Margaret Atwood - MaddAddam

A sigh. “I was magnetized to babes, naturally. Back when I was young. It’s a hormone thing, it comes with the hairy balls. Wonders of nature. But babes weren’t always magnetized to me.” A pause. “Anyway, I’m loyal. To whoever I’m with, if I’m really with them. A serial monogamist, you could say.”

Does Toby believe this? She isn’t sure.

“But then Lucerne left the Gardeners,” she says.

“And you were Eve Six. Talking to the bees, measuring out the head trips. You were like a Mother Superior. Figured you’d slap me down. Inaccessible Rail,” he says, using her old MaddAddam chatroom codename. “That was you.”

“And you were Spirit Bear,” says Toby. “Hard to find, but good luck if you happen to see one. That’s what the stories said, before those bears went extinct.” She starts to sniffle. The Meditation formula does that too: it melts the fortress walls.

“Hey. What? Did I say something bad?”

“No,” says Toby. “I’m just sentimental.”

All those years you were my lifeline, she wants to say. But doesn’t.

“Now I have to come up with something,” says Toby. “A story with Crake in it, and you as well. Crake did know Pilar when he was younger, I figured that out. But what am I going to say about you?”

“As it happens, that part’s actually true,” says Zeb. “I knew him before the Gardeners even got started. But he wasn’t Crake then, not even close. He was just a fucked-up kid named Glenn.”

Once Zeb was inside HelthWyzer West, he learned its memes and set about mimicking them as fast as he could. Displaying the right memes was the yellow brick road to blending in and thus surviving, so that when the giant Rev monster eye came looking for him via the giant Corps network, as it might at any moment, it would pass right over his head. Protective colouration, that’s what he needed.

The officially promoted view of HelthWyzer West was that it was one big happy family, dedicated to the pursuit of truth and the betterment of humankind. To dwell too much on the improvement in value for the shareholders was considered bad taste, but on the other hand there was an employee options package. All staff were expected to be unremittingly cheerful, to meet their assigned goals diligently, and — as in real families — not to ask too much about what was really going on.

Again like real families, there were no-go zones. Some were conceptual, but some were purely physical. The pleebland outside the HelthWyzer Compound was one of these, unless you had a pass and designated protection. The firewalls around IP had become thick and in some cases impenetrable, unless you had an inside track; so if you couldn’t hack the system, you grabbed the primary source material. Brainiacs from Corps of all kinds were being kidnapped and smuggled abroad, or — some said — into rival Corps Compounds — and then strip-mined for the gold and jewels their heads were assumed to contain.

This was a cause for serious concern at HelthWyzer West — which meant there was some fairly important stuff going on behind locked doors — and barriers had been put in place. The top biogeeks carried alarm beepers that registered their whereabouts, though these had sometimes been adroitly hacked and then used as a means of targeting their bearers and tracking them down. Here and there on the walls of hallways and meeting rooms, posters reminded the unwary of ever-present perils. FOLLOW THE SAFETY RULES AND KEEP YOUR HEAD! AND ITS CONTENTS! Or: YOUR MEMORY IS OUR IP, SO WE’LL PROTECT IT FOR YOU!

Or: BRAINS ARE LIKE MEADOWS: A CULTIVATED ONE IS WORTH MORE. On this last poster, someone had written with a Sharpie: Get more cultivated! Eat more shit! So, thought Zeb, there was at least some hidden dissent among the smiley faces.

As part of the happy family ethos, HelthWyzer West threw a barbecue every Thursday in the central parkette of the Compound. Adam had told Zeb that these affairs should not be missed, as they were prime territory for eavesdropping and figuring out the invisible power filaments. Those wearing the most casual clothing would most likely be the alphas. Adam also said that Zeb would find some of the recreational pursuits of interest, especially the board games; though he hadn’t said why.

So Zeb turned up at the HelthWyzer West barbecue on the first Thursday after his arrival. He sampled the eats: SoYummie ice cream for the kids, pork ribs for the carnivores, SoyOBoy products and quornburgers for the vegans. NevRBled Shish-K-Buddies for those who wanted to eat meat without killing animals — the cubes were lab-cultured from cells (“No Animal Suffered”), and he figured that with enough beer they wouldn’t taste too bad. But he intended to limit his drinking because he needed to stay alert, so he stuck with the ribs. You didn’t have to be half-cut to appreciate those.

Around the edges of the crowd, various geeky sports were in progress. Croquet and bocci in the sun, ping-pong and foosball under the awnings. Circle games for the under-sixes, variations of tag for the older ones. And for the serious and superintelligent and potentially Aspergerian child brainiacs, a row of umbrella-shaded computers where they could do obsessive-compulsive things online — within HelthWyzer firewalls, of course — and challenge each other to combat without making eye contact.

Zeb scoped out the games: Three-Dimensional Waco, Intestinal Parasites, Weather Challenge, Blood and Roses. Also Barbarian Stomp, a new one on him.

Here came Marjorie with the spaniel’s eyes, making a beeline towards him, her beseeching smile at the ready, enhanced by a smear of ketchup on the chin. Time to duck and cover: she had the look of a woman who’d already staked out a claim, and would go through a guy’s pants pockets while he was asleep in search of rivals, and would most likely read his email. Though maybe he was being paranoid. But best not to take chances.

“Want to go a round with me?” he said to the nearest youthful brainiac, a thin boy in a dark T-shirt with a stack of gnawed pork ribs on the paper plate beside him. Was that a cup of coffee? Since when was coffee allowable for a kid that age? Where were the parents?

The boy looked up at him with large, green, opaque but possibly mocking eyes. Even the children wore name tags to these barbecues, it seemed: Glenn , Zeb read.

“Sure,” said young Glenn. “Conventional chess?”

“As opposed to?” said Zeb.

“Three-dimensional,” said Glenn indifferently. If Zeb didn’t know that, then he couldn’t be a very good player. Blatantly obvious.

So that was how Zeb first met Crake.

“But like I said, he wasn’t Crake yet,” says Zeb. “He was just a kid then. Not too much bad stuff had happened to him, though ‘not too much’ is always a matter of taste.”

“Really?” says Toby. “That long ago?”

“Would I lie to you?” says Zeb.

Toby thinks about it. “Not about this,” she says.

Zeb generously and also patronizingly let Glenn play White, and Glenn walloped him, though Zeb put up an honourable fight. After that they did a round of Three-Dimensional Waco, and Zeb beat Glenn, who immediately wanted another game. This one ended in a tie. Glenn looked at Zeb with a small increase of respect and asked him where he’d come from.

Zeb then told a couple of lies, but they were entertaining lies: he put in Miss Direction and the Floating World, and some of the bears from Bearlift, though he changed the name and the location and left out anything about dead Chuck. Glenn had never been outside a Compound, or not that he could remember, so these tales must have had mythic dimensions for him. Though he made a point of not looking impressed.