Generosity: An Enhancement (13 page)

She realized, early on, how fast broadcast was becoming narrowcast, and she signed on with a boutique production outfit to work for a consumer-electronics tech showcase that the whole crew called
Geek of the Week
. She graduated to assistant producer and executed her responsibilities meticulously until someone had the brilliant idea to let her try hosting. The camera loved her, and so did the week’s geeks. In front of the lens, her old Brahmin insouciance combined with a sexy bewilderment to turn her into everybody’s favorite new toy with a new toy. Her arched-eyebrow amusement at the constant torrents of techno-novelty made
Over the Limit
, in the words of
Entertainment Weekly
, “science like you wished it had been, back in high school.”

Each week, the show delivers another round of
Scientific American
meets
Götterdämmerung
. In the months just before “The Genie and the Genome,” they do:

off-the-shelf electronic surveillance

drugs that eliminate the need for sleep

geisha bots

thought-reading fMRI

Augmented Cognition weapons systems

runaway nano-replicators

radio frequency skimming

untraceable performance enhancers

remotely implantable human ID chips

viral terrorism

Frankenfoods

neural marketing

smart, networked commodities

The show taps into the oldest campfire secret: in terror begins possibility. A sizable slice of the viewing public has unlimited appetite for all the latest ways that godly gadgets will destroy their lives. Schiff measures the success of each segment by the number of illegal clips floating around the Internet the next day. Even the occasional Photoshopped nude of her seems a testimonial.

It’s beyond lucky, getting to spend all her hours in the company of ingenious people. Her interviews have led to a few intense adventures with amusingly driven men. But even the ones who know how to entertain themselves need far more approval than she can deliver
without irony. The best of these intervals are bittersweet, like Mahler by candlelight. In between, she’s content with her circuit through the exercise rooms of three-star hotels, listening to podcasts of technology-show competitors while on the elliptical cross-trainer. Lately, she has begun to bid in online auction houses on the letters of famous inventors. She imagines giving the whole collection to the smartest of her nieces, when she graduates from high school.

Meanwhile, Tonia enjoys the admiration of everyone she knows except her humanitarian mother. Sigrid Schiff-Bordet watches the program now and then, when she’s not in Afghanistan or Mali. Tonia’s mother long ago adjusted to the world’s basic schizophrenia. She thinks nothing about passing from climate-controlled concourses studded with free drinking fountains into armed outposts where mortars battle over a few potable liters. But she can’t adjust to
Over the Limit
.

“I’m too old for your stories,” Sigrid tells Tonia. “I’ve voided my citizenship in that kind of future. You have to let me die a functional illiterate.”

Once, in the closest thing to a compliment she could muster, Dr. Schiff-Bordet told her daughter, “Your show is probably good for me. It sickens me to watch, but it’s powerful medicine. Like chemotherapy for the naïve soul.”

As for Tonia’s father, Gilbert Schiff died three years before “The Genie and the Genome,” at age sixty-nine, of a massive heart attack in the consulate in Tyumen. Two weeks before his death, in one of their biweekly phone calls, his daughter had the gall—or call it the enduring filial pride—to ask him when he was going to write his long-postponed diplomatic memoirs. The former young cultural attaché under Camelot had managed to survive in the State Department all the way through Bush the Second, battered up to the rank of vice-consul, still trying to convince the six billion neighbors that America had gentle, nuanced, humble, and diverse insights to offer the world conversation. Tonia had grown up on his increasingly embattled accounts, a foreign policy hiding inside the official foreign policy, a beautiful losing proposition that only a handful of lifers kept alive.

Her father answered her challenge in his best stentorian white-tie voice. “No one wants to read my autobiography. Story of my life.” She
foolishly pressed him, hinting at the ticking clock, until he released his last, jagged barb. “I’ll make you a deal. I’ll write my memoirs as soon as you give up the technology ringmaster act and write that history of interwar regionalist realism you once promised me.”

The rebuke stung; she knew how deeply she’d failed the man. Both Vice-consul Schiff and his beloved doctor wife felt something hopelessly magnificent about the human adventure, its ability to channel the brute instinct of a few hard-pressed hunter-gatherers into creating Athens, Byzantium, Florence, Isfahan. But in Gilbert Schiff’s considered opinion, the project had been running in reverse for more than a century; the beasts of unlimited appetite were loose and weren’t going back into the kennel anytime soon. Every individual being with any skill had to fight the fatuous, disposable present with everything of worth. Instead, his daughter—his polyglot, caryatid, harpist daughter, National Merit Finalist, queen of the debating society, captain of the chess club, choral society soloist—was partying with the barbarians.

She knew how much she’d once pleased him. On the morning of her first communion, he told her she was closer to perfection than any father could have asked. In her first year of college, during their long Christmas-vacation discussions of late Reginald Marsh and early Stuart Davis, she even detected a little hangdog adoration in his glance, a self-policing cringe ready to punish himself for imagining the full range of her lucky gifts.

The summer that she told him she’d switched to media studies, he was stationed in Oslo. She called him from Providence; the announcement merited more than a letter. He laughed from the gut at the send-up, until he realized it wasn’t one. He regrouped gracefully and told her that he and her mother would back her in anything she chose to study. When she got her first television job, he resigned himself to noble stoicism over her late-onset disease. But he’d have given anything for her cure, if any medicine offered one.

In time, he shifted his hopes from his daughter to her genes. Throughout her twenties, he treated every man she introduced to him with polite reserve.
Fun, maybe, for a weekend
or
Settling a little quickly, aren’t you?
In her thirties, he began praising even the bottom-dwellers.
So he has a record; half the justices on the D.C. circuit have a criminal sheet. The question is, where does he come down on the Pampers Size Six controversy?
Once, he even pronounced the abomination
“speed dating.” Both he and Tonia’s mother were too well-bred to come out and tell her,
Breed, damn you!
But that was all she could do for them, finally.

Tonia never confessed to her parents a genetic defect even more lethal than susceptibility to broadcast. But by thirty-three, the syndrome was undeniable: she possessed no maternal desire whatsoever. One glance at the only available planetary future made having children at best benighted and at worst depraved. Nulliparity—human build-down—was a moral imperative.

But Tonia never made that point to Gilbert Schiff. Even when she was still single at thirty-six, her father held out the same forsaken hope for her as he did for making the case for America abroad under Bush II. “I wouldn’t even insist on a monograph,” he told her, during that wretched phone call just before his death. “I’d be happy with a modest little coauthored study . . .”

“Someday,” she teased him. “When someone as good as Daddy comes along.” But she was already a member of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, even if she could not quite bring herself to qualify for their Golden Snip Award.

The old diplomat went to his grave nineteen days after that phone call, as defeated by his daughter’s choices as he was by his innocent, beginner country’s embrace of extraordinary rendition. After her father’s death and her mother’s subsequent expatriation, Tonia threw herself into a brief period of purposeful mate-seeking. But the thing about ghosts is that they outlast their own hopes. A dead father is forever beyond placating.

Now she concentrates on appeasing one million total strangers. Each forty-two-minute segment is an exercise in insouciance, taking her sixty hours to perfect. The goal is to compile an accurate map of the present at the scale of one to one, a massive mosaic of thumbnails of the blinding future.

For four decades, Tonia Schiff’s parents kept a pact. However busy they were, whatever remote outpost each of them found themselves in, they always managed to meet every two months for a private dinner. And at that dinner, one of them would argue a fiercely prepared debating motion. Resolved: the human race would have been better off if the agricultural revolution had never happened. Resolved: the government should cap the salaries of professional athletes. Resolved: Bach’s Passions should be banned from concert halls for
anti-Semitism. And the other delivered the fiercest possible rebuttal. In this way Gilbert and Sigrid preserved the fires of argument that had supplied such heat to their love.

Now, a decade past the age her parents were when they birthed her, Tonia revives the ritual, with the only difference being that she meets for a new topic twenty times a year with no fixed opponent. Resolved: the human race will not survive its own ingenuity. Resolved: the cure for our chronic despair is just around the corner. And no matter whom she spars with on any given occasion, Tonia Schiff can make the most cataclysmic debate almost as entertaining as reality itself.

Stone sits at his desk with tea and a slice of Dutch rusk, ignoring his stack of delinquent manuscripts. Instead, he reads yet another happiness book checked out from the library. This book stands apart from all the others—the bad seed. The book says happiness is a moving target, a trick of evolution, a bait and switch to keep us running. The doses must keep increasing, just to break even. True contentment demands that we wean ourselves from all desire. The pursuit of happiness will make us miserable. Our only hope is to break the habit.

He lifts his eyes from the page to wonder whether the Algerian woman might be experiencing massive anesthesia from post-traumatic stress disorder. Maybe her free-floating ecstasy might signal a coming collapse. But in all the hours he’s spent in her presence over recent weeks, the lowest she’s ever descended to is mild amusement. She will sit in class from beginning to end, whatever the tempers erupting around her, basking in light and loving her flailing peers. Russell has watched her all class long out of the corner of his eye, levitating in the middle of the fray, shining like some giant horse chestnut in full sun.

Does the woman feel real elation, or does she just imagine it? He runs the meaningless question into the ground.

He launches his slow Internet connection, then stares at the search-engine box, wondering how to initiate a search for unreasonable delight.

He taps in
euphoria
, and erases it. He taps in
manic depression
, and deletes that, too. He taps in
extreme well-being
. And right away, he’s swamped. In the world of free information, the journey of a single step begins in a thousand microcommunities. Inconceivable hours of global manpower have already trampled all over every thought he
might have and run it to earth with boundless ingenuity. Even
that
thought, a digitally proliferating cliché . . .