Richard Powers - Generosity

It’s not like she’s making facts public; the facts were never private to begin with. She’s twenty-one, young enough to know that there is no more public or private. There are only slow facts and fast facts, linked and unlinked, and every two sequences of value will eventually be correlated. Someone will publish the connection in another few days anyway, if she doesn’t. And why should someone else’s blog get all the eyeballs?

Schiff arrives in El Kef with her guts emptied and her brain in a similar state. She stands at the window of her hotel room in the Ville Nouvelle, above the Place de l’Indépendance, too light-headed to make out much more than the massive Byzantine fortress looming up out of a tumble of stone and whitewashed plaster. The streets of the medina twist down from the Casbah’s foot. More town spills down the other slope, a jumble of white-and-tan blocks watched over by minarets and domes. The tip of a cellular radio tower peeks out above the fortress, puncturing Tonia’s Orientalist fantasy. Coming here was mad. She’s like a time traveler from the golden age of pulp science fiction, trying to change a future that has already happened.

Schiff stands motionless, looking, until a heavyset man with a paintbrush mustache comes out on a balcony across the Place and returns her inspection. She turns back into her stale room. The detailed discovery of the town will wait a day, until she can do it right. As Thassa once told her, tomorrow will be there, as soon as you need it.

Schiff sheds her crumpled road clothes and takes a lukewarm shower in the tiny, open stall. Her head still spins from the louage , and she never wants to eat again. She wraps herself in a towel and stretches out on the bed. She finds her ratty pocket spiral notebook and writes: We talk tomorrow. For a moment, the whole expedition seems almost plausible. If I can record ten minutes, I’ll be happy.

All the while, she pretends she isn’t jonesing to discover whether the world as she knows it has continued to exist during her day away. At three minutes to the hour, she casually flips on the television (a broken remote left ceremoniously on the bedside table by the hotel staff) and trawls the channels like the worst of quidnuncs.

This two-star hotel in an outpost of forty thousand people in a remote western province of a little country wedged between the chaos of Algeria and the void of Libya pulls in more cosmopolitan broadcasts than she gets in New York. She pounces on the BBC like a starving person. The world is much as she left it. The day has gone like any other, held hostage by the past and doomed by coming appointments. In that closet hotel, each news story announces either imminent extinction or embryonic breakthrough. Hotel residents everywhere-any passenger in transit this night-must be forgiven for thinking that life will be solved at last, one way or the other, by the time they get home.

She flicks off the set and, in the highland silence of that molding room, opens her carry-on. She pulls out a plastic case packed with disks like makeup mirrors, each one storing hours of video. She’s packed only three days of clothes, but more digital clips than she could watch in three weeks. The secret of happiness is meaningful work.

She flips through her archive, the clips she’ll splice together to make her own real firstborn. In the middle of the stiff bed, surrounded by time capsules, she loads a short feature on the most notorious infant in living memory. The girl with that perfectly archaic middle name: Joy.

Whiplashing to think that the footage is three decades old. But the basic trope goes back millennia: a dangerous, destabilizing baby smuggled clandestinely into an unsuspecting world. The doctors don’t even tell the prospective parents that their little girl will be the first of her kind. Tonia sits on the bed, watching the videotaped birth, a message posted forward to whatever people might inhabit the evolved future. The infant head crowns on Schiff’s screen, and there is Louise Joy Brown, an impossibly slight five and three-quarters pounds, crying her lungs out in that first crisis, air.

The birth cries are nothing, compared to the ones they touch off. Perfectly moderate commentators face the camera and declare the doom of the human race. Almost ridiculous now, this dated hysteria. But almost right.

Schiff sits up in the bed and glances back out the window. A corsage of yellow lights now trace Kef’s edges all the way up the jagged mountain. This town’s basic cure for sterility may often still involve a prayer at the local zaouia . But then, so does New York’s.

Tonia turns back to the warnings posted forward from a previous planet. Later technologies make that first artificial conception look like a Hail Mary play. Intrafallopian transfer, intracytoplasmic sperm injection: a dozen of her friends have shopped from that list. A few hundred thousand IVF babies make their way through this night, as dark swings around the globe. The process is nothing now, and the real show is only getting started. A new industry, following only voluntary guidelines, already screens embryos for hundreds of genetic diseases. And Tonia Schiff will bet her return ticket that some billionaire, somewhere, is already paying to have his offspring screened for good traits. The race will take to selling characteristics on websites, like downloadable songs, the day it becomes possible.

She ejects the disk and flips through the stack, looking for the second half of tonight’s double feature. She has documentaries and biographies, old news clips on engineered bacteria, gene transfer, the world-famous photogenic sheep, xenotransplantation, embryos from skin DNA transplanted into eggs, embryos with two mothers and a father, and, from last week, the application for exclusive ownership of a wholly synthetic organism.

Apocalypse has become too commonplace to feel. Of the scribbling in books, there is no end. And all our writing will in time come alive.

She takes notes until she falls asleep. And falling asleep, she’ll tell herself that she asks for almost nothing: one more documentary, one more interview, one more clandestine infant named Joy. But the rim of cliffs guarding this ancient town mock any theme she might care to film.

Because Donna Washburn, the author of the Reader feature, googles her own name only once every two days, a full twenty-one hours pass before she sees herself mentioned in Sue Weston’s blog. Immediately Washburn leaves a message on Thassa’s voice mail, asking for confirmation. But Thassa doesn’t reply by the time the next week’s Reader is put to bed. So the paper runs an “unconfirmed rumor” squib. By the time the bit runs, it’s redundant. Jen’s secret identity has started to proliferate through the Web. Within a week, she’s pretty much a publicly traded commodity.

Three weeks before final exams, and Thassadit Amzwar is working flat out on Come Spring , trying to get a rough cut done before semester’s end. She hardly even notices the ripples. In this country, where continent-wide cultural transformations root, take over the biosphere, and go extinct several times in every twenty-four-hour news cycle, all she has to do is hunker down, finish the term, and wait until the public attention drifts back to celebrity divorces and custody fights, where it belongs.

The first assault is a simple repeat of last fall. She tries her best to answer the surge of e-mails. A few dozen fanboys and postpartum mothers write to ask, Is Jen really you? How old were you when you first realized that your genes were making you joyous? Does it still work late at night in winter? Could we meet for coffee, for a chat, for just forty-five minutes? I could be there on Thursday. Minneapolis isn’t all that far from Chicago