Generosity

by Richard Powers

  He edited a piece written by an administrative secretary at Mesquakie College about how to fight depression by feeding squirrels. The grateful woman alerted him to an emergency hiring in the Writing Department. A memoirist who taught the Journal and Journey course had taken unpaid leave after a bad episode with mood enhancers that made him travel to San Francisco and assault a blogger who’d insulted one of his published reminiscences about his father.

  To Russell Stone’s astonishment, he met the job’s prerequisites. He had the degree and prestigious publications, albeit none for eight years. With just a month to staff the course, the college was ready to take anyone. The interview felt weirdly furtive, as if Russell were defrauding a credit union.

  He got the job and crammed for three weeks, prep that the opening night’s class scattered to the winds. But that night goes so well that now, for the first time in years, he imagines himself, with something like shock, becoming someone quite different again, by this time next semester.

  From where I sit, the whole human race did something stupid when young-pulled some playful stunt that damaged someone. The secret of survival is forgetting. If evolution favored conscience, everything with a backbone would have hanged itself from the ceiling fan eons ago, and invertebrates would once again be running the place.

  “The Genie and the Genome”-final cut-opens with that relentless, digital techno-throb that stands for coming soon. Out of the pulsing blackness emerges a face Donatello might have cast, successfully refuting middle age. The eyebrows arch. The mouth twitches shyly and confides:

  Enhancement. Why shouldn’t we make ourselves better than we are now? We’re incomplete. Why leave something as fabulous as life up to chance?

  The impish face turns golden and explodes. Each shiny shard tumbles away into more throbbing blackness.

  Another face fades in from the void, a big, gruff, empirical Friar Tuck.

  Insane? No, I wouldn’t say Thomas Kurton is insane. I might say profoundly nutty. But Darwin was nuts too, right?

  Tuck shrugs, and his shoulder ripple starts a whirlpool that washes him away. The smiling Donatello rises from the flood.

  A lot of people think this is all science fiction. But then, we live in a country where 68 percent of folks don’t believe in evolution

  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.

  Up on floor seven, in the dingy, fluorescent-humming nest, he comes on Mason, Charlotte, and Adam debating the merits of garage bands he’s never heard of. He was an avid fan once, but these names sound like complex synthetic chemicals or villages scattered across Kyrgyzstan. “Are they running out of available garage band names?” he asks. The students laugh, at least. “Aren’t they running out of garages, by now?”

  The Kabyle woman isn’t there. Russell Stone wilts, sure that he said something last time to make her drop the course. She has disappeared, like a nighttime life-changing insight he has forgotten to jot down. Confidence failing, Stone asks for volunteers to read their first entry. One thing worth telling a total stranger. Adam Tovar demurs. “Mine isn’t ready yet. The story part is done; I just have to go back and put in the symbols.” John Thornell launches into a clinical account of two policemen chasing a screaming teenager into the courtyard of John’s apartment building. The tasers are just coming out when Thassa Amzwar appears in the doorway.

  She’s shorter than Stone thought. She’s wearing a kind of needlework, coral-colored shift. She could be from southern Italy. But her round face shines with precisely the light he remembers, the flushed look announcing that the most remarkable thing has happened to her, just now, down this hall, outside this building, on the streets of this improbable city. A thing that redeems everyone, for years to come. No apology in her eyes for being late; just a rash smile for her assembled, long-lost friends. She takes a seat, her silver-bangled wrist grazing Sue’s shoulder, her lilac fingernails curling around Charlotte’s elbow in greeting.

  All eight of them grow an inch more alert. John stumbles through another half a sentence then backs off, claiming the rest of the entry is too rough to share. “Roughness is the only thing worth sharing,” Russell claims. The others flip through their pages, eyes down, stripped of their art-student élan.

  No volunteers. Maybe it’s suburban diffidence, the Islands of the Blessed deferring to the edge of the scorched Sahara. Or maybe they’re just soaking in the glow of this woman, her eerie contentment. They shuffle their journals, glancing sidelong, checking to see if they’ve made her up.

  “We’re reading out loud?” Thassa asks. Her glee confers with everyone. “May I go next?”

  Before Stone can wonder how she learned her modal verbs better than the native speakers, she starts her entry. Her voice is one of those mountain flutes, somehow able to weave a second melody around the one it plays. Russell misses the gist of the words, he’s so wrapped up in the cadence of the sentences. It’s something out of the dawn of myth, set in a Chicago all but animist. One thing worth telling a total stranger, and the thing is this: an ancient woman, hoisting her aluminum walker up the Grand Staircase of the Cultural Center at the rate of one step a minute.

  The ascent is glacial, the staircase infinite, the climber a Wednesday-afternoon Sisyphus mounting toward the world’s largest Tiffany dome. The worn marble steps droop like cloth under the feet of a century of ghosts. But every word of Thassa’s description lifts the climber toward the light. By the third step, Russell realizes he’s never looked hard at anyone. By the top of the stairs, a sharp blue filament of need makes him want to see what will happen to the species, long after he’s dead.

  “Shit,” Sue Weston says, when Thassa is done. “Girlfriend? You expect me to read mine, after that?”

  They all laugh, and laughing, Russell remembers to breathe. Roberto Muñoz shudders in his loose flak jacket, rubs his shaved, plum-colored head with one cupped palm. “Thank you for that,” he murmurs. “Serious thanks. Makes me look forward to getting decrepit.” He shoots Thassa a look. “How old are you, anyway?”

  She’s twenty-three, it turns out, give or take an era.

  The others read, while the air is still jazzed with the colors of that ascent. They compete for approval, each of them fueled by Thassa’s encouraging nods. Affection threatens to replace all other texts. Algeria is nowhere, and Chicago a place just now become visible.

  The night ends before they get a chance to take a look at the assignment from Make Your Writing Come Alive. Russell scrambles to summarize Frederick P. Harmon’s thesis:

  Unless you care for the people in your story the way you want your reader to, all the description in the world will arrive stillborn.

  Nobody cares. They’re all too busy grooming and teasing one another. As the group packs up, Mason assigns them all nicknames. Kiyoshi becomes Invisiboy. There’s Artgrrl Weston and Princess Heavy Hullinger. John Thornell makes a born Spock. Adam becomes the Joker and Roberto, the Thief. Mason christens himself Counterstrike and declares that Russell Stone will hereafter be known as Teacherman. Only Thassadit gives him pause. He studies her, timid in her amused return gaze. “Hello, Dalai!” Then he corrects himself: “No, no. I know who you are. Miss Generosity.”

  Teacherman has to wave the grade book to get their attention. “Remember to e-mail your new pieces by midnight tomorrow.” The Joker and Artgrrl moan like cartoon characters caught in an ambush. Russell assigns the next topic as if he hasn’t been thinking about it for the last twenty-four hours, arranging and rearranging the words like a carpet of forest leaves hiding a pit trap. Convince someone that they wouldn’t want to grow up in your hometown.

  Des Plaines, Terre Haute, Buffalo Grove: the perils of home are many, and the rewards slim. Stone reads all about the top hazards, tedium chief among them. “If Wheaton were a reality show,” says Mason’s piece, “the sponsors would have crashed it halfway through the pilot.” Close behind come isolation, bigotry, aimlessness, crushing homogeny, commercial blight, crimes against every known aesthetic, and the terminal malaise of abundance. Charlotte Hullinger writes, “I spent my childhood simmering in a satellite dish.” You know the place. A hometown now opening in a development near you.

  Now come by train, a five-year-old from Sétif, into the swarming Agha Station, Algiers. Grow up in a sprawling suburban maze uphill from the port, in the sun-disintegrating, low-bid, postwar high-rises of that repeatedly despoiled recumbent odalisque, Alger la blanche. Postwar? Prewar. Midwar, now and always. Holy war. La sale guerre. H
alf a century of war that has emptied the country of a third of its people. The zeal of recent independence has turned on itself, and the state manufactures new enemies everywhere. The Islamic backlash against kleptocrat tyrants escalates into a mass movement. The separatist Berber Spring comes and goes, not so much suppressed as deferred into a simmering Berber Summer. Reculer pour mieux sauter

  The world’s most promising new state has gone stillborn. The girl knows the problem. Her parents map it out, every night, in hushed voices over dinner. A century and a half of the colonized mind has spewed out tribalism with a vengeance, but without any noble cause this time. Dress, words, facial hair: every trait declares allegiance, intended or not. A generation into the country’s third major linguectomy, words are again a capital offense. When her father slips into French while lecturing to his university engineering students-et donc, voilà-he’s publicly censured. Her mother, a document translator for the national oil company Sonatrach, gets hissed at one afternoon by a small chorus on a Bab el-Oued bus for her neckline and bare hair, and when she complains to a patrolling policeman, he fines her for rabble-rousing.