Oryx and Crake

by Margaret Atwood

  "He isn't here," said Jimmy.

  "Who is this?"

  "I can't tell you. Security protocol."

  "Listen, whoever you are, I have an idea what sort of scam that creep's up to and when I lay my hands on him I'm going to break his neck. I bet he's got the vaccine for this and he's gonna hold us up for an arm and a leg."

  "Really? Is that what you think?" said Jimmy.

  "I know the bastard's there. I'm coming over and blow the door in."

  "I wouldn't do that," said Jimmy. "We're seeing some very strange microbe activity here. Very unusual. The place is hotter than hell. I'm toughing it out in a biosuit, but I don't really know whether I'm contaminated or not. Something's really gone off the rails."

  "Oh shit. Here? In Rejoov? I thought we were sealed off."

  "Yeah, it's a bad break," said Jimmy. "My advice is, look in Bermuda. I think he went there with a lot of cash."

  "So he sold us out, the little shit. Hawked it deliberately to the competition. That would figure. That would absolutely figure. Listen, thanks for the tip."

  "Good luck," said Jimmy.

  "Yeah, sure, same to you."

  Nobody else buzzed the outer door, nobody tried to break in. The Rejoov folks must have got the message. As for the staff, once they'd realized the guards were gone they must have rushed outside and made a beeline for the outer gate. For what they'd confused with freedom.

  Three times a day Jimmy checked on the Crakers, peering in at them like a voyeur. Scrap the simile: he was a voyeur. They seemed happy enough, or at least contented. They grazed, they slept, they sat for long hours doing what appeared to be nothing. The mothers nursed their babies, the young ones played. The men peed in a circle. One of the women came into her blue phase and the men performed their courtship dance, singing, flowers in hand, azure penises waving in time. Then there was a quintuplet fertility fest, off among the shrubbery.

  Maybe I could do some social interaction, thought Jimmy. Help them invent the wheel. Leave a legacy of knowledge. Pass on all my words.

  No, he couldn't. No hope there.

  Sometimes they looked uneasy - they'd gather in groups, they'd murmur. The hidden mikes picked them up.

  "Where is Oryx? When is she coming back?"

  "She always comes back."

  "She should be here, teaching us."

  "She is always teaching us. She is teaching us now."

  "Is she here?"

  "Here and not here is the same thing, for Oryx. She said that."

  "Yes. She said it."

  "What does it mean?"

  It was like some demented theology debate in the windier corners of chat-room limbo. Jimmy couldn't stand listening to it for very long.

  The rest of the time he himself grazed, slept, sat for long hours doing nothing. For the first two weeks he followed world events on the Net, or else on the television news: the riots in the cities as transportation broke down and supermarkets were raided; the explosions as electrical systems failed, the fires no one came to extinguish. Crowds packed the churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples to pray and repent, then poured out of them as the worshippers woke up to their increased risk of exposure. There was an exodus to small towns and rural areas, whose inhabitants fought off the refugees as long as they could, with banned firearms or clubs and pitchforks.

  At first the newscasters were thoroughly into it, filming the action from traffic helicopters, exclaiming as if at a football match: Did you see that? Unbelievable! Brad, nobody can quite believe it. What we've just seen is a crazed mob of God's Gardeners, liberating a ChickieNobs production facility. Brad, this is hilarious, those ChickieNob things can't even walk! (Laughter.) Now, back to the studio.

  It must have been during the initial mayhem, thinks Snowman, that some genius let out the pigoons and the wolvogs. Oh, thanks a bundle.

  Street preachers took to self-flagellation and ranting about the Apocalypse, though they seemed disappointed: where were the trumpets and angels, why hadn't the moon turned to blood? Pundits in suits appeared on the screen; medical experts, graphs showing infection rates, maps tracing the extent of the epidemic. They used dark pink for that, as for the British Empire once. Jimmy would have preferred some other colour.

  There was no disguising the fear of the commentators. Who's next, Brad? When are they going to have a vaccine? Well, Simon, they're working round the clock from what I hear, but nobody's claiming to have a handle on this thing yet. It's a biggie, Brad. Simon, you said a mouthful, but we've licked some biggies before. Encouraging grin, thumbs-up sign, unfocused eyes, facial pallor.

  Documentaries were hastily thrown together, with images of the virus - at least they'd isolated it, it looked like the usual melting gumdrop with spines - and commentary on its methods. This appears to be a supervirulent splice. Whether it's a species-jumping mutation or a deliberate fabrication is anybody's guess. Sage nods all round. They'd given the virus a name, to make it seem more manageable. Its name was JUVE, Jetspeed Ultra Virus Extraordinary. Possibly they now knew something, such as what Crake had really been up to, hidden safely in the deepest core of the RejoovenEsense Compound. Sitting in judgment on the world, thought Jimmy; but why had that been his right?

  Conspiracy theories proliferated: it was a religious thing, it was God's Gardeners, it was a plot to gain world control. Boil-water and don't-travel advisories were issued in the first week, handshaking was discouraged. In the same week there was a run on latex gloves and nose-cone filters. About as effective, thought Jimmy, as oranges stuck with cloves during the Black Death.

  This just in. The JUVE killer virus has broken out in Fiji, spared until now. CorpSeCorps chief declares New New York a disaster area. Major arteries sealed off.

  Brad, this item is moving very fast. Simon, it's unbelievable.

  "Change can be accommodated by any system depending on its rate," Crake used to say. "Touch your head to a wall, nothing happens, but if the same head hits the same wall at ninety miles an hour, it's red paint. We're in a speed tunnel, Jimmy. When the water's moving faster than the boat, you can't control a thing."

  I listened, thought Jimmy, but I didn't hear.

  In the second week, there was full mobilization. The hastily assembled epidemic managers called the shots - field clinics, isolation tents; whole towns, then whole cities quarantined. But these efforts soon broke down as the doctors and nurses caught the thing themselves, or panicked and fled.

  England closes ports and airports.

  All communication from India has ceased.

  Hospitals are off limits until further notice. If you feel ill, drink plenty of water and call the following hotline number.

  Do not, repeat do not, attempt to exit cities.

  It wasn't Brad talking any more, or Simon. Brad and Simon were gone. It was other people, and then others.

  Jimmy called the hotline number and got a recording saying it was out of service. Then he called his father, a thing he hadn't done in years. That line was out of service too.

  He searched his e-mail. No recent messages. All he found was an old birthday card he'd failed to delete: Happy Birthday, Jimmy, May All Your Dreams Come True. Pigs with wings.

  One of the privately run Web sites showed a map, with lit-up points on it for each place that was still communicating via satellite. Jimmy watched with fascination as the points of light blinked out.

  He was in shock. That must have been why he couldn't take it in. The whole thing seemed like a movie. Yet there he was, and there were Oryx and Crake, dead, in the airlock. Any time he found himself thinking it was all an illusion, a practical joke of some kind, he went and looked at them. Through the bulletproof window, of course: he knew he shouldn't open the innermost door.

  He lived off Crake's emergency stores, the frozen goods first: if the bubble's solar system failed, the freezers and microwaves would no longer work, so he might as well eat his way through the ChickieNobs Gourmet Dinners while he had the chance. He smoked up Crake's st
ash of skunkweed in no time flat; he managed to miss about three days of horror that way. He rationed the booze at first, but soon he was getting through quite a pile of it. He needed to be fried just to face the news, he needed to be feeling not much.

  "I don't believe it, I don't believe it," he'd say. He'd begun talking to himself out loud, a bad sign. "It isn't happening." How could he exist in this clean, dry, monotonous, ordinary room, gobbling caramel soycorn and zucchini cheese puffs and addling his brain on spirituous liquors and brooding on the total fiasco that was his personal life, while the entire human race was kakking out?

  The worst of it was that those people out there - the fear, the suffering, the wholesale death - did not really touch him. Crake used to say that Homo sapiens sapiens was not hard-wired to individuate other people in numbers above two hundred, the size of the primal tribe, and Jimmy would reduce that number to two. Had Oryx loved him, had she loved him not, did Crake know about them, how much did he know, when did he know it, was he spying on them all along? Did he set up the grand finale as an assisted suicide, had he intended to have Jimmy shoot him because he knew what would happen next and he didn't deign to stick around to watch the results of what he'd done?

  Or did he know he wouldn't be able to withhold the formula for the vaccine, once the CorpSeCorps got to work on him? How long had he been planning this? Could it be that Uncle Pete, and possibly even Crake's own mother, had been trial runs? With so much at stake, was he afraid of failure, of being just one more incompetent nihilist? Or was he tormented by jealousy, was he addled by love, was it revenge, did he just want Jimmy to put him out of his misery? Had he been a lunatic or an intellectually honourable man who'd thought things through to their logical conclusion? And was there any difference?

  And so on and so forth, spinning the emotional wheels and sucking down the hootch until he could blank himself out.

  Meanwhile, the end of a species was taking place before his very eyes. Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species. How many legs does it have? Homo sapiens sapiens, joining the polar bear, the beluga whale, the onager, the burrowing owl, the long, long list. Oh, big points, Grandmaster.

  Sometimes he'd turn off the sound, whisper words to himself. Succulent. Morphology. Purblind. Quarto. Frass. It had a calming effect.

  Site after site, channel after channel went dead. A couple of the anchors, news jocks to the end, set the cameras to film their own deaths - the screams, the dissolving skins, the ruptured eyeballs and all. How theatrical, thought Jimmy. Nothing some people won't do to get on TV.

  "You cynical shit," he told himself. Then he started to weep.

  "Don't be so fucking sentimental," Crake used to tell him. But why not? Why shouldn't he be sentimental? It wasn't as if there was anyone around to question his taste.

  Once in a while he considered killing himself - it seemed mandatory - but somehow he didn't have the required energy. Anyway, killing yourself was something you did for an audience, as on nitee-nite.com. Under the circumstances, the here and now, it was a gesture that lacked elegance. He could imagine Crake's amused contempt, and the disappointment of Oryx: But Jimmy! Why do you give up? You have a job to do! You promised, remember?

  Perhaps he failed to take seriously his own despair.

  Finally there was nothing more to watch, except old movies on DVD. He watched Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson in Key Largo. He wants more, don't you, Rocco? Yeah, that's it, more! That's right, I want more. Will you ever get enough? Or else he watched Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. Flapflapflap, eek, screech. You could see the strings where the avian superstars were tied to the roof. Or he watched Night of the Living Dead. Lurch, aargh, gnaw, choke, gurgle. Such minor paranoias were soothing to him.

  Then he'd turn it off, sit in front of the empty screen. All the women he'd ever known would pass in front of his eyes in the semi-darkness. His mother too, in her magenta dressing gown, young again. Oryx came last, carrying white flowers. She looked at him, then walked slowly out of his field of vision, into the shadows where Crake was waiting.

  These reveries were almost pleasurable. At least while they were going on everyone was still alive.

  He knew this state of affairs couldn't continue much longer. Inside Paradice proper, the Crakers were munching up the leaves and grasses faster than they could regenerate, and one of these days the solar would fail, and the backup would fail too, and Jimmy had no idea about how to fix those things. Then the air circulation would stop and the doorlock would freeze, and both he and the Crakers would be trapped inside, and they'd all suffocate. He had to get them out while there was still time, but not too soon or there would still be some desperate people out there, and desperate would mean dangerous. What he didn't want was a bunch of disintegrating maniacs falling on their knees, clawing at him: Cure us! Cure us! He might be immune from the virus - unless, of course, Crake had been lying to him - but not from the rage and despair of its carriers.

  Anyway, how could he have the heart to stand there and say: Nothing can save you?

  In the half-light, in the dank, Snowman wanders from space to space. Here for instance is his office. His computer sits on the desk, turning a blank face to him like a discarded girlfriend encountered by chance at a party. Beside the computer are a few sheets of paper, which must have been the last he'd ever written. The last he'd ever write. He picks them up with curiosity. What is it that the Jimmy he'd once been had seen fit to communicate, or at least to record - to set down in black and white, with smudges - for the edification of a world that no longer existed?

  To whom it may concern, Jimmy had written, in ballpoint rather than printout: his computer was fried by then, but he'd persevered, laboriously, by hand. He must still have had hope, he must still have believed that the situation could be turned around, that someone would show up here in the future, someone in authority; that his words would have a meaning then, a context. As Crake had once said, Jimmy was a romantic optimist.

  I don't have much time, Jimmy had written.

  Not a bad beginning, thinks Snowman.

  I don't have much time, but I will try to set down what I believe to be the explanation for the recent extraordinary events catastrophe. I have gone through the computer of the man known here as Crake. He left it turned on - deliberately, I believe - and I am able to report that the JUVE virus was made here in the Paradice dome by splicers hand-selected by Crake and subsequently eliminated, and was then encysted in the BlyssPluss product. There was a time-lapse factor built in to allow for wide distribution: the first batch of virus did not become active until all selected territories had been seeded, and the outbreak thus took the form of a series of rapidly overlapping waves. For the success of the plan, time was of the essence. Social disruption was maximized, and development of a vaccine effectively prevented. Crake himself had developed a vaccine concurrently with the virus, but he had destroyed it prior to his assisted suicide death.

  Although various staff members of the BlyssPluss project contributed to JUVE on a piecework basis, it is my belief that none, with the exception of Crake, was cognizant of what that effect would be. As for Crake's motives, I can only speculate. Perhaps ...

  Here the handwriting stops. Whatever Jimmy's speculations might have been on the subject of Crake's motives, they had not been recorded.

  Snowman crumples the sheets up, drops them onto the floor. It's the fate of these words to be eaten by beetles. He could have mentioned the change in Crake's fridge magnets. You could tell a lot about a person from their fridge magnets, not that he'd thought much about them at the time.

  Remnant

  ~

  On the second Friday of March - he'd been marking off the days on a calendar, god knows why - Jimmy showed himself to the Crakers for the first time. He didn't take his clothes off, he drew the line at that. He wore a set of standard-issue Rejoov khaki tropicals, with mesh underarms and a thousand pockets, and his favourite fake-leather sandals. The Crakers gathered around him, g
azing at him with quiet wonder: they'd never seen textiles before. The children whispered and pointed.

  "Who are you?" said the one Crake had christened Abraham Lincoln. A tall man, brown, thinnish. It was not said impolitely. From an ordinary man Jimmy would have found it brusque, even aggressive, but these people didn't go in for fancy language: they hadn't been taught evasion, euphemism, lily-gilding. In speech they were plain and blunt.

  "My name is Snowman," said Jimmy, who had thought this over. He no longer wanted to be Jimmy, or even Jim, and especially not Thickney: his incarnation as Thickney hadn't worked out well. He needed to forget the past - the distant past, the immediate past, the past in any form. He needed to exist only in the present, without guilt, without expectation. As the Crakers did. Perhaps a different name would do that for him.

  "Where have you come from, oh Snowman?"

  "I come from the place of Oryx and Crake," he said. "Crake sent me." True, in a way. "And Oryx." He keeps the sentence structure simple, the message clear: he knows how to do this from watching Oryx through the mirror wall. And from listening to her, of course.

  "Where has Oryx gone?"

  "She had some things to do," said Snowman. That was all he could come up with: simply pronouncing her name had choked him up.

  "Why have Crake and Oryx sent you to us?" asked the woman called Madame Curie.

  "To take you to a new place."

  "But this is our place. We are content where we are."

  "Oryx and Crake wish you to have a better place than this," said Snowman. "Where there will be more to eat." There were nods, smiles. Oryx and Crake wished them well, as they'd always known. It seemed to be enough for them.

  "Why is your skin so loose?" said one of the children.

  "I was made in a different way from you," Snowman said. He was beginning to find this conversation of interest, like a game. These people were like blank pages, he could write whatever he wanted on them. "Crake made me with two kinds of skin. One comes off." He took off his tropical vest to show them. They stared with interest at the hair on his chest.