Margaret Atwood - The Year of the Flood

Glenn used to say the reason you can’t really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, “I’ll be dead,” you’ve said the word I, and so you’re still alive inside the sentence. And that’s how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul – it was a consequence of grammar. And so was God, because as soon as there’s a past tense, there has to be a past before the past, and you keep going back in time until you get to I don’t know, and that’s what God is. It’s what you don’t know – the dark, the hidden, the underside of the visible, and all because we have grammar, and grammar would be impossible without the FoxP2 gene; so God is a brain mutation, and that gene is the same one birds need for singing. So music is built in, Glenn said: it’s knitted into us. It would be very hard to amputate it because it’s an essential part of us, like water.

I said, in that case is God knitted in as well? And he said maybe so, but it hadn’t done us any good.

His explanation of God was a lot different from the Gardeners’ explanation. He said “God is a Spirit” was meaningless because you couldn’t measure a Spirit. Also he’d say Use your meat computer when he meant Use your mind. I found that idea repulsive: I hated the idea of my head being full of meat.

I kept thinking I could hear people walking around in the building, but when I scanned the rooms I couldn’t see anyone moving. At least the solar was still working.

I counted the food again. Five days left, and that was stretching it.

I first spotted Amanda as a shadow on the videoscreen. She came into the Snakepit carefully, hugging the wall: the lights were still on, so she wasn’t groping in the dark. The music was still blaring and thumping, and once she’d looked around to make sure the place was empty she went over behind the stage and switched it off.

“Ren?” I heard her say.

Then she went offscreen. After a pause the videocam mike in the hallway picked up her soft footsteps, and then I could see her. And she could see me. I was crying so much with relief I couldn’t speak.

“Hi,” she said. “There’s a dead guy right outside the door. He’s gross. I’ll be back.” Mordis was who she meant – he’d never been taken away. She told me later that she got him onto a shower curtain and dragged him down the hall and bundled him into an elevator, what was left of him. The rats had been having a party, she said, not just at Scales but anywhere even close to urban. She’d put on the gloves of someone’s Biofilm Bodysuit before touching him – even though she was daring, Amanda didn’t take stupid risks.

After a while she was back on my screen. “So,” she said. “Here I am. Stop crying, Ren.”

“I thought you’d never get here,” I managed to say.

“That’s what I thought too,” she said. “Now. How does the door open?”

“I don’t have the code,” I said. I explained about Mordis – how he was the only one who’d known the Sticky Zone numbers.

“He never told you?”

“He said why would we need to know the codes? He changed them every day – he didn’t want them leaking out because crazies might get in. He just wanted to protect us.” I was trying hard not to panic: there was Amanda, outside the door, but what if she couldn’t do anything?

“Any clue?” she said.

“He did say something about my name,” I said. “Just before he – before they – Maybe that’s what he meant.”

Amanda tried. “Nope,” she said. “Well then. Maybe it’s your birthday. Month and day? Year?”

I could hear her punching in numbers, swearing gently to herself. After what seemed a long time, I heard the clunk of the lock. The door swung open, and there she was, right in front of me.

“Oh, Amanda,” I said. She was sunburned, tattered, and grimy, but she was real. I reached out my arms to her, but she stepped back and away.

“It was a simple A equals One code,” she said. “It was your name, after all. Brenda, only backwards. Don’t touch me, I might have germs. I need to shower.”

While Amanda was taking her shower in my Sticky Zone bathroom I propped the door open with a chair because I didn’t want it to swing shut and lock both of us inside. The air outside my room smelled awful compared with the filtered air I’d been breathing: rotting meat, and also smoke and burnt chemicals, because there’d been fires and nobody to put them out. It was lucky that Scales hadn’t caught fire and burned down with me inside it.

After Amanda had taken a shower I took one too, so I’d be as clean as her. Then we put on the green Scales dressing gowns Mordis kept for his best girls and sat around eating Joltbars from the minifridge and microwaving ChickieNobs, and drinking some beers we’d found downstairs, and telling each other the stories of why it was that we were still alive.

Toby wakes up suddenly, her blood rushing in her head: katoush, katoush, katoush. She knows at once that something in her space has changed. Someone’s sharing her oxygen.

Breathe, she tells herself. Move as if swimming. Don’t smell like fear.

She lifts the pink sheet off her damp body as slowly as she can, sits up, looks carefully around. Nothing large, not in this cubicle: there isn’t room. Then she sees it. It’s only a bee. A honeybee, walking along the sill.

A bee in the house means a visitor, said Pilar; and if the bee dies, the visit will not be good. I mustn’t kill it, Toby thinks. She folds it carefully in a pink washcloth. “Send a message,” she says to it. “Tell those in the Spirit world: ‘Please send help soon.’” Superstition, she knows that; yet she feels oddly encouraged. Though maybe the bee is one of the transgenics they let loose after the virus wiped out the natural bees; or it may even be a cyborg spy, wandering around with no one left to control it. In which case it will make a very poor messenger.

She slips the washcloth into the pocket of her top-to-toe: she’ll take the bee up to the roof, release it there, watch it set off on its errand to the dead. But in slinging the rifle over her shoulder by the strap she must have crushed the pocket, because when she unwraps the bee it looks less than alive. She shakes the cloth over the railing, hoping the bee will fly. It moves through the air, but more like a seed than an insect: the visit will not be a good one.

She walks to the garden side of the roof, looks over. Sure enough, the bad visit has already occurred: the pigs have been back. They’ve dug under the fence, then gone on a rampage. Surely it was less like a feeding frenzy than a deliberate act of revenge. The earth is furrowed and trampled: anything they haven’t eaten they’ve bulldozed.

If she were a cryer, she’d cry. She lifts her binoculars, scans the meadow. At first she doesn’t see them, but then she spots two pinkish-grey heads – no, three – no, five – lifting above the weedy flowers. Beady eyes, one per pig: they’re looking at her sideways. They’ve been watching for her: it’s as if they want to witness her dismay. Moreover, they’re out of range: if she shoots at them she’ll waste the bullets. She wouldn’t put it past them to have figured that out.

“You fucking pigs!” she yells at them, “Fuck-pigs! Pig-faces!” Of course, for them none of these names would be insults.

What now? Her supply of dried greens is tiny, her goji berries and chia are almost gone, her plant protein is finished. She was counting on the garden for all of that. Worst of all, she’s out of fats: she’s already eaten the last of the Shea and Avocado Body Butter. There’s fat in Joltbars – she still has some of those – but not enough to last for long. Without lipids your body eats your fat and then your muscles, and the brain is pure fat and the heart is a muscle. You become a feedback loop, and then you fall over.