~
It must have been a month or two after he got the rakunk that Jimmy's father changed jobs. He was headhunted by NooSkins and hired at the second-in-command level - the Vice level, Jimmy's mother called it. Ramona the lab tech from OrganInc made the move with him; she was part of the deal because she was an invaluable asset, said Jimmy's father; she was his right-hand man. ("Joke," he would say to Jimmy, to show that he knew Ramona wasn't really a man. But Jimmy knew that anyway.) Jimmy was more or less glad he might still be seeing Ramona at lunch - at least she was someone familiar - even though his lunches with his father had become few in number and far between.
NooSkins was a subsidiary of HelthWyzer, and so they moved into the HelthWyzer Compound. Their house this time was in the style of the Italian Renaissance, with an arched portico and a lot of glazed earth-tone tiles, and the indoor pool was bigger. Jimmy's mother called it "this barn." She complained about the tight security at the HelthWyzer gates - the guards were ruder, they were suspicious of everyone, they liked to strip search people, women especially. They got a kick out of it, she said.
Jimmy's father said she was making a big deal about nothing. Anyway, he said, there'd been an incident only a few weeks before they'd moved in - some fanatic, a woman, with a hostile bioform concealed in a hairspray bottle. Some vicious Ebola or Marburg splice, one of the fortified hemorrhagics. She'd nuked a guard who'd unwisely had his face mask off, contrary to orders but because of the heat. The woman had been spraygunned at once and neutralized in a vat of bleach, and the poor guard had been whisked into HotBioform and stuck into an 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 their soul to get a second kick at the sexual can? NooSkins for Olds, said the snappy logo. Not that a totally effective method had been found yet: the dozen or so ravaged hopefuls who had volunteered themselves as subjects, paying no fees but signing away their rights to sue, had come out looking like the Mould Creature from Outer Space - uneven in tone, greenish brown, and peeling in ragged strips.
But there were other projects at NooSkins as well. One evening Jimmy's father came home late and a little drunk, with a bottle of champagne. Jimmy took one look at this and got himself out of the way. He'd hidden a tiny mike behind the picture of the seashore in the living room and another one behind the kitchen wall clock - the one that gave a different irritating bird call for every hour - so he could listen in on st
uff that was none of his business. He'd put the mikes together in the Neotechnology class at school; he'd used standard components out of the mini-mikes for wireless computer dictating, which, with a few adjustments, worked fine for eavesdropping.
"What's that for?" said the voice of Jimmy's mother. She meant the champagne.
"We've done it," said Jimmy's father's voice. "I think a little celebration is in order." A scuffle: maybe he'd tried to kiss her.
"Done what?"
Pop of the champagne cork. "Come on, it won't bite you." A pause: he must be pouring it out. Yes: the clink of glasses. "Here's to us."
"Done what? I need to know what I'm drinking to."
Another pause: Jimmy pictured his father swallowing, his Adam's apple going up and down, bobbity-bobble. "It's the neuro-regeneration project. We now have genuine human neo-cortex tissue growing in a pigoon. Finally, after all those duds! Think of the possibilities, for stroke victims, and ..."
"That's all we need," said Jimmy's mother. "More people with the brains of pigs. Don't we have enough of those already?"
"Can't you be positive, just for once? All this negative stuff, this is no good, that's no good, nothing's ever good enough, according to you!"
"Positive about what? That you've thought up yet another way to rip off a bunch of desperate people?" said Jimmy's mother in that new slow, anger-free voice.
"God, you're cynical!"
"No, you are. You and your smart partners. Your colleagues. It's wrong, the whole organization is wrong, it's a moral cesspool and you know it."
"We can give people hope. Hope isn't ripping off!"
"At NooSkins' prices it is. You hype your wares and take all their money and then they run out of cash, and it's no more treatments for them. They can rot as far as you and your pals are concerned. Don't you remember the way we used to talk, everything we wanted to do? Making life better for people - not just people with money. You used to be so ... you had ideals, then."