Margaret Atwood - MaddAddam

So into the L2Ls went the Rev in his Frasket, headed for an extreme security biosampling unit — not at CryoJeenyus, they weren’t equipped for that, but at HelthWyzer Central. Pilar got in as well, and also Zeb. Mordis would change his outfit and head to the local Scales and Tails, where they needed a tougher manager.

Adam would change into his increasingly bizarre streetwear and shuffle off to do whatever it was that Adam did, out there in the deep pleebs. He gave the white bishop to Pilar, having extracted it from the salty cavity of the girl salt shaker: the cryptic team wanted to take a close look at the contents of those pills, and they thought they finally had the equipment to do so without exposing themselves to contagion.

Zeb was slated for yet another identity, which Pilar had already prepared for him: he was to be embedded right inside HelthWyzer Central.

“Do me a favour,” said Zeb to Pilar, once she had assured them that the L2Ls had been thoroughly swept for spyware. “Run a DNA comparison for me. On the Rev. The guy in the Frasket.” He’d never shaken his childhood notion that the Rev was not his real father, and this was surely his last chance to find out.

Pilar said it would be no problem. He handed over a cheek swab sample of himself, improvised on a piece of tissue, and she tucked it carefully inside a small plastic envelope that contained what looked like a dried-up elf ear, wrinkly in appearance, yellow in colour.

“What’s that?” he asked her. He wanted to say, “What the fuck’s that,” but proximity to Pilar did not encourage swearing. “Gremlin from outer space?”

“It’s a chanterelle,” she said. “A mushroom. An edible variety, not to be confused with the false chanterelle.”

“So, will I come out with the DNA of a fungus?”

Pilar laughed. “There’s not much chance of that,” she said.

“Good,” said Zeb. “Tell Adam.”

Only problem was, he thought later that night, when drifting off to sleep in his Spartan but acceptable HelthWyzer accommodations — only problem was that if Pilar ran the DNA comparison and the Rev wasn’t his dad, then Adam wouldn’t be his brother. Adam would be no relation to him at all. No blood relation.

Thus:

Fenella + the Rev = Adam.

Trudy + Unknown Semen Donor = Zeb.

= No shared DNA.

If that was the truth, did he really want to know it?

Zeb’s new title at HelthWyzer Central was that of Disinfector, First Rank. He got a pair of lurid green overalls with the HelthWyzer logo and a big luminous orange D on the front; he got a hairnet to keep his own shed follicle-ware from littering the desk spaces of his betters; he got a nose filter cone that made him look like a cartoon pig; he got an endless supply of protective liquid-repelling nanobioform-impermeable gloves and shoes; and, most importantly, he got a passkey.

Only for the bureaucratic offices, however: not for the labs. Those were in another building. But you never could tell what sort of intel a nimble-fingered robinhooder with a few lines of entry code slipped to him by underground cryptics might be able to scoop off an untended computer, late at night, when all good citizens were sound asleep in other people’s beds. HelthWyzer was somewhat porous in the spouse department.

Once upon a time Zeb’s Disinfector position would have been called “cleaner,” and before that “janitor,” and before that “charwoman”; but this was the twenty-first century and they’d added some nanobioform consciousness to the title. To deserve that title Zeb was supposed to have passed a rigid security check, for what hostile Corp — possibly from a foreign clime — wouldn’t think of disguising one of their keyboard pirates as a minor functionary and ordering him to grab whatever he could find?

To qualify as a Disinfector, Zeb was also supposed to have taken a training course replete with updated modern babble about where germs might lurk and how to render them unconscious. Needless to say, he hadn’t taken it; but Pilar had given him the condensed version before he started.

Germs were said to hang out on the usual toilet seats, floors, sinks, and doorknobs, of course. But also on elevator buttons, on telephone receivers, and on computer keyboards. So he had to wipe down all of these with antimicrobial cloths and zap them with death rays, in addition to the floor-washing in hallways and such, and the dust-sucking on the carpets in the plushier offices to pick up anything the daily robots might have missed. Those things were always rolling to and fro, backing up to wall outlets to plug themselves in and replenish their battery power, then scuttling away again, emitting beeping sounds so you wouldn’t trip over them. It was like navigating a beach littered with giant crabs. When he was alone on a floor he used to kick them into corners or turn them over on their backs, just to see how fast they could recover.

In addition to the outfit he got a new name, which was Horatio.

“Horatio?” says Toby.

“Laughter is uncalled for,” says Zeb. “It was someone’s idea of what a semi-legal Tex-Mex family who snuck under the Wall might have called a son they hoped would make good in the world. They thought I looked kind of Tex-Mex, or maybe like a hybrid that contained some of that DNA. Which I do, as was discovered not long after that.”

“Oh,” says Toby. “Pilar ran the DNA comparison.”

“You got it,” says Zeb. “Though it took a while for me to access the news. She couldn’t really be seen with me, because why would she know me? Anyway we’d have to go out of our way to meet, we were on different shifts. So we’d fixed up a fallback code when I gave her my cell sample.

“Before then, when I was on my way in the CryoJeenyus train car and she was putting my Disinfector identity together and getting it slotted into the system, she’d already learned I’d be cleaning the women’s washroom down the hall from the lab where she was working. I was night shift — it was all male Disinfectors for that shift, they didn’t want any groping or screaming, which might have taken place with a gender mix. So I had the run of the floor after dark. Second cubicle from the left: that was the one I needed to watch.”

“She left a note inside the toilet tank?”

“Nothing so obvious. Those toilet tanks were routinely checked; only an amateur would stash anything important in there. The dropbox was that square container thing they have in those washrooms, for what-have-you. Those items you aren’t supposed to flush. But it wouldn’t be a note, way too telltale.”

“So, a signal?” Toby wonders what kind. One for joy, two for sorrow? But one and two of what?

“Yeah. Something that wouldn’t be out of place, but wouldn’t be the usual. Pits, was what she decided.”

“Pits? What do you mean, pits?” Toby tries to visualize pits. Armpits, holes in the ground? “Like peach pits?” she guesses.

“Correct. Might be from a lunch that got eaten in the washroom. Some of the secretary-type women did that — they sat in the can for some peace and quiet. I did find sandwich remains in those boxes: the odd bacon rind, the odd cheesefood fragment. There was a lot of time pressure in HelthWyzer, and more of it the farther down the status ladder you were, so they liked to sneak breathers.”

“What was the pit selection?” Toby asks. “For the yes and the no?” The way Pilar thought has always intrigued her: she wouldn’t have made the fruit selections haphazardly.

“Peach pit for no: no relationship to the Rev. Date pit for yes: worse luck, the Rev is your dad, hear it and weep because you’re at least half psychopath.”

The peach choice makes sense to Toby: peaches were valued among the Gardeners as having been one of the possible candidates for the Fruit of Life in Eden. Not that the Gardeners disparaged dates, or any other fruit that had not been chemically sprayed.