Generation A

by Douglas Coupland

  by Serge Duclos

  Trevor thought these people surely had to be faking something as strange as this, but the more he questioned them, the more he learned about something called invariant memory.

  What, you ask, is invariant memory? It’s this: any body can look at a cat and tell it’s a cat. They can even look at a lion or a cougar and tell that it’s a cat, too. But there’s no such thing as the perfect cat, or the cattiest cat—an absolutely generic cat. The problem with logos versus cats is that logos exist purely unto themselves. A Starbucks logo is what it is, and only what it is. Because logos are absolute rather than a variant, the brains of these two test subjects were unable to read them. Capitalist time bombs? Darwinian masterpieces?

  Trevor thought about his own experience with words, of men tally converting novels into blobs and lines. He wondered if there was a connection—and he compared the brains and bloodstreams of the logosuppressives with the brains and bloodstreams of people deeply absorbed in reading Finnegans Wake. He found identical proteins.

  Sadly, it was also around this time that bees began to disappear, and Trevor thought nothing of it. Why would he? There wasn’t enough data to establish a pattern.

  “Serge! Stop! Crikes, my brain is hurting.” Sam was overloading. I’d been giving them much to absorb.

  I said, “Okay, then, let us take a break. Friends, could you please untape me?”

  “No.”

  They knew damn well I might, well, bolt.

  Harj asked, “How much of what you’re saying is true?”

  “It’s all a story. An allegory.”

  “That’s not what I asked. Is your story fully autobiographical?”

  “Every word we speak is autobiographical. How could it not be?”

  Sam was angry. “Jesus, Serge—just tell us, did all of this shit really happen?”

  “Your left brain is a potent tool. It forces you to create stories in order to make sense of information. Without enough information, it will create information to fill in the blanks. This storytelling capacity allows us to predict future events. It is the perfect way we have of sharing our brains with each other.”

  Diana asked if I was still a gambler.

  “No. I am not. Not any more.”

  “So your story is true, then.”

  “You are being too literal, Diana. I am not Trevor; Trevor is not me. And no, I don’t gamble.”

  Sam wrapped a new strip of duct tape around my mouth and upper torso. “Right, you smug prick. I’m really sick of you and science. We’re trapped on this ridiculous island, God only knows how many people are dead at the airstrip, bodies are strung up by the Esso station—should we even be feeling safe right now? Are we next to experience death-by-Esso? If Harj is correct—”

  Harj said, “I think I am, to be frank.”

  “. . . then the Haida have every right to be here with their bike chains before dawn.”

  Sam removed the duct tape. I requested a glass of water and a painkiller and was grudgingly given both. After this, we continued.

  The Gambler

  (continued)

  by Serge Duclos

  So now young Trevor was living and working in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, only he wasn’t quite so young any more, and he owed several times his annual salary in gambling debts. Literature lost its power over him—his brain felt like Chernobyl with helicopters buzzing around it.

  And what about the shapely, lively, sandwich-loving Amber? Reinventing himself as an American no longer gave Trevor’s daily life the flavour of radical surprise: minivans were boring, malls spiritually blank, and Amber left him after they attended a Rapture Preparedness workshop and he was caught reading a copy of InStyle for Tweens during a ten-minute cleansing prayer circle. Worst of all, he remained a prisoner of the near future, unable to live in the moment, his life morphed back into a rerun of his Montpelier experience.

  Then one day he and his team isolated a neuroprotein from people reading Finnegans Wake that, when diluted in a mild solution of sodium phosphate, became a chemical that had a calming effect on the people who took it. Prisoners stopped feeling imprisoned; isolation stopped bothering them. When their daily hour of communal time with other prisoners came around, most simply shrugged and said they’d rather not. Trevor and his colleagues were onto something huge.

  The wondrous new drug, however, was both difficult and expensive to make. The protein used to start it refused to be cloned, either in a petri dish or within a crèche of stem cells; it took hundreds of litres of blood to isolate enough protein to make a significant dose of the drug. It had to be synthesized in a wildly expensive 128-step process. Of course, Trevor was hooked on this stuff from the start. So forget Finnegans Wake. Forget books and forget reading and forget everything else on the planet except for this godsend of a brain fixer-upper that slowed his gambling to a point where he could keep it in check.

  Our Trevor was now a senior scientist who controlled budgets; he ensured that meaningful amounts of the drug were made, even at disastrous cost to the company. He had the most expensive jones in history. No more fear of aloneness! No more fear of poverty! No more fear of spiritual dearth! And mostly, no more brain spitting out an endless stream of gambling chatter.

  This is when co-workers noted a link between this new drug’s production and declining bee populations. Wherever the drug was made in North America, nearby bees vanished from their hives. His company’s plants, big and small, were everywhere. Trevor saw the maps; he knew there was no way to deny the direct correlation.

  So, as you can see, Trevor and the few colleagues who knew the truth were in a moral quandary. It wasn’t even future bucketloads of money they were thinking of when they decided to ramp up the drug’s production; it was the inability to imagine life without the drug.

  And so the bees vanished.

  Trevor’s company was finally able to make enough of the drug in bulk to make it cost-effective, but in order to turn a profit, they had to get people hooked quickly. This turned out not to be a problem, as the drug had a one-hundred-percent user satisfaction rate and a one-hundred-percent word of mouth recommendation rate. The world was turning into a world of loners. Families disintegrated. Casinos went out of business. Prison lost its capacity to intimidate and crime flourished.

  And many plants lost their ability to reproduce because the bees were gone.

  And then one day an Apis mellifera stung some guy in Iowa and all hell broke loose. For years, police forces everywhere had been training for a what-if scenario—probably the only properly funded response programs in the world—and then what-if actually happened. They descended on the guy like a tornado, and within a few hours he was underground beneath Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.

  And if there was one, then maybe there’d be more—and there were: New Zealand, France, Canada and Sri Lanka. And then no more. Most interesting of all was that one of the B5s (as we called them) had an adverse reaction to this new drug.

  “For fuck’s sake, can we just call it Solon?”

  “Okay, Zack, yes, let’s just call it Solon.”

  The Gambler

  (continued)

  by Serge Duclos

  Incroyable! Ce n’est pas possible! Trevor was a rock star within the company. He jetted between the B5s in their emotionally neutral rooms, ordering tests, checking blood serums, centrifuging this, laser-isolating that, and he liked what he found. The brains of these fresh young people secreted massive amounts of the rare molecule that, when tweaked, served as a cheap, easy starting point for Solon.

  Julien interrupted: “So you got what you wanted. A happy industrial ending.”

  “Almost, Sean Penn, almost.”

  Diana asked, “What happens next?”

  I said, “It’s a story in progress. It ends there. For now. Right now is part of the story—simply by being here, you’re storytelling.”

  The rainstorm erupted afresh. The room went quiet. Harj turned up the space heater
and a candle sputtered out. I asked, “Could you please take me out of this absurd Tarantino chair thingamajig.”

  Their ten eyeballs told me: No.

  Sam asked, “Right. What’s next? Do the five of us become living chemical factories for Trevor and his Solon? Why not just put us in a coma and get our personalities out of the way?”

  “That idea did come up. I talked them out of it.”

  Harj blurted out, “Why did you run for the door?”

  I replied, “I freaked out. I really don’t know what I was doing.”

  “You ‘freaked out’? I don’t believe you.”

  “Then don’t. Blame the booze.”

  “A mouse drinks more than you.”

  The sound of breathing filled the room as rain started to batter the windows. It felt like a trip to a therapist, where someone must speak first, except nobody would. My five young friends were on painkillers and tired. Their legs were bloody. I, on the other hand, was alert and merely annoyed by the duct tape’s constriction. I said, “Why don’t I simply give you all the full meal deal? Let me tell you everything I can.”

  “Okay,” said Zack. “Talk.”

  “Very well. To begin with, the bees obviously chose the five of you for a reason: your brains make what you might call a Solon starter molecule. Like yeast for bread. But this capacity also makes you allergic to Solon.

  “There are probably a few more people on the planet like you; we just don’t know who they are or where they are. We probably never will.

  “The five of you might be genetic accidents or you may be Darwinian progressions. Or, if you’re into God, maybe you were chosen. But we found you the only way we ever could have: because you were stung.

  “And it wasn’t just the fact that the bees saw you and stung you. They were waiting for the circumstances to be perfect. All of you were, at the moment of the stinging, involved with the planet—using satellites to do sketches in an Iowa cornfield; making Earth sandwiches in New Zealand; being expelled from virtual gaming worlds in Paris; being excommunicated from the afterworld in Ontario; or simply participating in global consumer miasma in Sri Lanka. Your situations had to be perfect before bees could do the deed.

  “We suspect that the bees lived in small hives all over the world and were waiting until the right situation occurred. Your body had to be sending off the exact chemical signal to trigger the sting.

  “At first, we tried to figure out if the five of you had anything in common. We found only two things: First, none of you has ever been in a real relationship with another person. Not a real one. There’s something about you that makes you keep yourselves away from others. Second, despite its prevalence, none of you ever expressed any interest in Solon.”

  Sam said, “Why would bees point out people who contain Solon starter molecules? That’s suicide.”

  “Let me remind you that all bee stings are suicides, however unintentional. Also, Solon’s starter molecule cuts both ways. If we add hydrogen to it in the right way, we create a genuine anti-Solon. Taking it makes it almost impossible for Solon to work ever again.”

  “Why didn’t you people just kill us, then? We’re the worst thing that could happen to you.”

  “The company doesn’t know about the anti-Solon yet. But I do. That’s why you’re all here on the island. I’m saving you.”

  Zack said, “Great. But you did run for the door.”

  “Tell us more,” said Harj. “Why do so many of our stories involve books or reading?”

  “Because Solon mimics the solitude one feels when reading a good book. Both books and Solon pull you away from the world. But to your brain, one Solon is like reading a thousand books in twenty-four hours.”

  “Why did you ask us to tell stories out loud?”

  “When you tell stories out loud, your bodies make a corrective molecule, one that brings people together. The anti-Solon. You felt the closeness. You’re feeling it now.”

  “Yes, but not with you.”

  “No need to rub it in.”

  “Show us something that would make us trust you,” said Sam.

  “Very well. Bring me my laptop and I will.”

  Julien brought my unit and we put it on a coffee table. I gave them a link, and the window opened to display a real-time camera focused on an industrial facility within a massive airplane hangar. They navigated the site from cam to cam, taking a tour of what appeared to be a giant candy factory. Julien said, “Ugh, it’s that disgusting dessert you Americans eat. Jell-O.”

  Diana looked at the screen and asked, “A Jell-O factory? What is that place?”

  “It’s a neurofarm.”

  “Huh? Where?”

  “That one?” I focused on the screen. “Nebraska, I think, far away from any protestors. And it’s manned by unemployed corn workers eager to accept Bangladeshi-calibre hourly wages. It’s massively cloning neural tissue.”

  Zack asked, “What is that stuff they’re making?”

  I looked more closely. “That batch is green. That means the gel-like substance is, well, you, Zack.”

  “What?”

  “Just what I said. Specifically, it is two-point-three acres, eight inches deep, of cells from your central nervous system, all of them cranking out Solon starter. It takes three days per batch, 33,000 cubic feet grown atop a sterile culture of agar. Congratulations, Zack—you’re the biggest person who ever lived.”

  Onscreen, a worker pushing a small dolly bumped into the edge of the jellied mass; it jiggled. Young Zack barfed inside his mouth.

  Diana said, “You mean all of us have been farmed like this?”

  “That is correct. The Solon starter cells from the five of you clone easily. And each of you is colour-coded.”

  “And all that jelly food we ate in the underground rooms—that was . . . us?”

  “Yes, it was.”

  “Wait,” said Zack. “I was eating this jelly shit even before the others got stung.”

  “At first you were eating a synthetic version.”

  “At first?”

  “Yes, at first.”

  Diana left the room to vomit in the bathroom. The others sat frozen. I put the farming into perspective for them. “Remember, those cells are unconnected to a brain and experience no pain.”

  Zack asked, “Okay, then, Serge, what do you do with this stuff once you’ve grown it?”

  “We cut it into slabs that are then dried into sheets. The sheets are then taken to a nearby facility.”

  Diana re-entered the room.

  “The material is powdered and mixed with toluene. We run this slurry through a centrifuge and extract your eons. These eons are quickly modified by replacing a few sulphur atoms with phosphorous atoms, and—voilà!—we have Solon.”

  “What? We’re made of Solon?”

  “No, you’re made of DNA, and it’s your DNA that helps make Solon. And farming your brains is much cheaper and easier than building Solon molecules from scratch.”

  Sam said, “This is like one of our stories. No, this is weirder than any of our stories.”

  I replied, “Haven’t all of you noticed that your personalities and your ideas have begun to morph into each other’s? It’s a terrible pun, but the five of you are turning into a hive mind. I think it would have happened to you anyway—your minds are somehow rigged to melt together; it’s the storytelling chemical you make—but eating each other’s brain material only sped up the process. You heard each other’s stories. The five of you almost arrived at the truth on your own. Your bodies know the truth.” I looked at Harj. “You guessed it, Apu.”

  Diana said, “You know this is all being taped and webcast, right?”

  “Sure. Fine.”

  “So you realize this is an end to your evil plans.”

  “You make me sound like the Riddler, the Penguin or Solomon Grundy. And I wouldn’t say Solon is finished. People like Solon. Even if they know there’s an antidote, they won’t take it. People like the freedom of being alone.
Once you go Solon, there’s no going back. Once you start using it, our perpetual revenue stream begins. So there you have it. Does the truth make you happy? Does the truth set you free? Ha!”

  Zack said, “Serge, tell us, then, why are you fucking with the Haida?”

  “Why? Why? Oh, grow up, young man. You know nothing about power. Why do I do it? Why do I do it? I do it because I can.”

  ZACK

  We stored Serge in a downstairs room with only a mattress and a unicorn poster abandoned by a long-gone former tenant. We buttressed the door and the windows with plywood and long screws, and by the time we finished, it was almost sunrise—but no sleep for us.

  Sam said, “Right. I, for one, prefer not to wake up and find myself hanging by a bike chain from the Esso station sign.”

  Diana said, “Serge stores uppers in his travelling case. They’ll keep us charged.”

  We went into his room—anally organized, as one might expect. Beside Serge’s small medical bag sat a large trunk case.

  I asked, “What’s in there?”

  We pried it open with the bowie knife, and . . . holy shit! It was a love child born of Louis Vuitton and the Texas Medical Center’s main operating room. Hundreds of gleaming surgical instruments: retractors, saws, rasps, forceps, specula and blades—just amazing. Diana wolf-whistled at the shiny steel cornucopia and apologized for using a rudimentary knife to remove our chips earlier. “I wish I’d known about this thing a few hours ago. Jesus, you could separate Siamese twins and put them back together with this much gear.”

  We then quickly got ourselves hopped up on primo amphetamines—far smoother than my father’s home-cooked meth. I felt clear and radiant, and my body was already tingling and saying, Zack, you know, you really might enjoy being addicted to this stuff.

  Serge was yelling from within his own little neutrality chamber: “You people are being stupid! Listen to me. All I wanted to do here was find a way to come up with a cheap, easy antidote to Solon. It’s inside you—you know it is. Just keep on making up stories, we’ll do some blood tests. Do it for the betterment of our goddam species.”

  Our thinking was, Well, okay, Serge, you make a good point, but we can’t get past the idea that you could destroy a tribe—a society—as if it were so many sea monkeys in a fishbowl. So we ignored him, and as he began to withdraw from Solon, his personality grew nasty and our trust level for him, already low, sank further. “Do we have last night backed up?”