Oryx and Crake

When Jimmy and Crake graduated from high school, Crake was top of his class and was snatched by the Watson-Crick Institute for a high price. As a middling student, meanwhile, Jimmy ended up at the Martha Graham Academy. Jimmy knew that his father and Ramona would be trying for a baby soon but he did not care: he wanted to be alone and self-sufficient. As for Crake, his mother had died a month previously after having picked up “a hot bioform that had chewed through her like a solar mower.” Crake had found it “impressive” to see “froth coming out.” Jimmy could not understand how Crake could be so aloof but assumed that it was just a front.

During a post-graduation vacation, Jimmy and Crake spent the summer watching the gen-mod coffee wars. A HelthWyzer subsidiary had developed a new coffee bush whose beans would ripen simultaneously and coffee could be harvested with machines. This reduced growers and labourers to poverty, and resistance was global, leading to riots and violence. There was also the omnipresent Happicuppa coverage, which protestors brandishing posters reading, “Don’t Drink Death!”

Things worsened after crazed anti-Happicuppa fanatics bombed the Lincoln Memorial and a blockade formed around the head Happicuppa compound. Among the protesters, Jimmy spotted his mother. There was then a release of teargas and the sound of gunfire, after which his mother disappeared. Crake told Jimmy that he had recognized her too, and Jimmy was concerned as to who else had made the connection. Crake had also revealed the details of his own father, who died after plummeting from an overpass. Crake did not believe that he would have jumped, and, when Jimmy suggested that he may have fallen, Crake replied, “He didn’t always watch where he was going. He was head in the clouds. He believed in contributing to the improvement of the human lot.”

Looking back, Snowman asks himself how he could have missed what Crake was telling him. However, he realizes that his ignorance had not been wilful; rather, he had “grown up in walled spaces, and then he had become one. He had shut things out.”

After summer, Jimmy and Crake parted ways and Jimmy began attending an Arts and Humanities college called Martha Graham. He was not looking forward to the future; still, he hunkered down to college life. He also found that he “he projected a form of melancholy attractive to a certain kind of woman.” Even so, Jimmy had a short attention span and move from one woman to another.

Jimmy is pleased to think that he had the edge over Crake when it came to interaction with women. Crake thought that falling in love was a “hormonally induced delusional state” and that sex was necessary solely for genetic transfer. The girls who Jimmy knew found this somewhat creepy. But what had happened to Crake since then? The emails that Jimmy received initially revealed little, but Crake later wrote that students called Watson-Crick “Asperger’s U” due to its high percentage of “brilliant weirdos.” When Crake invited Jimmy over, Jimmy accepted.

At Martha Graham, Jimmy spent a lot of time looking at old books in the library. He had resolved that, if he had been deemed a reject and was studying topics that were deemed a waste of time, he would embrace this—he would “pursue the superfluous as an end in itself.” He had also started compiling lists of words that were no longer meaningful in the present day and memorizing the lingo used in self-help books.

Passing through the strict security at Watson-Crick, guards questioned Jimmy about his mother. They had then hooked him up to a neural-impulse monitor to make sure that he was not lying. Finally, they let him through to see Crake. Upon seeing his friend, Jimmy was overcome with nostalgia.

Watson-Crick was like a palace compared to Jimmy’s college. Crake took Jimmy on a tour of the college, showing him various projects that students were working on; for instance, wallpaper that changed color depending on the mood of a room’s inhabitant.

The environment at Watson-Crick reminded him of his childhood and he had no desire to go back there. For all its faults, Martha Graham was preferable. As the final stop in the tour, Crake had shown Jimmy the wolvogs, which looked like dogs but whose friendly appearance belied an aggressive temperament. They were being bred for security purposes, but Jimmy wondered what would happen if they broke free and their population spiraled out of control.

When Jimmy asked Crake if he had a girlfriend, Crake replied that students were encouraged to focus on work. However, in exchange for deductions from a student’s scholarship, Student Services could arrange someone to come in from the city. Jimmy was shocked that Student Services would do such a thing, but Crake explained that “it avoids the diversion of energies into unproductive channels, and short-circuits malaise.”

One day, Crake outlined a scenario: a company makes money from drugs and procedures that help sick people or stop people from getting sick. But what happens when everything has been cured? Then, companies would need to create new diseases. According to Crake, that was what HealthWyzer had been doing. They had created both new diseases and cures for these diseases. Crake’s father knew about this, and that is why he was pushed off a bridge when Crake was a child. Crake himself had found out by hacking into his father’s computer, which contained evidence against the company.

Though Jimmy did not want to talk about his mother, Crake speculated that she may have found out that her husband was in on something similar to the HealthWyzer project. Crake concluded, “I bet she knew they were starting to know she knew.”

On the last day of Jimmy’s visit, Crake opened a file on his computer containing the picture of Oryx—the girl who had made such an impression on Jimmy—and clicked on the iris of her eye, which served as a gateway to a playroom within Extinctathon (of which Crake was now a Grandmaster). In this confidential area were bulletins about such matters as a parasitic wasp outbreak and bean crops being menaced by a new type of weevil. Crake said that he had initially thought that the bulletins were from an animal liberation organization. Now, however, he sensed that something much bigger was going on. Jimmy warned him not to get involved, but Crake was curious. Jimmy, meanwhile, was most concerned with Crake using the image of Oryx as a gateway.

Snowman enters an area that used to be residential and is marked with signs of the violence that took place in the final days. He observes that it will not be long before the final signs of human inhabitation are gone. He then wonders if he is the last of his kind: maybe there is a monk or survivalist who is still alive. He imagines descendants finding remnants of the past and asking how this happened.

One evening, Crake had ruminated on what would happen if civilization were destroyed. He stated that it would never be rebuilt, as all available surface metals had already been mined. He concluded that all it takes is the elimination of one generation for the game to be over.

As Snowman proceeds on his journey, he realizes that, were he to die, he would not be mourned. He wonders if he is not the Abominable Snowman but the other kind of snowman, who is either pushed down or left to melt. Upon reaching the Compounds, he imagines “when the lights went out and two thousand frozen millionaires’ heads awaiting resurrection began to melt in the dark.” He then enters the RejoovenEsence complex and finds various objects that people must have dropped in flight. He imagines that “The fugitives must have had hope, to begin with. They must have thought they’d have a use for these things later. Then they’d changed their minds and let go.”

Upon spotting the central park featuring “Crake’s charmed dome,” Snowman shivers. Looking at the vegetation, he observes that “The whole world is now one vast uncontrolled experiment – the way it always was, Crake would have said.” He enters a house and notices that the bathroom mirror has been smashed in “some last act of ineffectual rage, of cosmic protest.” He proceeds to take food and any other potentially useful items, and sees a notepad featuring the words “Call clinic.” He notices that “The ballpoint pen is still on the paper, as if dropped from a slackening hand: it must have come suddenly, right then, the sickness and the realization of it.”

Once Snowman has left the house and continued on his question, a storm breaks and Snowman finds shelter in a security building. Snowman initially feels perturbed at finding himself alone in the dark but then finds that he can drift away and imagine that Oryx is with him.