Generosity: An Enhancement

by Richard Powers

  “I can’t,” he tells her. “That’s the problem. It’s not mine to tell.”

  Then change it all, slightly, so no one gets hurt. Set the tale in some imaginary landscape, some otherworldly Chicago of naked invention. Forget about scene or plot or dialogue. Engineer a style you yourself would never dream of using. Confess or lie, show or tell, over-or underwrite: it doesn’t matter. Your words will be public again, and no one will even know they exist, except one or two accidental scavengers. And everything you write can alter in a heartbeat.

  He does as commanded. It’s almost a pleasure, two nights later, to describe how miserably the experiment fails.

  “I just kept thinking, We’re overrun with this stuff. It’s out of control. Kill yours before it multiplies.”

  “I see,” she says. Wholly without judgment. He can hear her private diagnosis: patient has lost his nerve.

  He closes his eyes and writes in the air. Left-handed, from Yacine’s Nedjma: Keep still or say the unspeakable.

  Another night. Candace says, “Thassa called today.”

  “Did she?” The topic might be Chinese hydroelectric development.

  “She was full of Boston stories.”

  “Was she?”

  “She thinks she’s upset you.”

  “Why would she think that?”

  Candace won’t play. She’s trained not to. “You never answered her messages from the trip. She’s afraid you’re angry at her for going out.”

  He’s not even sure what that might mean: Thassa afraid. She can’t possibly be losing any sleep. He doesn’t care who she gives her genome away to. He doesn’t care what science might find out about her. He wants Truecyte to work out the precise biochemistry for every ridiculous bait-and-switch human emotion that people have ever taken seriously and then develop an antidote. Fifty years from tonight, between genetic intervention, rising consumer satisfaction, upgraded telecommunications, pharmacology, the solidifying hive mind, improved diet, exercise, and behavioral modification, anger will be less of a concern than ringworm.

  “I’d be ridiculous to be angry at her,” he says.

  “You would be,” the therapist agrees.

  Chance grows like a tumor in Stone. Ever since Thassa went to Boston, he’s been plagued by the body’s code, the twenty thousand genes hatching their million protein votes into his heart, lungs, and flooded brain. In the dark, safely on his end of the phone line, he asks the counselor, “How programmed are we?”

  Candace will not fictionalize for him. The data keep accumulating: impulsivity, aggression, anxiety, self-destruction—all heritable. The genetic contribution to addictive behavior: 30 to 50 percent. Anorexia and bulimia: a 70 percent genetic component. “But still, the students who come to see me change. They can get better.”

  “From talking to you? Or from drugs?”

  “From both. The point is, for better or worse, will and words make a difference.”

  “How much of a difference?”

  For whatever reason, she humors his despair. “I don’t know, Russell. How much is enough? Did I ever tell you about my tightrope lessons? For my final exam, I walked across a twelve-foot gap on a piece of hemp half the width of my foot. Twenty feet in the air. And I’m terrified of standing on a footstool. Turns out, you just take one baby step. Then another. I’ve seen it happen. Temperament can self-modify. People can get free, or at least a little freer. And then a little more.”

  “But not as free as we’re bred to believe we are.”

  “Gosh, Russell. You make life sound like a sadistic experiment.”

  “Let’s just say the grant proposal would never have passed my ethics board.”

  “Hope is useful, man. It keeps us moving.”

  “I see. Like a hamster wheel?”

  He likes the sound of her midnight sigh.

  They talk nine times in two weeks. It’s something out of the archaic novels he used to love: a prisoner who lives for the letters from a companion he’s never met. An invalid obsessed with a vivid woman sealed in a century-and-a-half-old daguerreotype.

  They keep deep down, amid the productive psychosis of the city. Neither one of them suggests that they get together for lunch or drinks or anything. They are each other’s solitary reading. The world is graduating from face time to MySpace anyway. The two of them are simply a little ahead of the curve . . .

  Stone puts it to himself: If the sound of Candace Weld’s voice suffices for the night that needs getting through, why should he escalate? Who decided that words are just action’s junior prom? He’s richer with her now, in the tangled inventions of their nightly sentences, than they would be after three weeks stranded in sexual intimacy.

  Not disabled: deliberate. He’s read in his happiness books that deaf couples sometimes refuse medical intervention that might “cure” their offspring and banish them to the world of the hearing. Why should he be forced into the community of touch, when this is his real medium?

  Candace’s voice asks for nothing. He can’t simply be imagining it: she’s grateful, as well, for this reprieve from the short-range senses. Yes, their nightly calls may be all too much like how she makes her living. Yet this—the free trade of signs—is where she, too, would live.

  He likes when her midnight housekeeping stops, when the only background sound is Candace Weld lowering herself with contentment to a repose he can only imagine. Make me a pallet on your floor.

  The question is whether affection can need no more than itself.

  He stops being the one who says when their conversations end. She’s the one who sends them off now. And that, too, becomes their ritual. “Well, Master Stone. Any further words for you tonight?”

  And one night, to Russell Stone’s quiet astonishment, he discovers: there might be.

  Kurton has held up the study for too long, waiting for an ideal subject who will solidify the correlation at the outer edges of their model. Then C3-16f comes to visit. Even before Thassa completes the routine tests, everyone on the project knows what they have: a candidate whose alleles confirm their extreme-end predictions. They measure the lengths of repeating segments in the promoter regions of her transporter genes, then map these variants onto a new data point, high up in the blank area of the graph pointed to by the rest of their data set. And when they see how close she is to the existing straight line of their larger sample, even Thomas Kurton is ready to announce.

  They pay the fee for fast-track peer review and—after filing all the appropriate patent papers—they publish in a respectable journal. From a holding pattern to a record finish. All viable labs have been bred for speed, and each generation, science gets better at hunting the mastodon. It’s either that or go extinct.

  Time passes, as the novelist says. The single most useful trick of fiction for our repair and refreshment: the defeat of time. A century of family saga and a ride up an escalator can take the same number of pages. Fiction sets any conversion rate, then changes it in a syllable. The narrator’s mother carries her child up the stairs and the reader follows, for days. But World War I passes in a paragraph. I needed 125 pages to get from Labor Day to Christmas vacation. In six more words, here’s spring.

  Weeks vanish, during which Stone achieves the moral equivalent of contentment. He works. One part per billion of the world’s magazine prose gets detoxified. His days contain no agitations greater than spam. He returns all the happiness books to the public library, which makes him feel much better. In their place, he reads forty pages of gruesome details a day from a doorstop text about the French colonial enterprise outre-mer. And at intervals frequent enough to steady him and scarce enough to surprise, he has his nighttime lifelines with Candace—travelogues to anywhere.

  But there comes a night, in late March, when Stone gets a different call. He can tell from the hello: Candace Weld has news she doesn’t want to give. “Can you come for dinner tomorrow?” She adds a hurried truth-in-advertising, her voice unsure whether it will lure him or scare him away: “
Thassa will be here.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Not really wrong.” She keeps her professional calm. “She has a piece she wants you to read.”

  “A piece? A story?”

  “Maybe.” Candace chuckles without mirth. “A preprint of an article from Kurton’s lab. It’s coming out next week, in something called The Journal of Behavioral Genomics.”

  “And she wants me to help her with it? You’re the PhD.”

  “She says you’re the best reader she’s ever met.”

  He issues the appropriate cry of pain.

  “It references her,” Candace says.

  “Jesus. Not by name?”

  Weld cycles her breathing—praka, kumbhaka, rechaka. “Not exactly by name. Come have a look.” And before he can beg her to fax him the article, she murmurs, “She’ll be happy to see you.”

  Ah, but she’s happy even when rebel groups shoot up her neighborhood.

  He buses over to Edgewater the next night. The air is thick with supercooled rain that ices as it hits. It’s six thirty, and the roads are already a hockey rink. He should have called Candace and canceled. The bus fishtails through the intersection at Western and smacks a Lincoln Town Car. Nobody’s hurt, but the bus isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Russell gets out and slides the remaining half mile to Candace’s apartment, slashed the whole way by tiny hypodermics of sleet.

  Young Gabriel buzzes him through the foyer. The boy holds out one sullen hand for Russell to high-five. “Happy Persian New Year.”

  Stone’s mouth is slow to thaw. “It’s Persian New Year?”

  “Well, I think it was like yesterday or something.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I don’t,” the boy confesses.

  A high-pitched ululation, and Thassa comes flying at him from down the hall. “Ween ghebtu, ya ustadh? Russell, where have you been?” Her momentum rocks Stone. She squeezes his arms to his ribs. He reminds himself that she’d give the same greeting to a cashier just back from a week’s vacation. She releases and inspects him more shyly. There’s something different about her, some shadow of reserve: the article he’s been summoned here to read.

  Candace trails down the hall, smoothing her face and dusting off her flour-spattered teal shirt-dress. Her cheeks flush as she nears. “You’re all ice!”

  She strips him of coat and hat, shoes and socks. Over his objections, she pushes him down the hall and into a bathroom, instructing him to dry off his jeans with a blow dryer. She slips in a pair of men’s heavy woolen socks, which just fit. Whose toe space is he taking?

  He emerges into one of those casual, upholstered living rooms that experimenters strew with pillows and games and books, then watch from behind two-way mirrors as the inhabitants imitate their normal lives. His three hosts converge on him again, all talking at once. It’s like he’s been dropped down into a time-share burrow somewhere underneath the Shire. And for an instant he’s stabbed by the feeling that the world might be far from over, that life might still have plans for him, that domesticity might yet survive the worst that knowledge can throw at it.

  The preprint sits on a cleared edge of the cluttered coffee table, waiting for him. It looks like something that might come in a registered envelope: injunction, medical notification, summons. He glances at Candace. She’s already read it, and her face shows.

  “You promised,” Gabe accosts him. “You said you would, back when I was at your house.”

  “Go,” Candace instructs the mystified Stone. Discovery can wait. “We’re busy in the kitchen anyway.”

  Thassa, too, shoos them off. “Don’t worry. But get ready for the amazing!” It takes Stone a moment to realize: she means the meal. Only then does he smell the travelogue aromas issuing from down the hall.

  “They’re making something foreign,” Gabe warns. “Zero stars.” With the right male ally, he might be emboldened to make a break for it.

  He pulls Stone into a back room that’s a cross between a Hindu temple and NORAD’s facility under Cheyenne Mountain. If some newly mutated virus were to decimate the race tomorrow, a fair chunk of civilization’s id from the Paleolithic to the Nanotech Age could be re-created out of this room’s strewn treasures. The overflowing dragon’s hoard of Wi-Fi medieval castles, interstellar Monopoly sets, speech-recognizing ant colonies, and GPS-ready counterterrorist dolls seems to contain a total of three books. Stone picks up one: Danny Dunn and the International Clone Cartel. “Don’t you read?”

  Gabriel is already booting up Darth Sauron’s Personal Quantum Rearrangement Center. “Uh . . . ye-ah? Like . . . all the time? Hey! Put that down and come over here.”

  Stone does as ordered. On the screen is something like the animated Saturday-morning adventures he and Robert used to watch back in the day, only sharper, richer, and much more deeply realized. Also, there’s the little matter of Gabriel actually moving around in the animated universe and leaving behind footprints.

  “I’m sorry about the quality,” Gabe says, mostly to the screen. “The frame rates on this piece of junk are pretty much down the toilet. You should come see it on my dad’s machine sometime.”

  “Sure,” Russell says. What they move through on-screen is as smooth and textured as waking life.

  “This is Chaoseeker. The character I was telling you about?”

  Only then does Stone realize: they’re in Futopia, the persistent, massively multiplayer world that Candace’s son and millions of others around the globe find far more rewarding than anything the less persistent real world has to offer.

  Gabe in Futopia looks much as he does in Edgewater, aside from the steroidal body mass and the wings. He circles in the air, a lazy spiral over a megalopolis that—unknown to either boy—is modeled on the most futuristic wards of Tokyo.

  “Where do you want to go?” the flying child asks.

  Omnipotence-induced nausea washes over Stone. He shrugs, paralyzed, but the angel doesn’t wait for an answer. It peels over the cityscape, banking across a harbor filled with frenetic activity. Alter-Gabe heads over an ocean of deepening blues. Small craft toss on the stormy waters. The horizon offers a spectrum of available weather from sunburst to squalls.

  The boy flies in a trance, beyond speech. They skim over monstrous islands, mashups of ancient cultural memories and historical nostalgia—medieval bestiaries, frontier romances, Victorian steam-punk, and recombinant hybrids of everything from spell-casting spacemen to Panzer-driving elves.

  Gabe mistakes his visitor’s vertigo for thrill. “Can you believe my mother doesn’t get this?”

  “How big is this place?”

  “Which? The whole . . . ? Endless! You can even create new lands, if you gather enough power.”

  Stone nods, for no one. When we run out of resources, we can always move here.

  He breathes easier when the flying boy touches down in a desolate landscape. The coast, a plain of ocher rocks, a stone farmhouse. “One of my homes,” Chaoseeker explains. The only moving things are birds and the occasional large mammals, off on the rim of olive-riddled mountains.

  “Where are we?”

  But the reward centers in the boy’s brain spark so fiercely it degrades his power of speech. “I built this here . . . I’m a quest . . . There’s a relic from the Old Ways I have to . . .”

  He trots up into the foothills, ducking into hidden canyons, fending off the occasional assaults of hungry creatures under the remorseless sun. Now and then he finds a sparkling artifact, which he pockets. “We can trade this for great stuff, back in the village.”

  It’s something out of colonialist fantasy literature. The boy’s real jaw hangs panting and his eyes dart in heightened alert. Futopia taps into more of the child’s legacy nervous system than Chicago ever will. Candace’s boy is a junkie, addicted to something that can match any narcotic floating around the public school system.

  Futopia spreads before Stone. He, too, might wander forever in mysterious mountains in search of
hidden relics, driven by a pleasure as much in need of constant renewal as sex. After each momentary injection of success, always another goal. A little repeated exposure and Russell could easily become as enslaved as this child.

  Years ago, in a different desert, under a rock face filled with petroglyphs, Grace cut him his first line of cocaine on a pocket mirror. It terrified him, but she offered up the rite in such innocence—an exploratory lark required of all aspiring writers—that he gave himself over to her and breathed in the dust. It did almost nothing. It made his two front teeth glow and numbed his gums. Yes, the afternoon was glorious; yes, he felt full and funny and grateful and even powerful. But that’s what an afternoon with Grace always made him feel.

  A week later, he asked, offhand, How hard is it to get that stuff? She laughed so long at his casual pretense that he realized: he would do this chemical never again, or he would do it forever. Something in his cells had come into life pre-addicted, as it had for his father and uncle and great-aunt and probably his brother. And the only cure for him was never to take the first taste.

  “She hates this,” the boy says. “She thinks it’s fake. But it’s no faker than her phone life.”

  Russell doesn’t even want to ask. “Take me somewhere else,” he tells Gabe.

  “Wait! We’re really close. Let’s try over there.”

  There’s no more talking to him. Stone leans back on his stool and watches his guide, the child of the future. Happy citizen of the place that cultural evolution has finally created to shelter the brain, after its long exile.

  Just when Russell is about to flee, the door opens, framing Thassa against the blazing hallway. Two steps and she’s kneeling between them, one arm around each of their shoulders. “Jibreel. Mister Stone. What are you men doing?”

  Gabe says, “What did you call me?”

  She studies the screen and her eyes narrow. “Hey! Where is that?”