“I wondered about that, too, until I met this ten. And the weird thing is, her genome differs from yours by only a few small tweaks.”
She sees it in Thomas Kurton’s trusting, suppliant face: There’s only one real resource. One fungible commodity that the future will trade in. “You’re going to make us all happy. Is that the plan?”
His eyebrows crumple and his lips sour. She’s hurt him, at least as much as he’s capable of being hurt by anyone. He shrugs off her mockery. “A little more capable of being well in this world. But not if you don’t want it, of course.”
“You folks have finally found the formula for soma. Damn.”
He breathes out a long-suffering sigh and leans against her car. “First, I really do hope that Aldous Huxley is burning in the pain-ennobling hell of his choice. That book is one of the most dangerous, hope-impeding, ideological rants ever written. Just because the author is stunted by some virtuous vision of embattled humanism, the rest of the race is supposed to keep suffering for all time?”
“I’m not sure that’s exactly his-”
“Second, yes: our initial products, if you insist, will likely consist of pharmaceuticals. But not the shot-in-the-dark stuff that we dispense today. Drugs tailor-made to the genome of the recipient. Smart bullets, genetically personalized prescriptions, and the sooner we get there, the faster we can finally get medicine out of the dark ages. Once we understand the brain chemistry behind depression and elation ”
He catches himself this time. He nods, repentant, but the fingers of both hands flick rapidly against his thumbs. “I’m sorry. I’m an enthusiast. Guilty. What’s your problem with that? I assume you have no moral qualms about curing depression? We’re talking about substances that will be to today’s serotonin reuptake inhibitors what fentanyl is to biting on a towel.”
“Why do I have the funny feeling that genetically tailored pills are just the beginning?” She catches him appraising her hair with the gaze of a connoisseur. Her left hand sweeps up, brushes back her flowing bangs, and lets them fall again.
He copies her involuntarily. “Because you are America’s most irreverent science television journalist.” His voice can’t help revering that irreverent.
“And all this public talk about life-span extension-”
“Oh, we’re working on that, too. Quality and quantity. Listen. We’re after the same thing humanity has been after since toolmaking.”
“Except for the bit about rewriting the script?”
He looks genuinely puzzled. “We’ve been doing that all along, as well.”
“And we’re not allowed to stop until every appetite is satisfied and every itch is scratched.”
The honest bafflement only grows. What else would you suggest? “Speaking of appetite satisfaction: stay for dinner.”
She pushes off of the car and drifts toward the house before the invitation is out. “I don’t know. What about this massive calorie-restriction diet you’re on?”
“I make each one count.”
Back in a rocker on the wraparound porch, she calls Nicholas Garrett, in Damariscotta. “Boss? Listen. I’m going to be a little delayed. Go on and eat without me.”
She can hear Keyes cackling in the background: What did I tell you? A hundred bucks, suckers. Pay up.
She tells Nick she won’t be too late, but no need to wait up. Then she rings off, to her director’s suppressed mirth. She sits in the rocker for a moment, examining herself. It’s not even an effort, really. Not even a decision. Just large molecules, passing their oldest signals back and forth across the infinite synapse gap.
A noise comes from up in the woods. She can’t tell if it’s a mammal, bird, or something stranger. A throat considerably smaller than hers, but monstrous compared to the rest of creation, moans in spectral restlessness. She waits until the sound returns. It’s a call from back long before contentment and agitation parted ways. She walks around the side of the porch to get a look. There’s nothing to see but dark woods, the prison-bar stand of pines and spruce, the rising hillside, and needle-covered night.
I have no center. The thought wastes her. Not even a thought: just a fact the exact size of her body. She’s disappeared into playing herself. She has no clue what her bliss is, and trying to follow it would lead worse than nowhere.
She walks back around the side door to the kitchen, where he’s already started slicing a cornucopia of phytonutrients. “I’m sorry,” she says. She doesn’t even know what she’s saying until she hears it announced. “I’ve got to get back.”
“Really?” His disappointment is insultingly anemic. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to stay? You should stay. You should experiment. Almost sixty is the new forty.”
She snickers, as she sometimes does during the show’s more outrageous segments. “I can see that. You guys are all over these smart drugs already, aren’t you?” He doesn’t, she notices, deny it. “Unfortunately, almost forty is the new early retirement.”
She walks back through the quarry-stone-and-cedar living room, past the shelf of pictures of the ex-wife and two kids, each already on their way to becoming multimillionaires. She grabs her bag and keeps walking. He follows her back out to the Camry. He doesn’t try to touch her.
At the car, arm’s distance, she tells him, “Thanks again for all the cooperation. This will be one of our better shows. You make fantastic television.”
He stands there, open as ever, ready for the next big thing. His crinkled face would simply like to discover what drives her. Born researcher. He may not have the happiness gene, but he possesses an ebullience she finds more attractive than beauty.
“You should stay a little,” he decides. “I’m telling you. You never know what might make you glad.”
“True, that.” She wants to beg him not to cure melancholy, not for another century or two, anyway. She hears the nocturnal creature call again, from up in the tomb of woods. She puts a hand on Kurton’s shoulder, pecks his pursed lips, opens the car door, and is gone.
She’s seven miles down the winding, dark road when story crashes over her like a whitecap. She pulls off in front of a trim saltbox store whose laddered signage reads:
GROCERIES
GIFTS
BAIT
UNITED STATES POST OFFICE
She fishes in her bag, finds the phone, and-something she never does-pulls back onto the road even while hitting the speed dial. Nicholas picks up. “Hey,” she says. “It’s me.” Whoever that may be. “I’m on my way. Get your hundred dollars back from Pomade Boy. And listen. We need to do one more show on this. Exactly. You’re a mind reader. I can’t imagine she’ll be too hard to hunt down.”
She says goodbye and snaps the phone shut, feeling grim and purposeful and halfway to vague exuberance.
Creative nonfiction comes down to this: science now holds routine press conferences. As the article hits print, Truecyte orchestrates their announcement about the network of genes that helps regulate the brain’s set point for well-being. The few dozen science writers, photographers, lawyers, and investment researchers who show up for the Cambridge event know the drill. All the actors in the network adjusted to the fact ten years ago: genetics has become genomics. Science has long since passed beyond the realm of wonder into entrepreneurship. New biochemical properties mean new intellectual property. Nobody mobilizes this much apparatus or lays in that much catering unless they mean to recoup it many times, down the line.