The MaddAddam Trilogy

by Margaret Atwood

  He now had a circle around him again: he’d rediscovered that pleasure. Oh Jimmy, do Cosmetic Surgery for Everyone! Do Access Your Inner Child! Do Total Womanhood! Do Raising Nutria for Fun and Profit! Do The Survival Handbook of Dating and Sex! And Jimmy, the ever-ready song-and-dance man, would oblige. Sometimes he’d make up books that didn’t exist – Healing Diverticulitis Through Chanting and Prayer was one of his best creations – and nobody would spot the imposture.

  He’d turned that paper topic into his senior dissertation, later. He’d got an A.

  There was a bullet-train connection between Martha Graham and Watson-Crick, with only one change. Jimmy spent a lot of the three-hour trip looking out the window at the pleeblands they were passing through. Rows of dingy houses; apartment buildings with tiny balconies, laundry strung on the railings; factories with smoke coming out of the chimneys; gravel pits. A huge pile of garbage, next to what he supposed was a high-heat incinerator. A shopping mall like the ones at HelthWyzer, only there were cars in the parking lots instead of electric golf carts. A neon strip, with bars and girlie joints and what looked like an archeological-grade movie theatre. He glimpsed a couple of trailer parks, and wondered what it was like to live in one of them: just thinking about it made him slightly dizzy, as he imagined a desert might, or the sea. Everything in the pleeblands seemed so boundless, so porous, so penetrable, so wide-open. So subject to chance.

  Accepted wisdom in the Compounds said that nothing of interest went on in the pleeblands, apart from buying and selling: there was no life of the mind. Buying and selling, plus a lot of criminal activity; but to Jimmy it looked mysterious and exciting, over there on the other side of the safety barriers. Also dangerous. He wouldn’t know the ways to do things there, he wouldn’t know how to behave. He wouldn’t even know how to pick up girls. They’d turn him upside down in no time, they’d shake his head loose. They’d laugh at him. He’d be fodder.

  The security going into Watson-Crick was very thorough, unlike the sloppy charade that took place at Martha Graham: the fear must have been that some fanatic would sneak in and blow up the best minds of the generation, thus dealing a crippling blow to something or other. There were dozens of CorpSeCorps men, complete with sprayguns and rubber clubs; they had Watson-Crick insignia, but you could tell who they really were. They took Jimmy’s iris imprint and ran it through the system, and then two surly weightlifters pulled him aside for questioning. As soon as it happened he guessed why.

  “You seen your runaway mother lately?”

  “No,” he said truthfully.

  “Heard from her? Had a phone call, another postcard?” So they were still tracking his snail mail. All of the postcards must be stored on their computers; plus his present whereabouts, which was why they hadn’t asked where he’d come from.

  No again, he said. They had him hooked up to the neural-impulse monitor so they knew he wasn’t lying; they must also have known that the question distressed him. He was on the verge of saying And if I had I wouldn’t tell you, apeface, but he was old enough by then to realize that nothing would be served by that, and it was likely to land him on the next bullet train back to Martha Graham, or worse.

  “Know what she’s been doing? Who she’s hanging out with?”

  Jimmy didn’t, but he had a feeling they themselves might have some idea. They didn’t mention the Happicuppa demonstration in Maryland though, so maybe they were less informed than he feared.

  “Why are you here, son?” Now they were bored. The important part was over.

  “I’m visiting an old friend for Thanksgiving Week,” said Jimmy. “A friend from HelthWyzer High. He’s a student here. I’ve been invited.” He gave the name, and the visitor authorization number supplied to him by Crake.

  “What sort of a student? What’s he taking?”

  Transgenics, Jimmy told them.

  They pulled up the file to check, frowned at it, looked moderately impressed. Then they made a cellcall, as if they hadn’t quite believed him. What was a serf like him doing visiting the nobility? their manner implied. But finally they let him through, and there was Crake in his no-name dark clothing, looking older and thinner and also smarter than ever, leaning on the exit barrier and grinning.

  “Hi there, cork-nut,” said Crake, and nostalgia swept through Jimmy like sudden hunger. He was so pleased to see Crake he almost wept.

  Wolvogs

  ~

  Compared with Martha Graham, Watson-Crick was a palace. At the entranceway was a bronzed statue of the Institute’s mascot, the spoat/gider – one of the first successful splices, done in Montreal at the turn of the century, goat crossed with spider to produce high-tensile spider silk filaments in the milk. The main application nowadays was bulletproof vests. The CorpSeCorps swore by the stuff.

  The extensive grounds inside the security wall were beautifully laid out: the work, said Crake, of the JigScape Faculty. The students in Botanical Transgenics (Ornamental Division) had created a whole array of drought-and-flood-resistant tropical blends, with flowers or leaves in lurid shades of chrome yellow and brilliant flame red and phosphorescent blue and neon purple. The pathways, unlike the crumbling cement walks at Martha Graham, were smooth and wide. Students and faculty were beetling along them in their electric golf carts.

  Huge fake rocks, made from a combo-matrix of recycled plastic bottles and plant material from giant tree cacti and various lithops – the living-stone members of the Mesembryanthemaceae – were dotted here and there. It was a patented process, said Crake, originally developed at Watson-Crick and now a nice little money-spinner. The fake rocks looked like real rocks but weighed less; not only that, they absorbed water during periods of humidity and released it in times of drought, so they acted like natural lawn regulators. Rockulators, was the brand name. You had to avoid them during heavy rainfalls, though, as they’d been known to explode.

  But most of the bugs had now been ironed out, said Crake, and new varieties were appearing every month. The student team was thinking of developing something called the Moses Model, for dependable supplies of fresh drinking water in times of crisis. Just Hit It With a Rod, was the proposed slogan.

  “How do those things work?’ asked Jimmy, trying not to sound impressed.

  “Search me,” said Crake. “I’m not in NeoGeologicals.”

  “So, are the butterflies – are they recent?” Jimmy asked after a while. The ones he was looking at had wings the size of pancakes and were shocking pink, and were clustering all over one of the purple shrubs.

  “You mean, did they occur in nature or were they created by the hand of man? In other words, are they real or fake?”

  “Mm,” said Jimmy. He didn’t want to get into the what is real thing with Crake.

  “You know when people get their hair dyed or their teeth done? Or women get their tits enlarged?”

  “Yeah?”

  “After it happens, that’s what they look like in real time. The process is no longer important.”

  “No way fake tits feel like real tits,” said Jimmy, who thought he knew a thing or two about that.

  “If you could tell they were fake,” said Crake, “it was a bad job. These butterflies fly, they mate, they lay eggs, caterpillars come out.”

  “Mm,” said Jimmy again.

  ~ ~ ~

  Crake didn’t have a roommate. Instead he had a suite, accented in wood tones, with push-button venetians and air conditioning that really worked. It consisted of a large bedroom, an enclosed bath and shower unit with steam function, a main living-dining room with a pullout couch – that was where Jimmy would camp out, said Crake – and a study with a built-in sound system and a full array of compu-gizmos. It had maid service too, and they picked up and delivered your laundry. (Jimmy was depressed by this news, as he had to do his own laundry at Martha Graham, using the clanking, wheezy washers and the dryers that fried your clothes. You had to slot plastic tokens into them because the machines had been jimmied regularly when they’d
taken coins.)

  Crake also had a cheery kitchenette. “Not that I microwave much,” said Crake. “Except for snack food. Most of us eat at our dining halls. There’s one for each faculty.”

  “How’s the food?” Jimmy asked. He was feeling more and more like a troglodyte. Living in a cave, fighting off the body parasites, gnawing the odd bone.

  “It’s food,” said Crake indifferently.

  On day one they toured some of the wonders of Watson-Crick. Crake was interested in everything – all the projects that were going on. He kept saying “Wave of the future,” which got irritating after the third time.

  First they went to Décor Botanicals, where a team of five seniors was developing Smart Wallpaper that would change colour on the walls of your room to complement your mood. This wallpaper – they told Jimmy – had a modified form of Kirilian-energy-sensing algae embedded in it, along with a sublayer of algae nutrients, but there were still some glitches to be fixed. The wallpaper was short-lived in humid weather because it ate up all the nutrients and then went grey; also it could not tell the difference between drooling lust and murderous rage, and was likely to turn your wallpaper an erotic pink when what you really needed was a murky, capillary-bursting greenish red.

  That team was also working on a line of bathroom towels that would behave in much the same way, but they hadn’t yet solved the marine-life fundamentals: when algae got wet it swelled up and began to grow, and the test subjects so far had not liked the sight of their towels from the night before puffing up like rectangular marshmallows and inching across the bathroom floor.

  “Wave of the future,” said Crake.

  Next they went to NeoAgriculturals. AgriCouture was its nickname among the students. They had to put on biosuits before they entered the facility, and scrub their hands and wear nose-cone filters, because what they were about to see hadn’t been bioform-proofed, or not completely. A woman with a laugh like Woody Woodpecker led them through the corridors.

  “This is the latest,” said Crake.

  What they were looking at was a large bulblike object that seemed to be covered with stippled whitish-yellow skin. Out of it came twenty thick fleshy tubes, and at the end of each tube another bulb was growing.

  “What the hell is it?” said Jimmy.

  “Those are chickens,” said Crake. “Chicken parts. Just the breasts, on this one. They’ve got ones that specialize in drumsticks too, twelve to a growth unit.”

  “But there aren’t any heads,” said Jimmy. He grasped the concept – he’d grown up with sus multiorganifer, after all – but this thing was going too far. At least the pigoons of his childhood hadn’t lacked heads.

  “That’s the head in the middle,” said the woman. “There’s a mouth opening at the top, they dump the nutrients in there. No eyes or beak or anything, they don’t need those.”

  “This is horrible,” said Jimmy. The thing was a nightmare. It was like an animal-protein tuber.

  “Picture the sea-anemone body plan,” said Crake. “That helps.”

  “But what’s it thinking?” said Jimmy.

  The woman gave her jocular woodpecker yodel, and explained that they’d removed all the brain functions that had nothing to do with digestion, assimilation, and growth.

  “It’s sort of like a chicken hookworm,” said Crake.

  “No need for added growth hormones,” said the woman, “the high growth rate’s built in. You get chicken breasts in two weeks – that’s a three-week improvement on the most efficient low-light, high-density chicken farming operation so far devised. And the animal-welfare freaks won’t be able to say a word, because this thing feels no pain.”

  “Those kids are going to clean up,” said Crake after they’d left. The students at Watson-Crick got half the royalties from anything they invented there. Crake said it was a fierce incentive. “ChickieNobs, they’re thinking of calling the stuff.”

  “Are they on the market yet?” asked Jimmy weakly. He couldn’t see eating a ChickieNob. It would be like eating a large wart. But as with the tit implants – the good ones – maybe he wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

  “They’ve already got the takeout franchise operation in place,” said Crake. “Investors are lining up around the block. They can undercut the price of everyone else.”

  Jimmy was becoming annoyed by Crake’s way of introducing him – “This is Jimmy, the neurotypical” – but he knew better than to show it. Still, it seemed to be like calling him a Cro-Magnon or something. Next step they’d be putting him in a cage, feeding him bananas, and poking him with electroprods.

  Nor did he think much of the Watson-Crick women on offer. Maybe they weren’t even on offer: they seemed to have other things on their minds. Jimmy’s few attempts at flirtation got him some surprised stares – surprised and not at all pleased, as if he’d widdled on these women’s carpets.

  Considering their slovenliness, their casual approach to personal hygiene and adornment, they ought to have fainted at the attention. Plaid shirts were their formal wear, hairstyles not their strong suit: a lot of them looked as if they’d had a close encounter with the kitchen shears. As a group, they reminded him of Bernice, the God’s Gardeners pyromaniac vegan. The Bernice model was an exception at Martha Graham, where the girls tried to give the impression they were, or had been once, or could well be, dancers or actresses or singers or performance artists or conceptual photographers or something else artistic. Willowy was their aim, style was their game, whether they played it well or not. But here the Bernice look was the rule, except that there were few religious T-shirts. More usual were ones with complex mathematical equations on them that caused snickers among those who could decode them.

  “What’s the T-shirt say?” asked Jimmy, when he’d had one too many of these experiences – high-fives among the others, himself standing with the foolish look of someone who’s just had his pocket picked.

  “That girl’s a physicist,” said Crake, as if this explained everything.

  “So?”

  “So, her T-shirt’s about the eleventh dimension.”

  “What’s the joke?”

  “It’s complicated,” said Crake.

  “Try me.”

  “You have to know about the dimensions and how they’re supposed to be all curled up inside the dimensions we know about.”

  “And?”

  “It’s sort of like, I can take you out of this world, but the route to it is just a few nanoseconds long, and the way of measuring those nanoseconds doesn’t exist in our space-frame.”

  “All that in symbols and numbers?”

  “Not in so many words.”

  “Oh.”

  “I didn’t say it was funny,” said Crake. “These are physicists. It’s only funny to them. But you asked.”

  “So it’s sort of like she’s saying they could make it together if he only had the right kind of dick, which he doesn’t?” said Jimmy, who’d been thinking hard.

  “Jimmy, you’re a genius,” said Crake.

  “This is BioDefences,” said Crake. “Last stop, I promise.” He could tell Jimmy was flagging. The truth was that all this was too reminiscent. The labs, the peculiar bioforms, the socially spastic scientists – they were too much like his former life, his life as a child. Which was the last place he wanted to go back to. Even Martha Graham was preferable.

  They were standing in front of a series of cages. Each contained a dog. There were many different breeds and sizes, but all were gazing at Jimmy with eyes of love, all were wagging their tails.

  “It’s a dog pound,” said Jimmy.

  “Not quite,” said Crake. “Don’t go beyond the guardrail, don’t stick your hand in.”

  “They look friendly enough,” said Jimmy. His old longing for a pet came over him. “Are they for sale?”

  “They aren’t dogs, they just look like dogs. They’re wolvogs – they’re bred to deceive. Reach out to pat them, they’ll take your hand off. There’s a large pit-bul
l component.”

  “Why make a dog like that?” said Jimmy, taking a step back. “Who’d want one?”

  “It’s a CorpSeCorps thing,” said Crake. “Commission work. A lot of funding. They want to put them in moats, or something.”

  “Moats?”

  “Yeah. Better than an alarm system – no way of disarming these guys. And no way of making pals with them, not like real dogs.”

  “What if they get out? Go on the rampage? Start breeding, then the population spirals out of control – like those big green rabbits?”

  “That would be a problem,” said Crake. “But they won’t get out. Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.”

  “Meaning what?” said Jimmy. He wasn’t paying close attention, he was worrying about the ChickieNobs and the wolvogs. Why is it he feels some line has been crossed, some boundary transgressed? How much is too much, how far is too far?

  “Those walls and bars are there for a reason,” said Crake. “Not to keep us out, but to keep them in. Mankind needs barriers in both cases.”

  “Them?”

  “Nature and God.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in God,” said Jimmy.

  “I don’t believe in Nature either,” said Crake. “Or not with a capital N.”

  Hypothetical

  ~

  “So, you got a girlfriend?” said Jimmy on the fourth day. He’d been saving this question for the right time. “I mean, there’s quite an array of babes to choose from.” He meant this to be ironic. He couldn’t picture himself with the Woody Woodpecker–laugh girl or the ones with numbers all over their chests, but he couldn’t picture Crake with one of them either. Crake was too suave for that.