work with what's on the table."

  The BlyssPluss Pill was designed to take a set of givens, namely the nature of human nature, and steer these givens in a more beneficial direction than the ones hitherto taken. It was based on studies of the now unfortunately extinct pygmy or bonobo chimpanzee, a close relative of Homo sapiens sapiens. Unlike the latter species, the bonobo had not been partially monogamous with polygamous and polyandrous tendencies. Instead it had been indiscriminately promiscuous, had not pair-bonded, and had spent most of its waking life, when it wasn't eating, engaged in copulation. Its intraspecific aggression factor had been very low.

  Which had led to the concept of BlyssPluss. The aim was to produce a single pill, that, at one and the same time:

  a) would protect the user against all known sexually transmitted diseases, fatal, inconvenient, or merely unsightly;

  b) would provide an unlimited supply of libido and sexual prowess, coupled with a generalized sense of energy and well-being, thus reducing the frustration and blocked testosterone that led to jealousy and violence, and eliminating feelings of low self-worth;

  c) would prolong youth.

  These three capabilities would be the selling points, said Crake; but there would be a fourth, which would not be advertised. The BlyssPluss Pill would also act as a sure-fire one-time-does-it-all birth-control pill, for male and female alike, thus automatically lowering the population level. This effect could be made reversible, though not in individual subjects, by altering the components of the pill as needed, i.e., if the populations of any one area got too low.

  "So basically you're going to sterilize people without them knowing it under the guise of giving them the ultra in orgies?"

  "That's a crude way of putting it," said Crake.

  Such a pill, he said, would confer large-scale benefits, not only on individual users - although it had to appeal to these or it would be a failure in the marketplace - but on society as a whole; and not only on society, but on the planet. The investors were very keen on it, it was going to be global. It was all upside. There was no downside at all. He, Crake, was very excited about it.

  "I didn't know you were so altruistic," said Jimmy. Since when had Crake been a cheerleader for the human race?

  "It's not altruism exactly," said Crake. "More like sink or swim. I've seen the latest confidential Corps demographic reports.

  As a species we're in deep trouble, worse than anyone's saying. They're afraid to release the stats because people might just give up, but take it from me, we're running out of space-time. Demand for resources has exceeded supply for decades in marginal geopolitical areas, hence the famines and droughts; but very soon, demand is going to exceed supply for everyone. With the BlyssPluss Pill the human race will have a better chance of swimming."

  "How do you figure?" Maybe Jimmy shouldn't have had that extra drink. He was getting a bit confused.

  "Fewer people, therefore more to go around."

  "What if the fewer people are very greedy and wasteful?" said Jimmy. "That's not out of the question."

  "They won't be," said Crake.

  "You've got this thing now?" said Jimmy. He was beginning to see the possibilities. Endless high-grade sex, no consequences. Come to think of it, his own libido could use a little toning up. "Does it make your hair grow back?" He almost said Where can I get some, but stopped himself in time.

  It was an elegant concept, said Crake, though it still needed some tweaking. They hadn't got it to work seamlessly yet, not on all fronts; it was still at the clinical trial stage. A couple of the test subjects had literally fucked themselves to death, several had assaulted old ladies and household pets, and there had been a few unfortunate cases of priapism and split dicks. Also, at first, the sexually transmitted disease protection mechanism had failed in a spectacular manner. One subject had grown a big genital wart all over her epidermis, distressing to observe, but they'd taken care of that with lasers and exfoliation, at least temporarily. In short, there had been errors, false directions taken, but they were getting very close to a solution.

  Needless to say, Crake continued, the thing would become a huge money-spinner. It would be the must-have pill, in every country, in every society in the world. Of course the crank religions wouldn't like it, in view of the fact that their raison d'etre was based on misery, indefinitely deferred gratification, and sexual frustration, but they wouldn't be able to hold out long. The tide of human desire, the desire for more and better, would overwhelm them. It would take control and drive events, as it had in every large change throughout history.

  Jimmy said the thing sounded very interesting. Provided its shortcomings could be remedied, that is. Good name, too - BlyssPluss. A whispering, seductive sound. He liked it. He had no further wish to try it out himself, however: he had enough problems without his penis bursting.

  "Where do you get the subjects?" he said. "For the clinical trials?"

  Crake grinned. "From the poorer countries. Pay them a few dollars, they don't even know what they're taking. Sex clinics, of course - they're happy to help. Whorehouses. Prisons. And from the ranks of the desperate, as usual."

  "Where do I fit in?"

  "You'll do the ad campaign," said Crake.

  MaddAddam

  ~

  After lunch they went to Paradice.

  The dome complex was at the far right side of the Rejoov Compound. It had its own park around it, a dense climate-controlling plantation of mixed tropical splices above which it rose like a blind eyeball. There was a security installation around the park, very tight, said Crake; even the Corpsmen were not allowed inside. Paradice had been his concept, and he'd made that a condition when he'd agreed to actualize it: he didn't want a lot of heavy
-handed ignoramuses poking into things they couldn't understand.

  Crake's pass was good for both of them, of course. They rolled in through the first gate and along the roadway through the trees. Then there was another checkpoint, with guards - Paradice uniforms, Crake explained, not Corps - that seemed to materialize from the bushes. Then more trees. Then the curved wall of the bubble-dome itself. It might look delicate, said Crake, but it was made of a new mussel-adhesive/silicon/dendrite-formation alloy, ultra-resistant. You'd have to have some very advanced tools to cut through it, as it would reconform itself after pressure and automatically repair any gashes. Moreover, it had the capacity to both filter and breathe, like an eggshell, though it required a solar-generated current to do so.

  They turned the golf cart over to one of the guards and were coded through the outer door, which closed with a whuff behind them.

  "Why did it make that sound?" said Jimmy nervously.

  "It's an airlock," said Crake. "As in spaceships."

  "What for?"

  "In case this place ever has to be sealed off," said Crake. "Hostile bioforms, toxin attacks, fanatics. The usual."

  By this time Jimmy was feeling a little strange. Crake hadn't really told him what went on in here, not in specific detail. "Wait and see," was all he'd said.

  Once they were through the inner door they were in a familiar-enough complex. Halls, doors, staff with digital clipboards, others hunched in front of screens; it was like OrganInc Farms, it was like HelthWyzer, it was like Watson-Crick, only newer. But physical plants were just a shell, said Crake: what really counted in a research facility was the quality of the brains.

  "These are top-of-the-line," he said, nodding left and right. In return there was a lot of deferential smiling, and - this wasn't faked - a lot of awe. Jimmy had never been clear about Crake's exact position, but whatever his nominal title - he'd been vague about that - he was obviously the biggest ant in the anthill.

  Each of the staff had a name tag with block lettering - one or two words only. BLACK RHINO. WHITE SEDGE. IVORY-BILLED WOODPECKER. POLAR BEAR. INDIAN TIGER. LOTIS BLUE. SWIFT FOX.