The MaddAddam Trilogy Read Free Page B

mother. “Daddy is thinking. That’s what they pay him for. He doesn’t have time for you right now.”
    His father threw down the pencil. “Cripes, can’t you give it a rest?”
    His mother stuck her cigarette into her half-empty coffee cup. “Come on, Jimmy, let’s go for a walk.” She hauled Jimmy up by one wrist, closed the back door with exaggerated care behind them. She didn’t even put their coats on. No coats, no hats. She was in her dressing gown and slippers.
    The sky was grey, the wind chilly; she walked head down, her hair blowing. Around the house they went, over the soggy lawn at a double-quick pace, hand in hand. Jimmy felt he was being dragged through deep water by something with an iron claw. He felt buffeted, as if everything was about to be wrenched apart and whirled away. At the same time he felt exhilarated. He watched his mother’s slippers: already they were stained with damp earth. He’d get in big trouble if he did that to his own slippers.
    They slowed down, then stopped. Then his mother was talking to him in the quiet, nice-lady TV-teacher voice that meant she was furious. A disease, she said, was invisible, because it was so small. It could fly through the air or hide in the water, or on little boys’ dirty fingers, which was why you shouldn’t stick your fingers up your nose and then put them into your mouth, and why you should always wash your hands after you went to the bathroom, and why you shouldn’t wipe …
    “I know,” said Jimmy. “Can I go inside? I’m cold.”
    His mother acted as if she hadn’t heard him. A disease, she continued in that calm, stretched voice, a disease got into youand changed things inside you. It rearranged you, cell by cell, and that made the cells sick. And since you were all made up of tiny cells, working together to make sure you stayed alive, and if enough of the cells got sick, then you …
    “I could get a cough,” said Jimmy. “I could get a cough, right now!” He made a coughing sound.
    “Oh, never mind,” said his mother. She often tried to explain things to him; then she got discouraged. These were the worst moments, for both of them. He resisted her, he pretended he didn’t understand even when he did, he acted stupid, but he didn’t want her to give up on him. He wanted her to be brave, to try her best with him, to hammer away at the wall he’d put up against her, to keep on going.
    “I want to hear about the tiny cells,” he said, whining as much as he dared. “I want to!”
    “Not today,” she said. “Let’s just go in.”

OrganInc Farms
   ~
    Jimmy’s father worked for OrganInc Farms. He was a genographer, one of the best in the field. He’d done some of the key studies on mapping the proteonome when he was still a post-grad, and then he’d helped engineer the Methuselah Mouse as part of Operation Immortality. After that, at OrganInc Farms, he’d been one of the foremost architects of the pigoon project, along with a team of transplant experts and the microbiologists who were splicing against infections.
Pigoon
was only a nickname: the official name was
sus multiorganifer
. But pigoon was what everyone said. Sometimes they said Organ-Oink Farms, but not as often. It wasn’t really a farm anyway, not like the farms in pictures.
    The goal of the pigoon project was to grow an assortment of foolproof human-tissue organs in a transgenic knockout pig host – organs that would transplant smoothly and avoid rejection, but would also be able to fend off attacks by opportunistic microbes and viruses, of which there were more strains every year. A rapid-maturity gene was spliced in so the pigoon kidneys and livers and hearts would be ready sooner, and now they were perfecting a pigoon that could grow five or six kidneys at a time. Such a host animal could be reaped of its extra kidneys; then, rather thanbeing destroyed, it could keep on living and grow more organs, much as a lobster could grow another claw to replace a