Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam 1)

Perhaps he failed to take seriously his own despair.

Finally there was nothing more to watch, except old movies on DVD. He watched Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson in Key Largo. He wants more, don't you, Rocco? Yeah, that's it, more! That's right, I want more. Will you ever get enough? Or else he watched Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. Flapflapflap, eek, screech. You could see the strings where the avian superstars were tied to the roof. Or he watched Night of the Living Dead. Lurch, aargh, gnaw, choke, gurgle. Such minor paranoias were soothing to him.

Then he'd turn it off, sit in front of the empty screen. All the women he'd ever known would pass in front of his eyes in the semi-darkness. His mother too, in her magenta dressing gown, young again. Oryx came last, carrying white flowers. She looked at him, then walked slowly out of his field of vision, into the shadows where Crake was waiting.

These reveries were almost pleasurable. At least while they were going on everyone was still alive.

He knew this state of affairs couldn't continue much longer. Inside Paradice proper, the Crakers were munching up the leaves and grasses faster than they could regenerate, and one of these days the solar would fail, and the backup would fail too, and Jimmy had no idea about how to fix those things. Then the air circulation would stop and the doorlock would freeze, and both he and the Crakers would be trapped inside, and they'd all suffocate. He had to get them out while there was still time, but not too soon or there would still be some desperate people out there, and desperate would mean dangerous. What he didn't want was a bunch of disintegrating maniacs falling on their knees, clawing at him: Cure us! Cure us! He might be immune from the virus - unless, of course, Crake had been lying to him - but not from the rage and despair of its carriers.

Anyway, how could he have the heart to stand there and say: Nothing can save you?

In the half-light, in the dank, Snowman wanders from space to space. Here for instance is his office. His computer sits on the desk, turning a blank face to him like a discarded girlfriend encountered by chance at a party. Beside the computer are a few sheets of paper, which must have been the last he'd ever written. The last he'd ever write. He picks them up with curiosity. What is it that the Jimmy he'd once been had seen fit to communicate, or at least to record - to set down in black and white, with smudges - for the edification of a world that no longer existed?

To whom it may concern, Jimmy had written, in ballpoint rather than printout: his computer was fried by then, but he'd persevered, laboriously, by hand. He must still have had hope, he must still have believed that the situation could be turned around, that someone would show up here in the future, someone in authority; that his words would have a meaning then, a context. As Crake had once said, Jimmy was a romantic optimist.

I don't have much time, Jimmy had written.

Not a bad beginning, thinks Snowman.

I don't have much time, but I will try to set down what I believe to be the explanation for the recent extraordinary events catastrophe. I have gone through the computer of the man known here as Crake. He left it turned on - deliberately, I believe - and I am able to report that the JUVE virus was made here in the Paradice dome by splicers hand-selected by Crake and subsequently eliminated, and was then encysted in the BlyssPluss product. There was a time-lapse factor built in to allow for wide distribution: the first batch of virus did not become active until all selected territories had been seeded, and the outbreak thus took the form of a series of rapidly overlapping waves. For the success of the plan, time was of the essence. Social disruption was maximized, and development of a vaccine effectively prevented. Crake himself had developed a vaccine concurrently with the virus, but he had destroyed it prior to his assisted suicide death.

Although various staff members of the BlyssPluss project contributed to JUVE on a piecework basis, it is my belief that none, with the exception of Crake, was cognizant of what that effect would be. As for Crake's motives, I can only speculate. Perhaps ...

Here the handwriting stops. Whatever Jimmy's speculations might have been on the subject of Crake's motives, they had not been recorded.

Snowman crumples the sheets up, drops them onto the floor. It's the fate of these words to be eaten by beetles. He could have mentioned the change in Crake's fridge magnets. You could tell a lot about a person from their fridge magnets, not that he'd thought much about them at the time.

Remnant

~

On the second Friday of March - he'd been marking off the days on a calendar, god knows why - Jimmy showed himself to the Crakers for the first time. He didn't take his clothes off, he drew the line at that. He wore a set of standard-issue Rejoov khaki tropicals, with mesh underarms and a thousand pockets, and his favourite fake-leather sandals. The Crakers gathered around him, g

azing at him with quiet wonder: they'd never seen textiles before. The children whispered and pointed.

"Who are you?" said the one Crake had christened Abraham Lincoln. A tall man, brown, thinnish. It was not said impolitely. From an ordinary man Jimmy would have found it brusque, even aggressive, but these people didn't go in for fancy language: they hadn't been taught evasion, euphemism, lily-gilding. In speech they were plain and blunt.

"My name is Snowman," said Jimmy, who had thought this over. He no longer wanted to be Jimmy, or even Jim, and especially not Thickney: his incarnation as Thickney hadn't worked out well. He needed to forget the past - the distant past, the immediate past, the past in any form. He needed to exist only in the present, without guilt, without expectation. As the Crakers did. Perhaps a different name would do that for him.

"Where have you come from, oh Snowman?"

"I come from the place of Oryx and Crake," he said. "Crake sent me." True, in a way. "And Oryx." He keeps the sentence structure simple, the message clear: he knows how to do this from watching Oryx through the mirror wall. And from listening to her, of course.

"Where has Oryx gone?"

"She had some things to do," said Snowman. That was all he could come up with: simply pronouncing her name had choked him up.

"Why have Crake and Oryx sent you to us?" asked the woman called Madame Curie.

"To take you to a new place."

"But this is our place. We are content where we are."

"Oryx and Crake wish you to have a better place than this," said Snowman. "Where there will be more to eat." There were nods, smiles. Oryx and Crake wished them well, as they'd always known. It seemed to be enough for them.

"Why is your skin so loose?" said one of the children.

"I was made in a different way from you," Snowman said. He was beginning to find this conversation of interest, like a game. These people were like blank pages, he could write whatever he wanted on them. "Crake made me with two kinds of skin. One comes off." He took off his tropical vest to show them. They stared with interest at the hair on his chest.