Maybe I could do some social interaction, thought Jimmy. Help them invent the wheel. Leave a legacy of knowledge. Pass on all my words.
No, he couldn’t. No hope there.
Sometimes they looked uneasy—they’d gather in groups, they’d murmur. The hidden mikes picked them up.
“Where is Oryx? When is she coming back?”
“She always comes back.”
“She should be here, teaching us.”
“She is always teaching us. She is teaching us now.”
“Is she here?”
“Here and not here is the same thing, for Oryx. She said that.”
“Yes. She said it.”
“What does it mean?”
It was like some demented theology debate in the windier corners of chat-room limbo. Jimmy couldn’t stand listening to it for very long.
The rest of the time he himself grazed, slept, sat for long hours doing nothing. For the first two weeks he followed world events on the Net, or else on the television news: the riots in the cities as transportation broke down and supermarkets were raided; the explosions as electrical systems failed, the fires no one came to extinguish. Crowds packed the churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples to pray and repent, then poured out of them as the worshippers woke up to their increased risk of exposure. There was an exodus to small towns and rural areas, whose inhabitants fought off the refugees as long as they could, with banned firearms or clubs and pitchforks.
At first the newscasters were thoroughly into it, filming the action from traffic helicopters, exclaiming as if at a football match: Did you see that? Unbelievable! Brad, nobody can quite believe it. What we’ve just seen is a crazed mob of God’s Gardeners, liberating a ChickieNobs production facility. Brad, this is hilarious, those ChickieNob things can’t even walk! (Laughter.) Now, back to the studio.
It must have been during the initial mayhem, thinks Snowman, that some genius let out the pigoons and the wolvogs. Oh, thanks a bundle.
Street preachers took to self-flagellation and ranting about the Apocalypse, though they seemed disappointed: where were the trumpets and angels, why hadn’t the moon turned to blood? Pundits in suits appeared on the screen; medical experts, graphs showing infection rates, maps tracing the extent of the epidemic. They used dark pink for that, as for the British Empire once. Jimmy would have preferred some other colour.
There was no disguising the fear of the commentators. Who’s next, Brad? When are they going to have a vaccine? Well, Simon, they’re working round the clock from what I hear, but nobody’s claiming to have a handle on this thing yet. It’s a biggie, Brad. Simon, you said a mouthful, but we’ve licked some biggies before. Encouraging grin, thumbs-up sign, unfocused eyes, facial pallor.
Documentaries were hastily thrown together, with images of the virus—at least they’d isolated it, it looked like the usual melting gumdrop with spines—and commentary on its methods. This appears to be a supervirulent splice. Whether it’s a species-jumping mutation or a deliberate fabrication is anybody’s guess. Sage nods all round. They’d given the virus a name, to make it seem more manageable. Its name was JUVE, Jetspeed Ultra Virus Extraordinary. Possibly they now knew something, such as what Crake had really been up to, hidden safely in the deepest core of the RejoovenEsense Compound. Sitting in judgment on the world, thought Jimmy; but why had that been his right?
Conspiracy theories proliferated: it was a religious thing, it was God’s Gardeners, it was a plot to gain world control. Boil-water and don’t-travel advisories were issued in the first week, handshaking was discouraged. In the same week there was a run on latex gloves and nose-cone filters. About as effective, thought Jimmy, as oranges stuck with cloves during the Black Death.
This just in. TheJUVE killer virus has broken out in Fiji, spared until now. CorpSeCorps chief declares New New York a disaster area. Major arteries sealed off.
Brad, this item is moving very fast. Simon, it’s unbelievable.
“Change can be accommodated by any system depending on its rate,” Crake used to say. “Touch your head to a wall, nothing happens, but if the same head hits the same wall at ninety miles an hour, it’s red paint. We’re in a speed tunnel, Jimmy. When the water’s moving faster than the boat, you can’t control a thing.”
I listened, thought Jimmy, but I didn’t hear.
In the second week, there was full mobilization. The hastily assembled epidemic managers called the shots—field clinics, isolation tents; whole towns, then whole cities quarantined. But these efforts soon broke down as the doctors and nurses caught the thing themselves, or panicked and fled.
England closes ports and airports.
All communication from India has ceased.
Hospitals are off limits until further notice. If you feel ill, drink plenty of water and call the following hotline number.
Do not, repeat do not, attempt to exit cities.
It wasn’t Brad talking any more, or Simon. Brad and Simon were gone. It was other people, and then others.
Jimmy called the hotline number and got a recording saying it was out of service. Then he called his father, a thing he hadn’t done in years. That line was out of service too.
He searched his e-mail. No recent messages. All he found was an old birthday card he’d failed to delete: Happy Birthday, Jimmy, May All Your Dreams Come True. Pigs with wings.
One of the privately run Web sites showed a map, with lit-up points on it for each place that was still communicating via satellite. Jimmy watched with fascination as the points of light blinked out.
He was in shock. That must have been why he couldn’t take it in. The whole thing seemed like a movie. Yet there he was, and there were Oryx and Crake, dead, in the airlock. Any time he found himself thinking it was all an illusion, a practical joke of some kind, he went and looked at them. Through the bulletproof window, of course: he knew he shouldn’t open the innermost door.
He lived off Crake’s emergency stores, the frozen goods first: if the bubble’s solar system failed, the freezers and microwaves would no longer work, so he might as well eat his way through the ChickieNobs Gourmet Dinners while he had the chance. He smoked up Crake’s stash of skunkweed in no time flat; he managed to miss about three days of horror that way. He rationed the booze at first, but soon he was getting through quite a pile of it. He needed to be fried just to face the news, he needed to be feeling not much.
“I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it,” he’d say. He’d begun talking to himself out loud, a bad sign. “It isn’t happening.” How could he exist in this clean, dry, monotonous, ordinary room, gobbling caramel soycorn and zucchini cheese puffs and addling his brain on spirituous liquors and brooding on the total fiasco that was his personal life, while the entire human race was kakking out?
The worst of it was that those people out there—the fear, the suffering, the wholesale death—did not really touch him. Crake used to say that Homo sapiens sapiens was not hard-wired to individuate other people in numbers above two hundred, the size of the primal tribe, and Jimmy would reduce that number to two. Had Oryx loved him, had she loved him not, did Crake know about them, how much did he know, when did he know it, was he spying on them all along? Did he set up the grand finale as an assisted suicide, had he intended to have Jimmy shoot him because he knew what would happen next and he didn’t deign to stick around to watch the results of what he’d done?