Richard Powers - Generosity

His face tears in two and rolls up into a double helix. Out of that spiral appears a woman with straight brown hair and eyes as sad as a bloodhound’s. In a clipped Midlands accent, she declares:

One-fifth of human genes have already been patented. You have to pay a license fee just to look at them. People like Thomas Kurton buy and sell genetic material like it’s movie rights

She turns into a sand painting that the wind scatters. Next comes a quick, cross-fade cavalcade of talking heads:

He plays at life like it’s a German board game

The man made two fortunes by the age of thirty-five

It’s not really about profit, for Thomas. It’s about ingenuity

This is not your grandfather’s scientific method

The British bloodhound returns to declare:

He’s driven by a massively dangerous altruism.

Kurton fades back, his face morphing into other instances of itself:

Superdrugs, smart drugs. Healthier people. Stronger people. Smarter people

He turns into a watercolor, whose brushstrokes reassemble into Friar Tuck:

You do know that Thomas is going to live forever?

Thomas Kurton swims up again from the abyss:

The first person to live to one hundred and fifty has already been born.

The British bloodhound pushes back a limp hank of hair from her weary face.

I don’t want to live in his world. I do not look forward to the day when people will have to pay a royalty to have a child.

Her pall gives way again to Donatello’s daybreak.

We’re heading toward something glorious. Something better than anyone alive can imagine.

The close-ups relax into expansive midrange. A tall, bright woman in surgical scrubs strolls through a clean room at a biotech facility. She turns, removes her sterile cap, and shakes out a mass of flaxen hair.

Is Thomas Kurton the villain in a morality fable gone terribly wrong? Or is he the hero of a noble experiment that’s just about to pay off? No matter how the future judges him, he’s already helping the present to spin Over the Limit .

As the host’s Mid-Atlantic accent shapes these three last words, they animate, strobing in dozens of languages, spinning off mathematical proofs, chemical symbols, and physical equations until the entire laboratory is buried in bits of self-replicating information.

Establishing shot: a crazy-cantilevered, glass-skinned building near Kendall Square, Cambridge, one of those prestige-designer palaces that look like the solution to a logic puzzle.

Interior: the big-windowed corner office reserved for high-volume grant winners. Ambient sounds of wind and trickling water fill the room. On a five-foot-wide LCD panel across one wall, wild landscapes cross-fade into one another.

Close-up: Thomas Kurton seated behind a swept-wing desk that looks invisible to radar. A complex pneumatic chair props up his spine. His hands work with the detachment of someone throwing the I Ching. More screens dot the glass desktop. He speaks into one, brushes two fingers across another, dragging data in changing formation across the parade ground.

Voice-over, the cool voice of Tonia Schiff, the video journalist who hosts this world:

Thomas Kurton made his first splash at twenty-eight, when his PhD research helped lead to the creation of transgenic cows that produced disease-curing proteins in their milk. He formed his first biotech company soon after he got his first academic job. At Harvard, he plowed his pharmaceutical farming profits back into the search for a bacterial catalyst for fermenting bio-butanol from sugar beets. He spun off this search, too, into a successful venture

The ginger-headed figure dispatches brisk communiqués. Between commands, he leans over to his desk’s long glass return, and from a stash of hundreds of capsules and tablets, he selects two dozen rust-colored supplements, washing them down with a large bottle of Swiss spring water.

At the Wyde Institute, Kurton helped to develop a technique called rapid gene signature reading. Using it, he has produced three landmark association studies, isolating complexes of genes correlated with susceptibility to anxiety, childhood hyperactivity, and depression

The ginger man waves a matchbook-sized device in the air. The room dims into a hushed dusk. He spins to face the picture window behind him, gazing out on a cluster of glass buildings oozing venture capital. He tips up in the chair, closes his eyes, and starts to meditate.

He has founded seven companies and advises fifteen more. He serves on the editorial board of six scientific journals while holding positions with three different universities. He races in triathlons and breeds exhibition-quality zebra finches. In his spare time, he writes ecstatic pieces about the coming transhuman age that electrify hundreds of thousands of readers

Close-up of his right wrist: a red medical-alert bracelet instructs the finders of his dead body to act quickly, administer calcium blockers and blood thinner, pack his corpse in ice water, balance its pH, and call the 800 number of a firm that will helicopter in paramedics to begin cryonic suspension.

The view out the window darkens and the sound of electronic surf starts up again. He swings back around to the circle of screens and resumes conducting a symphony of scientific management. In a sound bridge, his cheerful voice says:

I don’t see why, given enough time and creativity, we humans can’t make ourselves over into anything we want.

A jump cut, and Tonia Schiff, the amused show host, is sitting in a rocker in a flagstone-and-cedar cabin. Her clothes are a little young for her-a gypsy shirt and knit gilet with pleated floaty skirt. She’s a parody of genetic fitness as it approaches forty. Her lips curl as the scientist finishes his thought.

Now when you say “anything ”

A reverse shot reveals Kurton-in moth-eaten flannel-grinning and tipping his chin up and down.

Well, look: we’ve been remaking ourselves for ten thousand years. Every moment of our lives, we do something that some previous incarnation of humanity would consider godly. We simply can’t know our upper limits. All we can do is keep exploring them.

He reaches into the vest pocket of his ratty jacket and pulls out a Moleskine. He opens the soft notebook and hands it to her.

I carry this around with me. My mantra.

The shot reverses are clean and crisp. Tonia Schiff takes the notebook and reads:

“Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation. Teilhard de Chardin.” Wasn’t he a Christian mystic?

Kurton grins.

Nothing mystical about deep genomic understanding! It’s just good science.

Stone is more solid to me the second night of class. A breeze off the lake slows him as he walks from the Roosevelt stop to Mesquakie. He waits at a vendor window for a veggie wrap and green tea. Someone presses a flyer into his hand: Did We Cause Darfur ? He mumbles a thank-you and pretends to read. Walking while sipping, he passes a clothing boutique-turbaned women in paramilitary jumpsuits. Two stores down is Prosthetechs: 1,000+ mobile, wearable, portable, and sportable electronic devices! He lifts his head: three miles of this, from here through the Gold Coast. The city wants to burn him for fuel, and he’s fine with that. Anything to be useful.

Surly art students fill the college lobby in nervous knots, planning the world’s next essential, interactive, networked-art trend, one that will change the way the race sees itself. They remind him how it feels, to imagine you have the right to excite another human. He skirts past them tonight, careful to make no more than accidental eye contact.