“The CorpSeCorps always substituted rumor for action, if action would cost them anything. They believed in the bottom line.” – The Year of the Flood
What made the MaddAddam trilogy so gripping, I feel, is the width of the world. All three books present different slices of pre- and post-apocalyptic human experiences – life through the eyes of Snowman, Ren, and Toby, finally splitting to examine the role of the storyteller in history and fiction alike at the tail end of MaddAddam. The books and their narrative structures lend themselves so easily to being reimagined by another perspective, and that is what propelled me through my part in “Today is the Day of the Flood.”
I started off planning what to do as a final project with vague ideas about retelling the mythology of good, kind Oryx and Crake, the benevolent invented deities, and ended up instead crafting a day in the life of a CorpSeCorpsman. Such is the richness of the text; there are so many avenues left unexplored in the narrative, so many stories untold or demanding more telling. The CorpSeCorps looms over Oryx & Crake, obviously vanishing in the wake of the Waterless Flood. But while the world is still spinning, the Corps maintains its iron grip on the populaces of the Compounds and the pleebs alike. Jimmy, before he’s Snowman, lives in constant fear of Corps interrogations about his runaway rebel mother from the time she vanishes into adulthood. But aside from these appearances, the Corps is largely an invisible force that seems to rule by word of mouth more than force of hand in Oryx & Crake. We as readers don’t know who the Corpsmen were before they were Corpsmen, where they come from, or what their lives are like, and those unanswered questions led me to my character, the junior Corpsman Echo-Minus.
The main theme that led me in my writing was the fact that Jimmy, despite his lack of prized scientific genius, never considers the Corps as a career option. Therefore, I could safely assume that enlisting in the CorpSeCorps is not something a child of the Compounds does. Jimmy is unhappy about ending up at Martha Graham and unhappy with his subsequent jobs until he’s recruited by Crake, but that place for him at Martha Graham still exists, and that’s a luxury he has no awareness of. So who becomes a Corpsman? That question took my story out to the pleebs and I began to explore the concepts of choice and identity and how that translates into social classes in an oppressive dystopian society. Echo-Minus leaves his life, his family, and – most importantly – his name behind in the pleebs he grew up in, desperate for upward social mobility and willing to do anything to grasp at it. He repeatedly has to convince himself that he’s in a better place now in comparison to where he was before to justify sacrificing his identity. He has to keep telling himself he made the right choice, but the fact I wanted to emphasize is that he never had a choice, not a real one. Choosing the Corps over a gang or a religious faction was not a “real” choice, but simply the best one available to him due to the strict social hierarchy that exists over him. Snowman reflects on intellectual hierarchies in the Compounds, while Ren and Toby describe their lives outside those walls and the much harsher hierarchies imposed on them. All these characters are forced into corners and forced to make less than ideal choices: Snowman finds his way back to Crake out of desperation for purpose, Toby ends up with the Gardeners for her own self-preservation after losing her parents and spiraling into worse and worse states, and Ren is abandoned by Lucerne and forced to support herself with sex work. (It’s important to note that she chooses sex work and it’s not a negative reflection on her to do so; however, it’s telling that SeksMart offered the best benefits out of any available profession, and Ren’s decision is motivated by money and less than ideal circumstances: “I wasn’t likely to get anything better without a degree.”)
In the same way, Echo-Minus becomes one with the oppressive system that rules his life and, instead of blaming the system, he blames the product of it: the pleebs themselves. He doesn’t have the benefit of seeing the whole picture. He can only see what’s in front of him, and of course a life in the pleebs is infused with desperation and full of dead ends. Thus, he gives up his identity. I found the idea of Corpsmen being given designated identities that change as they move up the ranks both within the realm of possibility and relevant to the themes of my route in the game – it’s an insidious means of dehumanization. If most Corpsmen come from the pleebs, as I let myself assume, then the Corps would likely be very interested in removing them from their previous lives. Taking one’s name is taking one’s identity, and considering the MaddAddam books are full of people using false names or changing their names along with their situations, I think the Corps designations fit right in thematically. I used the NATO phonetic alphabet, both because it’s an international code and therefore ubiquitous and already associated with government usage, and because the NATO letters carry their own meanings when used in the International Code of Signals. I chose “Echo” solely because of Echo-Minus’s fixation on his past, how it lingers with him and keeps “echoing” in his internal monologue, but “Uniform” and “Kilo,” Echo-Minus’s Corpsman coworkers, were names chosen by their International Code of Signals meanings; “Uniform,” as a single-flag signal, means “You are running into danger,” and “Kilo” means “I wish to communicate with you.” In the story, Kilo-Minus imparts bits of information and Uniform’s absence is Echo-Minus’s first signal that something is amiss in-story. The suffixes of plus and minus were my own idea and impart their own hierarchies: plus at the top, with no suffix being neutral, and minus indicating junior status of some variety. Echo-Minus is supposed to be new to the Corps and Kilo-Minus is likely under observation for the way she talks. Uniform’s in good standing, but not the best.
For a choice-based game, Echo-Minus’s route in “Today is the Day of the Flood” is devoid of actual choice to reflect the fact that his own life is devoid of choice as well. My goal was to trick the reader into assuming they’re making choices, but really, each option leads straight to the next. The order can be played with, somewhat, but only in slight and insignificant ways – for example, what order Echo-Minus does his tasks before leaving for the pleebs. He can’t avoid eventually checking his messages at work, nor can he avoid catching Crake’s plague and dying in the Scales and Tails riot. It was funny, but when I set out writing, my sense of empathy for Echo-Minus was limited; he chose to be part of the Corps, I figured. He sold his soul into this oppressive police force in an effort to get ahead, to save himself at the expense of others. But the more I wrote and the more I thought about him and his life, the more empathy I had. He grew his own dimensions as I wrote through him; I felt his frustration, his feeling of futility, his subconscious knowledge that he was making the wrong choices, his suppressed guilt for abandoning his family, the damage dealt to him psychologically by his father’s death. He made an impossible choice, and no matter what he may have done, there would have been negative side effects. My route ends with Echo-Minus’s death in the pleebs, despite his desperation to not die in the pleebs, but the real tragedy is that he can’t remember his real name. He beat his real name out of his mind, and at that last critical moment as he fights to die as himself, not as “Echo-Minus,” he fails. The entire story is wrapped up in this identity crisis, exacerbated by the external world but fought internally. Echo-Minus depersonalized himself (and the people of the pleebs) to separate himself from his past and his family, but in that process of depersonalization, he lost everything that made him human. This is how the Corps operates. They prey on people desperate for a way out, and merely trap them in a different way.
SOURCES/EXTRA READING
A Study of Prisoners and Guards in a Simulated Prison (1973) [.pdf], otherwise known as “the Stanford Prison Experiment,” a famous study about tensions between the imprisoned and their imprisoners. Most significant to Echo-Minus’s story was how the students designated as “guards” in the study felt they had to prove their authority through violence and other oppressive tactics; similarly, he truly feels a need to prove himself as different from other pleeblanders to distance himself from them and their lifestyle.
Sheckels, Theodore F. The Political in Margaret Atwood’s Fiction: The Writing on the Wall of the Tent (available in part via Google Books). The chapter about The Year of the Flood contains some analysis of the role of the Corps and contemplates how much power they really hold, as well as asserting that relatively little is known about them, which made me feel better about making things up.
Oates, Joyce Carol. “Margaret Atwood’s Tale.” The New York Review (available online). Joyce Carol Oates, another contemporary female novelist, covers a majority of Atwood’s writing in this analysis, but about halfway through she discusses Oryx & Crake exclusively. I liked getting the perspective of a fellow writer.
