“I’m not surprised,” she says.
“You’re not?”
“I’m not surprised that that’s what most people say.” She crosses to the cold window casement by the pantry and breathes on the glass. In the condensation, she draws two contentment graphs. The first is a steady, high, straight line. The second is a diagonal, starting at zero and maxing out at the end. She stands aside, a counselor pretending to be an actress playing a schoolteacher. “Which of these two is happier?”
By any measure that Stone can think of, it’s the first.
“Now: which life do most people want to have?”
He stares at his choices. “Are you serious?”
She shrugs. “Number two is a better story. Most people are already pretty happy. What we really want is to be happier. And most people think they will be, in the future. Keeps us in the trenches, I guess.”
She rubs her finger slowly across the chill glass, obliterating all graphs.
“Have you come across Norbert Schwarz’s work? It’s classic. Subjects fill in a questionnaire about life satisfaction. But the subject must go into the next room to make a copy of the questionnaire before filling it in. One group finds a dime sitting on the copy machine. Their lucky day. The control group finds nothing.”
Stone grips a plate. “Don’t tell me.”
“I’m afraid I have to; it’s science! The lucky group reports significantly higher satisfaction with their entire life.”
He grins, shakes his head, and plunges his fists back in the hot water, now tepid to his accustomed hands.
“Don’t take it so hard.” She grazes his shoulder with her towel. “Works with a chocolate bar, too.”
He lifts his hands from the water and presses his soapy palms to his cheeks. “We’re pathetic.”
“We’re beautiful,” she replies. “We just have no idea how we feel or what makes us feel that way!”
“So feeling good is really that cheap?”
“Not cheap.” She traces out a quick hieroglyphic on the upper arm of his waffle shirt. “ Affordable. And easier than we think.”
Easy is exactly the problem. He turns and faces her, holds her eyes for the first time all evening. “And Thassa?”
“And Thassa.” She gazes off into a ceiling corner full of cobwebs he missed in the afternoon’s scrub-down. “She must carry around one hell of a chocolate bar.”
At the evening’s end, mother and son don coats, scarves, hats, and gloves. Outside, the snow is thin but gathering, a taste of things to come. The boy sticks out a king crab claw and shakes Russell’s hand. He promises to show Stone his life in Futopia, anytime. Bundled, the mother turns to Stone, slips one padded arm around his middle, turns her head away, and pulls him into her. She lays her right ear on his clavicle and listens.
He plays dead. The one time Grace was this gentle was right before she left.
Dr. Weld breaks the embrace. “Merry Christmas,” she says. She looks up at him, wincing. She waves an erasing mitten in the air. Don’t worry, it says. Means nothing. A dime’s a dime. Grab it when you see it.
No one at Truecyte searches for the story. They come across it by data mining, scouring the Web with automated scripts and prospecting bots. The company’s intelligent agents race from server to server at all hours, extracting patterns and converging on the next genetic trends before they’ve even materialized.
Nodes, clusters, trackbacks, memes Truth follows bandwidth, as sure as use follows invention. By now, the idea is a commonplace: only that massively parallel computer, the entire human race, is powerful enough to interpret the traffic that it generates. No single expert can calculate the outcome of tomorrow’s big game. But the averaged aggregate guess of hundreds of millions of amateurs can come as close as God.
In this way, a self-assembling network of page traffic presents itself daily to three graduate-student interns trained to prowl around each morning’s tidal pools and pull out shiny things. If two out of the three of them tag the same story, it goes to Kurton’s own news aggregator. And for an hour every morning before dawn, the inventor of rapid gene signature reading mulls over the day’s trove of stories.
He consumes the feeds, looking for new upheaval, the same constant upheaval that has carried him this far. He still remembers the Boethius that his ex-wife made him read at Stanford a third of a century ago, insisting it would make him a better person: no one will ever be safe or well until Fortune upends him.
As Kurton reads, he drags various links into tree branches in his visual concept-mapper, trees that start out as bonsais but-tended and grafted and trained toward the light-grow into redwoods.
People who read stories about subjective well-being also subscribe to posts about affective set point.
People who subscribe to posts about affective set point are also interested in genetic basis of happiness.
People who follow genetic basis of happiness.
comment and respond to/.
spend many page minutes with/.
rate highly/.
frequently link to.
one of several mutually quoting accounts of Kabylia’s outpost in Chicago, stories that spread the keyword hyperthymia like a pheromone trail.
He reads the Reader story and feels the journalist’s excitement. This Kabyle woman has grown up in a vicious free-for-all that makes the stoic Boethius look like a bed-wetting schoolboy. And despite the worst that environment can contribute, her body pumps out the standing gladness that should be every human’s birthright.
Hunch’s role in science has never embarrassed Kurton. And he has a hunch that this woman may be the missing datum that Truecyte’s three-year study needs. If she isn’t, the study will only be strengthened by learning why. He checks with his schedule keeper, who tells him he’ll be at the University of Chicago in the second week of January, for a debate with an Australian Nobelist in literature who believes that scientific investigation has killed the world’s soul.
With six clicks, Kurton finds a contact for the immigrant student. He composes an e-mail, using a Tamazight greeting that he picked up on one of his trips to Morocco. He tells her about his work in understanding what makes humans happy, and his hopes for using genetic information to heal the future. He describes how much his lab has already learned by exploring people like her, and he says how much she would contribute to the study. Everyone alive would love to know a little more about how you tick! He mentions that he’s coming to Chicago and asks if they might meet when he’s in the city. He gives her five ways to contact him. And his e-mail software automatically appends, beneath the obligatory block of personal data, his signature quote:
. whatever was the beginning of this world, the end will be glorious and paradisiacal, beyond what our imaginations can now conceive.
– Joseph Priestley
PART THREE
WELL PAST CHANCE
For the point is this: not that myth refers us back to some original event which has been fancifully transcribed as it passed through the collective memory; but that it refers us forward to something that will happen, that must happen. Myth will become reality, however skeptical we might be.
– Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10 ݣ Chapters
And on a May night in the near future, Tonia Schiff will land at Tunis-Carthage International. Seen from the airport shuttle, the dense glow surprises her. So much flickering enterprise up so late, refining fresh surplus into new necessities. Tunis glitters as furtively as any of the earth’s two-hundred-or-so-million-inhabitant cities. This one just happens to be four thousand years old.
The science-show host wakes up in the Centre Ville, feeling that she’s landed by mistake in southern Italy. Only the palms along Avenue Mohammed V reassure Tonia. And these turn out to be just a holdover French colonial fantasy. For a day, she wanders at random. The perfect day to play the tourist in one’s own life. She climbs up to the Belvedere, loses herself in the tight medina maze, strolls through the bey’s palace. She
stands overwhelmed in the heart of the suq, beyond the simplest bargaining.
A pair of guards turn her away at the entrance to the Grande Mosquée, on account of her clothes. She tells herself she’ll try again later, more suitably dressed, but knows she won’t.
The city’s scent veers crazily from dawn to dusk. In the morning, fetid breezes blow over the dried salt lake, mixing with exhaust. Toward sundown, the flower vendors creep out to thread the cafés with jasmine garlands. A tiny white snail of a flower, whose scent is like falling down a bottomless well: solvent, secret, and as strange as sex, with final arrival lying just a few inches below reach Tonia Schiff might have come to this place for that smell alone.
The next day will be clearer still. In midmorning, she’ll make her way out to the marble carcass of Carthage. She winds up sitting at a stone table above the surf, aside the Chicago of the ancient world, scribbling production notes for her redemptive film now under way. Salt spray from the Mediterranean curls her pages. Coastal sun douses her, in a country she was sure she’d never live long enough to see.
The sea air is heavenly. Even the smearing haze over the city is beautiful. At a nearby table, a family of six picnics. A sinuous voice dances out of their radio; a woman who sounds seven feet tall threads a melody around instruments Schiff can’t even name. She won’t be able to tell the key, the scale, the words, the age, or even the feelings at stake. Her ignorance verges on glorious.
She digs into her bag and pulls out a beaten-up copy of Frederick P. Harmon’s Make Your Writing Come Alive. The book’s spine was broken long before it came to Tonia. She lays the volume flat on the table, open to chapter two: “Vital Fiction.” Ink fills the margins-words in three languages, sketches, diagrams, snaking arrows. Half the sentences are underlined in an elaborate, uncrackable color-code. The last paragraph on page 123 is double-underscored, in Berber red:
Here is the single most important secret of vivid writing: let your reader travel freely. No border checks, no customs declarations, no visa: let every reader reach the country of her innermost need.
In the margin, next to “travel freely,” the Berber woman has written “scares some people.”
“Innermost” is circled. Above it, the words “le plus profond” lead to another phrase in a language Tonia Schiff won’t be able to tell from random scratches in stone
Thassa reads Kurton’s message on a computer in a Montreal Public Library branch six blocks from her aunt and uncle’s council flat. She’s still on winter vacation and looking for messages from someone else-an interest only now dawning on me. She has had scores of e-mails from strangers in the last week, but this one ranks with the strangest. She laughs at the would-be Berber greeting. She clicks on the link in Kurton’s signature but can’t make much of the site. She googles “how you tick,” but ends up more in the dark than when she started.
She refuses to snub anyone, even obvious cranks. Many of the most interesting people in her life seemed like cranks, at first. She forwards the entire message to Chicago, adding a note of her own:
Chère Candace,
No foggy clue what this means. Yiii: it’s sci-ence! So you know all about that, and you told me once if anything ever looks funny, just to ask your opinion.
Your opinion?
Je t’embrasse très fort.
T.
Candace Weld’s opinion was split at best. She read three print interviews with Thomas Kurton and listened to the man play himself on a podcast. She found him vaguely messianic, but neither the thuggish Edward Teller nor the grandiose Craig Venter that scared or envious reporters made him out to be. Weld knew plenty of researchers like Kurton. She’d gone to school with them, studied under them, competed with them for her own PhD. These men had simply accepted science’s latest survival adaptation-salesmanship. Any funded researcher who condemned them was a hypocrite.
She looked up the full Priestley quote from Kurton’s signature, finding ten different mutations that fanned across the Web in adaptive radiation. Thousands of people were out there, disseminating the clergyman-chemist’s ecstatic vision. The coming paradise was fast becoming a start-up industry all its own:
[N]ature, including both its materials, and its laws, will be more at our command; men will make their situation in this world abundantly more easy and comfortable; they will probably prolong their existence in it, and will grow daily more happy, each in himself, and more able (and, I believe, more disposed) to communicate happiness to others
Part of Weld wanted this genomicist to see Thassa, to be there when the transhumanist met something that no amount of blood work, tissue samples, or gene sequencing would ever explain. Thassadit Amzwar’s gift had little to do with molecules; on that, Candace was ready to bet her own well-being. The Kabyle had found something about how best to be alive. Mr. Omega Point could find the same, by meeting her.
Candace recalled Dennis Winfield’s warning about boundaries, and she briefly considered consulting him. But Thassa had written her as a friend, not as a client. Candace wrote back on her Gmail account, not her college one. She told Thassa what she’d learned about the controversial scientist. Thassa should feel no obligation to meet the man, but if she wanted to, Candace would be happy to chaperone.
The reply came in, as good as predictable. That’s great. That’s perfect. Can Mister Stone come, too?
Men will grow daily more happy, each in himself, and more able to communicate happiness to others. Schiff reads the words at the end of dozens of e-mails. She reads at night by the dim ceiling light in her hotel above the ficus trees on Avenue Habib Bourguiba. Whatever the beginning of this world, the end will be glorious and paradisiacal. Beyond imagining
She carries the man’s correspondence around the globe, along with a dossier of files stolen from the archives of Over the Limit. She searches her folders for that broad-based survey on America’s attitudes toward genetic editing that will open her film in progress:
Two-thirds of Americans would genetically intervene to keep their offspring disease free.
Two-fifths would enhance their children, with the number rising every year.
On average, American parents would give their child ninety-fourth percentile beauty and fifty-seventh percentile brains.
These data keep her awake, working in her narrow rented room as the scent of jasmine blows through her open window. When jet lag finally catches her, she curls up on the hard mattress and goes through the motions of sleep. All the while, on the insides of her eyelids, hopes rise, taboos fade, miracles get marked down, the impossible goes ordinary, chance becomes choice, and Scheherazade keeps whispering, “What is this tale, compared to the one I will tell you tomorrow night, if you but spare me and let me live?”
A hurt message on Stone’s answering machine: Mister! I’m back. I went to your office hours, but they said you weren’t with the college anymore. I sent you a mail, but it bounced. Can you just tell me you are okay?
He writes back and says he’s fine. He’s returned to his real job. He wishes her well in the new semester. I hope you keep up your journal. He writes in a tone to preclude all reply, then checks his mail every fifteen minutes for the next ten hours.
Her answer is seven words: Did they fire you because of me?
No, he insists. That job was only temporary. He never expected to be renewed for spring. It’s the first lie he can remember telling that wasn’t prompted by real-time panic. He falls into the beginner’s trap: too many explanations. I have to focus my time and energies. I’m going to write a book.
She replies immediately: Mabrouk, mabrouk! Fantastic news. Maybe you can tell me all about it, the night of January 12? Candace and I are going to hear a mad scientist who wants to study me. Can you believe it?
Kurton is nursing the three-hundred-dollar shot of orange juice they serve in first class before takeoff when the flight attendant comes on the speakers like an old friend. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to American flight 1803 from Boston to Chicago
. If Chicago is not in your travel plans today, now might be a good time to deplane.
He laughs out loud, which makes his seatmate stop thumbing her BlackBerry and look up in alarm. Kurton apologizes and turns back to his notes. He’s working on his comments for the debate with the Australian Nobel novelist and searching for a good hook. As always, random assortment and selection hand him one. He scribbles onto his card stock with a fountain pen: If the future is not your destination, now might be a good time to disembark.
They go down to Hyde Park together, Stone, Weld, and Thassadit. The event is billed as “a dialogue between the Two Cultures,” but seems to be a cross between celebrity gawk and gladiatorial combat. Russell is a mess, and not just because each woman has a hold of an elbow and steers him in a different direction.
Candace needed days to talk him into coming. “You can’t avoid her forever. She wants to see you.”
In fact, he needs another look at her, now that the evening class is history. He’s starting to think that he made her up, that she’s just a good-natured kid he happened to meet in her first flush of college life in an exhilarating city. Even so, one small dose of her could take him through this winter’s unusually rough patch and armor him for spring.
It’s not Thassa he most dreads. It’s the novelist. From their seats near the back of the auditorium, even before the writer steps onto the stage, Russell Stone eyes the exits. Years ago, in Tucson, he read one of the man’s books, a stripped-down parable in the Eastern European style, set in no place or time, imbued with only the faintest outline of a plot and with no pretense of a psychological character study to carry it. But as young Stone homed in on the closing pages, fixed to the cadence of sentences almost biblical, his own life fell away, replaced by a glimpse of human collective desperation so rigorous that it left itself no place to land but in a futile embrace. Stone finished the last paragraph lying on his back on the quarry stone of his apartment floor, unable to raise himself or stop crying or do much of anything except lie there like a grazing animal struck by something massive and ruthless beyond comprehension. When at last he did stand up, startled by the sound of Grace letting herself in the front door, he hid the book behind a shelf of essays. He never mentioned reading it to Grace or anyone.
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