The tear of a fire alarm rips him awake. It’s still just half past ten, and his brain works for many cycles before it latches onto the concept of morning. His room blazes with sunlight. The fire alarm is his phone. He wonders whatever possessed him to keep the phone by the bed.
He’s an hour and a half late for work. The phone must be his old relay-race buddy from high school, the owner of Becoming You, calling to fire him. If he ignores the call and gets to the office before the phone stops ringing, he might still be able to save himself.
When his brain consolidates a bit more, it occurs to him that for the last three years he’s worked at home twice a week at his discretion. But the thought gives him little peace, and he doesn’t understand why, until he realizes the phone is still nagging him.
He picks up and says something with approximately two syllables. The voice on the other end cries out, “Mister! I’m so glad you’re alive.”
The sound of her voice retrieves his dream: a paragraph in an essay that Thassa had written for him had gotten loose and was infecting all kinds of other printed material with sentences that no one had composed.
“It’s you,” he says stupidly, himself again.
“Russell. I’m so happy to hear you. Please tell me you don’t hate me.”
“I don’t hate you,” he says. Even to himself, he sounds robotic.
“And Candace? Have I made permanent damage with her?”
A voice in his head that sounds like Candace says, You know I can’t speak for her; you’ll have to talk to Candace. But out loud he reverts: “Candace loves you. She told me, just yesterday.”
“Al-hamdulillah. Thank God!” And the voice at the other end crumples off into a grateful silence. After a bit, she rallies. “Then why won’t she talk to me, Russell? Everything has become such an ocean.”
Everything has always been mostly ocean. It strikes Stone that a constitutionally happy person in this country is like a New World native at the first touch of smallpox. No antibodies.
“Russell, the news has found me. Another story started spreading this morning. A worse one is going to come out, very soon.”
He tries to remember Candace’s assurances from the night before. Something about bored people going on to the next thing. Apparently, Candace Weld, LCP, is as deluded by need as anyone.
He hears the frail voice say, “Did you know that total strangers want me dead?” The frailty flashes out in anger. “Russell, I’m fed up with this.”
She is entitled.
“Do you remember you once told me, if I had any problems, just ask?”
“Anything,” he says, underlining his own word and flanking it with red-pen question marks.
“Are you very busy in your life at the moment?”
He’s forgotten exactly what subassembly of the collective human project he is responsible for, or when exactly it might be due. “No,” he tells her. “Not very busy . . . at the moment.”
“Can you take me home?”
“To Kabylia?” he asks, incredulous.
The word tears a laugh from her. “Not that one. Too far, that one.”
She wants him to drive her to Canada.
“I’m so sorry to ask, Russell. But if I don’t escape this soon, I’ll go mad. You’re the only one left who can help. I will pay for the essence and expenses, of course.”
When he doesn’t answer, her voice grows frantic. “You could be back home again in three or four days.”
The word baffles him beyond words. Not home; that one has at least some journalistic meaning. But back isn’t even fiction.
He has never been to Canada.
He hasn’t gone on a road trip with anyone since he and Grace visited the Grand Canyon.
He has never missed two days of work in a row.
He has never gone behind the back of anyone he loves.
He has never in his life done anything that anyone else could possibly construe as resolute.
He has, for most of his existence, dismissed the idea that he might author his own life.
He has become an accessory to her destiny, drive or not.
He does have a driver’s license and a major credit card.
He has never felt so daunted by his own breathing.
He calls Robert, who talks him through the steps of renting a car. His brother is shocked to hear his plans. “Are you sure? Canada, man? It’s a parallel universe up there. The queen on the dollar bills. The guaranteed health care. You are aware of the whole French thing?”
Russell rushes to reassure his brother.
“Chill, Roscoe. It’s called irony. Supposed to be our generation’s native idiom.”
There’s something weirdly chipper about Robert. Stone asks if he’s feeling all right.
“Me? I feel like a million bucks. In 1960 dollars. Don’t hate me, bro, but I’m in good shape these days. Law of averages, I guess. If the docs keep waving their arms around at random, eventually they flick on the light switch by mistake.”
For a few sentences, Robert becomes a salesman for the American Mental Health Industry.
“Go ahead and do this trip, Roscoe. Niagara Falls with this chick. Whatever. And when the honeymoon is over, we’ll get you in to talk to my mechanic. He’s got the whole Stone pharmacogenetic profile worked out already.”
Russell promises to be in touch as soon as he reaches Montreal or runs into trouble, whichever comes first. “Incidentally,” he adds, “you don’t have to mention this trip to Mom.”
“Of course not. Canada? The matriarch would have a coronary. She still thinks the Blue Jays are a terrorist sleeper cell.”
Russell slinks through Pilsen the next morning, scanning the rows of russet apartments in a clownish, chartreuse PT Cruiser. In this part of Chicago, such a car is begging to be rammed. People eye his vehicle as he cowers at the red lights. Every one of them knows he is about to make off with his former student.
Only the implausible staginess of the scene protects Stone. He knows this story: a modernist classic. He’s overly familiar with the book, and he’s even seen both movie adaptations. If this were his actual life, he would never in a million years be caught dead recreating it.
He finds a spot just half a block down from the designated building. He stands in the brick foyer and buzzes. A suspicious “Yes?” cuts through the intercom. He says, “Hello?” He can’t say her name, or his.
“Yes,” she announces. “I’m coming right there.” Her once idiomatic English has spent too many weeks immobile in a plaster cast.
He waits furtively in the vestibule until the elevator rattles to ground and a strange figure peeks around the corner. She steps into the lobby carrying two shoulder bags as large as she is. She’s wearing sunglasses, a dun-colored scarf, and drab olive sweats designed to be invisible. But there’s something else wrong, something he can’t make out until she comes through the foyer door and sweeps him up in a desperate, luggage-crushing hug: her hair has been cut harshly and dyed reddish brown.
“My God,” he says. “What happened?”
She grabs his arm and tugs him out to the street. “Come on, Mister. We’re gone.”
He takes the bags and they fumble to the car. He can’t stop looking at the transformation. She shifts the sunglasses and pulls the scarf tighter around her face. “Please don’t, Russell. You’re making me very sad.” She perks up a little when she sees the car. “It’s fantastic! Totally absurd. Some kind of film accessoire.” She beams at him, convinced that he’s the right man for this job. He puts her bags in back with his, and she climbs into the shotgun seat like they’re off on a family outing.
He steers by trial and error out to the southbound Dan Ryan. Beyond that, improvisation. He has picked up a map at the rental agency: everything from Chicago to Nova Scotia on one double-spread sheet. He just assumed Thassa would know the route, but she’s hopeless as a navigator. She shrugs at the lack of correspondence between the squiggly green interstate on the page and anything observable in t
he real world. “This map is total fantasy. Someone just invented it!”
He sees an exit ramp that says Indiana and heads toward it. Chapters later, they’re still stopped in a bumper-to-bumper bottleneck somewhere this side of Gary. Thassa fishes across the radio dial, but every station only leaves her more agitated. She knows how to be a refugee, but not a renegade.
She shuts off the radio and turns to him. “Tell me about your childhood, Russell. Did you ever run away from home before?”
The journey of a single mile begins with a thousand regrets.
Man goes fugitive with ambiguous woman: the oldest story in the book. I’ve written that one myself, hundreds of times, in my sleep. And every time, the story wanted to break away, lose itself, escape altogether its birthright plot . . .
On the day that Russell and Thassa make their break for the north, Thomas Kurton walks into a special meeting of the Truecyte board of directors.
He knows these men and women. He handpicked them: good scientists and skillful executives all. But he has small patience for even regular meetings, let alone the extra sessions. The whole purpose of incorporating is to let business free up science to do science. It’s not really Kurton’s job to keep teaching the adolescent enterprise new ways to stay solvent; that’s what the MBAs are for. He does not really care if Truecyte manages to stay in business or not: the point is to discover if it can.
Every company Kurton has founded is a creature let loose in the world. Together, they’re part of a longitudinal experiment in determining which forms of human desire are evolutionarily viable. Still, he shows up for the latest Truecyte fire drill, sips at the herbal tea, nibbles at the spreads of fruit, and jokes with his fellow board members, all the while prepared to supply his own blunt opinions about any course corrections the collective organism needs to make.
Peter Weschler, CFO, starts the formal meeting. He calls for two quick presentations—mind-numbing slides by the inner circle meant to reassure the inner circle that the company is fundamentally fit, with no Mendelian diseases. Truecyte has two new products in the pipeline and a small library of licensable processes that may prove instrumental to future genetic research.
But the venture capitalists have threatened to pull the plug and write off Truecyte’s rising flood of red. “I’ll put it simply,” Weschler says. “Two of the top three stakeholders want to know what in hell is going on.”
All eyes at the long glass conference table flicker deniably toward Thomas Kurton, who takes some time to realize that he’s being reprimanded. When he does come alive, he’s sardonic in his own defense. “You know, if this association study has survived the scrutiny of hundreds of hostile competitors over the last few months, it should survive the scrutiny of friendly investors.”
“No one is challenging the study,” Weschler says.
“It’s impeccable science,” Thomas says.
Zhang Jung Li, the CEO, says, “This is not really about scientific practice qua science.”
“We had to push you to get the study out,” Weschler reminds Thomas.
Kurton simply can’t imagine what the investors have a right to fuss about. Research has tied a genomic network to a high-level behavioral trait. How can such a finding be anything but a gold mine?
“They want,” the steady proteomics researcher George Cheung growls, “an explanation of all the recent questionable business decisions and publicity.”
Calm falls over Kurton. “I don’t see how they can hold us accountable for the media fallout . . .”
Weschler flips through a yellow legal pad. It looks to me, from my distance, weirdly like the pad Stone used to prepare his first day of class. “They want to know why you grandstanded for an $800 million licensing fee and came up empty-handed. They want to know how getting humiliated in court fits into the company business model.”
Kurton nods appreciatively. It’s the first interesting question posed by the VCs since founding. He himself, after several days of reflection, still has no good public explanation for his action aside from sentimentality.
“I see,” he says. “And they won’t be satisfied until heads roll.”
He means it poetically. But no one at the table speaks a word.
The silence replicates until even Kurton can’t fail to read it. “You’re not . . . Are you asking me to resign?”
He looks around the table, enlightened at last. If only these hired assassins were bolder, could plunge the knife in with less sheepish chagrin, he might take some pleasure in this scene. He glares at them, grinning: Run your damn cost-benefit analyses. Side with the smart money. But do not apologize for surviving.
No one says anything for way too long. Finally, Zhang Jung Li speaks. “Realistically put, Thomas, we have to get back to more practical research.”
What does nature call this? Cannibalism? Parricide? Fatal parasitism? Thomas fights down the urge to say anything; the entire spectrum of available responses feels puerile. He can’t keep from smiling; the drama just seems so absurdly conventional, like one of those cheap paperback genres: death by robot insurrection or unstoppable nanotech gray goo. His company, straight out of his own . . . what? Loins? Frontal lobes? His own company is transcending him.
He wants to dismiss the lot, as summarily as he appointed them. But his every possible defense is forestalled. He himself saw to that, when he set up the company bylaws. Has made sure that the group desire would not be crippled by his own.
His feet and hands go cold. He’s not what he was. He has let some strange idealism blind him. He hasn’t even the strength to play himself anymore. The alpha researcher in him falters, and with the stumble comes an almost instant drop in serotonin. So long as he produced the prizes, so long as he was profitable, the tribe let him mate with everything in sight. Now, at the first sign of weakness, they launch this inevitable takedown . . .
He remembers the thousand beautiful implications of his association study, and a parent’s panic seizes him. The genetic screen for well-being will be shelved in favor of more practical, portable projects. The real work—overcoming the limits of our archaic design—will be crushed underneath this creature that cares less about the nature of things than about feeding and shitting and reproducing and expanding its range.
All life long, he has believed in the one nonarbitrary enterprise, fairer than any politics, truer than any religion, deeper than any artwork: measurement. Double-blind, randomize, and test again: something will circulate, something cold and real and beyond mere desire. Something that can put us inside the atom, outside the solar system. Something that can come to change even its own enabling code . . .
The method is life’s magnificence, our one external court of appeal. Koch, Reed, Pasteur—the pantheon of heroes stenciled onto his boyhood ceiling—could have been other names. Often, they were other names, not always recorded. Individuals will come and go; the method will leverage them, or find new bodies. Truth can escape all local frailties.
Or so he has always thought. Now, way too late for an intelligent man, he sees: Crucial facts might easily go missing. To be discovered, it hardly suffices that a thing be true.
Yet the beauty of the method is its utter indifference. All life long, Kurton has predicted the upgrade of human life by its evolutionary heirs. It remains the species’ unique destiny to preside over the design of its own obsolescence. Thomas’s one job now is to show how peacefully a good transhumanist can die.
“I understand,” he tells the board, only two of whom meet his eye. And weirdly, he does. He stands, makes the rounds, shakes the hands of his executioners. But already he’s working again. For the last several months, since the study was published, he has had in the back of his mind the idea for another project, a whole new experiment for releasing the happiness-gene complex back into the wild and studying it in situ. But the idea is far too rich for any institutional backing. Now he has the time, the liberty, the isolation to run that test. The final freedom of the exiled mind. Every event—especia
lly extinction—can turn to endless new forms most beautiful.
And by a minor coincidence I don’t know how to handle any other way, Candace Weld reads the Time article about Truecyte v. Future Families, late that afternoon. No one has told Weld that she can’t read about Thassa in her off hours. She wants to call Russell, just to talk about the decision. She hasn’t heard from him since he bolted from her front stoop.
By ring four, she wonders if he’s ducking her. His silence has been too long to be anything but choice. By the seventh ring, she’s gripping the phone and mouthing, Pick up, damn it. Of course he has no voice mail.
She squeezes the Off button and cradles the phone. She spends forty-five minutes cleaning up after Gabe, her time-honored method for regaining emotional control. When she finishes, she goes online and binges horribly, like she hasn’t in months. She searches the news pages of the top three engines, sorting by time. She combs the blogs for every occurrence and permutation of “Thassa Amzwar.” It stuns her, how much poisonous shit is milling around out there, toxic bacteria doubling and redoubling, dividing and mutating on no food supply whatsoever.
But after ten minutes of scouring, she discovers: there is food. A whole, steaming barnyard full of it. An energy source big enough that even the moribund print media start to tap into it. Four Mesquakie art students have announced that the Algerian woman is missing from the apartment where they’ve been hiding her. And they claim she has been lured away by her former writing teacher.
I watch to see how Candace Weld can respond to this news. But she herself is paralyzed with looking.
For a long time, Chicago refuses to disappear behind them. The city sprawls for a hundred miles, its hinterland industries like freight strewn from a cargo plane. Only the sun proves that the car isn’t stuck in an enormous loop.