Generosity: An Enhancement (50 page)

She wanted to meet in Algiers, of course. Better yet, Bône, Sétif—anyplace in Kabylia. But two months ago, an unnamed terrorist group attached a bomb to the undercarriage of a personnel carrier near the Hassi Messaoud oil field in east-central Algeria, killing nineteen people and wounding twelve. The attack would have been routine, in a
country that suffers such strikes as often as North America suffers sports championships. But among the dead this time were three U.S. “advisers,” all of them in uniform.

Schiff didn’t even know her country had military personnel in Algeria. Nor did most of the world, gauging from the fallout on six continents. The State Department immediately issued a travel ban, and the chance of a visa vanished into fiction. A town just over the Tunisian border is as close as she will get—a compromise solution with narrative possibilities all its own.

Schiff will find herself sitting in the designated café, forty-five minutes early. She has no trouble finding the place.
The Café de la Liberté, just behind the Association de Sauvegarde de la Médina.
She has checked it on maps for a week. She made sure it was truly there, earlier that morning.
You’re a Western woman; no one will trouble you.

She has been denied further phone contact on the thinnest of fatalisms. “I will be there, Ms. Schiff. And if I’m not, a phone won’t help. We both just have to trust.” Schiff sits nursing what is surely the worst tea she has ever encountered anywhere in the world, served in a beautiful enameled glass. The liquid has been repeatedly boiled down to something the consistency and sweetness of a hot Popsicle, served with a jaunty sprig of mint on top. She wants to film it, but she’s afraid to take the DV camera out of the bag. Every ten minutes a waiter turns up to scowl at her for being a single woman sitting in a café, for thinking taboo thoughts, and for not making any more headway on the innocuous beverage. But Tonia has bought her right to sit in silence, and no one shoos her away.

She sits and does what she’s done now for three days: reads Thassa’s beaten-up copy of
Make Your Writing Come Alive
. At 12:48 local time, she opens it and points to a passage at random, divining by scripture. Harmon says:

Everywhere in the world, for almost all of human history, most people would have mocked the thought that a person might beat fate.

 

Several lifetimes later, at 12:53, she goes to the well again:

 

Some characters seem to be born with a blazing red X on their forehead.

The author seems to be getting shrewder, the longer that Schiff spends away from home. At 12:57, Harmon decides:

The great paradox of existence may be that only the dead certainty of losing everything makes anything at all worth keeping.

She can’t decide whether this is profound or portentous commonplace. All she knows is that the author isn’t helping her nerves. She periscopes the streets, jerking in recognition at every moving figure of approximately the right size and age. She goes on checking her watch every forty seconds until five minutes after the appointed hour. The whole idea is absurd: two people on opposite sides of the planet arranging to meet at a café on the edge of nowhere, at exactly 1:00 p.m. local time on a Thursday afternoon at the end of the age of chance.

The midday muezzins sing longingly to her, promises scattered evenly around the horizon. Long after all the root causes of such needs have been found and addressed, people will still answer the nomadic call to prayer. For centuries after the transgenics have pulled up stakes and gone elsewhere, many will still seek the cure this world cannot give.

At exactly 1:20, Schiff comes to the conclusion that she’s been stood up. She has blown a week out of her life, spent $3,000, and journeyed 5,000 miles just to sit in a café and sip the most cloying tea known to mankind. Her film will never get made. No chance to redeem herself. The race will blunder into the age of choice without so much as a proxy vote from her.

She’ll flip open Harmon again, but she won’t like the passage she lands on. She’ll try again, and once more after that—as many times as I say—until she hits upon a divination destined for her:

A great amount of ink has been spilled in the belief that when every other peace fails us, we still have words.

She’ll look up from the page, trying to decide if the words give her any consolation to write home about. And there, working toward her down the sloping street, still two hundred meters away, will be the
leisurely, reconciled, unmistakable silhouette of the figure she has come halfway around the world to learn from.

Kurton descends from his coastal cabin and returns to work. His first public act is an injunction against the Houston clinic that wins the bidding for a dozen of Thassa’s sex cells. News of a deal has spread like a contagion from biotech newsletters to tacky bio sites: the happiness woman has signed away her eggs for $32,000.

Kurton files to stop the deal. His argument is simple, and similar to those upheld for decades in America’s courts. Whatever they mean to use the eggs for, this clinic is buying a genome whose increased bio-value results directly from the association studies performed by Truecyte. Truecyte’s intellectual efforts have established a correlation, and the company has filed for the appropriate patents. So if this fertility clinic means to profit from the probability of increased emotional health inherent in Thassadit Amzwar’s genome, then they owe Truecyte a licensing fee.

Journalists of every stripe converge on Kurton, and he talks to all of them. “We’ve done the research,” he tells a prominent op-ed commentator, for a wire-syndicated piece called “Fixing the Price of Delight”: “And we’ve determined $800 million to be a fair pro rata evaluation of the accumulated future benefits of our finding, as enjoyed by all its direct descendants into the indefinite future . . .”

In short, a nuisance suit, but one whose motives baffle all commentators. Thomas Kurton, who has long taken a beating for hustling humanity into the consumer-genomics era, is now hammered in scores of blogs for gratuitously impeding a free-market transaction and asserting ownership over a woman’s genes.

Several posses of self-deputizing reporters descend on the Houston clinic for comment. Dr. Sidney Green, the facility’s director, declares that his staff will carry on with their collection of the woman’s gametes unless restrained by a court of law.

As the public furor spins out, the wheels of justice fail to find traction. Legal analysts split between those who see this case as no different from a routine egg donation and those who feel that denying Truecyte compensation would reverse three decades of intellectual-property rulings. Uphold the claim, and everyone might soon be paying
licensing fees to procreate. Throw it out, and billions of dollars of bio-economic property rights will go up in pollen dust.

An Episcopalian priest turned bioethicist who teaches at Illinois Institute of Technology goes on Chicago talk radio to try to slow down “this terrible and dehumanizing drift toward the trade in human traits.” He points out that successful donation can happen fairly efficiently these days, and if the extracted things get fertilized and turned into embryos soon after collection, no amount of law short of slaughter of the innocents will be able to reverse that step. But the judge in the Truecyte filing refuses to be hurried.

The alarmed congressman from Illinois’s Seventh Congressional District makes a speech on Capitol Hill. It’s really just a long-planned attack on the use of paid studies in the pharmaceutical industry. But the congressman works in a reference to the “joy genome” controversy in his home district, playing to his constituency while insisting on the need to rein in the bio-economy.

In all the noise, Jen falls badly in the eyes of those millions who so recently took her to their hearts. As far as the vocal majority is concerned, she’s become something sinister. Sure, lots of people take money for their potential offspring, but few agree to take
so much
. How could this shining woman, the standard-bearer of bodily happiness, put such a price tag on her gift? She should place it in the public domain.

Thassa’s egg contract makes her fair game for every kind of Web-disinhibited public attack. She turns pariah in several demographic sectors, especially among the adoring teenage girls who aped her
Oona
appearance just a few news cycles ago. A West Coast techno band writes her into a biting song, which ultimately goes on to make ten times more money than Houston wants to pay Thassa for her eggs.

Pastor Mike Burns, from the South Barrington megachurch, preaches a much e-mailed sermon in which he distances himself from his earlier proclamations about Thassadit Amzwar. “God may send us many messages, but we make our own errors in translation. Thank God He’s always ready to forgive!”

A great national debate ensues on whether feeling happy is the same as being happy, and over the ways in which earned happiness differs from happiness purchased by one’s parents at birth. This debate plays out on sitcoms everywhere.

The Economist
runs an experimental, Java-based decision market program that allows people to bid on the actual price—somewhere between $32,000 and $800 million—that a tenfold increase in the odds of inheriting an unshakably happy disposition should fetch on the open market. The running average closes in asymptotically on $740,000, which is, coincidentally, close to the lifetime cost of chronic, nonresponsive bipolar disorder.

A giant international reality-show production company called Endemic successfully markets the idea of a sudden-death competition pitting gangs of potential sperm donors against one another for the honor of fertilizing a single woman, who must eliminate them on the basis of their genotypes until only one remains. The company tells the skeptical press that the concept was in development long before Thassa’s egg auction went public.

Three writers from National Lampoon, Inc. (AMEX: NLN) start a humor site called
killthesmileyarabchick.com
. It spawns several more violent imitations.

Throughout, Thomas Kurton goes on giving his careful, scientific opinion on every question that anyone places in front of him. He does one final television interview with Tonia Schiff, for her genomic-happiness episode. They sit on a bench in the Boston Common, twenty yards from where Ralph Waldo Emerson turned into a transparent eyeball and saw all the currents of the Universal Being circulating through him. On film, Kurton struggles to remain game, but he comes across as stoic at best.

I frankly don’t understand most of this reaction. Mass psychology is too hard for me. Genomics is trivial, compared to sociology.

Tonia Schiff seems almost indignant. She asks whether Truecyte can honestly demand a licensing fee on an unmodified human genome. He replies:

We’re licensing the laborious and expensive discovery that a particular combination of alleles increases the probability of a particularly desirable health benefit. If you want to keep encouraging innovation, you have to reward that.

She asks him why Truecyte, a for-profit venture, has undercut their own business interests by demanding a fee that no potential client could pay. He replies that many human institutions have paid much larger sums for much smaller return. She can’t flush him out of hiding. When she goads him into predicting how large the genomic-happiness industry might be in ten years, he responds with all the resignation of a Tibetan monk.

If a reasonably alert person wants to be exhilarated, she just has to read a little evolution. Think of it: a Jupiter flyby, emerging out of nothing. A few slavish chemicals producing damn near omnipotent brains . . . That discovery is better than any drug, any luxury commodity, or any religion. Science should be enough to make any person endlessly well. Why do we need happiness when we can have knowing?

When she suggests that very few people are temperamentally capable of sharing his vision, he bites out his words.

Listen: Six hundred generations ago, we were scratching on the walls of caves. Now we’re sequencing genomes. Three billion years of accident is about to become something truly meaningful. If that doesn’t inspire us, we don’t deserve to survive ourselves.