Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam 1)

"If you really need to, you can arrange that kind of thing through Student Services," Crake said, rather stiffly. "They deduct the price from your scholarship, same as room and board. The workers come in from the pleeblands, they're trained professionals. Naturally they're inspected for disease."

"Student Services? In your dreams! They do what?"

"It makes sense," said Crake. "As a system, it avoids the diversion of energies into unproductive channels, and short-circuits malaise. The female students have equal access, of course. You can get any colour, any age - well, almost. Any body type. They provide everything. If you're gay or some kind of a fetishist, they'll fix that too."

At first Jimmy thought Crake might be joking, but he wasn't. Jimmy longed to ask him what he'd tried - had he done a double amputee, for instance? But all of a sudden such a question seemed intrusive. Also it might be mistaken for mockery.

The food in Crake's faculty dining hall was fantastic - real shrimps instead of the CrustaeSoy they got at Martha Graham, and real chicken, Jimmy suspected, though he avoided that because he couldn't forget the ChickieNobs he'd seen; and something a lot like real cheese, though Crake said it came from a vegetable, a new species of zucchini they were trying out.

The desserts were heavy on the chocolate, real chocolate. The coffee was heavy on the coffee. No burnt grain products, no molasses mixed in. It was Happicuppa, but who cared? And real beer. For sure the beer was real.

So all of that was a welcome change from Martha Graham, though Crake's fellow students tended to forget about cutlery and eat with their hands, and wipe their mouths on their sleeves. Jimmy wasn't picky, but this verged on gross. Also they talked all the time, whether anyone was listening or not, always about the ideas they were developing. Once they found Jimmy wasn't working on a space - was attending, in fact, an institution they clearly regarded as a mud puddle - they lost any interest in him. They referred to other students in their own faculties as their conspecifics, and to all other human beings as nonspecifics. It was a running joke.

So Jimmy had no yen to mingle after hours. He was happy enough to hang out at Crake's, letting Crake beat him at chess or Three-Dimensional Waco, or trying to decode Crake's fridge magnets, the ones that didn't have numbers and symbols. Watson-Crick was a fridge-magnet culture: people bought them, traded them, made their own.

No Brain, No Pain (with a green hologram of a brain).

Siliconsciousness.

I wander from Space to Space.

Wanna Meet a Meat Machine?

Take Your Time, Leave Mine Alone.

Little spoat/gider, who made thee?

Life experiments like a rakunk at play.

I think, therefore I spam.

The proper study of Mankind is Everything.

Sometimes they'd watch TV or Web stuff, as in the old days. The Noodie News, brainfrizz, alibooboo, comfort eyefood like that. They'd microwave popcorn, smoke some of the enhanced weed the Botanical Transgenic students were raising in one of the greenhouses; then Jimmy could pass out on the couch. After he got used to his status in this brainpound, which was equivalent to that of a house plant, it wasn't too bad. You just had to relax and breathe into the stretch, as in workouts. He'd be out of here in a few days. Meanwhile it was always interesting to listen to Crake, when Crake was alone, and when he was in the mood to say anything.

On the second to last evening, Crake said, "Let me walk you through a hypothetical scenario."

"I'm game," said Jimmy. Actually he was sleepy - he'd had too much popcorn and beer - but he sat up and put on his paying-attention look, the one he'd perfected in high school. Hypothetical scenarios were a favourite thing of Crake's.

"Axiom: that illness isn't productive. In itself, it generates no commodities and therefore no money. Although it's an excuse for a lot of activity, all it really does moneywise is cause wealth to flow from the sick to the well. From patients to doctors, from clients to cure-peddlers. Money osmosis, you might call it."

"Granted," said Jimmy.

"Now, suppose you're an outfit called HelthWyzer. Suppose you make your money out of drugs and procedures that cure sick people, or else - better - that make it impossible for them to get sick in the first place."

"Yeah?" said Jimmy. Nothing hypothetical here: that was what HelthWyzer actually did.

"So, what are you going to need, sooner or later?"

"More cures?"

"After that."

"What do you mean, after that?"

"After you've cured everything going."

Jimmy made a pretence of thinking. No point doing any actual thought: it was a foregone conclusion that Crake would have some lateral-jump solution to his own question.