Ironically, it was Professor Moorhead, the most ardent champion of the old neo-Darwinian model, who had catapulted her into the exciting new field of epigenetics. After graduating, she had initially been thrilled to be given a place in his lab, only to discover that he was a serial seducer of his female students and that working under him was a proposition that he took, like so many others, all too literally. Since Moorhead assumed that human nature was entirely mechanical, as he explained with an irresistible combination of smugness and impatience in his masterwork, The Insatiable Machine, she had assumed that his advances could be mechanically rebuffed, but this particular machine seemed to have a mind of its own, or at least someone else’s mind programmed into it, since it wasn’t strictly speaking entitled to one of its own. With whatever mysterious quantity of free will he brought to the task, Moorhead turned out to be a pest, writing Olivia a thirteen-page letter endorsing his amorous claims with a list of notorious symptoms, including insomnia, starvation and a renewed interest in poetry. Luckily, his unwelcome flattery coincided with her growing interest in epigenetics, a subject that Moorhead regarded as a passing fad, or at least a waste of his graduates’ time, which should have been spent dragging blocks of data across the desert floor of his genetic fundamentalism to erect a mausoleum fit to entomb his reputation. Olivia could still remember when any mention of Moorhead had lowered her mood, fleetingly but irresistibly, like the eclipse she had seen on a field trip in Indonesia, when she stood on a hilltop watching the edge of the moon’s shadow race across the forest, silencing the wildlife with its perplexing darkness. At the time of his repulsive advances she had sidestepped a confrontation by changing the subject of her DPhil. Since then, she had been waiting in vain for what should have been his inevitable downfall, but instead had been forced to watch him leap, like a supercilious chamois, from one improbable perch to the next. He had gone on to acquire a knighthood which had led, by all accounts, to a further decline in his chivalry. Despite her contempt for him, Olivia’s objective had never been to lodge a complaint, but to defeat him in his own field, and to overthrow the oppressive and strangely popular influence of his scientific ideology. In the meantime, she had become a Research Fellow, without teaching or lecturing to distract her.
Olivia saw her phone light up on the corner of the table. She had only left it there as a salute to the sense of potential emergency fabricated by the technology itself. What if Francis had a flat tyre? What if her mother had dropped dead? She leant forward and saw that it was in fact her brother Charlie who was calling. For a moment her deep scholarly habits pushed back against the distraction, partly because she welcomed it so much, but then, just as she changed her mind, the call ended. She felt annoyed with herself for putting up a struggle, but moments later he called again – it was so like him to assume, to know, in fact, that she really wanted to talk to him.
‘Hi, C,’ she said.
‘Hi there,’ said Charlie. ‘Is that the clatter of a train I can hear?’
‘Yes, I’m on the way to Sussex.’
‘Because you met a tall magnetic stranger at a party, and he invited you to spend the weekend.’
‘Well, actually, it was a conference. The rest is terrifyingly accurate.’
‘I’m psychic,’ said Charlie. ‘At least when it comes to you.’
‘It’s only with your patients that you don’t have a clue what’s going on in their minds.’
‘It’s for them to make that discovery,’ said Charlie, ‘to find the gold mines that were hidden in their psyches.’
‘Or the potato fields,’ said Olivia. ‘I feel that’s more like the sort of discovery you would inspire … Hello? Hello?’
Charlie called back.
‘I was thanking you: potatoes are much more nutritious.’
‘Hmm,’ said Olivia, ‘of course that’s what I meant. Hello? Oh god. Hello?’
‘Hi, I’m here,’ said Charlie, ‘this connection is hopeless.’
‘Let’s talk when I’m back in Oxford; I must do some work. I have to finish my final edit.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Charlie, ‘nobody is going to read your book anyway!’
They both had time to laugh before the signal died again. Charlie had been one of the most ardent advocates of Olivia turning her thesis into a book and she knew that he was really ringing to cheer her on. They had spoken a few days earlier about a challenging new paper she was determined to include, even at this late stage. Trying to find the right place for it was keeping her editing fresh. The experiment consisted of administering electric shocks to mice each time they were exposed to the sweet orange smell of acetophenone. It was hardly surprising that the mice, electrocuted five times a day for three days, started to become ‘reliably fearful’ from exposure to the smell alone. What was challenging to the standard view of inheritance was that the offspring of those mice still exhibited fear in the presence of acetophenone, without being given any electric shocks themselves. Indeed, the effect lasted into a third generation. The mothers of the new generations were of course unexposed, in case they passed on their fear in utero, and a further control was introduced through artificial insemination, eliminating the risk of rumours spreading from mouse to mouse through other forms of communication. Nobody understood how the fear of acetophenone had produced chemical changes that altered the expression of genes in a way that entered the sperm of the electrocuted mice. The orthodoxy of random mutation claimed that an organism’s complement of DNA was fixed from the moment of its conception. In this view it was impossible for a learnt aversive response to write itself into the DNA and be stably inherited by the offspring. It was just this kind of challenge to the conventional view of inheritance that made epigenetics such an exhilarating field.
Olivia looked up at the display of the stations that lay ahead. There were still three stops to Horsham. She knew she didn’t have the concentration to read any more but promised herself that during her stay with Francis, or at the very latest on the return journey on Sunday, she would find a place in her pages for the subversive, paradigm-challenging, reliably fearful mice. What she really needed to do was to get any texts and emails out of the way before she became absorbed in her torrid weekend. She ran through the new messages with the efficiency that could only come from deciding to postpone all the complicated ones, delete the intrusive ones and deal exclusively with Lucy’s confirmation of their dinner on Tuesday with a simple, ‘Can’t wait. Xx’.
Lucy was flying in from New York this evening. It would be lovely to have her back after her six years in the States. They had been so close as undergraduates and had both stayed on at Oxford but Lucy, unlike Olivia, had grown sick of academic life and had gone on to work as a corporate consultant in London and later New York. It was all very well for Olivia to say that she wanted to pursue pure knowledge, but she also knew that Lucy had no back-up, no inheritance in the pipeline, whereas Olivia’s parents had slowly acquired their large house in Belsize Park over decades of hard work. It was now preposterously valuable and would one day be coming down to her and to Charlie. It was naïve to underestimate the psychological impact of that difference. They had kept closely in touch, inter-continentally, but it was exciting that Lucy was now going to be fully back in her life.
Olivia finally switched off her phone, packed the proofs in her rucksack and took her overcoat down from the ledge overhead. There was no way for her to be more prepared without loitering by the carriage door and getting in everybody’s way during the next two stops. She sank back in her seat, turning slightly sideways so she could raise her knee and tuck it against the edge of the table. She gazed across a field, enjoying the complicity between the colours of the autumn woods and of the fiery evening sky stretching behind them, but soon her attention folded back on to the volatile thrill of imagining herself so close to someone she hardly knew.
4
‘Everything happens for a reason,’ said Saul, holding the silver straw delicately between his thumb and forefinge
r, ‘but unfortunately, when it really matters, we don’t know what the reason is.’
Saul had always spoken rapidly, but on that Monday morning he was sprinting to the next full stop like an athlete trying to break a record.
‘For instance, the exact nature of the correlation between electro-chemical activity in the brain and the experience of being conscious is entirely obscure, and since everything we know depends on being conscious, the description we give of reality, however coherent it seems, hangs over an abyss.’
He leant down and sniffed up the softly gleaming powder; perfect cocaine with the texture of crushed pearls, its curving lines like claw marks across the glass surface of a silver-framed photograph of Barry Goldwater. All the presidential candidates, Democrat and Republican, going back to Nixon’s failed contest against JFK in 1960, had given Hunter’s father signed photographs. He hadn’t had to wait for Wall Street to teach him about hedging his bets, he just used to totter into the library and read all the warm messages inscribed to his father by America’s bitterest rivals.
‘An abyss…’ Saul repeated. ‘God, this stuff is really good … Where was I? Oh, yeah, I mean, experience accuses science of being reductionist and authoritarian, while science dismisses experience as subjective, anecdotal and self-deceived. We have an absurd situation where the first-person narrative of experience and the third-person narrative of experiment shout insults at each other from either side of an explanatory gap, that huge, huge explanatory gap.’
He threw his arms apart to give Hunter some idea of just how huge this explanatory gap was, and then sank back into his creaking wicker chair, puffed out his cheeks and stared from the rosewood deck at the interlocking golden hills of Apocalypse Now, Hunter’s ranch in Big Sur, sloping steeply down to the silent Pacific. Out at sea a fog bank drifted towards the shore, swallowing the lazy glitter of the swell, but however thick the fog grew, Hunter knew that it would never reach the house, only generate a sea of hoary mist beneath his feet.
‘Looking at this view,’ said Hunter, ‘I’m having a complex experience of perceptions, reflections and memories. What I’m not experiencing is neurons firing, even though none of this could take place without firing neurons—’
‘It’s a tormenting question,’ Saul interrupted. ‘I mean, what is the matrix that transforms one into the other? I’m a materialist, don’t get me wrong—’
‘I’m pleased to hear that,’ said Hunter. ‘Maybe developing Brainwaves can help reduce your torment.’
‘Sure,’ said Saul, ‘but materialism still has a lot of explaining to do, not just about consciousness but about a ton of other things as well…’ He trailed off, overwhelmed by pleasure. ‘God, I feel so high without being wired. Can I buy some of this off you? Sorry, maybe that was inappropriate.’
‘It was,’ Hunter confirmed.
‘Are we cool?’ said Saul nervously.
‘Well, one of us is cool and the other isn’t,’ said Hunter, with a guffaw.
One thing Saul Prokosh was not and never would be was cool. He and Hunter hadn’t really been friends at Princeton, but at least Hunter never gratuitously insulted him, unlike some of their more lock-jawed contemporaries whose grandfathers still sighed longingly at the memory of the golden days when Jews were not admitted to the best hotels in New York and Palm Beach. Saul was now The Lafayette Smith and Bathsheba Smith Professor of Chemical Engineering, Artificial Intelligence and The Realisation of Human Potential at The California Institute of Technology, as it said on his unusually large business card. Currently, he was scanning the brains of people in various allegedly desirable states of mind in order to reconstruct those states in other volunteers, using trans-cranial magnetic stimulation. It was proving fiendishly difficult to reverse engineer these correspondences and replicate the effects in the minds of others, who seemed set on having their own thoughts, even when the scans of their brains, after trans-cranial stimulation, showed many similarities to the original neuroimaging. There were no completely clear results up to now, but Hunter had been so impressed by the addictive potential of this new technology that he impulsively offered to make Saul a Senior Vice-President of Digitas and put him in charge of Brainwaves and New Projects.
‘Maybe I’m a visionary,’ said Hunter, texting ‘Wagyu Ragu’ in answer to his cook’s lunch suggestions, ‘or maybe I’m suffering from survivor’s guilt, but I’ve decided that it’s time to give something back. Perhaps “back” isn’t exactly the right word. I’m not talking about refunding the investors who bought my hedge fund for $1.6 billion a few weeks before the stock price tanked; and I’m not giving the five hundred former employees of Midas their jobs back.’
‘It sounds like “back” is definitely not the right word,’ said Saul, looking longingly at Barry Goldwater.
‘In any case,’ said Hunter, ‘I want our products, Brainwaves, YouGenetics, and all the other great ideas we have, to be based on intellectual property that makes a fundamental contribution and wins all the science Nobels across the board.’
‘We gotta leave them some of the prizes,’ said Saul, like a lawyer pleading for clemency.
‘They can have Peace and Literature,’ said Hunter.
For some reason, the two men just cracked up and couldn’t stop laughing.
‘Peace and Literature,’ said Saul, trying to control himself. ‘Why is that so funny?’
‘We’re stoned,’ said Hunter.
‘I know, but it’s still just inherently…’ He couldn’t go on, except to howl ‘Peace and Literature’ one more time.
‘You’ve pretty much nailed the Focus and Relax programs,’ said Hunter, ‘but we’ve gotta do more work on the Bliss algorithm and then, once we’ve got a global craze on our hands, we’ll release the Nirvana helmet.’
‘Totally,’ said Saul. ‘In fact, I should head back to Pasadena; we’re scanning Matthieu Ricard’s love, joy and compassion this afternoon.’
‘The French lama—’ said Hunter.
‘Right,’ said Saul. ‘This guy is phenomenal. You could waterboard him and his vital signs wouldn’t shift, he’s so deep in the Alpha State.’
‘Here, have one for the road,’ said Hunter, handing Saul a signed photograph of Ronald Reagan on which he had been chopping a couple of long lines. ‘We shouldn’t really have carried our weekend into Monday morning, but when you’re brainstorming, you’re brainstorming.’
‘Definitely. Brainstorming,’ said Saul, snuffling up one of Ronald Reagan’s trouser legs.
‘You’d better go scan your lama. I’ve gotta make a call to Lucy Russell, the new head of Digitas in London.’
‘How’s she working out?’
‘We’ll see, but you know me – easily bored – and I’m not bored by her. Most people are falling over to agree with me, but she’s not afraid to point out if I’ve missed a beat,’ said Hunter, snorting his way up Reagan’s red tie, across his creased and grinning face and into his incongruously inky hair.
The two men parted with back-slapping hugs and Saul set off on the six-mile drive from Hunter’s ranch down to the meandering ribbon of road along the coast.
Left alone, Hunter returned indoors and after cleaning the photos with screen wipes, hung Senator Goldwater and President Reagan back on their hooks against the oak-panelled walls of his magnificent study, which looked entirely traditional, except that two of the walls formed an arrow head of thick glass pointing out to sea, making the masculine gravitas of the room seem to float in air and light. He was fired up and ready to talk to Lucy. The call was scheduled for fifteen minutes’ time. He took up his position in a red leather chair opposite the gleaming scabbard of a priceless samurai sword, cradled among the bookshelves on the other side of the room.
Saul and Lucy and the rest of the team were his consiglieri as he laid claim to the crucial neighbourhood of human endeavour known as science, so often neglected by the billionaire community in favour of art, animals, opera, Mars, orphans and famous diseases. It was hard to make a
splash when Bill Gates already had malaria and the Metropolitan Museum was growing more philanthropic wings than a mutant fruit fly, but he had endowed a Foundation devoted to finding scientific solutions to the world’s manifold problems. The trouble was that whenever he came across a good idea it somehow ended up in Digitas. Still, for a man as rich as him to show his face in society without a Foundation would be like a construction worker not having a hard hat on a building site. At the dinner party where he had met Lucy, he had mentioned his Foundation, quite casually, only to have her say, ‘To a foreign eye, America has so much philanthropy and so little charity. Most people have to kill themselves to prove that they deserve ordinary kindness, while a tiny group of people never stop boasting about how generous they are – as long as it’s tax-deductible.’ That’s when he’d decided to hire her.
Eight minutes left and he was beginning to feel the encroachment of that old catastrophe: comedown. He glanced up at Jimmy Carter (it was his turn) but realised it was too late to organise himself and he would screw up the call. Punctuality and control mattered to him immensely – perhaps because part of him was so out of control. He had been living this way since he was a teenager; now only in occasional bursts, but with the threat always there in the background. When he had first become vaguely aware of Saul at Princeton, Hunter invariably wrote his essays through the night, just before they were due. The exchange rate was about twenty lines of writing for one line of coke; writing that started out with declamatory confidence and degenerated into convoluted confusion. He must stop. It was no way to carry on for a man in his late forties, but despite all the therapy, there was something he couldn’t reach, a bomb he hadn’t disposed of, a part of him that wanted to smash everything up. He thought of using these last painful minutes to check the stock market on his phone, or check the schedule Jade emailed him each morning, but instead he glazed over, looking bleakly at the perfection of his surroundings until the digits on his clock finally flicked to the right number. He punched his fist into the palm of his other hand and brought himself back before he tapped Lucy’s number.
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