The Year of the Flood (MaddAddam 2)

After going to Scales, I was only in touch with Amanda by phone. She was away a lot, doing her art projects; also I didn't want to see her in person. I'd feel uncomfortable because of Jimmy, and she'd pick up on that feeling and ask about it, and I'd either lie or tell her; and if I told her she'd be angry, or maybe just curious; or she'd think I was being stupid. There was a hard side to Amanda.

Jealousy is a very destructive emotion, Adam One used to say. It's part of the stubborn Australopithecine heritage we're stuck with. It eats away at you and deadens your Spiritual life, but also it leads you to hatred, and causes you to harm others. But Amanda was the last person I'd ever want to harm.

I tried to visualize my jealousy as a yellowy-brown cloud boiling around inside me, then going out through my nose like smoke and turning into a stone and fall

ing down into the ground. That did work a little. But in my visualization a plant covered with poison berries would grow out of the stone, whether I wanted it to or not.

Then Amanda broke up with Jimmy. She let me know about it in a roundabout way. She'd already told me about her outdoor art landscape installation series called The Living Word -- how she was spelling words out in giant letters, using bioforms to make the words appear and then disappear, just like the words she used to do with ants and syrup when we were kids. Now she said, "I'm up to the four-letter words." And I said, "You mean the dirty ones, like shit?" And she laughed and said, "Worse ones than that." And I said, "You mean the c-word and the f-word?" and she said, "No. Like love."

And I said, "Oh. So Jimmy didn't work out." And she said, "Jimmy can't be serious." So I knew he must've cheated on her, or something like that.

"I'm sorry," I said. "Are you really pissed off at him?" I tried to keep the happiness out of my own voice. Now I can forgive her, I thought. But really there was nothing to forgive her for because she hadn't done anything hurtful to me on purpose.

"Pissed off?" she said. "You can't be pissed off with Jimmy." I wondered what she meant by that, because I was certainly pissed off with Jimmy. Though I still loved him.

Maybe that's what love is, I thought: it's being pissed off.

After a while, Glenn started coming to Scales -- not every night, but often enough to get discounts. I hadn't seen him since HelthWyzer -- he'd been with the brainiacs, doing science at the Watson-Crick Institute -- but now he was a top guy at the Rejoov Corp. He wasn't shy about bragging, though with Glenn it was more like stating a fact, the way you'd say, "It's going to rain." What I picked up from listening in on his conversations with the Mr. Bigs and his funders was that he was in charge of a really important initiative called the Paradice Project. They'd built a special dome for it, with its own air supply and quadruple security. He'd assembled a team of the best brains available, and they were working night and day.

Glenn was vague about what they were working on. Immortality was a word he used -- Rejoov had been interested in it for decades, something about changing your cells so they'd never die; people would pay a lot for immortality, he said. Every couple of months he'd claim they'd made a breakthrough, and the more breakthroughs he made, the more money he could raise for the Paradice Project.

Sometimes he'd say he was working on solutions to the biggest problem of all, which was human beings -- their cruelty and suffering, their wars and poverty, their fear of death. "What would you pay for the design of a perfect human being?" he'd say. Then he'd hint that the Paradice Project was designing one, and they'd dump more money on him.

For the finales of these meetings he'd rent the feather-ceiling room and order up the drinks and the drugs and the Scalies -- not for himself, but for the guys he'd bring with him. Sometimes he'd even entertain the top CorpSeMen. They were sinister, those guys. I never had to do the Painballers, but I had to do the CorpSeMen, and they were my least favourite clients. It was like they had machine parts in behind their eyes.

Occasionally Glenn would rent two or three Scalies for the whole evening, not for sex but for some very strange things. Once he wanted us to purr like cats so he could measure our vocal cords. Another time he wanted us to sing like birds so he could record us. Starlite complained to Mordis that this wasn't what we were paid for, but Mordis only said, "So, he's a loony. You've seen those before. But he's a rich loony and he's harmless, so just humour him."

I was part of the threesome the night he gave us a sort of quiz. What would make us happy? he wanted to know. Was happiness more like excitement, or more like contentment? Was happiness inside or outside? With trees, or without? Did it have running water nearby? Did too much of it get boring? Starlite and Crimson Petal tried to figure out what he wanted to hear so they could tell the right lies. "No," I said. I knew what Glenn was like. "He's a geek. He wants us to say what we honestly feel." Which confused them a lot.

He never asked us about sadness, though. Maybe he thought he knew enough about that.

Then he started bringing a woman -- an Asian Fusion body type with a foreign accent. He said she wanted to familiarize herself with Scales because ReJoov had picked us as one of their prime test venues, and she'd be explaining a new product to us -- the BlyssPluss pill, which would solve every known problem connected with sex. We had been awarded the privilege of introducing it to our clients. This woman had a ReJoov executive title -- Senior VP Satisfaction Enhancement -- though her real job was Glenn's main plank.

I could tell she'd been one of us: a girl for rent, of one kind or another. It was obvious if you knew the signs. She was acting all the time, giving nothing away about herself. I'd watch them onscreen: I was curious because Glenn was such a cold fish, but he could have sex all right, just like a human being. This girl had more moves than an octopus, and her plankwork was astonishing. Glenn acted like she was the first, last, and only girl on the planet. Mordis used to watch them too, and he said Scales would pay this girl top dollar. But I told him he couldn't afford her: she was way out of his price range.

The two of them had pet names for each other. She'd call him Crake, he'd call her Oryx. The other girls found it strange -- the two of them being lovey-dovey -- because it was so out of character for Glenn. But I thought it was kind of nice.

"That Russian or something?" Crimson Petal asked me. "Oryx and Crake?"

"I guess," I said. They were extinct animal names -- every Gardener had to memorize a ton of those -- but if I said it the girls would wonder why I knew.

The first time Glenn came to Scales I recognized him right away, but of course he didn't recognize me, in my Biofilm Bodysuit and with green sequins all over my face, and I didn't let on. Mordis told us not to forge personal bonds with the customers, because if they wanted a relationship they could get one elsewhere. He said that Scales customers didn't care about your life history, they just wanted epidermis and fantasy. They wanted to be carried away to Never-Never Land, where they could have sinful experiences they'd never, never be able to have at home. Dragon ladies winding around them, snake women slithering over them. So we should save our private emotional crap for people who actually cared about us, like the other Scalies.

One night Glenn arranged an evening of extra-special treatment -- for an extra-special guest, he said. He ordered up the feather room with the green bedspread, plus the most powerful Scales and Tails martinis -- "kicktails," they called them -- plus two Scalies, me and Crimson Petal. Mordis picked us because Glenn said this extra-special guest preferred the slender body type.

"Does he want the schoolgirl sailor suit thing?" I asked; sometimes that's what "slender body type" meant. "Do I need to bring my skipping rope?" If so I'd have to change, because right then I was in full glitter.

"This guy's already so shitfaced he doesn't know what he wants," Mordis said. "Just give him your all, baby bunny. We want to see the high-number tips. Make those multiple zeroes shoot right out of his ears."

When we got to the room, the guy was lying on the green satin bedspread as if he'd been thrown from a plane, but happy about it, because he had a whole-body grin.

It was Jimmy. Sweet, ruinous Jimmy. Jimmy, who'd trashed my life.

My heart flipped over. Oh shit, I thought. I'm not up to this. I'm going to lose it and start crying. I knew he wouldn't know it was me: I was covered in glitz, and he was flying so high he was almost blind. So I just slid into the usual act and started in on his buttons and Velcro. We Scalies used to call it "peeling the shrimp." "Oh, nice abs," I whispered. "Honey, just lie back."

Did I hate this or love it? Why did it have to be one or the other? As Vilya always said about her boobs, Take two, they're cheap.

Now he was trying to pull the scales off my face, so I had to keep taking his hands and putting them elsewhere. "Are you a fish?" he was saying. He didn't seem to know.