Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam 1)

-handed ignoramuses poking into things they couldn't understand.

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?"