Margaret Atwood - MaddAddam

In any case, Glenn started turning up in Zeb’s vicinity at the Thursday barbecue events and hanging around at lunchtimes. It wasn’t hero-worship, not exactly; nor did Glenn want Zeb to be his dad. More like an older brother, Zeb decided. There weren’t that many kids his age at HelthWyzer West for Glenn to play games with. Or not ones as smart as him. Not that Glenn thought Zeb was up to scratch, smarts-wise, but he was within range. Though there was a slight air of command performance about these proceedings: Glenn as the crown prince and Zeb as the somewhat dim courtier.

How old exactly was Glenn? Eight, nine, ten? It was hard for Zeb to tell because he didn’t like to remember what his own life had been like when he’d been eight or nine or ten. He’d spent too much time in the dark back then, one way or another. All of that needed to be forgotten, and he’d worked at forgetting it. Still, when he saw a boy of that age the first thing he wanted to say was, Run away! Run away very fast! And the second thing was, Grow bigger! Grow very big! If you could grow very big, then whoever they were would cease to have power over you. Or so much power. Though it hadn’t worked for whales, he reflected. Or tigers. Or elephants.

There must have been a they in the life of young Glenn, or maybe an it : something that was haunting him. He had that look about him, a look Zeb used to catch glimpses of when he saw himself unawares in the mirror: a wary, distrustful look, as if he didn’t know what bush or parking lot or piece of furniture was going to chasm suddenly to reveal the lurking enemy or the bottomless pit. Though Glenn had no scars, no bruises, and no difficulty eating his meals, or not that Zeb could see; so what was that haunting entity? Nothing definite, perhaps. More like a lack, a vacuum.

After several Thursdays and some close observation, Zeb concluded that neither of Glenn’s parents had a lot of time for him. Nor for each other: from the body language, they were well past the stage of irritation or even occasional dislike and were deep into active hatred. When they met in public they resorted to iceman stares and monosyllables, and to walking quickly away. There was a pot of boiling rage on a private stove behind their closed curtains: that bubbling cauldron was taking all their attention, with Glenn relegated to a footnote or else a trading card. Maybe the kid gravitated to Zeb for the same reason children like dinosaurs: when feeling abandoned in a world of forces beyond your control, it’s comforting to have a huge, scaly beast who is your friend.

Glenn’s mother was on the food admin staff, tracking supplies and devising meal plans. Glenn’s dad was a semi-top researcher — an expert in unusual microbes, wonky viruses, odd antigens, and offbeat variants of anaphylaxis biovectors. Ebola and Marburg were among his specialties, but right now he was working on a rare allergic reaction to red meat that was linked to tick bites. An agent in the salivary proteins of ticks caused it, said Glenn.

“So,” said Zeb, “a tick drools into you and then you can’t have steak any more without bursting out in hives and suffocating to death?”

“Bright side,” said Glenn. He was going through a phase: he’d say “bright side,” then add some gruesome sidebar. “Bright side, if they could spread it through the population — those tick saliva proteins embedded in, say, the common aspirin — then everyone would be allergic to red meat, which has a huge carbon footprint and causes the depletion of forests, because they’re cleared for cattle grazing; and then …”

“Not my idea of a bright side,” said Zeb. “For argument: we’re hunter-gatherers, we evolved to eat meat.”

“And to develop lethal allergies to tick saliva,” said Glenn.

“Only in those slated to be eliminated from the gene pool,” said Zeb. “Which is why it’s rare.”

Glenn grinned, not something he did often. “Point,” he said.

While Zeb and Glenn were playing onscreen games at the Thursday events, Glenn’s mother, Rhoda, would sometimes drift over to watch, leaning a little too close to Zeb’s shoulder, sometimes even touching it with — what? The business end of her tit? Felt like it: that nubbin shape. Certainly not a finger. Her breath, scented with beer, would riffle the fine hairs near his ear. She never touched Glenn, however. In fact, nobody ever touched Glenn. He somehow arranged it that way: he’d erected an invisible no-fly zone around himself.

“You guys,” Rhoda would say. “You should get out there and run around. Play some croquet.” Glenn didn’t acknowledge these motherly interventions, nor did Zeb: Glenn’s mother, although not wizened, was past the optimum freshness date as far as he was concerned, though if he’d been marooned on a liferaft with her.… But he wasn’t, so he ignored the nipple nudges and the breath-to-ear signals and concentrated on the Blood part of Blood and Roses: eradicating the population of ancient Carthage and sowing the land with salt, enslaving the Belgian Congo, and murdering firstborn Egyptian babies.

Though why stop at firstborns? Some atrocities turned up by the virtual Blood and Roses dictated that the babies be tossed into the air and skewered on swords; others, that they be thrown into furnaces; yet others, that their brains be dashed out against stone walls. “Trade you a thousand babies for the Palace of Versailles and the Lincoln Memorial,” he said to Glenn.

“No deal,” said Glenn. “Unless you throw in Hiroshima.”

“That’s outrageous! You want these babies to die in agony?”

“They aren’t real babies. It’s a game. So they die, and the Inca Empire gets preserved. With all that cool gold art.”

“Then kiss the babies goodbye,” said Zeb. “Heartless little bugger, aren’t you? Splat. There. Gone. And by the way, I’m cashing in my Wildcard Joker points to blow up the Lincoln Memorial.”

“Who cares?” said Glenn. “I’ve still got the Palace of Versailles, plus the Incas. Anyway, there’s too many babies. They make a huge carbon footprint.”

“You guys are awful,” said Rhoda, scratching herself. Zeb could hear the fingernails going behind his back, a sound like cat claws on felt. He wondered which part of herself she was scratching, then made an effort to stop wondering. Glenn had enough troubles without his one reliable friend making the double-backed beast with his unreliable mother.

Before he knew it, Zeb was giving young Glenn some extracurricular lessons in coding, which meant — practically speaking — in hacking as well. The kid was a natural, and he was finally impressed by some of the things Zeb knew and he didn’t, and he caught on like magic. How tempting was it to take that talent and hone it and polish it and pass on the keys to the kingdom — the Open Sesames, the back doors, the shortcuts? Very tempting. So that is what Zeb did. It was a lot of fun watching the kid soak it all up, and who was to foresee the consequences? Which is usually the way with fun.

In return for Zeb’s coding and hacking secrets, Glenn shared a few secrets of his own. For instance, he’d bugged his mother’s room with an audio earlet concealed in her bedside lamp, by which means it became known to Zeb that Rhoda was having it off with an upper-middle-management type called Pete, usually right before lunchtime.

“My dad doesn’t know,” said Glenn. He considered for a moment, fixing Zeb with his uncanny green eyes. “Think I should tell him?”

“Maybe you shoudn’t listen in on that shit,” said Zeb.

Glenn gave him a cool stare. “Why not?”

“Because those things are for grown-ups,” Zeb said, sounding prissy even to himself.

“You would, when you were my age,” Glenn said, and Zeb couldn’t deny that it was a thing he’d have done in a millisecond, given the opportunity and the tech. Avidly, gloatingly, without thinking twice.