Generosity: An Enhancement (51 page)

When the camera stops, journalist and subject say goodbye without so much as shaking hands.

Saint Augustine, the old Berber, once wrote,
Factus est Deus homo ut homo fieret Deus
: God became man so that man might become God. He also said, even more popularly,
Dilige et quod vis fac
: Love, and do as you wish. But that was before our abilities so far outstripped our love.

Oona decides on a follow-up show long before the demands for one start swelling. Dr. Sidney Green, afraid of the legal repercussions of
anything he might say in public, hedges until his accountants run spreadsheets on all the possible scenarios and his lawyers devise an unbeatable game plan. Thomas Kurton is ready in a heartbeat for a second chance.

But when Oona’s people try to contact Thassadit Amzwar, they discover what the wired world has known for two days: Jen has gone missing. She can’t be raised by any medium. A continuous vigil outside her Mesquakie dorm attests that nothing remotely resembling a five-foot-one North African woman has come anywhere near the building. The bandwidth swarms with so many flavors of rumor that the police begin to make inquiries. The school has no idea of her whereabouts. Kurton swears he’s had no communication with her since their joint TV appearance. No one comes forward with any further information.

The police find the record of the now ancient attempted rape. They contact her erstwhile teacher, who, like the law-abiding, civilization-committed idiot he is, surrenders the e-mail from Charlotte Hullinger. Princess Heavy, savvier child of the future age, lies through her teeth to the authorities. She admits that a few of Thassa’s friends were, for a while, moving her around from apartment to apartment. But Charlotte claims that no one has seen or heard from Thassa for weeks.

The truth is, the genetic destiny of the race is holed up in Adam Tovar’s vacant apartment in Pilsen. Adam is off cruising with Somali pirate friends that he has stayed in touch with since their brief introduction the summer before. Thassa stays in the two-room apartment all day long, afraid of stepping out and being recognized. The apartment is a sweatbox, but the heat pleases Thassa, triggering primal memories.

For hours, she points her camera out Adam’s fifth-story window, toward Eighteenth Street, filming the Mexican shoppers passing in front of the once Bohemian and Polish neo-baroque buildings. Then she loads her clips into the editing software on her notebook, using her graphics tablet to paint over and animate them. As imprisonments go, this one is omnipotent. Sometimes she uses Adam’s Internet connection to go online and see what the world is saying about her. She finds the website that says she should be killed. She begins to see why some people might want that.

At night she has her books. She memorizes long Tamazight lyric poems from out of her beloved leather-bound anthology. These she
performs out loud, in the apartment’s front room, as if for a gathered audience. In bed, she makes herself drowsy by reading Frederick P. Harmon. She falls asleep thinking of all the ways that a creative narrator might rescue her from nonfiction. She’s sustained only by knowing that the public must eventually grow bored, forget about her, and go on to the next story.

Her friends bring her food, supplies, and DVDs. Sue, Charlotte, and even Mason take their turns in the rotation. Roberto drives her to the North Side facility that monitors her for the Houston clinic.

From Invisiboy Sims, she asks more heroic services. She has been fine injecting herself with the first round of fertility hormones. But now the follow-up must be administered via a vastly larger needle. “I just can’t anymore,” she tells Kiyoshi. “I need your help.”

He tries to negotiate. He asks if he can just jab her through her skirt. It’s not possible, she tells the terrified apprentice. “You have to swab the area first.”

In a Midtown production studio, the
Over the Limit
crew gathered in a screening room to watch the rough first pass of the episode called “The Cooking of Joy.” A stiff dose of hormonal excitement passed through the assembled group, the anticipation that always came with a hot episode. Nothing in all of life could match work that tapped into the moment.

Schiff slipped into a second-row seat next to Kenny Keyes and Nick Garrett, just behind Pete Vitale, the segment’s director. Keyes and Garrett brayed at each other, even louder than usual. “You know,” Keyes said, “if I die just before all this crap gets implemented, I’m going to be supremely pissed. Can you imagine? Being the last generation to suffer from stupid, pointless misery.”

“Christ,” Garrett said. “One hundred and fifty billion people just like you have lived and died. You’ve had it better than any of them.”

“I see,” Kenny answered bitterly. “So you’re one of those glass 99 percent full guys?”

As the lights dimmed, Schiff looked around the room at the full crew—twenty-five men and seven women—a ratio as bad as that of the fields they filmed. The double-X chromosome and scientific aptitude: yet one more hot-button issue of scriptedness that no one would ever be able to think clearly about. It struck Schiff that she’d never get
to do a show on the topic. Such issues were, for any foreseeable future, over the limits of acceptable science entertainment.

Tonia always enjoyed the episodes before the music got added—a last chance to grasp the ideas without her viscera being manipulated by sound. But nothing ever protected her from the vague disgust of watching herself play herself on the screen. She did not slink like that; she did not purr like that; she was not that soul of cool, remote hip.

Tonia the viewer battened down to weather this episode’s intro. Schiff the on-screen host said,
Why is it that some human beings seem to be born with an extra dose of delight in life?
The off-screen Tonia twisted in her seat. She’d thought it the most simpleminded of all the intros they had filmed; she couldn’t believe that Vitale had settled on it.
Some people just seem to shoot straight toward joy, the way an airport dog heads for backpacks full of contraband.

From there, Schiff’s voice-over plunged into the biological basis of bliss. A stunning, swooshy CGI sequence zoomed into the eyes of a deliriously happy woman, tunneling through her optic nerve and into her brain. The view tunneled down by several orders of magnitude, landing in the nucleus of one of her nerve cells. There, in spectacular 3-D, the histone-wound coils of her DNA unzipped and bared their template surfaces to complementary strings of mRNA, which slipped into the ribosomes to be read by fleets of tRNA, each one porting its specified amino acid into the growing folds of a catalytic protein.

The molecular flyby gave Tonia vertigo. She watched the newly minted protein machines spin off the assembly line. As the sequence zoomed out, these catalysts began clamping and unzipping more DNA, igniting new genes, clipping and tamping together more RNA messages. Pulling back steadily by powers of ten, the sequence revealed the feedback loops of transmitters, receptors, and synapses that aggregated in ever-higher networks of neuronal chorus.

Just as Tonia forgot that she was inside an artist’s rendering, the animation zoomed out in a whoosh until it snaked back through the eyes of the deliriously happy woman, whose molecules had engineered her into something like the velvet rapture of orgasm.

The on-screen Schiff reappeared and said something clever that the off-screen Tonia tried not to hear. And before Tonia could follow the jump, her filmic alter ego was telling the story of twin boys, one raised in Minneapolis and the other in L.A. The two brothers never met until they were thirty-five, at which point they discovered that
they shared a list of identical happiness triggers that included juggling, harmonica music, cedar trees, and the actress Felicity Kendal.

“Amazing,” Kenny Keyes said, shaking his head in awe. “That’s just killer.”

The on-screen Schiff said,
Some researchers believe that the genetic contribution to our gladness thermostat may be as high as 80 percent.

The off-screen Tonia raised her hand. “Hang on a sec.” The film kept rolling. “Something’s been cut here. That whole segment about how quickly the hedonic set-point correlation falls off for fraternal twins.”

Pete Vitale nodded, on top of the objection. “We were getting several people saying it was complicated. Confusing.”

“But it’s important,” Schiff insisted. “We don’t want viewers to think that happiness is hereditary like height is.”

“What is it with you and height?” Kenny asked.

Vitale surveyed the group, even as they kept watching the segment. “Show of hands? Those for restoring the complications? Right. We run as is.”

By then the show had progressed to interviews with a neuroscientist, a positive psychologist, and Thomas Kurton. Talk of genes involved in extroversion, anxiety, and congeniality led to speculation about the “gladness thermostat.” Various predictions about gene-tailored happiness drugs seemed as groundless to Tonia as they had during filming.

By the time the scene with Thassadit Amzwar unfolded, Tonia feltill. All their clips of the manhandled, displaced Berber had been edited to eliminate any cloud or edge. The woman’s increasingly tumbled landscape had been cropped to just the smooth vistas. “This isn’t right,” Schiff said, without turning around. “We’re not doing justice to her. We have to use some of the rockier stuff, too.”

“We’re trying to tell a story here,” Garrett said.

“A story? You mean a fib?” But Schiff’s on-screen voice-over drowned Tonia out.
The day may come,
hostess Schiff said,
when we will choose our children as carefully as we now choose our mates. We may select our natures the way we screen for a career.
All the larger, qualifying, problematical follow-up had been clipped away.

The show ended with a rapid-fire, crosscut auction—various people saying how much they would pay for an imperturbably luminous
outlook on life. The last face in the accelerating cavalcade was Thomas Kurton’s, repeating,
Listen
. The shot pulled back to reveal the man speaking on Schiff’s two-inch phone screen. The show host watched as the genomicist intoned again,
Six hundred generations ago, we were scratching on the walls of caves. Now we’re sequencing genomes.

In the last shot, Schiff looked up from the minuscule screen, smiled her crooked smile, and asked the camera,
If we accomplished all of that as frightened, negatively biased, misery-prone creatures, what might we accomplish when genomics takes us . . . over our inborn limits?

In the cut to black, the few dozen people in the room began to applaud. Pete Vitale craned around from the row in front of Tonia and scanned the reactions. “Yeah? Pretty clean? No major surgery?” He stood and stretched, beaming. “All right. Thanks, all. Off to finishing. Remember: meeting on the transcranial-stimulation script at three. And everyone back here for the cyberwar brainstorming on Friday.”