Margaret Atwood - The Year of the Flood

Zeb glanced back along the hallway, then stepped in and shut the door. He sat down at her computer, then took a Sharpie and wrote on her desk pad: Watch what I do.

The Gardeners? Toby wrote. Adam One?

Schism, Zeb wrote. Own group now. “Having any trouble with the plantings?” he said out loud.

Shackleton and Crozier? Toby wrote. With you?

Manner of speaking, Zeb replied. Oates. Katuro, Rebecca. New ones too.

Amanda?

Got out. Higher education. Art. Smart.

He’d pulled up a site: EXTINCTATHON. Monitored by MaddAddam. Adam named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones. Do you want to play?

MaddAddam? Toby wrote on her desk pad. Your group? You’re plural? She was elated: Zeb was here, beside her, in the flesh. After she’d thought for so long that she’d never see him again.

I contain multitudes, wrote Zeb. Pick a codename. Life form, extinct.

Dodo, Toby wrote.

Last fifty years, Zeb wrote. Not much time. Pruning team waiting. Ask about aphids.

“There’s aphids on the lumiroses,” Toby said. She was riffling through the old Gardener lists in her head – animals, fish, birds, flowers, clams, lizards, recently extinct. Inaccessible Rail, she wrote. That bird had gone ten years ago. Can they hack this site?

“We can take care of that,” Zeb said. “Though there’s supposed to be a built-In insecticidal deterrent… I’ll take some samples. There’s more than one way to skin a cat.” No, he wrote. Made our own virtual private networks. Quadrupally encrypted. Sorry about the cat-skinning ref. Here’s your number.

He wrote her new codename and a pass number on the pad. Then he typed his own number and code into the log-in space provided. Welcome, Spirit Bear. Do you want to play a general game or do you want to play a Grandmaster? said the screen.

Zeb clicked on Grandmaster. Good. Find your playroom. MaddAddam will meet you there.

Watch, he wrote on her pad. He entered a site advertising Mo’Hair transplants, skipped through a pixel gateway on the eye of a magenta-haired sheep, entered the blue percolating stomach of an ad for a HelthWyzer antacid, which led to the avid open mouth of a SecretBurger customer caught in mid-chomp. Then a wide green landscape unfolded – trees in the distance, a lake in the foreground, a rhino and three lions drinking. A scene from the past.

A line of type unscrolled across it: Welcome to MaddAddam’s playroom, Spirit Bear. You have a message.

Deliver message, Zeb clicked.

The liver is evil and must be punished.

I hear you, Red-necked Crake, Zeb typed. All is well.

Then he closed the site and stood up. “Call me if there are any aphid recurrences,” he said. “If you’d check our work from time to time and keep me informed, that would be good.” He wrote on her pad: The hair’s great, babe. Love the slanty eyes. Then he was gone.

Toby gathered up all the desk-pad pages. Luckily she had some matches to burn them with; she’d been hoarding matches for her Ararat, storing them in a container labelled Lemon Meringue Facial.

After Zeb’s visit she felt less isolated. She’d log in to Extinctathon at irregular intervals and trace the path to the MaddAddam Grandmaster chat-room. Codenames and messages flitted across the screen: Black Rhino to Spirit Bear: Newbies coming. Ivory Bill to Swift Fox: Fear no weevil. White Sedge and Lotis Blue: Micesplice a ten. Red-necked Crake to MaddAddam: Marshmallow hiways nice one! She had no idea what most of these messages meant, but at least she felt included.

Sometimes there were e-bulletins that appeared to be CorpSeCorps classified information. Many of these were about strange outbreaks of new diseases, or peculiar infestations – the splice porcubeaver that was attacking the fan belts in cars, the bean weevil that was decimating Happicuppa coffee plantations, the asphalt-eating microbe that was melting highways.

Then the Rarity restaurant chain was obliterated by a series of lethal bombings. She saw the regular news, where these events were blamed on unspecified eco-terrorists; but she also read a detailed analysis on MaddAddam. It was the Wolf Isaiahists who’d done the bombings, they said, because Rarity had introduced a new menu item – liobam, a sacred animal for the Wolf Isaiahists. MaddAddam had added a P.S.: Warning all God’s Gardeners: They’ll pin this on you. Go to ground.

Shortly after that, Muffy came to the Spa unexpectedly. She was her usual elegant self; her manner gave nothing away. “Let’s walk on the lawn,” she said. When they were out in the open and away from any hidden mikes, she whispered, “I’m not here for a treatment. I just needed to tell you that we’re going away, I can’t say where. Don’t worry. It’s only urgent on the inside.”

“Will you be all right?” Toby asked.

“Time will tell,” said Muffy. “Good luck, dear Toby. Dear Tobiatha. Put Light around me.”

She and her husband were listed as fatalities in an airship accident a week later. The CorpSeCorps were good at arranging high-class mishaps for highly placed suspects, Zeb had told her – people whose disappearance without a trace would cause a stir, up there among the Corps anointed.

Toby didn’t go near the MaddAddam chatroom for months after that. She waited for the knock on the door, the shattering of glass, the zipzip of a spraygun. But nothing happened. When she finally screwed up the courage to enter MaddAddam again, there was a message for her:

Inaccessible Rail from Spirit Bear: The Garden is destroyed. Adams and Eves gone dark. Watch and wait.

POLLINATION DAY

YEAR TWENTY-ONE.

OF THE TREES, AND OF THE FRUITS IN THEIR SEASONS.

SPOKEN BY ADAM ONE.

Dear Friends and Fellow Mammals:

Today is a Feast day, but sadly we have no feast. Our flight was rapid: our escape narrow. Now, true to their nature, our enemies have laid waste to our Rooftop. But surely one day we will return to Edencliff and restore that blissful site to its former glory. The CorpSeCorps may have destroyed our Garden, but they have not destroyed our Spirit. Eventually, we shall plant again.

Why did the Corps strike? Alas, we were becoming too powerful for their liking. Many rooftops were blossoming as the rose; many hearts and minds were bent towards an Earth restored to balance. But in success lay the seeds of ruin, for those in power could no longer dismiss us as ineffectual faddists: they feared us, as prophets of the age to come. In short, we threatened their profit margins.

In addition, they linked us to the bio-attacks made on their infrastructures by the schismatic and heretical group calling itself MaddAddam. Last week’s bombing attacks on the Rarity restaurant chain – though perpetrated by the Wolf Isaiahists alone – gave them an excuse to unleash a sweeping crackdown on all who have sided with God’s Created Earth.

May they prove as blind in material vision as they have long been in Spiritual vision! For though our days of calling carnivores to open repentance on the pleebland streets are over, the lessons of Animal Camouflage have not been lost on us. Disguised to blend with the background, we thrive under the noses of our enemies. We have shed our plain vestments and swathed ourselves in mallway purchases. The monogrammed golf shirt, the lime green tank top, the striped pastel knit ensemble sported so courageously by Nuala – such is our defensive armour.

Some of you have chosen to allay suspicion by courageously eating the flesh of our fellow Creatures; but do not attempt feats beyond your strength, dear Friends. To bite into a SecretBurger and then choke on it will attract unwelcome scrutiny. If in doubts as to your limits, confine yourselves to a SoYummie ice cream. Such quasi-foods may be swallowed without undue strain.