The MaddAddam Trilogy by Margaret Atwood

she couldn’t remember his name; not only that, she couldn’t remember Crake’s name either. Sometimes she would ask Crake if his room was tidy, though she never went in there herself.
    “She believes in respecting a child’s privacy,” said Crake, straight-faced.
    “I bet it’s your mouldy socks,” said Jimmy. “All the perfumesof Arabia will not sweeten these little socks.” He’d recently discovered the joys of quotation.
    “For that we’ve got room spray,” said Crake.
    As for Uncle Pete, he was rarely home before seven. HelthWyzer was expanding like helium, and therefore he had a lot of new responsibilities. He wasn’t Crake’s real uncle, he was just Crake’s mother’s second husband. He’d taken on that status when Crake had been twelve, a couple of years too old for the “uncle” tag to have been viewed by him as anything but totally rancid. Yet Crake had accepted the status quo, or so it appeared. He’d smile, he’d say
Sure, Uncle Pete
and
That’s right, Uncle Pete
when the man was around, even though Jimmy knew Crake disliked him.
    One afternoon in – what? March, it must have been, because it was already hot as hell outside – the two of them were watching porn in Crake’s room. Already it felt like old time’s sake, already it felt like nostalgia – something they were too grown-up for, like middle-aged guys cruising the pleebland teeny clubs. Still, they dutifully lit up a joint, hacked into Uncle Pete’s digital charge card via a new labyrinth, and started surfing. They checked into Tart of the Day, which featured elaborate confectionery in the usual orifices, then went to Superswallowers; then to a Russian site that employed ex-acrobats, ballerinas, and contortionists.
    “Whoever said a guy can’t suck his own?” was Crake’s comment. The high-wire act with the six flaming torches was pretty good, but they’d seen things like that before.
    Then they went to HottTotts, a global sex-trotting site. “The next best thing to being there,” was how it was advertised. It claimed to show real sex tourists, filmed while doing things they’d be put in jail for back in their home countries. Their faces weren’t visible, their names weren’t used, but the possibilities for blackmail, Snowman realizes now, must have been extensive. The locations were supposed to be countries where life wascheap and kids were plentiful, and where you could buy anything you wanted.
    This was how the two of them first saw Oryx. She was only about eight, or she looked eight. They could never find out for certain how old she’d been then. Her name wasn’t Oryx, she didn’t have a name. She was just another little girl on a porno site.
    None of those little girls had ever seemed real to Jimmy – they’d always struck him as digital clones – but for some reason Oryx was three-dimensional from the start. She was small-boned and exquisite, and naked like the rest of them, with nothing on her but a garland of flowers and a pink hair ribbon, frequent props on the sex-kiddie sites. She was on her knees, with another little girl on either side of her, positioned in front of the standard gargantuan Gulliver-in-Lilliput male torso – a life-sized man shipwrecked on an island of delicious midgets, or stolen away and entranced, forced to experience agonizing pleasures by a trio of soulless pixies. The guy’s distinguishing features were concealed – bag with eyeholes over the head, surgical tape over the tattoos and scars: few of these types wanted to be spotted by the folks back home, though the possibility of detection must have been part of the thrill.
    The act involved whipped cream and a lot of licking. The effect was both innocent and obscene: the three of them were going over the guy with their kittenish tongues and their tiny fingers, giving him a thorough workout to the sound of moans and giggles. The giggles must have been recorded, because they weren’t coming from the three girls: they all