The job description for Seth was that of a routine low-level IT guy, dime a dozen. Data inputting, using a packet of snoreworthy but serviceable software designed to record and compare the various factoids and buckets o'data the HelthWyzer brainiacs were coming up with. Glorified digital secretary, that's all he was supposed to be.
The duties weren't challenging: he could do the job with two fingers of one hand in much less time than was allotted for it. The HelthWyzer project managers didn't supervise much, they just wanted him to keep current with the inputting. Meanwhile he could ferret around in the HelthWyzer databank unimpeded. He ran a few IT security tests of his own to see whether any outside pirates were trying to hack in: if they were, it would be useful to know about it.
At first he didn't uncover any telltale signs; but during one of his deep dives he pinpointed something that looked as if it might be a cryptic tunnel. He wiggled through it, found himself outside the HelthWyzer burning ring of firewalls, then lilypadded his way into the Extinctathon chatroom. A message was waiting for him: Use only when needed. Don't spend long. Wipe all prints. A. He logged out quickly, then erased his trail. He'd need to build another portal, because whoever was using this tunnel might work out that someone else had been through it.
He decided Seth needed to be known as a guy who did a lot of gaming so that checking into Extinctathon wouldn't stand out should anyone be snooping. That was the operational reason; but also he just wanted to test out the games, and to see how easy it was to fool around during work hours without being reprimanded - staff weren't supposed to waste time in this way, or not too much time - and also how easy it was to cheat. He thought of it as keeping his hand in.
Some of the games on recreational offer were standard - weapons, explosions, and so on - but others were posted by the staff at HelthWyzer West: biogeeks were just as geeky as other geeks, so naturally they designed games of their own. Spandrel was one of the better ones: it let you devise extra, functionally useless features for a bioform, then link them to sexual selection and fast-forward to see what the evolution machine would churn out. Cats with rooster-like wattles on their foreheads, lizards with big red lipstick-kiss lips, men with enormous left eyes - whatever the females chose was favoured, and you could manipulate their bad taste in male attributes, just like real life. Then you played predators against prey. Would the supersexy spandrels impede hunting skills or slow down escape? If your guy wasn't sexy enough, he wouldn't get laid and you'd go extinct; if he was too sexy, he'd get eaten and you'd go extinct. Sex versus dinner: it was a fine balance. Packets of random mutations could be purchased for a small sum.
Weather Monsters wasn't bad either: the game threw extreme weather events at your player - a puny human avatar of either gender - and you tried to see how long your player could survive them. With points won, you could purchase tools for your avatar: boots that allowed it to run faster and jump higher, lightning-proof clothing, floating planks for floods and tsunamis, wet handkerchiefs for covering its nose during brush fires, Joltbars for when it was trapped under a thick wad of snow due to an avalanche. A shovel, some matches, an axe. If your avatar survived the giant mudslide - a killer event - you'd get a whole toolbox and a thousand extra points for your next game.
The one Zeb played the most was called Intestinal Parasites - a nasty gucklunch the biogeeks thought was hilarious. The parasites were truly ugly, with rebarbed hooks all around their mouths and no eyes, and you had to nuke them with toxic pills or deploy an arsenal of nanobots or moteins before they could lay thousands of eggs in you or creep through your brain and out your tear ducts, or split themselves into regenerating segments and turn the inside of your body into a festering patty-melt. Were they real, or had the biogeeks made them up? Worse, were they gene-splicing them right now as part of a bio-weaponry project? Impossible to know.
Play Intestinal Parasites too much and you'd get nightmares, guaranteed, said the game's running slogan. So, never one to do as he was told, Zeb did play it too much, and he did get nightmares.
Which didn't stop him from creating an alias of the game, then reworking one of the hideous mouths so that it functioned as a gateway. He stashed his code in a triple-locked thumbdrive for safekeeping, then parked it at the back of his supervisor's desk drawer in a nest of rubber bands, used nosewipes, and orphaned cough drops. No one would ever look there.
Bone Cave
Cursive
Toby is at work on her journal. She doesn't really have the energy for it, but Zeb went to all that trouble to bring her the materials and he's bound to notice if she doesn't use them. She's writing in one of the cheap schooltime drugstore notebooks. The cover has a bright yellow sun, several pink daisies, and a boy and a girl, rudimentary figures of the kind children used to draw. Back when there were human children - how long ago? It seems like centuries since the plague swept through. Though it's less than half a year.
The boy has blue shorts, a blue cap, and a red shirt; the girl has pigtails, a triangular skirt, red, and a blue top. They both have smudgy black blob eyes and thick red upcurved mouths; they're laughing fit to kill.
Fit to die. They are only paper children, but they seem dead now anyway, like all the real children. She can't look at this notebook cover too much because it hurts.
Better to concentrate on the task at hand. Don't brood or mope. Take one day at a time.
Saint Bob Hunter and the Feast of Rainbow Warriors, Toby writes. This may not be accurate, time-wise - she's probably out by a day or two - but it will have to do because how can she check? There's no central authority any more for days of the month. But Rebecca might know. There were special recipes for the Festivals and Feasts. Maybe she's memorized them; maybe she's kept track.
Moon: Waxing gibbous. Weather: Nothing unusual. Noteworthy occurrences: Group pig aggression displayed. Painballer evidence sighted by Zeb's expedition: piglet shot and partly butchered. Discovery of a tire tread sandal, possible clue to Adam. No definite sign of Adam One and the Gardeners.
She thinks a minute, then adds: Jimmy is conscious and improving. Crakers continue friendly.
"What are you making, Oh Toby?" It's little Blackbeard: she didn't hear him come in. "What are those lines?"
"Come over here," she says. "I won't bite you. Look. I'm doing writing: that is what these lines are. I'll show you."
She runs through the basics. This is paper, it is made from trees.
Does it hurt the tree? No, because the tree is dead by the time the paper is made - a tiny lie, but no matter. And this is a pen. It has a black liquid in it, it is called ink, but you do not need to have a pen to do writing. Just as well, she thinks: those rollerballs will run out soon.
You can use many things to make writing. You can use the juice of elderberries for the ink, you can use the feather of a bird for the pen, you can use a stick and some wet sand to write on. All of these things can be used to make writing.
"Now," she says, "you have to draw the letters. Each letter means a sound. And when you put the letters together they make words. And the words stay where you've put them on the paper, and then other people can see them on the paper and hear the words."
Blackbeard looks at her, squinting with puzzlement and unbelief. "Oh Toby, but it can't talk," he says. "I see the marks you have put there. But it is not saying anything."
"You need to be the voice of the writing," she says. "When you read it. Reading is when you turn these marks back into sounds. Look, I will write your name."
She tears a page carefully from the back of the notebook, prints on it: BLACKBEARD. Then she sounds out each letter for him. "See?" she says. "It means you. Your name." She puts the pen in his hand, curls his fingers around it, guides the hand and the pen: the letter B.
"This is how your name begins," she says. "B. Like bees. It's the same sound." Why is she telling him this? What use will he ever have for it?
"That is not me," says Blackbeard, frowning. "It is not bees either. It is only some marks."
>
"Take this paper to Ren," says Toby, smiling. "Ask her to read it, then come back and tell me if she says your name."
Blackbeard stares at her. He doesn't trust what she's told him, but he takes the piece of paper anyway, holding it gingerly as if it's coated with invisible poison. "Will you stay here?" he says. "Until I come back?"
"Yes," she says. "I'll be right here." He backs out the doorway as he always does, keeping his eyes on her until he turns the corner.
She turns back to her journal. What else to write, besides the bare-facts daily chronicle she's begun? What kind of story - what kind of history will be of any use at all, to people she can't know will exist, in the future she can't foresee?
Zeb and the Bear, she writes. Zeb and MaddAddam. Zeb and Crake. All of these stories could be set down. But why, but for whom? Only for herself because it gives her a chance to dwell upon Zeb?
Zeb and Toby, she writes. But surely that will be only a footnote.
Don't jump to conclusions, she tells herself. He came to the garden, bringing gifts. You could be misinterpreting, about Swift Fox. And even if not, so what? Take what the moment offers. Don't close doors. Be thankful.
Blackbeard slips into the room again. He's carrying the sheet of paper, holding it in front of him like a hot shield. His face is radiant.
"It did, Oh Toby," he says. "It said my name! It told my name to Ren!"
"There," she says. "That is writing."
Blackbeard nods: now he's grasping the possibilities. "I can keep this?" he says.
"Of course," says Toby.
"Show me again. With the black thing."
Later - after it's rained, after the rain has stopped - she finds him at the sandbox. He has a stick, and the paper. There's his name in the sand. The other children are watching him. All of them are singing.
Now what have I done? she thinks. What can of worms have I opened? They're so quick, these children: they'll pick this up and transmit it to all the others.
What comes next? Rules, dogmas, laws? The Testament of Crake? How soon before there are ancient texts they feel they have to obey but have forgotten how to interpret? Have I ruined them?
Swarm
Breakfast is kudzu and other assorted forage greens, bacon, a strange flatbread with unidentified seeds in it, steamed burdock. Coffee from a blend of toasted roots: dandelion, chickory, something else. It has an undertaste of ashes.
They're running out of sugar, and there's no honey. But there is Mo'Hair milk. Another of the ewes - a blue-haired one - has given birth to twins, a blonde and a brunette. There have been some jokes about lamb stew, but no one wants to go there: somehow it would be hard to slaughter and eat an animal with human hair; especially human hair that so closely resembles, in its sheen and stylability, the shampoo ads of yore. Every time one of those Mo'Hairs shakes itself it's like watching the back view of a TV hair beauty: the shining mane, the flirtatious ripple and swirl. At any minute, thinks Toby, you expect them to come out with a product spiel. Every day a bad-hair day? My hair was driving me crazy, but then ... I died.
Don't be so dark, Toby, it's only hair. It's not the end of the world.
Over the coffee they discuss other food options. Protein variety is lacking, they're all agreed on that. Rebecca says she'd kill for some live chickens because then they could keep them in a henhouse and have eggs; but where are such chickens to be found? There are seabird eggs on top of the derelict towers offshore, down by the beach - there must be, the birds are nesting there - but who is willing to make the perilous trip down to the seashore through the increasingly overgrown Heritage Park that may harbour the Painballers, not to mention a squadron or two of large, malevolent pigs? And they shouldn't even think about climbing up the inner stairs of those towers, which must be very unstable by now.
A debate follows. One side points to the fact that the Crakers wander back and forth at will, singing their polyphonic music. They visit their home base by the shore, a hollow jumble of cement blocks. They keep it protected from animals by peeing in a circle around it, a circle they believe the pigoons and wolvogs and bobkittens won't cross. They spear the ritual fish to present to Toby so she will fulfill the functions of Snowman-the-Jimmy and tell them stories. No animal has molested the Crakers on their woodland walks, or not so far. As for the Painballers, they must be quite far away by now, judging from the location of the last known sign of them, which was the carcass of that recently killed piglet.
The other side argues that the Crakers appear to have ways of keeping the wildlife at bay while in transit, apart from the pissing defence. Maybe it's the singing? If so, and needless to point out, that won't work for normal human beings, whose vocal cords aren't made of organic glass or whatever it is that accounts for those digital-keyboard theremin sounds. As for the Painballers, they could easily have circled back by now, and might be lurking in ambush around the very next kudzu-smothered corner. You can never be too careful, and better safe than sorry, and they cannot afford to sacrifice one or two of their number for the sake of a few gull eggs, which are likely green and taste like fish guts anyway.
An egg is an egg, say the pro-eggers. Why not send a couple of human beings with the Crakers? That way the humans will be protected from wild animals via the Crakers, and the Crakers will be protected from the Painballers via the sprayguns toted by the MaddAddamites. No point in giving sprayguns to the Crakers, since you could never teach them about shooting and killing people. They just aren't capable, not being human as such.
Not so fast: that case has not yet been proven, says Ivory Bill. "If they can crossbreed with us, then case made. Same species. If not, then not." He leans forward, peers into his coffee cup. "Any more?" he asks Rebecca.
"Only half true," says Manatee. "A horse plus a donkey gives you a mule, but it's sterile. We wouldn't know for sure until the next generation."
"I've only got enough for tomorrow," says Rebecca. "We need to dig some dandelions. We've used up the ones around here."
"It would be an interesting experiment," says Ivory Bill. "But of course we would need the co-operation of the ladies." He inclines his head courteously towards Swift Fox, who's wearing a winsome floral print sheet, with bouquets of pink and blue flowers tied with pink and blue bows.
"You've seen those dicks of theirs?" says Swift Fox. "Too much of a good thing. If I find a dick in my mouth, I want to know it came in at the head end." Ivory Bill turns away, visibly shocked, silently angry. Laughter from some, frowns from others. Swift Fox likes to potty-mouth the crowd, especially the men; to demonstrate that she isn't just a pretty body, is Toby's guess. She wants to have it both ways.
Zeb is down at the other end of the table. He came late; he hasn't been joining in the debate. He appears to be engrossed in the flatbread. Swift Fox tosses him a glance: is he her intended audience? He pays no attention; but then he wouldn't, would he? That's what those lovelife advisers blogging about office romances used to say: you can tell the guilty parties by the way in which they studiously avoid each other.
"Those guys don't need any co-operation," says Crozier. "They jump anything with a c - Sorry, Toby. Anything with a skirt."
"A skirt!" says Swift Fox, laughing again, showing her white teeth. "Where've you been? You've seen any of us wearing skirts? Bedsheet wraps don't count." She twists her shoulders back and forth, as if on a fashion runway. "You like my skirt? It goes all the way up to my armpits!"
"Leave him alone, he's underage," says Manatee. Crozier is making a strange face: anger? Embarrassment? Ren's sitting beside him. He gives her a sheepish grin, puts his hand on her arm. She frowns at him like a spouse.
"They're the most fun, the underage ones," says Swift Fox. "Frisky. They're packed with endorphins, and their nucleotide sequences are to die for - miles of telomeres left." Ren stares at her, stone-faced.
"He's not underage," she says. Swift Fox smiles.
Do the men at the table see it? Toby wonders. The silent mud-wrestle in the air? No,
probably not. They're not on the progesterone wavelength.
"They only do that under the right conditions," says Manatee. "The group copulation. The woman has to be in heat."
"That's fine for their own women," says Beluga. "They've got clear hormonal signals there, both visual and olfactory. But our women register to them as in heat all the time."
"Maybe they are," says Manatee, grinning. "They just won't admit it."
"Point being: two different species," says Beluga.
"Women aren't dogs," says White Sedge. "I am finding this exchange offensive. I don't think you should refer to us like that." Her voice is calm but her spine's like a ramrod.
"This is merely an objective scientific discussion," says Zunzuncito.
"Hey," says Rebecca. "All I said is, it would be neat to have some eggs."
Morning worktime, the sun not yet too hot. Bright pink kudzu moths hang in the shade, flocks of butterflies in blue and magenta kite-fight in the air, golden honeybees flock on the polyberry flowers.
Toby's on garden duty again, weeding and deslugging. Her rifle leans against the inside of the fence: she prefers it within reach, wherever she is, because you never know. All around her the plants are growing, weeds and cultivars both. She can almost hear them pushing up through the soil, their rootlets sniffing for nutrients and crowding the rootlets of their neighbours, their leaves releasing clouds of airborne chemicals.
Saint Vandana Shiva of Seeds, she wrote in her notebook this morning. Saint Nikolai Vavilov, Martyr. She added the traditional God's Gardener invocation: May we be mindful of Saint Vandana and Saint Vavilov, fierce preservers of ancient seeds. Saint Vavilov, who collected the seeds and preserved them throughout the siege of Leningrad, only to fall victim to the tyrant Stalin; and Saint Vandana, tireless warrior against biopiracy, who gave of herself for the good of the Living Vegetable World in all its diversity and beauty. Lend us the purity of your Spirits and the strength of your resolve.
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