He’d meant well, or at least he hadn’t meant ill. He’d never wanted to hurt anyone, not seriously, not in real space-time. Fantasies didn’t count.

It was a Saturday. Jimmy was lying in bed. He was finding it hard to get up these days; he’d been late for work a couple of times in the past week, and added to the times before that and the times before that, it was going to be trouble for him soon. Not that he’d been out carousing: the reverse. He’d been avoiding human contact. The AnooYoo higher-ups hadn’t chewed him out yet; probably they knew about his mother and her traitor’s death. Well, of course they did, though it was the kind of deep dark open secret that was never mentioned in the Compounds—bad luck, evil eye, might be catching, best to act dumb and so forth. Probably they were cutting him some slack.

There was one good thing anyway: maybe now that they’d finally scratched his mother off their list, the Corpsmen would leave him alone.

“Get it up, get it up, get it up,” said his voice clock. It was pink, phallus-shaped: a Cock Clock, given to him as a joke by one of his lovers. He’d thought it was funny at the time, but this morning he found it insulting. That’s all he was to her, to all of them: a mechanical joke. Nobody wanted to be sexless, but nobody wanted to be nothing but sex, Crake said once. Oh yes siree, thought Jimmy. Another human conundrum.

“What’s the time?” he said to the clock. It dipped its head, sproinged upright again.

“It’s noon. It’s noon, it’s noon, it’s…”

“Shut up,” said Jimmy. The clock wilted. It was programmed to respond to harsh tones.

Jimmy considered getting out of bed, going to the kitchenette, opening a beer. That was quite a good idea. He’d had a late night. One of his lovers, the woman who’d given him the clock in fact, had made her way through his wall of silence. She’d turned up around ten with some takeout—Nubbins and fries, she knew what he liked—and a bottle of Scotch.

“I’ve been concerned about you,” she’d said. What she’d really wanted was a quick furtive jab, so he’d done his best and she’d had a fine time, but his heart wasn’t in it and that must have been obvious. Then they’d had to go through What’s the matter, Are you bored with me, I really care about you, and so forth and blah blah.

“Leave your husband,” Jimmy had said, to cut her short. “Let’s run away to the pleeblands and live in a trailer park.”

“Oh, I don’t think… You don’t mean that.”

“What if I did?

“You know I care about you. But I care about him too, and…”

“From the waist down.”

“Pardon?” She was a genteel woman, she said Pardon? instead of What?

“I said, from the waist down. That’s how you really care about me. Want me to spell it out for you?”

“I don’t know what’s got into you, you’ve been so mean lately.”

“No fun at all.”

“Well, actually, no.”

“Then piss off.”

After that they’d had a fight, and she’d cried, which strangely enough had made Jimmy feel better. After that they’d finished the Scotch. After that they’d had more sex, and this time Jimmy had enjoyed himself but his lover hadn’t, because he’d been too rough and fast and had not said anything flattering to her the way he usually did. Great ass, and so on and so forth.

He shouldn’t have been so crabby. She was a fine woman with real tits and problems of her own. He wondered whether he’d ever see her again. Most likely he would, because she’d had that I can cure you look in her eyes when she’d left.

After Jimmy had taken a leak and was getting the beer out of the fridge, his intercom buzzed. There she was, right on cue. Immediately he felt surly again. He went over to the speakerphone. “Go away,” he said.

“It’s Crake. I’m downstairs.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Jimmy. He punched in the numbers for the videocam in the lobby: it was Crake, all right, giving him the finger and the grin.

“Let me in,” said Crake, and Jimmy did, because right then Crake was about the only person he wanted to see.

Crake was much the same. He had the same dark clothing. He wasn’t even balder.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” said Jimmy. After the initial surge of pleasure he felt embarrassed that he wasn’t dressed yet, and that his apartment was knee-deep in dust bunnies and cigarette butts and dirty glassware and empty Nubbins containers, but Crake didn’t seem to notice.

“Nice to feel I’m welcome,” said Crake.

“Sorry. Things haven’t been too good lately,” said Jimmy.

“Yeah. I saw that. Your mother. I e-mailed, but you didn’t answer.”

“I haven’t been picking up my e-mails,” said Jimmy.

“Understandable. It was on brainfrizz: inciting to violence, membership in a banned organization, hampering the dissemination of commercial products, treasonable crimes against society. I guess that last was the demos she was in. Throwing bricks or something. Too bad, she was a nice lady.”

Neither nice nor lady was applicable in Jimmy’s view, but he wasn’t up to debating this, not so early in the day. “Want a beer?” he said.

“No thanks,” said Crake. “I just came to see you. See if you were all right.”

“I’m all right,” said Jimmy.

Crake looked at him. “Let’s go to the pleeblands,” he said. “Troll a few bars.”

“This is a joke, right?” said Jimmy.

“No, really. I’ve got the passes. My regular one, and one for you.”

By which Jimmy knew that Crake really must be somebody. He was impressed. But much more than that, he was touched that Crake would experience concern for him, would come all this way to seek him out. Even though they hadn’t been in close touch lately—Jimmy’s fault—Crake was still his friend.

Five hours later they were strolling through the pleeblands north of New New York. It had taken only a couple of hours to get there—bullet train to the nearest Compound, then an official Corps car with an armed driver, laid on by whoever was doing Crake’s bidding. The car had taken them into the heart of what Crake called the action, and dropped them off there. They’d be shadowed though, said Crake. They’d be protected. So no harm would come to them.

Before setting out, Crake had stuck a needle in Jimmy’s arm—an all-purpose, short-term vaccine he’d cooked himself. The pleeblands, he said, were a giant Petri dish: a lot of guck and contagious plasm got spread around there. If you grew up surrounded by it you were more or less immune, unless a new bioform came raging through; but if you were from the Compounds and you set foot in the pleebs, you were a feast. It was like having a big sign on your forehead that said, Eat Me.

Crake had nose cones for them too, the latest model, not just to filter microbes but also to skim out particulate. The air was worse in the pleeblands, he said. More junk blowing in the wind, fewer whirlpool purifying towers dotted around.

Jimmy had never been to the pleeblands before, he’d only looked over the wall. He was excited to finally be there, though he wasn’t prepared for so many people so close to one another, walking, talking, hurrying somewhere. Spitting on the sidewalk was a feature he personally could skip. Rich pleeblanders in luxury cars, poor ones on solarbikes, hookers in fluorescent Spandex, or in short shorts, or—more athletically, showing off their firm thighs—on scooters, weaving in and out of traffic. All skin colours, all sizes. Not all prices though, said Crake: this was the low end. So Jimmy could window-shop, but he shouldn’t purchase. He should save that for later.

The pleebland inhabitants didn’t look like the mental deficients the Compounders were fond of depicting, or most of them didn’t. After a while Jimmy began to relax, enjoy the experience. There was so much to see—so much being hawked, so much being offered. Neon slogans, billboards, ads everywhere. And there were real tramps, real beggar women, just as in old DVD musicals: Jimmy kept expecting them to kick up their battered bootsoles, break into song. Real musicians on the street corners, real bands of street urchins. Asymmetries, deformities: the faces here were a far cry from the regularity of the Compounds. There were even bad teeth. He was gawking.