By unspoken consent they’d given up on Blood and Roses, which was fine with Crake because he was into something new – Extinctathon, an interactive biofreak masterlore game he’d found on the Web. EXTINCTATHON, Monitored by MaddAddam. Adam named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones. Do you want to play? That was what came up when you logged on. You then had to click Yes, enter your codename, and pick one of the two chat rooms – Kingdom Animal, Kingdom Vegetable. Then some challenger would come on-line, using his own codename – Komodo, Rhino, Manatee, Hippocampus Ramulosus – and propose a contest. Begins with, number of legs, what is it? The it would be some bioform that had kakked out within the past fifty years – no T-Rex, no roc, no dodo, and points off for getting the time frame wrong. Then you’d narrow it down, Phylum Class Order Family Genus Species, then the habitat and when last seen, and what had snuffed it. (Pollution, habitat destruction, credulous morons who thought that eating its horn would give them a boner.) The longer the challenger held out, the more points he got, but you could win big bonuses for speed. It helped to have the MaddAddam printout of every extinct species, but that gave you only the Latin names, and anyway it was a couple of hundred pages of fine print and filled with obscure bugs, weeds, and frogs nobody had ever heard of. Nobody except, it seemed, the Extinctathon Grandmasters, who had brains like search engines.
2 comments:
By unspoken consent they’d given up on Blood and Roses, which was fine with Crake because
he was into something new – Extinctathon, an interactive biofreak masterlore game he’d found
on the Web. EXTINCTATHON, Monitored by MaddAddam. Adam named the living animals,
MaddAddam names the dead ones. Do you want to play? That was what came up when you
logged on. You then had to click Yes, enter your codename, and pick one of the two chat rooms –
Kingdom Animal, Kingdom Vegetable. Then some challenger would come on-line, using his
own codename – Komodo, Rhino, Manatee, Hippocampus Ramulosus – and propose a contest.
Begins with, number of legs, what is it? The it would be some bioform that had kakked out
within the past fifty years – no T-Rex, no roc, no dodo, and points off for getting the time frame
wrong. Then you’d narrow it down, Phylum Class Order Family Genus Species, then the habitat
and when last seen, and what had snuffed it. (Pollution, habitat destruction, credulous morons
who thought that eating its horn would give them a boner.) The longer the challenger held out,
the more points he got, but you could win big bonuses for speed. It helped to have the
MaddAddam printout of every extinct species, but that gave you only the Latin names, and
anyway it was a couple of hundred pages of fine print and filled with obscure bugs, weeds, and
frogs nobody had ever heard of. Nobody except, it seemed, the Extinctathon Grandmasters, who
had brains like search engines.
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Diprotodontia
Family: Phascolarctidae
Genus: Phascolarctos
Species: Phascolarctos cinereus
Goodbye Phascolarctos cinereus.
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