Oryx and Crake

  At lunch hour Jimmy collected Crake and the two of them grabbed some food - Crake put down two giant soy-sausage dogs and a big slab of coconut-style layer cake, so maybe he was trying to bulk up - and then they trudged up and down the halls and in and out of the classrooms and labs, with Jimmy giving the running commentary. Here's the gym, here's the library, those are the readers, you have to sign up for them before noon, in there's the girls' shower room, there's supposed to be a hole drilled through the wall but I've never found it. If you want to smoke dope don't use the can, they've got it bugged; there's a microlens for Security in that air vent, don't stare at it or they'll know you know.

  Crake looked at everything, said nothing. He volunteered no information about himself. The only comment he made was that the Chemlab was a dump.

  Well stuff it, Jimmy thought. If he wants to be an asshole it's a free country. Millions before him have made the same life choice. He was annoyed with himself for jabbering and capering, while Crake gave him brief, indifferent glances, and that one-sided demi-smile. Nevertheless there was something about Crake. That kind of cool slouchiness always impressed Jimmy, coming from another guy: it was the sense of energies being held back, held in reserve for something more important than present company.

  Jimmy found himself wishing to make a dent in Crake, get a reaction; it was one of his weaknesses, to care what other people thought of him. So after school he asked Crake if he'd like to go to one of the malls, hang out, see the sights, maybe there would be some girls there, and Crake said why not. There wasn't much else to do after school in the HelthWyzer Compound, or in any of the Compounds, not for kids their age, not in any sort of group way. It wasn't like the pleeblands. There, it was rumoured, the kids ran in packs, in hordes. They'd wait until some parent was away, then get right down to business - they'd swarm the place, waste themselves with loud music and toking and boozing, fuck everything including the family cat, trash the furniture, shoot up, overdose. Glamorous, thought Jimmy. But in the Compounds the lid was screwed down tight. Night patrols, curfews for growing minds, sniffer dogs after hard drugs. Once, they'd loosened up, let in a real band - The Pleebland Dirtballs, it had been - but there'd been a quasi-riot, so no repeats. No need to apologize to Crake, though. He was a Compound brat himself, he'd know the score.

  Jimmy was hoping he might catch a glimpse of Wakulla Price, at the mall; he was still sort of in love with her, but after the I-value-you-as-my-friend speech she'd ruined him with, he'd tried one girl and then another, ending up - currently - with blonde LyndaLee. LyndaLee was on the rowing team and had muscular thighs and impressive pecs, and had smuggled him up to her bedroom on more than one occasion. She had a foul mouth and more experience than Jimmy, and every time he went with her he felt as if he'd been sucked into a Pachinko machine, all flashing lights and random tumbling and cascades of ball bearings. He didn't like her much, but he needed to keep up with her, make sure he was still on her list. Maybe he could get Crake into the queue - do him a favour, build up some gratitude equity. He wondered what kind of girls Crake preferred. So far there'd been zero signals.

  At the mall there was no Wakulla to be seen, and no LyndaLee. Jimmy tried calling LyndaLee, but her cellphone was off. So Jimmy and Crake played a few games of Three-Dimensional Waco in the arcade and had a couple of SoyOBoyburgers - no beef that month, said the chalkboard menu - and an iced Happicuppuchino, and half a Joltbar each to top up their energy and mainline a few steroids. Then they ambled down the enclosed hallway with its fountains and plastic ferns, through the warm-bathwater music they always played in there. Crake was not exactly voluble, and Jimmy was about to say he had to go do his homework, when up ahead there was a noteworthy sight: it was Melons Riley with a man, heading towards one of the adults-only dance clubs. She'd changed out of her school clothes and had on a loose red jacket over a tight black dress, and the man had his arm around her waist, inside the jacket.

  Jimmy nudged Crake. "You think he's got his hand on her ass?" he said.

  "That's a geometrical problem," said Crake. "You'd have to work it out."

  "What?" said Jimmy. Then, "How?"

  "Use your neurons," said Crake. "Step one: calculate length of man's arm, using single visible arm as arm standard. Assumption: that both arms are approximately the same length. Step two: calculate angle of bend at elbow. Step three: calculate curvature of ass. Approximation of this may be necessary, in absence of verifiable numbers. Step four: calculate size of hand, using visible hand, as above."

  "I'm not a numbers person," said Jimmy, laughing, but Crake kept on: "All potential hand positions must now be considered. Waist, ruled out. Upper right cheek, ruled out. Lower right cheek or upper thigh would seem by deduction to be the most likely. Hand between both upper thighs a possibility, but this position would impede walking on the part of the subject, and no limping or stumbling is detectable." He was doing a pretty good imitation of their Chemlab teacher - the use-your-neurons line, and that clipped, stiff delivery, sort of like a bark. More than pretty good, good.

  Already Jimmy liked Crake better. They might have something in common after all, at least the guy had a sense of humour.

  But he was also a little threatened. He himself was a good imitator, he could do just about all the teachers. What if Crake turned out to be better at it? He could feel it within himself to hate Crake, as well as liking him.

  But in the days that followed, Crake gave no public performances.

  Crake had had a thing about him even then, thinks Snowman. Not that he was popular, exactly, but people felt flattered by his regard. Not just the kids, the teachers too. He'd look at them as if he was listening, as if what they were talking about was worthy of his full attention, though he would never say so exactly. He generated awe - not an overwhelming amount of it, but enough. He exuded potential, but potential for what? Nobody knew, and so people were wary of him. All of this in his dark laconic clothing.

  Brainfrizz

  ~

  Wakulla Price had been Jimmy's lab partner in Nanotech Biochem, but her father was headhunted by a Compound on the other side of the continent, and she'd taken the high-speed sealed bullet train and was never seen again. After she'd gone Jimmy moped for a week, and not even LyndaLee's dirty-mouthed convulsions could console him.

  Wakulla's vacant place at the lab table was filled by Crake, who was moved up from his solitary latecomer's position at the back of the room. Crake was very smart - even in the world of HelthWyzer High, with its overstock of borderline geniuses and polymaths, he had no trouble floating at the top of the list. He turned out to be excellent at Nanotech Biochem, and together he and Jimmy worked on their single-molecular-layer splicing project, managing to produce the required purple nematode - using the colour-coder from a primitive seaweed - before schedule, and with no alarming variations.

  Jimmy and Crake took to hanging out together at lunch hour, and then - not every day, they weren't gay or anything, but at least twice a week - after school. At first they'd play tennis, on the clay court behind Crake's place, but Crake combined method with lateral thinking and hated to lose, and Jimmy was impetuous and lacked finesse, so that wasn't too productive and they dropped it. Or, under pretence of doing their homework, which sometimes they really would do, they would shut themselves up in Crake's room, where they would play computer chess or Three-Dimensionals, or Kwiktime Osama, tossing to see who got Infidels. Crake had two computers, so they could sit with their backs to each other, one at each.

  "Why don't we use a real set?" Jimmy asked one day when they were doing some chess. "The old kind. With plastic men." It did seem weird to have the two of them in the same room, back to back, playing on computers.

  "Why?" said Crake. "Anyway, this is a real set."

  "No it's not."

  "Okay, granted, but neither is plastic men."

  "What?"

  "The real set is in your head."

  "Bogus!" Jimmy yelled. It was a good word, he'd got it off an old DVD;
they'd taken to using it to tear each other down for being pompous. "Way too bogus!"

  Crake laughed.

  Crake would get fixated on a game, and would want to play it and play it and perfect his attack until he was sure he could win, nine times out of ten anyway. For a whole month they'd had to play Barbarian Stomp (See If You Can Change History!). One side had the cities and the riches and the other side had the hordes, and - usually but not always - the most viciousness. Either the barbarians stomped the cities or else they got stomped, but you had to start out with the historical disposition of energies and go on from there. Rome versus the Visigoths, Ancient Egypt versus the Hyksos, Aztecs versus the Spaniards. That was a cute one, because it was the Aztecs who represented civilization, while the Spaniards were the barbarian hordes. You could customize the game as long as you used real societies and tribes, and for a while Crake and Jimmy vied with each other to see who could come up with the most obscure pairing.

  "Petchenegs versus Byzantium," said Jimmy, one memorable day.

  "Who the fuck are the Petchenegs? You made that up," said Crake.

  But Jimmy had found it in the Encyclopedia Britannica, 1957 edition, which was stored on CD-ROM - for some forgotten reason - in the school library. He had chapter and verse. " 'Matthew of Edessa referred to them as wicked blood-drinking beasts,' " he was able to say with authority. " 'They were totally ruthless and had no redeeming features.' " So they tossed for sides, and Jimmy got Petchenegs, and won. The Byzantines were slaughtered, because that was what Petchenegs did, Jimmy explained. They always slaughtered everyone immediately. Or they slaughtered the men, at least. Then they slaughtered the women after a while.

  Crake took the loss of all of his players badly, and sulked a little. After that he'd switched his loyalty to Blood and Roses. It was more cosmic, said Crake: the field of battle was larger, both in time and space.

  Blood and Roses was a trading game, along the lines of Monopoly. The Blood side played with human atrocities for the counters, atrocities on a large scale: individual rapes and murders didn't count, there had to have been a large number of people wiped out. Massacres, genocides, that sort of thing. The Roses side played with human achievements. Artworks, scientific breakthroughs, stellar works of architecture, helpful inventions. Monuments to the soul's magnificence, they were called in the game. There were sidebar buttons, so that if you didn't know what Crime and Punishment was, or the Theory of Relativity, or the Trail of Tears, or Madame Bovary, or the Hundred Years' War, or The Flight into Egypt, you could double-click and get an illustrated rundown, in two choices: R for children, PON for Profanity, Obscenity, and Nudity. That was the thing about history, said Crake: it had lots of all three.

  You rolled the virtual dice and either a Rose or a Blood item would pop up. If it was a Blood item, the Rose player had a chance to stop the atrocity from happening, but he had to put up a Rose item in exchange. The atrocity would then vanish from history, or at least the history recorded on the screen. The Blood player could acquire a Rose item, but only by handing over an atrocity, thus leaving himself with less ammunition and the Rose player with more. If he was a skilful player he could attack the Rose side by means of the atrocities in his possession, loot the human achievement, and transfer it to his side of the board. The player who managed to retain the most human achievements by Time's Up was the winner. With points off, naturally, for achievements destroyed through his own error and folly and cretinous play.

  The exchange rates - one Mona Lisa equalled Bergen-Belsen, one Armenian genocide equalled the Ninth Symphony plus three Great Pyramids - were suggested, but there was room for haggling. To do this you needed to know the numbers - the total number of corpses for the atrocities, the latest open-market price for the artworks; or, if the artworks had been stolen, the amount paid out by the insurance policy. It was a wicked game.

  "Homer," says Snowman, making his way through the dripping-wet vegetation. "The Divine Comedy. Greek statuary. Aqueducts. Paradise Lost. Mozart's music. Shakespeare, complete works. The Brontes. Tolstoy. The Pearl Mosque. Chartres Cathedral. Bach. Rembrandt. Verdi. Joyce. Penicillin. Keats. Turner. Heart transplants. Polio vaccine. Berlioz. Baudelaire. Bartok. Yeats. Woolf."

  There must have been more. There were more.

  The sack of Troy, says a voice in his ear. The destruction of Carthage. The Vikings. The Crusades. Ghenghis Khan. Attila the Hun. The massacre of the Cathars. The witch burnings. The destruction of the Aztec. Ditto the Maya. Ditto the Inca. The

  Inquisition. Vlad the Impaler. The massacre of the Huguenots. Cromwell in Ireland. The French Revolution. The Napoleonic Wars. The Irish Famine. Slavery in the American South. King Leopold in the Congo. The Russian Revolution. Stalin. Hitler. Hiroshima. Mao. Pol Pot. Idi Amin. Sri Lanka. East Timor. Saddam Hussein.

  "Stop it," says Snowman.

  Sorry, honey. Only trying to help.

  That was the trouble with Blood and Roses: it was easier to remember the Blood stuff. The other trouble was that the Blood player usually won, but winning meant you inherited a wasteland. This was the point of the game, said Crake, when Jimmy complained. Jimmy said if that was the point, it was pretty pointless. He didn't want to tell Crake that he was having some severe nightmares: the one where the Parthenon was decorated with cut-off heads was, for some reason, the worst.

  By unspoken consent they'd given up on Blood and Roses, which was fine with Crake because he was into something new - Extinctathon, an interactive biofreak masterlore game he'd found on the Web. EXTINCTATHON, Monitored by MaddAddam. Adam named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones. Do you want to play? That was what came up when you logged on. You then had to click Yes, enter your codename, and pick one of the two chat rooms - Kingdom Animal, Kingdom Vegetable. Then some challenger would come on-line, using his own codename - Komodo, Rhino, Manatee, Hippocampus Ramulosus - and propose a contest. Begins with, number of legs, what is it? The it would be some bioform that had kakked out within the past fifty years - no T-Rex, no roc, no dodo, and points off for getting the time frame wrong. Then you'd narrow it down, Phylum Class Order Family Genus Species, then the habitat and when last seen, and what had snuffed it. (Pollution, habitat destruction, credulous morons who thought that eating its horn would give them a boner.) The longer the challenger held out, the more points he got, but you could win big bonuses for speed. It helped to have the MaddAddam printout of every extinct species, but that gave you only the Latin names, and anyway it was a couple of hundred pages of fine print and filled with obscure bugs, weeds, and frogs nobody had ever heard of. Nobody except, it seemed, the Extinctathon Grandmasters, who had brains like search engines.

  You always knew when you were playing one of those because a little Coelacanth symbol would come up on the screen. Coelacanth. Prehistoric deep-sea fish, long supposed extinct until specimens found in mid-twentieth. Present status unknown. Extinctathon was nothing if not informative. It was like some tedious pedant you got trapped beside on the school van, in Jimmy's view. It wouldn't shut up.

  "Why do you like this so much?" said Jimmy one day, to Crake's hunched-over back.

  "Because I'm good at it," said Crake. Jimmy suspected him of wanting to make Grandmaster, not because it meant anything but just because it was there.

  Crake had picked their codenames. Jimmy's was Thickney, after a defunct Australian double-jointed bird that used to hang around in cemeteries, and - Jimmy suspected - because Crake liked the sound of it as applied to Jimmy. Crake's codename was Crake, after the Rednecked Crake, another Australian bird - never, said Crake, very numerous. For a while they called each other Crake and Thickney, as an in-joke. After Crake had realized Jimmy was not wholeheartedly participating and they'd stopped playing Extinctathon, Thickney as a name had faded away. But Crake had stuck.

  When they weren't playing games they'd surf the Net - drop in on old favourites, see what was new. They'd watch open-heart surgery in live time, or else the Noodie News, which was good for a few minute
s because the people on it tried to pretend there was nothing unusual going on and studiously avoided looking at one another's jujubes.

  Or they'd watch animal snuff sites, Felicia's Frog Squash and the like, though these quickly grew repetitious: one stomped frog, one cat being torn apart by hand, was much like another. Or they'd watch dirtysockpuppets.com, a current-affairs show about world political leaders. Crake said that with digital genalteration you couldn't tell whether any of these generals and whatnot existed any more, and if they did, whether they'd actually said what you'd heard. Anyway they were toppled and replaced with such rapidity that it hardly mattered.

  Or they might watch hedsoff.com, which played live coverage of executions in Asia. There they could see enemies of the people being topped with swords in someplace that looked like China, while thousands of spectators cheered. Or they could watch alibooboo.com, with various supposed thieves having their hands cut off and adulterers and lipstick-wearers being stoned to death by howling crowds, in dusty enclaves that purported to be in fundamentalist countries in the Middle East. The coverage was usually poor on that site: filming was said to be prohibited, so it was just some desperate pauper with a hidden minivideocam, risking his life for filthy Western currency. You saw mostly the backs and heads of the spectators, so it was like being trapped inside a huge clothes rack unless the guy with the camera got caught, and then there would be a flurry of hands and cloth before the picture went black. Crake said these bloodfests were probably taking place on a back lot somewhere in California, with a bunch of extras rounded up off the streets.

  Better than these were the American sites, with their sportsevent commentary - "Here he comes now! Yes! It's Joe 'The Ratchet Set' Ricardo, voted tops by you viewers!" Then a rundown of the crimes, with grisly pictures of the victims. These sites would have spot commercials, for things like car batteries and tranquilizers, and logos painted in bright yellow on the background walls. At least the Americans put some style into it, said Crake.