Richard Powers - Generosity

He sees an exit ramp that says Indiana and heads toward it. Chapters later, they’re still stopped in a bumper-to-bumper bottleneck somewhere this side of Gary. Thassa fishes across the radio dial, but every station only leaves her more agitated. She knows how to be a refugee, but not a renegade.

She shuts off the radio and turns to him. “Tell me about your childhood, Russell. Did you ever run away from home before?”

The journey of a single mile begins with a thousand regrets.

Man goes fugitive with ambiguous woman: the oldest story in the book. I’ve written that one myself, hundreds of times, in my sleep. And every time, the story wanted to break away, lose itself, escape altogether its birthright plot

On the day that Russell and Thassa make their break for the north, Thomas Kurton walks into a special meeting of the Truecyte board of directors.

He knows these men and women. He handpicked them: good scientists and skillful executives all. But he has small patience for even regular meetings, let alone the extra sessions. The whole purpose of incorporating is to let business free up science to do science. It’s not really Kurton’s job to keep teaching the adolescent enterprise new ways to stay solvent; that’s what the MBAs are for. He does not really care if Truecyte manages to stay in business or not: the point is to discover if it can.

Every company Kurton has founded is a creature let loose in the world. Together, they’re part of a longitudinal experiment in determining which forms of human desire are evolutionarily viable. Still, he shows up for the latest Truecyte fire drill, sips at the herbal tea, nibbles at the spreads of fruit, and jokes with his fellow board members, all the while prepared to supply his own blunt opinions about any course corrections the collective organism needs to make.

Peter Weschler, CFO, starts the formal meeting. He calls for two quick presentations-mind-numbing slides by the inner circle meant to reassure the inner circle that the company is fundamentally fit, with no Mendelian diseases. Truecyte has two new products in the pipeline and a small library of licensable processes that may prove instrumental to future genetic research.

But the venture capitalists have threatened to pull the plug and write off Truecyte’s rising flood of red. “I’ll put it simply,” Weschler says. “Two of the top three stakeholders want to know what in hell is going on.”

All eyes at the long glass conference table flicker deniably toward Thomas Kurton, who takes some time to realize that he’s being reprimanded. When he does come alive, he’s sardonic in his own defense. “You know, if this association study has survived the scrutiny of hundreds of hostile competitors over the last few months, it should survive the scrutiny of friendly investors.”

“No one is challenging the study,” Weschler says.

“It’s impeccable science,” Thomas says.

Zhang Jung Li, the CEO, says, “This is not really about scientific practice qua science.”

“We had to push you to get the study out,” Weschler reminds Thomas.

Kurton simply can’t imagine what the investors have a right to fuss about. Research has tied a genomic network to a high-level behavioral trait. How can such a finding be anything but a gold mine?

“They want,” the steady proteomics researcher George Cheung growls, “an explanation of all the recent questionable business decisions and publicity.”

Calm falls over Kurton. “I don’t see how they can hold us accountable for the media fallout ”

Weschler flips through a yellow legal pad. It looks to me, from my distance, weirdly like the pad Stone used to prepare his first day of class. “They want to know why you grandstanded for an $800 million licensing fee and came up empty-handed. They want to know how getting humiliated in court fits into the company business model.”

Kurton nods appreciatively. It’s the first interesting question posed by the VCs since founding. He himself, after several days of reflection, still has no good public explanation for his action aside from sentimentality.

“I see,” he says. “And they won’t be satisfied until heads roll.”

He means it poetically. But no one at the table speaks a word.

The silence replicates until even Kurton can’t fail to read it. “You’re not Are you asking me to resign?”

He looks around the table, enlightened at last. If only these hired assassins were bolder, could plunge the knife in with less sheepish chagrin, he might take some pleasure in this scene. He glares at them, grinning: Run your damn cost-benefit analyses. Side with the smart money. But do not apologize for surviving.

No one says anything for way too long. Finally, Zhang Jung Li speaks. “Realistically put, Thomas, we have to get back to more practical research.”

What does nature call this? Cannibalism? Parricide? Fatal parasitism? Thomas fights down the urge to say anything; the entire spectrum of available responses feels puerile. He can’t keep from smiling; the drama just seems so absurdly conventional, like one of those cheap paperback genres: death by robot insurrection or unstoppable nanotech gray goo. His company, straight out of his own what? Loins? Frontal lobes? His own company is transcending him.

He wants to dismiss the lot, as summarily as he appointed them. But his every possible defense is forestalled. He himself saw to that, when he set up the company bylaws. Has made sure that the group desire would not be crippled by his own.

His feet and hands go cold. He’s not what he was. He has let some strange idealism blind him. He hasn’t even the strength to play himself anymore. The alpha researcher in him falters, and with the stumble comes an almost instant drop in serotonin. So long as he produced the prizes, so long as he was profitable , the tribe let him mate with everything in sight. Now, at the first sign of weakness, they launch this inevitable takedown

He remembers the thousand beautiful implications of his association study, and a parent’s panic seizes him. The genetic screen for well-being will be shelved in favor of more practical, portable projects. The real work-overcoming the limits of our archaic design-will be crushed underneath this creature that cares less about the nature of things than about feeding and shitting and reproducing and expanding its range.

All life long, he has believed in the one nonarbitrary enterprise, fairer than any politics, truer than any religion, deeper than any artwork: measurement. Double-blind, randomize, and test again: something will circulate, something cold and real and beyond mere desire. Something that can put us inside the atom, outside the solar system. Something that can come to change even its own enabling code

The method is life’s magnificence, our one external court of appeal. Koch, Reed, Pasteur-the pantheon of heroes stenciled onto his boyhood ceiling-could have been other names. Often, they were other names, not always recorded. Individuals will come and go; the method will leverage them, or find new bodies. Truth can escape all local frailties.

Or so he has always thought. Now, way too late for an intelligent man, he sees: Crucial facts might easily go missing. To be discovered, it hardly suffices that a thing be true.

Yet the beauty of the method is its utter indifference. All life long, Kurton has predicted the upgrade of human life by its evolutionary heirs. It remains the species’ unique destiny to preside over the design of its own obsolescence. Thomas’s one job now is to show how peacefully a good transhumanist can die.