Richard Powers - Generosity

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 room 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.