Richard Powers - Generosity

But the minute the DV cameras turn off, Kurton does as threatened. He flings himself up off the porch rocker and into his utility room, where he retrieves a six-inch cotton swab. He tears the sterile packaging, dips into Tonia Schiff’s coffee-cup backwash, and seals the swab in its plastic housing.

The gesture is weirdly intimate. “I now have your genetic profile. Your SNPs and indels-the variations in your genome of any significance. I can identify your ancestors-and your descendants. I can predict your health and development, and I can even speculate about your disposition. I can make a good bet of your likely age span and what you’ll die of, if you don’t get hit by a car first. Hide this away in the cooler for a few years, and I’ll be able to do a whole lot more. Would you like a look? It’s the closest thing to time travel you’ll ever get.”

The man has morphed into something out of Wagner. The whole crew regrets shutting down the cameras too soon. The future hits Tonia, and her stomach folds. She rearguards: “Am I allowed to look? Or is somebody like you going to sue me for infringement?”

“Good question. Let’s say the law is in a period of adjustment at the moment.”

She’s not really listening. She has her eyes on the plastic tube and its contents, which he’s waving around in the air like a conductor’s baton. “I’m sorry. Could I just ”

He teases her for a second, the swab barely out of reach. “Sure. It’s all yours.” He turns to the mesmerized film crew. “Anyone want to wash the other cups?”

Schiff and Kurton are still disputing the phrase the wisdom of repugnance as the crew brings the gear down to the van. Tonia looks up to see her colleagues spinning their wheels, waiting for her. “Go on ahead. I’ll meet you back at the B and B in Damariscotta.”

The smirking crew pulls away in the van, but not before that punk Kenny Keyes gives her a little knowing finger salute off the side of his nose. She denies him the pleasure of a reaction.

She drifts alongside Kurton back up the driveway. They’ve talked to each other for weeks, on and off camera, testing each other’s bright and dark places, familiar, now, as any two adversaries. She watches him stack empty flower pots. “People will be swabbing each other soon, won’t they? Before you hire somebody. Before you marry somebody. Consent or not. We’re going to be on file with hospitals, corporations, the government ”

“I believe that is already under way.”

“It doesn’t bother you, does it? How creepy society is going to get.”

He shrugs his shoulders, like a sixteen-year-old answering the question What the hell do you think you’re doing? “There was a time when income tax and government-issued IDs were unthinkably creepy. Technology changes what we think is intolerable.”

She squirrels the line away for use in the interview’s introduction.

He stares down through the thin line of pines across the road to the shimmering water, a Boy’s Book of Adventure look. “Would you like to take a quick sail? We have a couple of hours before dusk.”

His boat is a beautiful little gaff-rigged twelve-footer, cedar, oak, and Doug fir, from the sixties. He takes them down the inlet past the headlands, then hands her the rudder. Gulls gather on the rocky spit, like whispers. As the sky plushes out toward ginger and the waves quiet, he leans back against the front of the cockpit, toying with a cleat. They glide on no sound. She comes about, catches the wind, settles into the flow, and is filled with the most profound sense of aimlessness to be had anywhere.

“May I ask you something? Completely off the record.”

He tilts his face back in a speckle of sun, eyes closed, smile compliant.

“How in God’s name do your companies make a profit?”

He laughs so hard it folds him upright. “You’re making a small assumption, there.”

“Seriously. You must be bleeding money away into all these projects, some of which, if you’ll pardon me, seem as flaky as pie crust. Okay: You have a couple of drug patents. You’ve licensed a pair of processes to larger pharmaceutical outfits. And you own the rights to two diagnostic screens. But all of that together can’t possibly pay for even half the R and D-”

He juts out his iconoclastic chin. “You’re right! It doesn’t!”

She tacks again, taking a bead back up the inlet, toward his dock and home. “So how do you stay in business?”

He smiles more generously, unable to keep from admiring her. “You’re not much of a businessman, are you?”

“Enough of one to know that credits are supposed to be greater than debits.”

He waves away the nuisance technicalities. “Forget about bookkeeping. You can’t bookkeep what’s coming. In a few years, we’re going to be biologically literate. We’ll have figured out how to make cells do whatever chemistry we want. You think computer programming has changed the world? Wait till we start programming the genome.”

“Thomas. Relax. We’re done filming.”

He turns toward starboard and pushes his curls back over the crown of his head. “I’m sorry if I sound like I’m still performing. But believe me. It’s coming.”

“Okay. So medicine keeps getting more complicated. I see the revenue potential there, down the line. But you can’t run a business without products. What exactly are you selling?”

He gazes at her with the warmth caught so nakedly on film an hour earlier. “At the moment, Truecyte is in the business of selling the same product as most of the biotech sector: vaporware. But the venture capitalists know what’s in the pipeline.”

His voice drops to the hush of the wake against the hull. “The coming market is endless. Think about the five years just before the Internet. The five years just before the steam engine. Only those companies that free themselves of preconceptions will take advantage of the biggest structural change in society since ”

The simile eludes him, as irrelevant as bookkeeping. The sail starts to luff. She nudges the tiller and lets out the boom. Whatever Thomas Kurton’s knowledge of the future, he’s right, in any case, about her . For all her seasons Over the Limit , she’s never really taken the flood of transcendental hype seriously. That’s been her source of appeal: the clear-eyed, unflappable skeptic who simply wants to see the future’s photo ID.

She brings the boat in line with his dock, now yawning up in front of them. Together she and Kurton furl the sail and drift into a light knock against the hanging tire bumpers. Kurton leaps onto the dock, ties down the prow and stern, and helps her over the gunwales.

On the dock, she says, “You really think we’re going to get life to play by our rules?” The sun burnishes the water’s surface. In a moment, the air and the pines on the crag behind them turn crazed orange.

He comes next to her and takes her forearm. She has predicted this, with no skill in futurism at all. She lets him. It feels lovely. In her experience, it has never not felt lovely, at first. Dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin. Does knowing the chemistry change anything? How long ago did she discover that lovely was a chemical trick?

“I’m telling you: Forget what you know. Free your mind. Use your imagination .” His eyes fish for hers. No end of stories play in his. Microbes that live on dioxins and digest waste plastics. Fast-growing trees that sequester greenhouse gases. Human beings free from all congenital disease.

She looks away, back out over the water. “You’re overselling again.”

“It’s not sales. It’s just what happens next.” His thumb strokes her wrist. He lets go of her arm. He shrugs again, and in that simple gesture suggests that all literature, all fiction, all prediction to date is nothing more than a preparatory sketch of the possibilities available to the human animal.