Snowman lies splayed out on the grillwork of the bed, in the liquid shade, giving himself up to the heat. Let’s pretend this is a vacation! A schoolteacher’s voice this time, perky, condescending. Ms. Stratton Call-Me-Sally, with the big butt. Let’s pretend this, let’s pretend that. They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing. Let’s pretend I’m here with you, big butt and all, getting ready to suck your brains right out your dick.

Is there a faint stirring? He looks down at himself: no action. Sally Stratton vanishes, and just as well. He has to find more and better ways of occupying his time. His time, what a bankrupt idea, as if he’s been given a box of time belonging to him alone, stuffed to the brim with hours and minutes that he can spend like money. Trouble is, the box has holes in it and the time is running out, no matter what he does with it.

He might whittle, for instance. Make a chess set, play games with himself. He used to play chess with Crake but they’d played by computer, not with actual chessmen. Crake won mostly. There must be another knife somewhere; if he sets his mind to it, goes foraging, scrapes around in the leftovers, he’d be sure to find one. Now that he’s thought of it he’s surprised he hasn’t thought of it before.

He lets himself drift back to those after-school times with Crake. It was harmless enough at first. They might play Extinctathon, or one of the others. Three-Dimensional Waco, Barbarian Stomp, Kwiktime Osama. They all used parallel strategies: you had to see where you were headed before you got there, but also where the other guy was headed. Crake was good at those games because he was a master of the sideways leap. Jimmy could sometimes win at Kwiktime Osama though, as long as Crake played the Infidel side.

No hope of whittling that kind of game, however. It would have to be chess.