Generosity: An Enhancement

by Richard Powers

  She shook her head, exasperated.

  “Good. Because you’ve had . . . We’ve been over this in the past. You are a wonderful woman, Candace. But you do need to protect yourself from your best intentions sometimes. Do be careful. Boundaries get blurry so fast.”

  She sat still for the justified lecture, and when Dennis encouraged her to come back and talk if she ever felt any uncertainty, she nodded and said she would.

  Candace Weld arrives right on time, Saturday night, an experimental tease in her tea-green eyes and a veil of light snow on her hair. She shows up with her chest-high son, who holds out one diffident paw to shake Russell’s. The child has seen this drill before, and places no faith in the latest candidate. As soon as he rescues his hand from Russell’s, he pulls a flashing, bleeping Game Boy back out of his pocket.

  Stone ushers them in from the cold. She no longer looks that much like Grace. He was crazy ever to imagine a resemblance. Candace’s features are more fluid and eager. Her eyes don’t have Grace’s webcam look. Her nose twitches like it’s trying to sniff him. She hands him a nice Shiraz, then cups his elbow hello. With her other hand, she shakes a colorful sack of pungent Happy Meal. “For Gabe,” she says.

  “I’m carnivorous,” the child at her side explains.

  Russell slaps his forehead. “I should have asked.”

  The boy shrugs. “Many primates are. But those are cool pictures, anyway.” He points to Stone’s pastels. “Are they like dungeon creatures? Three stars, at least.”

  Russell takes a beat. “Thanks, I think.”

  Over the meal, he and Candace hunt for a conversation topic other than the only one they’ve ever talked about. Weld is oddly at ease in her awkwardness. She asks about Stone’s magazine editing. He’s too considerate to give her a real answer.

  Finally, it’s Stone and the boy who find a theme. Gabe regales his host with tales of an online world called Futopia. The boy raves about his life as a Ranger, discovering ancient artifacts and selling them for tons of gold in cities scattered around virgin continents. Stone marvels to see this sullen child bloom into a full-fledged raconteur, a Marco Polo who can’t get enough of the questions Stone asks.

  The mother is embarrassed for the first time all evening. “It’s terrifying. Like there’s a probe directly stimulating the pleasure centers of his brain. He gets ninety minutes a night. I know: it should be zero.”

  The kid is all over her in panic. “Mom, no! We’ve talked about this. It’s social. It’s completely social. There’s almost no killing at all.”

  After dessert, when the talk runs out, Candace stands and starts stacking dishes. “Leave them,” Russell says. “I’ll get them after you go.” But she insists on helping.

  He fills the basin with hot water. She takes a dish towel and stands next to him, snatching dishes as he cleans them. It surprises him to discover how easy she is to be with—just company, just variation, a respite from his own inescapable self. Side by side, five inches from each other, in front of the double basin, he doesn’t even have to look at her to find her painfully pleasing.

  She grins, admiring his washing technique. “You’ve done this before, haven’t you?”

  Candace Weld is flirting. Russell would like to call it something else, but English won’t cooperate. Chapter four: in any closely observed scene, your key protagonists will have different action objectives, driven by different inner needs.

  The boy Gabe sits at the cleared table, flipping through a book that Stone has left out: Emotional Chemistry: How the Brain Lifts and Lowers Us.

  “You’re still researching?” she asks.

  He twists the sponge into a drinking glass. “Did you know that most people say they are happier than average?”

  “I’m not surprised,” she says.

  “You’re not?”

  “I’m not surprised that that’s what most people say.” She crosses to the cold window casement by the pantry and breathes on the glass. In the condensation, she draws two contentment graphs. The first is a steady, high, straight line. The second is a diagonal, starting at zero and maxing out at the end. She stands aside, a counselor pretending to be an actress playing a schoolteacher. “Which of these two is happier?”

  By any measure that Stone can think of, it’s the first.

  “Now: which life do most people want to have?”

  He stares at his choices. “Are you serious?”

  She shrugs. “Number two is a better story. Most people are already pretty happy. What we really want is to be happier. And most people think they will be, in the future. Keeps us in the trenches, I guess.”

  She rubs her finger slowly across the chill glass, obliterating all graphs.

  “Have you come across Norbert Schwarz’s work? It’s classic. Subjects fill in a questionnaire about life satisfaction. But the subject must go into the next room to make a copy of the questionnaire before filling it in. One group finds a dime sitting on the copy machine. Their lucky day. The control group finds nothing.”

  Stone grips a plate. “Don’t tell me.”

  “I’m afraid I have to; it’s science! The lucky group reports significantly higher satisfaction with their entire life.”

  He grins, shakes his head, and plunges his fists back in the hot water, now tepid to his accustomed hands.

  “Don’t take it so hard.” She grazes his shoulder with her towel. “Works with a chocolate bar, too.”

  He lifts his hands from the water and presses his soapy palms to his cheeks. “We’re pathetic.”

  “We’re beautiful,” she replies. “We just have no idea how we feel or what makes us feel that way!”

  “So feeling good is really that cheap?”

  “Not cheap.” She traces out a quick hieroglyphic on the upper arm of his waffle shirt. “Affordable. And easier than we think.”

  Easy is exactly the problem. He turns and faces her, holds her eyes for the first time all evening. “And Thassa?”

  “And Thassa.” She gazes off into a ceiling corner full of cobwebs he missed in the afternoon’s scrub-down. “She must carry around one hell of a chocolate bar.”

  At the evening’s end, mother and son don coats, scarves, hats, and gloves. Outside, the snow is thin but gathering, a taste of things to come. The boy sticks out a king crab claw and shakes Russell’s hand. He promises to show Stone his life in Futopia, anytime. Bundled, the mother turns to Stone, slips one padded arm around his middle, turns her head away, and pulls him into her. She lays her right ear on his clavicle and listens.

  He plays dead. The one time Grace was this gentle was right before she left.

  Dr. Weld breaks the embrace. “Merry Christmas,” she says. She looks up at him, wincing. She waves an erasing mitten in the air. Don’t worry, it says. Means nothing. A dime’s a dime. Grab it when you see it.

  No one at Truecyte searches for the story. They come across it by data mining, scouring the Web with automated scripts and prospecting bots. The company’s intelligent agents race from server to server at all hours, extracting patterns and converging on the next genetic trends before they’ve even materialized.

  Nodes, clusters, trackbacks, memes . . . Truth follows bandwidth, as sure as use follows invention. By now, the idea is a commonplace: only that massively parallel computer, the entire human race, is powerful enough to interpret the traffic that it generates. No single expert can calculate the outcome of tomorrow’s big game. But the averaged aggregate guess of hundreds of millions of amateurs can come as close as God.

  In this way, a self-assembling network of page traffic presents itself daily to three graduate-student interns trained to prowl around each morning’s tidal pools and pull out shiny things. If two out of the three of them tag the same story, it goes to Kurton’s own news aggregator. And for an hour every morning before dawn, the inventor of rapid gene signature reading mulls over the day’s trove of stories.

  He consumes the feeds, looking for new upheaval, the same constant upheaval that
has carried him this far. He still remembers the Boethius that his ex-wife made him read at Stanford a third of a century ago, insisting it would make him a better person: no one will ever be safe or well until Fortune upends him.

  As Kurton reads, he drags various links into tree branches in his visual concept-mapper, trees that start out as bonsais but—tended and grafted and trained toward the light—grow into redwoods.

  People who read stories about subjective well-being also subscribe to posts about affective set point.

  People who subscribe to posts about affective set point are also interested in genetic basis of happiness.

  People who follow genetic basis of happiness.

  comment and respond to/.

  spend many page minutes with/.

  rate highly/.

  frequently link to.

  one of several mutually quoting accounts of Kabylia’s outpost in Chicago, stories that spread the keyword hyperthymia like a pheromone trail.

  He reads the Reader story and feels the journalist’s excitement. This Kabyle woman has grown up in a vicious free-for-all that makes the stoic Boethius look like a bed-wetting schoolboy. And despite the worst that environment can contribute, her body pumps out the standing gladness that should be every human’s birthright.

  Hunch’s role in science has never embarrassed Kurton. And he has a hunch that this woman may be the missing datum that Truecyte’s three-year study needs. If she isn’t, the study will only be strengthened by learning why. He checks with his schedule keeper, who tells him he’ll be at the University of Chicago in the second week of January, for a debate with an Australian Nobelist in literature who believes that scientific investigation has killed the world’s soul.

  With six clicks, Kurton finds a contact for the immigrant student. He composes an e-mail, using a Tamazight greeting that he picked up on one of his trips to Morocco. He tells her about his work in understanding what makes humans happy, and his hopes for using genetic information to heal the future. He describes how much his lab has already learned by exploring people like her, and he says how much she would contribute to the study. Everyone alive would love to know a little more about how you tick! He mentions that he’s coming to Chicago and asks if they might meet when he’s in the city. He gives her five ways to contact him. And his e-mail software automatically appends, beneath the obligatory block of personal data, his signature quote:

  . . . whatever was the beginning of this world, the end will be glorious and paradisiacal, beyond what our imaginations can now conceive.

  —Joseph Priestley

  PART THREE

  WELL PAST CHANCE

  For the point is this: not that myth refers us back to some original event which has been fancifully transcribed as it passed through the collective memory; but that it refers us forward to something that will happen, that must happen. Myth will become reality, however skeptical we might be.

  —Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters

  And on a May night in the near future, Tonia Schiff will land at Tunis-Carthage International. Seen from the airport shuttle, the dense glow surprises her. So much flickering enterprise up so late, refining fresh surplus into new necessities. Tunis glitters as furtively as any of the earth’s two-hundred-or-so-million-inhabitant cities. This one just happens to be four thousand years old.

  The science-show host wakes up in the Centre Ville, feeling that she’s landed by mistake in southern Italy. Only the palms along Avenue Mohammed V reassure Tonia. And these turn out to be just a holdover French colonial fantasy. For a day, she wanders at random. The perfect day to play the tourist in one’s own life. She climbs up to the Belvedere, loses herself in the tight medina maze, strolls through the bey’s palace. She stands overwhelmed in the heart of the suq, beyond the simplest bargaining.

  A pair of guards turn her away at the entrance to the Grande Mosquée, on account of her clothes. She tells herself she’ll try again later, more suitably dressed, but knows she won’t.

  The city’s scent veers crazily from dawn to dusk. In the morning, fetid breezes blow over the dried salt lake, mixing with exhaust. Toward sundown, the flower vendors creep out to thread the cafés with jasmine garlands. A tiny white snail of a flower, whose scent is like falling down a bottomless well: solvent, secret, and as strange as sex, with final arrival lying just a few inches below reach . . . Tonia Schiff might have come to this place for that smell alone.

  The next day will be clearer still. In midmorning, she’ll make her way out to the marble carcass of Carthage. She winds up sitting at a stone table above the surf, aside the Chicago of the ancient world, scribbling production notes for her redemptive film now under way. Salt spray from the Mediterranean curls her pages. Coastal sun douses her, in a country she was sure she’d never live long enough to see.

  The sea air is heavenly. Even the smearing haze over the city is beautiful. At a nearby table, a family of six picnics. A sinuous voice dances out of their radio; a woman who sounds seven feet tall threads a melody around instruments Schiff can’t even name. She won’t be able to tell the key, the scale, the words, the age, or even the feelings at stake. Her ignorance verges on glorious.

  She digs into her bag and pulls out a beaten-up copy of Frederick P. Harmon’s Make Your Writing Come Alive. The book’s spine was broken long before it came to Tonia. She lays the volume flat on the table, open to chapter two: “Vital Fiction.” Ink fills the margins—words in three languages, sketches, diagrams, snaking arrows. Half the sentences are underlined in an elaborate, uncrackable color-code. The last paragraph on page 123 is double-underscored, in Berber red:

  Here is the single most important secret of vivid writing: let your reader travel freely. No border checks, no customs declarations, no visa: let every reader reach the country of her innermost need.

  In the margin, next to “travel freely,” the Berber woman has written “scares some people.”

  “Innermost” is circled. Above it, the words “le plus profond” lead to another phrase in a language Tonia Schiff won’t be able to tell from random scratches in stone . . .

  Thassa reads Kurton’s message on a computer in a Montreal Public Library branch six blocks from her aunt and uncle’s council flat. She’s still on winter vacation and looking for messages from someone else—an interest only now dawning on me. She has had scores of e-mails from strangers in the last week, but this one ranks with the strangest. She laughs at the would-be Berber greeting. She clicks on the link in Kurton’s signature but can’t make much of the site. She googles “how you tick,” but ends up more in the dark than when she started.

  She refuses to snub anyone, even obvious cranks. Many of the most interesting people in her life seemed like cranks, at first. She forwards the entire message to Chicago, adding a note of her own:

  Chère Candace,

  No foggy clue what this means. Yiii: it’s sci-ence! So you know all about that, and you told me once if anything ever looks funny, just to ask your opinion.

  Your opinion?

  Je t’embrasse très fort.

  T.

  Candace Weld’s opinion was split at best. She read three print interviews with Thomas Kurton and listened to the man play himself on a podcast. She found him vaguely messianic, but neither the thuggish Edward Teller nor the grandiose Craig Venter that scared or envious reporters made him out to be. Weld knew plenty of researchers like Kurton. She’d gone to school with them, studied under them, competed with them for her own PhD. These men had simply accepted science’s latest survival adaptation—salesmanship. Any funded researcher who condemned them was a hypocrite.

  She looked up the full Priestley quote from Kurton’s signature, finding ten different mutations that fanned across the Web in adaptive radiation. Thousands of people were out there, disseminating the clergyman-chemist’s ecstatic vision. The coming paradise was fast becoming a start-up industry all its own:

  [N]ature, including both its materials, and its laws, will be m
ore at our command; men will make their situation in this world abundantly more easy and comfortable; they will probably prolong their existence in it, and will grow daily more happy, each in himself, and more able (and, I believe, more disposed) to communicate happiness to others . . .

  Part of Weld wanted this genomicist to see Thassa, to be there when the transhumanist met something that no amount of blood work, tissue samples, or gene sequencing would ever explain. Thassadit Amzwar’s gift had little to do with molecules; on that, Candace was ready to bet her own well-being. The Kabyle had found something about how best to be alive. Mr. Omega Point could find the same, by meeting her.

  Candace recalled Dennis Winfield’s warning about boundaries, and she briefly considered consulting him. But Thassa had written her as a friend, not as a client. Candace wrote back on her Gmail account, not her college one. She told Thassa what she’d learned about the controversial scientist. Thassa should feel no obligation to meet the man, but if she wanted to, Candace would be happy to chaperone.

  The reply came in, as good as predictable. That’s great. That’s perfect. Can Mister Stone come, too?

  Men will grow daily more happy, each in himself, and more able to communicate happiness to others. Schiff reads the words at the end of dozens of e-mails. She reads at night by the dim ceiling light in her hotel above the ficus trees on Avenue Habib Bourguiba. Whatever the beginning of this world, the end will be glorious and paradisiacal. Beyond imagining . . .

  She carries the man’s correspondence around the globe, along with a dossier of files stolen from the archives of Over the Limit. She searches her folders for that broad-based survey on America’s attitudes toward genetic editing that will open her film in progress: