Oryx and Crake

by Margaret Atwood

  "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 Decor 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 wer
e 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-bull 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.

  "Not as such," said Crake shortly.

  "What do you mean, not as such? You've got a girl, but she's not a human being?"

  "Pair-bonding at this stage is not encouraged," said Crake, sounding like a guidebook. "We're supposed to be focusing on our work."

  "Bad for your health," said Jimmy. "You should get yourself fixed up."

  "Easy for you to say," said Crake. "You're the grasshopper, I'm the ant. I can't waste time in unproductive random scanning."

  For the first time in their lives, Jimmy wondered - could it be? - whether Crake might be jealous of him. Though maybe Crake was just being a pompous tightass; maybe Watson-Crick was having a bad effect on him. So what's the super-cerebellum-triathlon ultralife mission? Jimmy felt like saying. Deign to divulge? "I wouldn't call it a waste," he said instead, trying to lighten Crake up, "unless you fail to score."

  "If you really need to, you can arrange that kind of thing through Student Services," Crake said, rather stiffly. "They deduct the price from your scholarship, same as room and board. The workers come in from the pleeblands, they're trained professionals. Naturally they're inspected for disease."

  "Student Services? In your dreams! They do what?"

  "It makes sense," said Crake. "As a system, it avoids the diversion of energies into unproductive channels, and short-circuits malaise. The female students have equal access, of course. You can get any colour, any age - well, almost. Any body type. They provide everything. If you're gay or some kind of a fetishist, they'll fix that too."

  At first Jimmy thought Crake might be joking, but he wasn't. Jimmy longed to ask him what he'd tried - had he done a double amputee, for instance? But all of a sudden such a question seemed intrusive. Also it might be mistaken for mockery.

  The food in Crake's faculty dining hall was fantastic - real shrimps instead of the CrustaeSoy they got at Martha Graham, and real chicken, Jimmy suspected, though he avoided that because he couldn't forget the ChickieNobs he'd seen; and something a lot like real cheese, though Crake said it came from a vegetable, a new species of zucchini they were trying out.

  The desserts were heavy on the chocolate, real chocolate. The coffee was heavy on the coffee. No burnt grain products, no molasses mixed in. It was Happicuppa, but who cared? And real beer. For sure the beer was real.

  So all of that was a welcome change from Martha Graham, though Crake's fellow students tended to forget about cutlery and eat with their hands, and wipe their mouths on their sleeves. Jimmy wasn't picky, but this verged on gross. Also they talked all the time, whether anyone was listening or not, always about the ideas they were developing. Once they found Jimmy wasn't working on a space - was attending, in fact, an institution they clearly regarded as a mud puddle - they lost any interest in him. They referred to other students in their own faculties as their conspecifics, and to all other human beings as nonspecifics. It was a running joke.

  So Jimmy had no yen to mingle after hours. He was happy enough to hang out at Crake's, letting Crake beat him at chess or Three-Dimensional Waco, or trying to decode Crake's fridge magnets, the ones that didn't have numbers and symbols. Watson-Crick was a fridge-magnet culture: people bought them, traded them, made their own.

  No Brain, No Pain (with a green hologram of a brain).

  Siliconsciousness.

  I wander from Space to Space.

  Wanna Meet a Meat Machine?

  Take Your Time, Leave Mine Alone.

  Little spoat/gider, who made thee?

  Life experiments like a rakunk at play.

  I think, therefore I spam.

  The proper study of Mankind is Everything.

  Sometimes they'd watch TV or Web stuff, as in the old days. The Noodie News, brainfrizz, alibooboo, comfort eyefood like that. They'd microwave popcorn, smoke some of the enhanced weed the Botanical Transgenic students were raising in one of the greenhouses; then Jimmy could pass out on the couch. After he got used to his status in this brainpound, which was equivalent to that of a house plant, it wasn't too bad. You just had to relax and breathe into the stretch, as in workouts. He'd be out of here in a few days. Meanwhile it was always interesting to listen to Crake, when Crake was alone, and when he was in the mood to say anything.

  On the second to last evening, Crake said, "Let me walk you through a hypothetical scenario."

  "I'm game," said Jimmy. Actually he was sleepy - he'd had too much popcorn and beer - but he sat up and put on his paying-attention look, the one he'd perfected in high school. Hypothetical scenarios were a favourite thing of Crake's.

  "Axiom: that illness isn't productive. In itself, it generates no commodities and therefore no money. Although it's an excuse for a lot of activity, all it really does moneywise is cause wealth to flow from the sick to the well. From patients to doctors, from clients to cure-peddlers. Money osmosis, you might call it."

  "Granted," said Jimmy.

  "Now, suppose you're an outfit called HelthWyzer. Suppose you make your money out of drugs and procedures that cure sick people, or else - better - that make it impossible for them to get sick in the first place."

  "Yeah?" said Jimmy. Nothing hypothetical here: that was what HelthWyzer actually did.

  "So, what are you going to need, sooner or later?"

  "More cures?"

  "After that."

  "What do you mean, after that?"

  "After you've cured everything going."

  Jimmy made a pretence of thinking. No point doing any actual thought: it was a foregone conclusion that Crake would have some lateral-jump solution to his own question.

  "Remember the plight of the dentists, after that new mouth-wash came in? The one that replaced plaque bacteria with friendly ones that filled the same ecological niche, namely your mouth? No one ever needed a filling again, and a lot of dentists went bust."

  "So?"

  "So, you'd need more sick people. Or else - and it might be the same thing - more diseases. New and different
ones. Right?"

  "Stands to reason," said Jimmy after a moment. It did, too. "But don't they keep discovering new diseases?"

  "Not discovering," said Crake. "They're creating them."

  "Who is?" said Jimmy. Saboteurs, terrorists, is that what Crake meant? It was well known they went in for that kind of thing, or tried to. So far they hadn't had a lot of successes: their puny little diseases had been simple-minded, in Compound terms, and fairly easy to contain.

  "HelthWyzer," said Crake. "They've been doing it for years. There's a whole secret unit working on nothing else. Then there's the distribution end. Listen, this is brilliant. They put the hostile bioforms into their vitamin pills - their HelthWyzer over-the-counter premium brand, you know? They have a really elegant delivery system - they embed a virus inside a carrier bacterium, E. coli splice, doesn't get digested, bursts in the pylorus, and bingo! Random insertion, of course, and they don't have to keep on doing it - if they did they'd get caught, because even in the pleeblands they've got guys who could figure it out. But once you've got a hostile bioform started in the pleeb population, the way people slosh around out there it more or less runs itself. Naturally they develop the antidotes at the same time as they're customizing the bugs, but they hold those in reserve, they practise the economics of scarcity, so they're guaranteed high profits."

  "Are you making this up?" said Jimmy.

  "The best diseases, from a business point of view," said Crake, "would be those that cause lingering illnesses. Ideally - that is, for maximum profit - the patient should either get well or die just before all of his or her money runs out. It's a fine calculation."

  "This would be really evil," said Jimmy.

  "That's what my father thought," said Crake.

  "He knew?" Jimmy really was paying attention now.

  "He found out. That's how come they pushed him off a bridge."

  "Who did?" said Jimmy.

  "Into oncoming traffic."

  "Are you going paranoid, or what?"

  "Not in the least," said Crake. "This is the bare-naked truth. I hacked into my dad's e-mails before they deep-cleansed his computer. The evidence he'd been collecting was all there. The tests he'd been running on the vitamin pills. Everything."

  Jimmy felt a chill up his spine. "Who knows that you know?"