Generosity: An Enhancement by Richard Powers

happens?”
    The others go on arguing, as if Invisiboy’s confusion is just one more available story line.
    “When you really stop and think about it,” the Joker concludes, “there have to be something like . . . three? I mean: happy ending, miserable ending, and ‘Watch me get all arty.’ ”
    It’s two, Russell thinks, though no one bothers to ask him. It’s the old, elemental two, the only two that anyone will read: the future arrives to smack around the past, or the past reaches out to strangle the future. Hero goes on journey; stranger comes to town.
    Here in front of him, at any event, is one plot no one will ever bother writing down:
A happy girl passes through the world’s wretchedness and stays happy.
The hung jury turns to Miss Generosity, who hugs herself against their combined outrage. By tacit agreement, Thassa’s vote is now worth any three of theirs.
    “Yo, Genie!” Charlotte corners her. “What do you think? Lots of stories, or not?”
    Her radiant face insists,
This one is easy.
“No hurry!” she tells them. “The time to choose
that
is after we’re dead.”

     
    I search for Russell Stone all over. I read the almanac for that year. I read his class textbook, of course. I read back issues of his magazine. I even loot those hall-of-mirrors avant-garde novels whose characters tryto escape their authors, the kind he once loved, the kind he thought he’d write one day, before he gave up fiction.
    He’s nowhere, except in his work. On the day shift, in between classes, he puts in his stints on
Becoming You.
He sits motionless in his shared cubicle in the refurbished River North warehouse, pruning effusion back to the root.
    According to many of the two thousand new self-help titles that appear every year, once a person rises above poverty, income influences well-being only slightly, and social class affects it just a little more. Marriage counts for a bit, and volunteering works wonders. But nothing short of pharmaceuticals can help sustain contentment as much as a satisfying job.
    What pleasure does he get from his selfless editing? Stone strikes me as the kind of guy who might not know what his pleasures
are
. He’s not alone. No one does: the happiness books are adamant on this. We’re shaped to think the things we want will make us happy. But shaped to take only the briefest thrill in getting.
Wanting
is what
having
wants to recover.

     
    Russell phones his brother—the first call he’s made from work since the half-minute dinner negotiations he used to make with Marie. He reaches Robert’s cell; it still amazes Stone that his own flesh and blood even
has
a cell. All the remaining hunter-gatherers on Papua New Guinea will be packing loaded smartphones before Russell goes mobile. Mobile is the last thing in existence he wants to be. His every original thought is already being interrupted by real time.
    His brother is camped on some stranger’s pitched roof in Oak Brook. It’s what he does—crawl around on strangers’ roofs, installing satellite receivers. He tells people he’s in the throughput business. It troubles Robert that a lot of the general public is still getting only a few dozen stories an hour. His company can get anyone up to a couple hundred plus. And then there’s retrieval and on-demand and downloading. As he often tries explaining to Russell, it’s all about shifting. Time shifting and place shifting. Taste shifting and mood shifting. And if you get the throughput up high enough, it’s like nobody’s even
telling
you stories anymore; it’s like you’re making them up yourself.
    “You busy?” Russell asks. “Got a minute?”
    “No problem,” his brother tells him. “Parallel is more efficient than serial.”
    For some reason, Robert always has time for Stone. He still thinks that Russell is going to be famous someday: a famous writer, whose hilarious stories will pour through the pipes of all the need-shifting, narrative-addicted strangers in the