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-especially 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.
Just beyond South Bend, Stone has an epiphany. He knows why he could never in his life or anytime thereafter write fiction: he’s crushed under the unbearable burden of a plot. He could never survive the responsibility of making something happen. Plot is preposterous: event following event in a chain of clean causes, rising action building to inevitable climax and resolving into meaning. Who could be suckered by that? The classic tension graph is a vicious lie, the negation of a mature grasp of reality. Story is antilife, the brain protecting itself from its only possible finale.
Right around Elkhart, Russell concludes that truth laughs at narrative design. Realism-the whole threadbare patch job of consoling conventions-is like one of those painkillers that gets you addicted without helping anything. In reality, a million things happen all at once for no good reason, until some idiot texting on his cell plows into you on the expressway in northern Indiana. The End. Not exactly The Great Gatsby. Sales: zip. Critical reception: total bewilderment. A failed avant-garde experiment. Not even a decent allegory. Even the cutout bin doesn’t want it.
Stone shares none of these literary insights with his former pupil. In fact, he studiously avoids talking about anything substantive whatsoever. He just drives as best he can, while Thassa rides shotgun and flips nervously across the AM spectrum. Love Radio and Hate Radio: both only succeed in further agitating her. Every one hundred seconds, she cranes around to look through the back window of the PT Cruiser, as if the assembled posse of human history were coming down the interstate after them, to take tissue samples.