The MaddAddam Trilogy by Margaret Atwood Read Free Book Online Page B

isolation room, where he’d dissolved into a puddle of goo. No greater damage done, but naturally the guards were jumpy.
    Jimmy’s mother said that didn’t change the fact that she felt like a prisoner. Jimmy’s father said she didn’t understand the reality of the situation. Didn’t she want to be safe, didn’t she want her son to be safe?
    “So it’s for my own good?” she said. She was cutting a piece of French toast into even-sided cubes, taking her time.
    “For
our
own good. For us.”
    “Well, I happen to disagree.”
    “No news there,” said Jimmy’s father.
    According to Jimmy’s mother their phones and e-mail were bugged, and the sturdy, laconic HelthWyzer housecleaners that came twice a week – always in pairs – were spies. Jimmy’s father said she was getting paranoid, and anyway they had nothing to hide, so why worry about it?
    The HelthWyzer Compound was not only newer than the OrganInc layout, it was bigger. It had two shopping malls instead of one, a better hospital, three dance clubs, even its own golf course. Jimmy went to the HelthWyzer Public School, where at first he didn’t know anyone. Despite his initial loneliness, that wasn’t too bad. Actually it was good, because he could recycle his old routines and jokes: the kids at OrganInc had become used to his antics. He’d moved on from the chimpanzee act and was into fake vomiting and choking to death – both popular – and a thing where he drew a bare-naked girl on his stomach with her crotch right where his navel was, and made her wiggle.
    He no longer came home for lunch. He got picked up by the school’s combo ethanol-solarvan in the morning and returned by it at night. There was a bright and cheerful school cafeteria with balanced meals, ethnic choices – perogies, felafels – and a kosher option, and soy products for the vegetarians. Jimmy was so pleased to be able to eat lunch with neither one of his parents present that he felt light-headed. He even put on some weight, and stopped being the skinniest kid in class. If there was any lunchtime left over and nothing else going on, he could go to the library and watch old instructional CD-ROMs. Alex the parrot was his favourite, from
Classics in Animal Behaviour Studies
. He liked the part where Alex invented a new word –
cork-nut
, for almond – and, best of all, the part where Alex got fed up with the blue-triangle and yellow-square exercise and said,
I’m going away now. No, Alex, you come back here! Which is the blue triangle – no, the
blue
triangle?
But Alex was out the door. Five stars for Alex.
    One day Jimmy was allowed to bring Killer to school, where she – it was now officially a she – made a big hit. “Oh Jimmy, you are so lucky,” said Wakulla Price, the first girl he’d ever had a crush on. She stroked Killer’s fur, brown hand, pink nails, and Jimmy felt shivery, as if her fingers were running over his own body.
    Jimmy’s father spent more and more time at his work, but talked about it less and less. There were pigoons at NooSkins, just as at OrganInc Farms, but these were smaller and were being used to develop skin-related biotechnologies. The main idea was to find a method of replacing the older epidermis with a fresh one, not a laser-thinned or dermabraded short-term resurfacing but a genuine start-over skin that would be wrinkle- and blemish-free. For that, it would be useful to grow a young, plump skin cell that would eat up the worn cells in the skins of those on whom it was planted and replace them with replicas of itself, like algae growing on a pond.
    The rewards in the case of success would be enormous, Jimmy’s father explained, doing the straight-talking man-to-man act he had recently adopted with Jimmy. What well-to-do and once-young, once-beautiful woman or man, cranked up on hormonal supplements and shot full of vitamins but hampered by the unforgiving mirror, wouldn’t sell their house, their gated retirement villa, their kids, and