Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam, #1)(17)
Blood was coming from somewhere on the top of Zeb’s head, he could feel the warmth trickling down. Scalp wound. Not dangerous, but they bleed a lot. Your head’s the most shallow part of you, his sociopath of a father had been in the habit of saying. Except for your brain. And your soul, supposing you’ve been blessed with one, which I doubt. The Rev had been a big cheerleader for souls, in addition to which he thought he was the boss of them.
Now Zeb found himself wondering if Chuck had a soul, and if it was still hovering over his body like a feeble smell. “Chuck, you stupid f*ck,” Zeb said out loud. If he’d been given a brief to kidnap himself on behalf of the brainscrapers, he’d have done a way better job of it than Chuck had, the f*ckwit.
Too bad Chuck was dead, in a way – he must’ve had some good sides to him, maybe he liked puppies – but now there was one less * in the world, and wasn’t that a plus? A checkmark in the column of the forces of light. Or darkness, depending on who was doing the double-entry moral accounting.
Though Chuck hadn’t been an ordinary *; not grouchy, not aggressive, not like Zeb himself on his * setting. Too much the other way. Too friendly, too eager to be on message, man is obsolete, dooming ourselves to extinction, restore the balance of nature and babble babble, he overdid it so much that he sounded preposterous, and in an outfit like Bearlift, with its full quota of preposterous green-hued furf*ckers, that took some effort.
They weren’t all furf*ckers, however: some claimed to be along for the challenge. Adventurous, devil-may-care, no strings on me, tattoo-upholstered, with greasy ponytails like bikers in old movies – boundary-pushing muscle-flexers, boot soles a little too hot for ordinary strolling. That was how Zeb had positioned himself: bulked up on natural steroids, do what had to be done, could take the pace, wings on the ankles, needed the money, liked the shadowy rimlands where nobody official could stick their tentacles into your back pocket, within which the contents of other people’s hacked bank accounts might be bashfully lurking.
The card-carrying furf*ckers looked down their narrow green true-believer noses at Zeb and his edgy like, but they didn’t push that my-shit-don’t-stink agenda too hard. They needed the manpower because not everyone on the planet thought it was a great idea to aero/orno/helithopter numerous dumpsterloads of rancid biotrash around the far north so a bunch of mangy Ursidae could gobble it free of charge.
“This was before the oil shortage really kicked in?” says Toby. “And the carbon garboil business took off. Otherwise, they’d never have let you waste such valuable primary material on bears.”
“It was before a lot of things,” says Zeb. “Though the oil prices were already getting pretty steep.”
Bearlift had four old-model ’thopters they’d bought on the grey market. The Flying Pufferfish was their nickname. ’thopters claimed to use biodesign: they had a helium/hydrogen gas-filled blimp with a skin that sucked in or exhaled molecules like a fish’s swim bladder that contracted and expanded and allowed them to lift heavy weights. Plus, they had stabilizing ventral fins, a couple of heli-blades for hovering, and four bird-like flapping wings for manoeuvrability at slow speeds. The upside being minimum fuel consumption, ultra-high freight weight, and the ability to fly low and slow; the downside being that a ’thopter flight took forever, the software on the things failed regularly, and few among them knew how to fix the brutes. Questionable digimechanics had to be called in, or rather smuggled in from Brazil, where the digital darkside flourished.
They’d hack you as soon as look at you down there. Roaring business in politicians’ medical records and sordid affairs, celebrities’ plastic surgeries – that was the small end. At the big end it was one Corp hacking another. Hacking a powerful Corp was the kind of thing that could get you into the real crapola, even if you were firewalled by being on the blackbox payroll of another powerful Corp.
“So I suppose you did it,” says Toby. “The kind of thing with the real crapola.”
“Yeah, I’d been down there, just making a living,” says Zeb. “That was one reason I was taking a breather at Bearlift: it was ultra far from Brazil.”
Bearlift was a scam, or partly a scam. It didn’t take anyone with half a brain too long to figure that one out. Unlike many scams it was well meaning, but it was a scam nonetheless. It lived off the good intentions of city types with disposable emotions who liked to think they were saving something – some rag from their primordial authentic ancestral past, a tiny shred of their collective soul dressed up in a cute bear suit. The concept was simple: the polar bears are starving because the ice is almost gone and they can’t catch seals any more, so let’s feed them our leftovers until they learn to adapt, “adapt being the buzzword of those days, if you’ll recall, though I doubt you’re old enough; you must still have been in playskirts. Learning to wiggle your little mantrap.”
“Stop flirting,” said Toby.
“Why? You like it.”
“I remember adapt,” says Toby. “It was another way of saying tough luck. To people you weren’t going to help out.”
“You got it,” said Zeb. “Anyway, feeding trash to the bears didn’t help them adapt, it just taught them that food falls out of the sky. They’d start slavering every time they heard the sound of a ’thopter, they had their very own cargo cult.