A Creative Response to Oryx and Crake

New Religion

He gets up intending just to piss. Awoken in the night by the uncomfortable feeling of a full bladder, Jimmy pads to the bathroom and relieves himself. If the night had been going as planned, if his mind felt as tired as his body does, he’d have headed back to bed and fallen asleep without a second glance.

As it is, Jimmy picks up a glass and pours himself a drink from the minibar. The cold, clinical light of the fridge illuminates his dark room, casting strange eldritch shadows across piles of laundry and discarded bed sheets. His bed suddenly looks unappealing; vast, empty, uncomfortably warm. Struck by a strange impulse, Jimmy’s feet carry him out of the room, into the hallway beyond.

The corridors of Paradice are dark. Jimmy’s sure that somewhere within the complex MaddAddam geniuses are working away on some scientific equation, but here, so close to where Crake himself sleeps, everything is quiet. He turns left, down past Crake’s office with the eggplant painting, following a silent siren call towards the main event.

He comes to the window. Absurdly, he feels like the investigating officer in a shitty crime procedural. Watching his suspects behind mirrored glass, drink in hand. Jimmy takes a sip of his scotch, and barely feels the burn. Behind the glass, a small, pristine Eden sits in repose. The simulated sky is a deep Windsor Violet, devoid of any stars. It takes him a moment, at first he thinks he’s just missing them, but no, there are no stars. No pinpricks of light in the heavenly canopy. Jimmy wonders why. Are the stars too creative? Too conducive to fantasy, myth or religion? On Crake’s desk, is there a scrawled note about the effect of starlight on the human brain?

There is a moon, though. Glowing and incandescent, it paints the clearing, the sleeping forms of Crakers with silver. Suddenly, Jimmy’s reminded of one of Crake’s geeky magnets: There are two moons, the one you can see and the one you can’t.

“Can’t sleep?”

Jimmy turns, somehow not surprised to see Crake’s gangly silhouette. He shrugs. “Can you?”

Crake comes over to the window. “No.”  He takes Jimmy’s glass from him gently, holds it between two pale fingers. He raises it to his mouth and takes a sip. It’s unlike Crake to drink. Though not preachy by nature, his feelings about alcohol and it’s effect on the brain’s processes are clear.

They stand in silence. It’s in moments like these that Jimmy misses high school, in all it’s asinine simplicity. Oryx is somewhere halfway across the world, selling youth and immortality with her beautiful ageless face. Still, she’s somehow there between the two of them, faintly admonishing, reminding Jimmy of his deceits. He wonders, as he has before, if Crake knows.

But if he does, he doesn’t show it. Crake looks out over his creations, proud and protective like a father. But there’s something else in his expression, something that Jimmy can’t quite identify. For the first time, he wonders if there are consequences to playing God.

“What do you think?” asks Crake quietly.

What does Jimmy think? He thinks a great deal, and very little of it about the Crakers. Still…  “I don’t know,” he says, because he doesn’t. The Crakers are amazing, an unprecedented scientific advance. But there’s something wrong about them. He watches one of them stand up, stretch in the oncoming light of their false-dawn. Her skin is too smooth, too unmarred, her proportions exact. Jimmy looks at their sleeping, humanoid forms and feels a profound nothing.

Crake nods. “Thanks.” Then he’s gone, taking Jimmy’s glass with him.

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I chose to write the missing scene I did because I wanted to explore more of Crake and Jimmy's relationship. I also found the possible criticisms of Crake's work interesting. Personally, I wonder if Jimmy ever had moments of doubt whilst working for Rejoov.