Margaret Atwood - Oryx and Crake

Crake’s pass was good for both of them, of course. They rolled in through the first gate and along the roadway through the trees. Then there was another checkpoint, with guards—Paradice uniforms, Crake explained, not Corps—that seemed to materialize from the bushes. Then more trees. Then the curved wall of the bubble-dome itself. It might look delicate, said Crake, but it was made of a new mussel-adhesive/silicon/dendrite-formation alloy, ultra-resistant. You’d have to have some very advanced tools to cut through it, as it would reconform itself after pressure and automatically repair any gashes. Moreover, it had the capacity to both filter and breathe, like an eggshell, though it required a solar-generated current to do so.

They turned the golf cart over to one of the guards and were coded through the outer door, which closed with a whuff behind them.

“Why did it make that sound?” said Jimmy nervously.

“It’s an airlock,” said Crake. “As in spaceships.”

“What for?”

“In case this place ever has to be sealed off,” said Crake. “Hostile bioforms, toxin attacks, fanatics. The usual.”

By this time Jimmy was feeling a little strange. Crake hadn’t really told him what went on in here, not in specific detail. “Wait and see,” was all he’d said.

Once they were through the inner door they were in a familiar-enough complex. Halls, doors, staff with digital clipboards, others hunched in front of screens; it was like OrganInc Farms, it was like HelthWyzer, it was like Watson-Crick, only newer. But physical plants were just a shell, said Crake: what really counted in a research facility was the quality of the brains.

“These are top-of-the-line,” he said, nodding left and right. In return there was a lot of deferential smiling, and—this wasn’t faked—a lot of awe. Jimmy had never been clear about Crake’s exact position, but whatever his nominal title—he’d been vague about that—he was obviously the biggest ant in the anthill.

Each of the staff had a name tag with block lettering—one or two words only. BLACK RHINO. WHITE SEDGE. IVORY-BILLED WOODPECKER. POLAR BEAR. INDIAN TIGER. LOTIS BLUE. SWIFT FOX.

“The names,” he said to Crake. “You raided Extinctathon!”

“It’s more than the names,” said Crake. “These people are Extinctathon. They’re all Grandmasters. What you’re looking at is MaddAddam, the cream of the crop.”

“You’re joking! How come they’re here?” said Jimmy.

“They’re the splice geniuses,” said Crake. “The ones that were pulling those capers, the asphalt-eating microbes, the outbreak of neon-coloured herpes simplex on the west coast, the ChickieNob wasps and so on.”

“Neon herpes? I didn’t hear about that,” said Jimmy. Pretty funny. “How did you track them down?”

“I wasn’t the only person after them. They were making themselves very unpopular in some quarters. I just got to them ahead of the Corps, that’s all. Or I got to most of them, anyway.”

Jimmy was going to ask What happened to the others , but he thought better of it.

“So you kidnapped them, or what?” That wouldn’t have surprised Jimmy, brain-snatching being a customary practice; though usually the brains were snatched between countries, not within them.

“I merely persuaded them they’d be a lot happier and safer in here than out there.”

“Safer? In Corps territory?”

“I got them secure papers. Most of them agreed with me, especially when I offered to destroy their so-called real identities and all records of their previous existences.”

“I thought those guys were anti-Compound,” said Jimmy. “The stuff MaddAddam was doing was pretty hostile, from what you showed me.”

“They were anti-Compound. Still are, probably. But after the Second World War in the twentieth century, the Allies invited a lot of German rocket scientists to come and work with them, and I can’t recall anyone saying no. When your main game’s over, you can always move your chessboard elsewhere.”

“What if they try sabotage, or…”

“Escape? Yeah,” said Crake. “A couple were like that at the beginning. Not team players. Thought they’d take what they’d done here, cart it offshore. Go underground, or set up elsewhere.”

“What did you do?”

“They fell off pleebland overpasses,” said Crake.

“Is that a joke?”

“In a manner of speaking. You’ll need another name,” Crake said, “a MaddAddam name, so you’ll fit in. I thought, since I’m Crake here, you could go back to being Thickney, the way you were when we were—how old?”

“Fourteen.”

“Those were definitive times,” said Crake.

Jimmy wanted to linger, but Crake was already hurrying him along. He’d have liked to talk with some of these people, hear their stories—had any of them known his mother, for instance?—but maybe he could do that later. On the other hand, maybe not: he’d been seen with Crake, the alpha wolf, the silverback gorilla, the head lion. Nobody would want to get too cozy with him. They’d see his as the jackal position.

They dropped in at Crake’s office, so Jimmy could get a little oriented, said Crake. It was a large space with many gizmos in it, as Jimmy would have expected. There was a painting on the wall: an eggplant on an orange plate. It was the first picture Jimmy ever remembered seeing in a place of Crake’s. He thought of asking if that was Crake’s girlfriend, but thought better of it.

He zeroed in on the mini-bar. “Anything in that?”

“Later,” said Crake.

Crake still had a collection of fridge magnets, but they were different ones. No more science quips.

“What are you really up to here?” said Jimmy.

Crake grinned. “What is really ?”

“Bogus,” said Jimmy. But he was thrown off balance.

Now, said Crake, it was time to get serious. He was going to show Jimmy the other thing they were doing—the main thing, here at Paradice. What Jimmy was about to see was… well, it couldn’t be described. It was, quite simply, Crake’s life’s work.

Jimmy put on a suitably solemn face. What next? Some gruesome new food substance, no doubt. A liver tree, a sausage vine. Or some sort of zucchini that grew wool. He braced himself.

Crake led Jimmy along and around; then they were standing in front of a large picture window. No: a one-way mirror. Jimmy looked in. There was a large central space filled with trees and plants, above them a blue sky. (Not really a blue sky, only the curved ceiling of the bubble-dome, with a clever projection device that simulated dawn, sunlight, evening, night. There was a fake moon that went through its phases, he discovered later. There was fake rain.)

That was his first view of the Crakers. They were naked, but not like the Noodie News: there was no self-consciousness, none at all. At first he couldn’t believe them, they were so beautiful. Black, yellow, white, brown, all available skin colours. Each individual was exquisite. “Are they robots, or what?” he said.

“You know how they’ve got floor models, in furniture stores?” said Crake.

“Yeah?”

“These are the floor models.”

It was the result of a logical chain of progression, said Crake that evening, over drinks in the Paradice Lounge (fake palm trees, canned music, real Campari, real soda). Once the proteonome had been fully analyzed and interspecies gene and part-gene splicing were thoroughly underway, the Paradice Project or something like it had been only a matter of time. What Jimmy had seen was the next-to-end result of seven years of intensive trial-and-error research.