The Possibility of an Island by Michel Houellebecq, Gavin Bowd

whether for food or for the possession of females; the pups were abandoned, and occasionally devoured by their older brothers.
    I was drinking more and more during this time, and it was after my third anisette, on stumbling toward the Bentley, that I was astonished to see Isabelle pass through an opening in the fence, and approach a group of about ten dogs who were stationed on a piece of wasteland near the car park. I knew that she was naturally rather timorous, and that these animals were generally considered dangerous. The dogs, however, watched her approach without aggression or fear. A little white-and-ginger mongrel, with pointed ears, aged about three months at most, began to creep toward her. She stooped, took it in her arms, and returned to the car. This is how Fox entered our lives; and, with him, unconditional love.

 
     
    Daniel24, 6
     
    THE COMPLEX INTERWEAVING OF PROTEINS constituting the nuclear envelope among primates made human cloning, for several decades, dangerous, risky, and, at the end of the day, almost impracticable. The operation was, on the other hand, an immediate and total success with the majority of pets, including—though with a slight delay—dogs. It is therefore exactly the same Fox who rests at my feet as I write these lines, adding my commentary, according to tradition, as my predecessors have done, to the life story of my human ancestor.
    I live a calm and joyless life; the surface of the residence permits short walks, and a complete array of equipment enables me to tone my muscles. As for Fox, he is happy. He gambols around the residence, content with the imposed perimeters—he quickly learned to keep away from the protective fence; he plays with the ball, or with one of the small plastic animals (I have several hundred of them, bequeathed to me by my predecessors); he really likes musical toys, especially a duck made in Poland, which emits various tuneful quacks. Above all, he likes me to take him in my arms, and rest like that, bathed in sunshine, his eyes closed, his head placed on my knees, in a happy half-sleep. We sleep together, and every morning is a festival of licks and scratches from his little paws; it is an obvious joy for him to be reunited with life and daylight. His joys are identical to those of his ancestors, and they will remain identical among his descendants; his nature in itself contains the possibility of happiness.
    I am only a neohuman, and my nature includes no possibility of this order. Humans, or at least the most advanced among them, already knew that unconditional love is the condition for the possibility of happiness. A full understanding of the problem has not yet enabled us to advance toward some kind of solution. The study of the lives of the saints, on whom some based so much hope, has shed no light. Not only did the saints, in their quest for salvation, obey motives that were only partially altruistic (even though submission to the will of the Lord, which they professed, must have often been simply a convenient way of justifying to others their natural altruism), but prolonged belief in a manifestly absent divine entity provoked in them displays of idiocy incompatible in the long term with the maintenance of a technological civilization. As for the hypothesis of a gene for altruism, it caused so many disappointments that no one dares today to openly put it forward. It has certainly been demonstrated that the centers of cruelty, moral judgment, and altruism were situated in the prefrontal cortex; but research has not enabled us to go beyond this purely anatomical observation. Since the appearance of the neohumans, the thesis of the genetic origin of moral sentiments has given rise to at least three thousand scientific papers, emanating each time from the most authoritative scientific milieus; but not one has been able yet to cross the barrier of experimental verification. What’s more, the Darwinian theories explaining the appearance of altruism by