"Fourteen."
"Those were definitive times," said Crake.
Jimmy wanted to linger, but Crake was already hurrying him along. He'd have liked to talk with some of these people, hear their stories - had any of them known his mother, for instance? - but maybe he could do that later. On the other hand, maybe not: he'd been seen with Crake, the alpha wolf, the silverback gorilla, the head lion. Nobody would want to get too cozy with him. They'd see his as the jackal position.
Paradice
~
They dropped in at Crake's office, so Jimmy could get a little oriented, said Crake. It was a large space with many gizmos in it, as Jimmy would have expected. There was a painting on the wall: an eggplant on an orange plate. It was the first picture Jimmy ever remembered seeing in a place of Crake's. He thought of asking if that was Crake's girlfriend, but thought better of it.
He zeroed in on the minibar. "Anything in that?"
"Later," said Crake.
Crake still had a collection of fridge magnets, but they were different ones. No more science quips.
Where God is, Man is not.
There are two moons, the one you can see and the one you can't.
Du musz dein Leben andern.
We understand more than we know.
I think, therefore.
To stay human is to break a limitation.
Dream steals from its lair towards its prey.
"What are you really up to here?" said Jimmy.
Crake grinned. "What is really?"
"Bogus," said Jimmy. But he was thrown off balance.
Now, said Crake, it was time to get serious. He was going to show Jimmy the other thing they were doing - the main thing, here at Paradice. What Jimmy was about to see was ... well, it couldn't be described. It was, quite simply, Crake's life's work.
Jimmy put on a suitably solemn face. What next? Some gruesome new food substance, no doubt. A liver tree, a sausage vine. Or some sort of zucchini that grew wool. He braced himself.
Crake led Jimmy along and around; then they were standing in front of a large picture window. No: a one-way mirror. Jimmy looked in. There was a large central space filled with trees and plants, above them a blue sky. (Not really a blue sky, only the curved ceiling of the bubble-dome, with a clever projection device that simulated dawn, sunlight, evening, night. There was a fake moon that went through its phases, he discovered later. There was fake rain.)
That was his first view of the Crakers. They were naked, but not like the Noodie News: there was no self-consciousness, none at all. At first he couldn't believe them, they were so beautiful. Black, yellow, white, brown, all available skin colours. Each individual was exquisite. "Are they robots, or what?" he said.
"You know how they've got floor models, in furniture stores?" said Crake.
"Yeah?"
"These are the floor models."
It was the result of a logical chain of progression, said Crake that evening, over drinks in the Paradice Lounge (fake palm trees, canned music, real Campari, real soda). Once the proteonome had been fully analyzed and interspecies gene and part-gene splicing were thoroughly underway, the Paradice Project or something like it had been only a matter of time. What Jimmy had seen was the next-to-end result of seven years of intensive trial-and-error research.
"At first," said Crake, "we had to alter ordinary human embryos, which we got from - never mind where we got them. But these people are sui generis. They're reproducing themselves, now."
"They look more than seven years old," said Jimmy.
Crake explained about the rapid-growth factors he'd incorporated. "Also," he said, "they're programmed to drop dead at age thirty - suddenly, without getting sick. No old age, none of those anxieties. They'll just keel over. Not that they know it; none of them has died yet."