The Year of the Flood

Stuck in the Sticky Zone, Ren remembered Adam One’s words that “even bad things did some good because they were a challenge” (332). She tried meditating in her boredom, but unsuccessfully. Afterward, Ren turned on the TV and listened to the news about “another minor epidemic” (332), but it didn’t alarm her because she knew that the Corporations would invent a treatment.

After the news, Ren turned on the web camera to see what was happening in the club. She noticed that the Painballers started a fierce fight. Soon someone threw a bottle at the camera and smashed it, and it took Ren some time to turn on another one. When she finally looked into the Snakepit again, all the customers were gone, and two Scales and Tails girls, Savona and Crimson Petal, are dead. Savona had blood all over her face; Crimson Petal had one of the ropes around her neck and a bottle shoved between her legs. Then Ren heard noises outside the Sticky Zone door and saw Mordis on the video screen. He stared at her and whispered, “Your name” (334). Suddenly, one of the Painballers put a slice of a bottle to Mordis’s throat and demanded the door code. After Mordis refused to open the door, and the Painballer killed him. CorpSeMen arrive and arrest the men who started the fight. Since Mordis was the only one who knew the Sticky Zone door code, Ren was locked inside with no one to save her.

With no one else left at Scales and Tails, Ren tried to calm herself down by hoping that SeksMart would eventually send cleaning staff to the club who would rescue her. But the following day, she heard on the news that the previously reported minor epidemic had turned into “an eruptive plague” (336) that spread all over the world. Since the media, controlled by the Corporations, usually lied when something like this happened, the fact that they were reporting the real story proved its severity. Soon after, people in biosuits came and took away the dead bodies. Even though Ren screamed the whole time, they didn’t hear her or check the second floor. Although Ren was trapped, being in the Sticky Zone prevented her from getting infected by the plague. Shortly after, there was no more news, because there was no one left alive.

Ren tried to keep her spirits up by rationing the food in the minifridge. As long as the solar didn’t break down, the water pump, the minifridge, the freezer, and the air filters would keep working. Ren tried to stay practical, making an inventory of all the food she had and realizing that if she ate just a little every day, she had enough for about six weeks.

Worried about Amanda, Ren tried to get in touch with her, to tell her to come to Scales and Tails, but there was no service. After a while, Ren received a call from Amanda, who said she was in Ohio. Before Ren could warn her about the epidemic, the signal disappeared again.

Thoughts of Amanda made Ren remember when she took the bullet train to Martha Graham Academy. Then she’d felt like she had lost not just Amanda but “everything in [her] life that had any meaning” (340), including the Gardeners and Jimmy. Although Ren was still in love with him, she realized that he had long forgotten about her.

When she got to college, she took Dance Calisthenics and Dramatic Expression, hoping to get a job as an exercise program instructor for the Corporations. The college campus was run down, and as a first-year student, Ren had to share a suite with a roommate. She was assigned to a boy named Buddy the Third, who was in Football. Ren had to keep the door on her side of their shared bathroom locked because “the guys on the football team were known for date rape” (341).

Since Ren’s roommate was usually hungover in the mornings, she often went to Happicuppa for breakfast. One morning, on her way there, she saw a group of people picketing the franchise and recognized Bernice among the protesters. After momentary doubt, Ren approached and asked Bernice to have a drink, because she wanted “to put things right” (343). Bernice still held a grudge against Ren, but she reluctantly agreed to meet after the protest. During their conversation, Bernice said that Veena had gone onto a HelthWyzer vitamin-supplements franchise and joined a religion called the Known Fruits, “who claimed it was a mark of God’s favour to be rich” (344). Veena wanted Bernice to major in Business, but Bernice said she was still a Gardener by faith, so she took How to Profit from Holistic Healing instead. After Ren told her about Buddy the Third, Bernice complained about her former roommate as well, mentioning that his name was Jimmy. When Bernice asked Ren if she would like to move in with her since she was no longer sharing a suite with Jimmy, Ren quickly changed the subject not to offend her by saying no. She apologized for telling Bernice that Burt was having sex with Nuala, but Bernice didn’t defend him and instead said that he was “a generate” who didn’t stop at just groping little girls’ armpits. Bernice explained that when she decided not to suffer his abuses in silence, she told Veena what happened, and Veena informed the CorpSeCorps.

During their conversation, Ren felt as if she was “still just as much of a simpy lightweight as [she’d] ever been” (346). She didn’t know this was the last time she’d see Bernice. Years later she saw on TV that Bernice was killed in a raid on a Gardeners safe house.

Sometime after her conversation with Bernice, Ren saw Jimmy on campus. Although he saw Ren, too, he didn’t wave and pretended he didn’t know her, proving he had no feelings for Ren. One of her classmates, a girl named Shayluba, mentioned to Ren that she used to date Jimmy, but they broke up because he said he was “incapable of commitment because of the girlfriends he’d had in high school” (348). Ren thought he meant Wakulla Price, but Shayluba said Jimmy said it was Ren who broke his heart.

After two years at Martha Graham, Lucerne told Ren that her biological father, Frank, had been kidnapped by a rival Corporation. He knew a formula for a “slow-acting but incurable gene-spliced disease germ” (350) that was put into HelthWyzer supplements so that they could make a lot of money selling the treatments. Since HelthWyzer didn’t think his life was more valuable than the formula, Frank was murdered. HelthWyzer wasn’t worried about its reputation because “the media Corps controlled what was news and what wasn’t” (350).

As a result, Lucerne couldn’t support Ren any longer, which meant that Ren would have to leave Martha Graham. Lucerne also announced that she was moving to the CryoJeenyus Compound because she was in love with a man who worked there.

Since Ren dropped out of school before graduating, she went to a job fair on campus where “the various Corps set up interview booths” (352). Her Dance Calisthenics teacher told her to talk to Scales and Tails, because it was “a legitimate Corp with health benefits and a dental plan, so it wasn’t like being a prostitute” (352). Ren met Mordis there, and when she did a routine dance for him, he made her an offer. But Ren also saw the AnooYoo booth, and a woman who worked there reminded her of Toby. The woman actually was Toby, though disguised. With the Gardeners’ support, she changed her name to Tobiatha, altered her appearance, and took a job at AnooYoo to hide from the vengeful Blanco.

Seeing Ren, Toby took her aside and asked about her current situation. Toby didn’t tell Ren about her real identity, but she offered her a job as an apprentice at AnooYoo. Ren agreed but took Mordis’s card just in case she changed her mind.

When Ren relocated to the AnooYoo Spa, she liked it there. It was situated in the middle of Heritage Park, so the air was better, and they had their own organic vegetable garden. Her task was to fold sheets and towels in the laundry room, and she enjoyed the work because it was peaceful. On her third day there, Toby took Ren aside and told her that she had recognized Ren right away. She said that since the Gardner had been destroyed and the Gardeners were outlawed, it was their duty to look after each other.

Ren didn’t know what had happened to the Garden, and the news upset her because she had hoped to go back there “if things got really bad” (355). Ren shared with Toby everything that had happened since she left the Garden, and Toby warned her that Lucerne came to the spa regularly, so Ren should be careful not to run into her. Toby promised Ren that she would take care of her because she, too, had a hard childhood and was an orphan. She then told Ren about her Ararat with dried food, sharing the door code in case Ren ever needed it.

Since Ren was desperate to talk to Amanda, after being at AnooYoo for almost a year, Toby managed to get in touch with her “through mutual acquaintances on the Internet” (357). Amanda was living near Heritage Park, and Toby arranged a pass for Ren to go see her.

During their meeting, Ren found out that Amanda had been working as a bioartist, and she had a boyfriend named Jimmy, who was “sweet though really moody at times because he was still getting over some teen-lust girlfriend” (359). There was a picture of them on the fridge, and Ren saw that it was really Jimmy. Although she was hurt, she realized that Amanda had no idea about their history, so she hadn’t done it on purpose. Amanda gave Ren her cellphone number, and they made plans to meet again.

Back at the Spa, Ren was so distracted by thoughts of Amanda and Jimmy that she forgot Lucerne had an appointment that day. When she bumped into her, Lucerne didn’t react in any way, which made Ren feel “like being erased off the slate of the universe—to have your own mother act as if you’d never been born” (360). At that moment, Ren realized that she wanted to leave the spa to be on her own, so she found Mordis’s card and left a goodbye note for Toby.

At Scales and Tails, Mordis became a “the closest thing to a father [Ren] was ever going to get” (362). He praised her talent and told her she was “the answer to every dream, wet ones included” (362). While dancing on the trapeze, Ren imagined that she was performing just for Jimmy.

She and Amanda talked on the phone sometimes, and during one of their conversations Amanda mentioned that she and Jimmy had broken up, which made Ren very happy. After some time, Glenn started coming to Scales and Tails regularly. He was working for the Rejoov Corp on an initiative called the Paradice Project, and although he was vague about it, he sometimes hinted that they were designing a perfect human being.

During his nights at the club, he rented the feather-ceiling room and bought drinks and drugs and girls—not for himself, but for the men with him. When he asked for two or three girls, he didn’t use them for sex but for conducting strange experiments, like measuring their vocal cords.

After a while he started bringing an Asian Fusion woman with a foreign accent. She was a Rejoov executive—Senior VP Satisfaction Enhancement—and she was there because her company had chosen Scales and Tails as a venue for trying their new product, the BlyssPluss pill. Ren could tell that the woman was in fact “a girl for rent” (366), but Glenn acted “like she was the first, the last, and only girl on the planet” (368). Glenn called her Oryx, and she called him Crake. Ren knew these were extinct animal names, but she didn’t tell anyone.

One night Glenn ordered up a room, drinks, and girls for “an extra-special guest” (366). When Ren came into the room, she realized that the special guest was Jimmy, but he didn’t recognize her because “he was flying so high he was almost blind” (367).