A great national debate ensues on whether feeling happy is the same as being happy, and over the ways in which earned happiness differs from happiness purchased by one’s parents at birth. This debate plays out on sitcoms everywhere.
The Economist runs an experimental, Java-based decision market program that allows people to bid on the actual price-somewhere between $32,000 and $800 million-that a tenfold increase in the odds of inheriting an unshakably happy disposition should fetch on the open market. The running average closes in asymptotically on $740,000, which is, coincidentally, close to the lifetime cost of chronic, nonresponsive bipolar disorder.
A giant international reality-show production company called Endemic successfully markets the idea of a sudden-death competition pitting gangs of potential sperm donors against one another for the honor of fertilizing a single woman, who must eliminate them on the basis of their genotypes until only one remains. The company tells the skeptical press that the concept was in development long before Thassa’s egg auction went public.
Three writers from National Lampoon, Inc. (AMEX: NLN) start a humor site called killthesmileyarabchick.com. It spawns several more violent imitations.
Throughout, Thomas Kurton goes on giving his careful, scientific opinion on every question that anyone places in front of him. He does one final television interview with Tonia Schiff, for her genomic-happiness episode. They sit on a bench in the Boston Common, twenty yards from where Ralph Waldo Emerson turned into a transparent eyeball and saw all the currents of the Universal Being circulating through him. On film, Kurton struggles to remain game, but he comes across as stoic at best.
I frankly don’t understand most of this reaction. Mass psychology is too hard for me. Genomics is trivial, compared to sociology.
Tonia Schiff seems almost indignant. She asks whether Truecyte can honestly demand a licensing fee on an unmodified human genome. He replies:
We’re licensing the laborious and expensive discovery that a particular combination of alleles increases the probability of a particularly desirable health benefit. If you want to keep encouraging innovation, you have to reward that.
She asks him why Truecyte, a for-profit venture, has undercut their own business interests by demanding a fee that no potential client could pay. He replies that many human institutions have paid much larger sums for much smaller return. She can’t flush him out of hiding. When she goads him into predicting how large the genomic-happiness industry might be in ten years, he responds with all the resignation of a Tibetan monk.
If a reasonably alert person wants to be exhilarated, she just has to read a little evolution. Think of it: a Jupiter flyby, emerging out of nothing. A few slavish chemicals producing damn near omnipotent brains That discovery is better than any drug, any luxury commodity, or any religion. Science should be enough to make any person endlessly well. Why do we need happiness when we can have knowing?
When she suggests that very few people are temperamentally capable of sharing his vision, he bites out his words.
Listen: Six hundred generations ago, we were scratching on the walls of caves. Now we’re sequencing genomes. Three billion years of accident is about to become something truly meaningful. If that doesn’t inspire us, we don’t deserve to survive ourselves.
When the camera stops, journalist and subject say goodbye without so much as shaking hands.
Saint Augustine, the old Berber, once wrote, Factus est Deus homo ut homo fieret Deus: God became man so that man might become God. He also said, even more popularly, Dilige et quod vis fac: Love, and do as you wish. But that was before our abilities so far outstripped our love.
Oona decides on a follow-up show long before the demands for one start swelling. Dr. Sidney Green, afraid of the legal repercussions of anything he might say in public, hedges until his accountants run spreadsheets on all the possible scenarios and his lawyers devise an unbeatable game plan. Thomas Kurton is ready in a heartbeat for a second chance.
But when Oona’s people try to contact Thassadit Amzwar, they discover what the wired world has known for two days: Jen has gone missing. She can’t be raised by any medium. A continuous vigil outside her Mesquakie dorm attests that nothing remotely resembling a five-foot-one North African woman has come anywhere near the building. The bandwidth swarms with so many flavors of rumor that the police begin to make inquiries. The school has no idea of her whereabouts. Kurton swears he’s had no communication with her since their joint TV appearance. No one comes forward with any further information.
The police find the record of the now ancient attempted rape. They contact her erstwhile teacher, who, like the law-abiding, civilization-committed idiot he is, surrenders the e-mail from Charlotte Hullinger. Princess Heavy, savvier child of the future age, lies through her teeth to the authorities. She admits that a few of Thassa’s friends were, for a while, moving her around from apartment to apartment. But Charlotte claims that no one has seen or heard from Thassa for weeks.
The truth is, the genetic destiny of the race is holed up in Adam Tovar’s vacant apartment in Pilsen. Adam is off cruising with Somali pirate friends that he has stayed in touch with since their brief introduction the summer before. Thassa stays in the two-room apartment all day long, afraid of stepping out and being recognized. The apartment is a sweatbox, but the heat pleases Thassa, triggering primal memories.
For hours, she points her camera out Adam’s fifth-story window, toward Eighteenth Street, filming the Mexican shoppers passing in front of the once Bohemian and Polish neo-baroque buildings. Then she loads her clips into the editing software on her notebook, using her graphics tablet to paint over and animate them. As imprisonments go, this one is omnipotent. Sometimes she uses Adam’s Internet connection to go online and see what the world is saying about her. She finds the website that says she should be killed. She begins to see why some people might want that.
At night she has her books. She memorizes long Tamazight lyric poems from out of her beloved leather-bound anthology. These she performs out loud, in the apartment’s front room, as if for a gathered audience. In bed, she makes herself drowsy by reading Frederick P. Harmon. She falls asleep thinking of all the ways that a creative narrator might rescue her from nonfiction. She’s sustained only by knowing that the public must eventually grow bored, forget about her, and go on to the next story.
Her friends bring her food, supplies, and DVDs. Sue, Charlotte, and even Mason take their turns in the rotation. Roberto drives her to the North Side facility that monitors her for the Houston clinic.
From Invisiboy Sims, she asks more heroic services. She has been fine injecting herself with the first round of fertility hormones. But now the follow-up must be administered via a vastly larger needle. “I just can’t anymore,” she tells Kiyoshi. “I need your help.”
He tries to negotiate. He asks if he can just jab her through her skirt. It’s not possible, she tells the terrified apprentice. “You have to swab the area first.”
In a Midtown production studio, the Over the Limit crew gathered in a screening room to watch the rough first pass of the episode called “The Cooking of Joy.” A stiff dose of hormonal excitement passed through the assembled group, the anticipation that always came with a hot episode. Nothing in all of life could match work that tapped into the moment.
Schiff slipped into a second-row seat next to Kenny Keyes and Nick Garrett, just behind Pete Vitale, the segment’s director. Keyes and Garrett brayed at each other, even louder than usual. “You know,” Keyes said, “if I die just before all this crap gets implemented, I’m going to be supremely pissed. Can you imagine? Being the last generation to suffer from stupid, pointless misery.”
“Christ,” Garrett said. “One hundred and fifty billion people just like you have lived and died. You’ve had it better than any of them.”
“I see,” Kenny answered bitterly. “So you’re one of those glass 99 percent full guys?”
As the lights dimmed, Schiff looked around the ro
om at the full crew-twenty-five men and seven women-a ratio as bad as that of the fields they filmed. The double-X chromosome and scientific aptitude: yet one more hot-button issue of scriptedness that no one would ever be able to think clearly about. It struck Schiff that she’d never get to do a show on the topic. Such issues were, for any foreseeable future, over the limits of acceptable science entertainment.
Tonia always enjoyed the episodes before the music got added-a last chance to grasp the ideas without her viscera being manipulated by sound. But nothing ever protected her from the vague disgust of watching herself play herself on the screen. She did not slink like that; she did not purr like that; she was not that soul of cool, remote hip.
Tonia the viewer battened down to weather this episode’s intro. Schiff the on-screen host said, Why is it that some human beings seem to be born with an extra dose of delight in life? The off-screen Tonia twisted in her seat. She’d thought it the most simpleminded of all the intros they had filmed; she couldn’t believe that Vitale had settled on it. Some people just seem to shoot straight toward joy, the way an airport dog heads for backpacks full of contraband.
From there, Schiff’s voice-over plunged into the biological basis of bliss. A stunning, swooshy CGI sequence zoomed into the eyes of a deliriously happy woman, tunneling through her optic nerve and into her brain. The view tunneled down by several orders of magnitude, landing in the nucleus of one of her nerve cells. There, in spectacular 3-D, the histone-wound coils of her DNA unzipped and bared their template surfaces to complementary strings of mRNA, which slipped into the ribosomes to be read by fleets of tRNA, each one porting its specified amino acid into the growing folds of a catalytic protein.
The molecular flyby gave Tonia vertigo. She watched the newly minted protein machines spin off the assembly line. As the sequence zoomed out, these catalysts began clamping and unzipping more DNA, igniting new genes, clipping and tamping together more RNA messages. Pulling back steadily by powers of ten, the sequence revealed the feedback loops of transmitters, receptors, and synapses that aggregated in ever-higher networks of neuronal chorus.
Just as Tonia forgot that she was inside an artist’s rendering, the animation zoomed out in a whoosh until it snaked back through the eyes of the deliriously happy woman, whose molecules had engineered her into something like the velvet rapture of orgasm.
The on-screen Schiff reappeared and said something clever that the off-screen Tonia tried not to hear. And before Tonia could follow the jump, her filmic alter ego was telling the story of twin boys, one raised in Minneapolis and the other in L.A. The two brothers never met until they were thirty-five, at which point they discovered that they shared a list of identical happiness triggers that included juggling, harmonica music, cedar trees, and the actress Felicity Kendal.
“Amazing,” Kenny Keyes said, shaking his head in awe. “That’s just killer.”
The on-screen Schiff said, Some researchers believe that the genetic contribution to our gladness thermostat may be as high as 80 percent.
The off-screen Tonia raised her hand. “Hang on a sec.” The film kept rolling. “Something’s been cut here. That whole segment about how quickly the hedonic set-point correlation falls off for fraternal twins.”
Pete Vitale nodded, on top of the objection. “We were getting several people saying it was complicated. Confusing.”
“But it’s important,” Schiff insisted. “We don’t want viewers to think that happiness is hereditary like height is.”
“What is it with you and height?” Kenny asked.
Vitale surveyed the group, even as they kept watching the segment. “Show of hands? Those for restoring the complications? Right. We run as is.”
By then the show had progressed to interviews with a neuroscientist, a positive psychologist, and Thomas Kurton. Talk of genes involved in extroversion, anxiety, and congeniality led to speculation about the “gladness thermostat.” Various predictions about gene-tailored happiness drugs seemed as groundless to Tonia as they had during filming.
By the time the scene with Thassadit Amzwar unfolded, Tonia feltill. All their clips of the manhandled, displaced Berber had been edited to eliminate any cloud or edge. The woman’s increasingly tumbled landscape had been cropped to just the smooth vistas. “This isn’t right,” Schiff said, without turning around. “We’re not doing justice to her. We have to use some of the rockier stuff, too.”
“We’re trying to tell a story here,” Garrett said.
“A story? You mean a fib?” But Schiff’s on-screen voice-over drowned Tonia out. The day may come, hostess Schiff said, when we will choose our children as carefully as we now choose our mates. We may select our natures the way we screen for a career. All the larger, qualifying, problematical follow-up had been clipped away.
The show ended with a rapid-fire, crosscut auction-various people saying how much they would pay for an imperturbably luminous outlook on life. The last face in the accelerating cavalcade was Thomas Kurton’s, repeating, Listen. The shot pulled back to reveal the man speaking on Schiff’s two-inch phone screen. The show host watched as the genomicist intoned again, Six hundred generations ago, we were scratching on the walls of caves. Now we’re sequencing genomes.
In the last shot, Schiff looked up from the minuscule screen, smiled her crooked smile, and asked the camera, If we accomplished all of that as frightened, negatively biased, misery-prone creatures, what might we accomplish when genomics takes us over our inborn limits?
In the cut to black, the few dozen people in the room began to applaud. Pete Vitale craned around from the row in front of Tonia and scanned the reactions. “Yeah? Pretty clean? No major surgery?” He stood and stretched, beaming. “All right. Thanks, all. Off to finishing. Remember: meeting on the transcranial-stimulation script at three. And everyone back here for the cyberwar brainstorming on Friday.”
“Pete,” Tonia said, and felt herself falling. “Pete. We have some major problems here.”
The crew kept filing out. Tonia herself barely registered her own objection. Vitale turned to look, sidesaddling away from her.
Tonia tried smiling. “You do realize this is total shit?”
The director stopped and turned, along with Garrett and Keyes.
“The way this has been cut, we are just fanning the unsubstantiated hype. If even one-tenth of this should turn out to be real, then we ought Don’t you think we should at least mention the challenges? We’re still a science show, right? Don’t you think we should restore some of those scenes with all the objecting researchers?”
The cluster of rearguard crew paused in the double doors of the theater at the scent of drama. “Tonia,” Garrett said, somewhere between peremptory and resigned.
“We’ve got Kurton himself having all those second thoughts. And that poor girl-she was ragged, Pete. This whole carnival is making her wretched. You’ve cut the interview to make her look-”
“It’s done, Ton. You heard everyone sign off.”
She saw, in clean animation, the assembly lines inside her cells thrown into wartime production. Even as it rose up in her throat, she wanted to know what caused this bile. These men she hated? But she’d hated them for years. Her public smackdown and humiliation of a few minutes ago? She wasn’t so vain. Some early parental moral inculcation that she’d managed to resist for decades? Late-onset honesty or scruples or guilt or any of a dozen other predispositions lurking inside her haplotype, just waiting like a heart attack or cancer to be pushed over a threshold and expressed full-blown? Why get righteous now?
Runaway branching feedback-who knew how? Everything, she decided: everything is caused by nothing short of everything else.
What she found so amusing about the unfolding scene was how well all the performers already knew it, even before she spoke her lines. They’d seen it too often to count, in every packaged narrative they’d ever consumed. They had her revolt pegged, long before she herself had seen it coming. The room filled with a deep, almost respe
ctful compliance, everyone ready to play the parts that had been scored for each of them so long ago.
Pete Vitale asked, from a great way off, “You have problems with this work?”
“Tonia, don’t,” Garrett warned again.
“It’s cool,” Kenny said. “Let her blow. She can’t be the only one of us who never uncorks.”
But even the coffee-bearers and copyboys standing in the doorway already knew this story.
Schiff gave in to the warm, predestined familiarity of it all. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry to be so predict We don’t have to labor this. I can just cut to the credits here.” She turned and walked up the aisle and through the knot in the doorway, which parted, fascinated, for her.
Behind her, Garrett told Vitale, “You better go save your nest egg.”
Vitale called out, “Tonia, come on. Come back. We can recut anything you want.”
“Hey: bye-bye, baby,” Kenny said. “Who needs her? Bring on the clones.” And the last thing she heard as she slipped from the screening room was Keyes asking, “Bitch thinks her face can’t be replaced?”
For three crosstown blocks, Tonia Schiff hammers herself for her own long complicity. Five seasons perfecting a voguey pose in the face of anything iridescent. But the future has been feeding on her all along, as sure as any bloodsucker. As sure as she and her collaborators have fed on that ragged woman.
Every twelfth person she passes almost recognizes her. I glimpse her at last, skirting along at a panicked if aimless trot, reflected in five long panes of department-store glass. She glimpses herself-all she has ever tried for, the thing she’s wanted to be from birth. Blameless observer. But the blameless can’t afford to look. Just looking is already the worst kind of guilt.
Generosity Page 29
