Cast of Shadows - v4 (31 page)

“I’ve never played Shadow World myself, and I don’t have any children” — Davis hadn’t meant this as an oblique reference to Anna Kat, but guests who were familiar with every part of his biography became suddenly silent, as if any noise they made would be interpreted by the speaker as pity — “but in its ads the makers ridicule other online games, in which the players take on fictional personas and go on magical adventures in make-believe lands. The Shadow World is the exact world we live in, every building, park, bus stop, and store in the thirty-five hundred cities around the world — and counting — that the TyroSoft programmers have drawn in the game to date. Within any city, you can walk or drive down most any street or alley, enter any building if the door’s open or you have a key. You can even travel from city to city through working airports and train stations and a skeletal interstate system. Every player begins the game with a character representing himself. You start with your real-world job, your real-world family, your real-world education. But in Shadow World, the player can do all the things they are afraid to do in real life. You can choose new destinies or take outrageous chances. You can ask models out on dates or tell off your boss. The price of failure is nothing worse than the forced start of a new game, beginning again as the real you, with another shot at deciding what choices will make you happy.

“I’m told different players use the game in different ways. Many people try to live their dreams in the game, hoping to become actors or musicians or famous writers. Some use it to practice — a dry run at real life, if you will — working out scenarios to determine what might happen if they asked for a raise or cheated on a spouse. Many people, oddly, mirror their real life in the virtual world down to every detail, going to work in the morning, ordering lunch from the same places, coaching their kids in Little League. In the gaming vocabulary, these individuals are called ‘True-to-Lifers,’ and they apparently enjoy watching their lives play out realistically on-screen as if it were an animated documentary elevating their mundane lives to something like art.

“Now, when Shadow World was introduced, many people thought it could provide a road map to Utopia here on earth. Through virtual experimentation, we would discover that life truly does offer limitless choices. With Shadow World as a guide, mankind would discover its real potential. We would invent synthetic fuels, find cures for terminal diseases, happen upon new and better systems of governance and diplomacy.

“As you know, that hasn’t happened. Or it hasn’t yet. Six years after its creation, life in Shadow World has become almost an exact copy of life in the real world. The crime rate is about the same. Disease spreads with the same efficiency. Wars between nations occur with the same frequency. Government corruption and corporate malfeasance turn out to be as seductive in Shadow World as they are in this one.

“Why do you think that is? Sociologists who study this sort of thing, which is nice work if you can get it” — laughter — “suggest several possibilities. First of all, the so-called True-to-Lifers make up more than a quarter of the gaming public. In fact, sociologists say these people, replicating their actual lives on the Internet, are critical to the stability of the game. Their presence ensures that Shadow World isn’t populated entirely by aspiring movie stars and rock singers.” Laughter. “In the game, True-to-Lifers aren’t always taking outrageous risks, failing, and starting over. Their lives go on and on, running the insurance businesses and the bakeries and the movie theaters. They are the invisible matter that makes Shadow World so real. So livable. So popular. And that’s the irony. The fantasy world is seductive because it is so very much like our own.

“I have a good friend named Walter Hirschberg, who’s a respected professor at the University of Chicago, and he has another theory: perhaps Utopias can’t exist because in a reasonably free society, happiness is a constant.” Davis paused here at the introduction of an abstract concept. “Of course, it goes without saying that misery would be a constant, too, and some people will be happier than others. But when you add up our talents, our aspirations, our capabilities, our treachery, our selfishness, our generosity, our technology, our addictions, our hope, our anxiety, our love, our anger, you find that collectively we tend toward a certain level of happiness. That level can change slightly, in the short term, but it always works its way back to equilibrium.

“Now, what does any of this have to do with science or liberty? Walter suggests that when we are at our natural level of happiness, restrictions on liberty can only result in a net loss of that happiness.” Applause. “Now, of course we need certain laws to preserve order” — ironic boos — “yes, yes, I know who the anarchists are among us” — laughter — “but laws that seek to restrict liberty because of fear, because of ignorance, because a wrong-headed idealist is trying to construct his own version of Utopia: these laws cause a ripple effect through society, one that affects us all for the worse. The Buckley-Rice Anti-Cloning Act is exactly that kind of unnecessary legislation.” Enthusiastic applause. “And we might even have proof.

“One year ago, inside the game of Shadow World, the United States legislature
passed
the Buckley-Rice Anti-Cloning Act. The result, in the universe of the game, has been an
increase
in infant mortality, an
increase
in reports of clinical depression, an
increase
in violence committed by mothers suffering from postpartum depression, and an across-the-board increase in the suicide rate. Not much of one, just a few percent, but it didn’t correspond, as such things usually do, to an increase in the real-world suicide rate. Can I tell you for certain this overall
decrease
in happiness is a direct result of Buckley-Rice? No, I’m not that smart. But I can tell you what Walter Hirschberg would say. I can tell you because I called Walter up and I asked him.

“First I must tell you that Walter, despite his friendship with me, is not a supporter of cloning. He and I have had that ethical debate many times over the years. But even Walter agrees that Buckley-Rice would be a horrible mistake. Laws are not equivalent to ethics. They do not effectively answer questions of whether we should or shouldn’t do things. Laws address whether we
can
do things, and with respect to cloning, clearly the answer is yes. The mapping of the human genome and the successful, even routine, cloning of man is one of the great accomplishments of our lifetimes, and if the United States Congress tells us, all evidence to the contrary, that we
cannot
clone stem cells in order to prolong life,
cannot
use cloning to treat infertility and stop the spread of hereditary disease,
cannot
seek out every resource and tool at our disposal to reduce the suffering of our patients, they are not creating a better America, they are
increasing
American
misery
.”

The applause was kick-started by a chorus of supporting cheers. One of the middle tables stood first, the diners kicking chairs back from the table and straightening their legs in the space between. In a moment, most of the gathered were standing and the applause grew in celebration of the consensus. Davis smiled and let the cheers subside until he could finally hear chair legs rubbing against the thin carpet as the guests returned to their seats.

Davis continued: “This is not meant to end the discussion about cloning. Walter and I debate this issue every time we get together. He suggests that just because we
can
clone human beings doesn’t mean we
should
. I tell him he’s answered the wrong question. If we
can
do something — to increase health, to increase happiness — doesn’t that mean we
must
?” Applause. “A couple comes into your office. They can’t have children, or they’re afraid to. They ask for your help and you have the ability to help them. How could it possibly be ethical to do otherwise?” Louder applause. “Walter says that what cloning professionals do is remarkable — and I agree, but not for the same reasons. He is amazed that we can take a cell, a fraction of a fingernail, and from that make a human being. I tell him nature has been doing that for years.
Conception
is still the bigger miracle to me. From two, one. It’s the lower organisms that usually reproduce asexually, after all.

“We do not ‘make people’ as Walter suggests. What we do is give them moms and dads. That truly
is
a remarkable thing.” Sustained and satisfied clapping.

“I agree with Walter on another matter, however. Our profession
must
have an ongoing and rigorous discussion concerning the ethics of
all
our practices. One of the reasons I support the efforts of this organization” — Davis gestured to the CALS banner behind him — “is that a free society must make difficult ethical decisions, must weigh the consequences of its actions, must debate and justify the validity of its works. To live under an oppressive government is to live without ethical dilemmas. In Castro’s Cuba, in Saddam’s Iraq, in the North Korea of Kim Jong Il, ordinary people did not debate whether they should do this or should not do that, only whether they
could
do this or
could
do that.

“Utilitarians ask us to consider the
greatest good
. That’s a valid philosophical approach, I suppose. The attorney general, along with the sponsors of Buckley-Rice, uses that rhetoric all the time. He claims the greatest good will be served by government regulation of scientific research, by the banning of all cloning procedures, by letting Congress set the agenda for scientific research in this country. But what about the
greatest evil
? The only thing the Luddites have against technology is their own fear of it. But if we stop, or even slow the pace of genetic research, thousands will die, tens of thousands will suffer, and billions — all the world’s free people, in fact — will find themselves worse off for it.”

Davis used eight true examples of current research to demonstrate his points, and he projected slides and videos on a giant screen behind him for illumination. He made sure to mention the work of a half-dozen people in attendance — Dr. Seebohm, Dr. Harmon, both Dr. Carters, Dr. Manet, Dr. Huang. CALS members grinned through it all, laughed three or four more times, and cheered him vigorously when he was through.

“Terrific!” Dr. Poonwalla said over his shoulder as guests lined up at the conclusion of the event to introduce themselves to Davis and express concurring opinions. “Just the thing to rally the troops!”

When the last well-wisher had made off for the coat check, Davis rode the elevator alongside a balding drunk wearing a name tag (not from the CALS conference, Davis ascertained). He leaned against the back wall of the cab and couldn’t even spit out the number of the floor he wanted. Annoyed, Davis got off on fourteen and when the drunk tried to follow, he pushed him back on and lit buttons for random floors with a slap of his hand.

Davis turned several corners, following arrows on painted wall plaques until he found his room number, then dropped his key card through the vertical slot and leaned on the door. The room was silent and he guessed without looking that she would be wound into the armchair by the floor lamp, reading one of the three paperbacks she had packed for the thirty-six-hour trip. It was dark except for a dim light in the foyer, however, and when he stepped gently into the room he saw she was asleep. He detoured into the oversized bathroom, where he peeled away his charcoal suit and brushed his teeth and ran a comb of wet fingers through his silver hair.

“How was it?” Joan asked, making a mockery of his exaggerated attempts at stealth. He continued them anyway, easing weightlessly into the bed next to her, pulling the sheet to his neck without billowing the cool air underneath.

“Just another day preaching to the converted,” he whispered.

“Mmm. That’s good. The converted don’t shoot at you, generally.” Joan made a reference to his old wound at least once a day, but she never mentioned Jackie’s death, according to the never-discussed rules of their partnership. They used to talk about Anna Kat all the time, but now her name was spoken less and less. Davis no longer felt he had to prove to Joan that he remembered his daughter.

Joan had left New Tech shortly after Davis, setting up her own practice at a clinic affiliated with Northwestern Hospital. As his legal troubles were confronted and dispatched, their relationship advanced as an inevitability, with each step toward intimacy seeming as preordained as a precocious child’s graduation from one grade to the next. When they were finally married, late last year, Joan worried her husband’s notoriety would scare away patients (or the parents of her patients, anyway) but she discovered, as he did, that people had long ago ceased to find the difference between fame and infamy interesting. There were a few extreme anti-cloners who no doubt imagined eternity in hell for any parent who put their child’s well-being in the hands of Davis Moore’s wife, but if anything, appointments increased when she changed her listing from Dr. Joan Burton to Dr. Joan Burton-Moore.

She reached across him with her right arm and placed her palm against the top of his stomach. With the nails of her left hand, she scratched him on the right temple. He smiled and rolled to his side, where she met his mouth with hers. She was naked, to his surprise — she always slept in a long T-shirt — and he kissed her with enthusiasm. His eyes adjusting to the light by the minute, he paused above her long enough to make her smile, and he delighted in his proximity to her, that she allowed him to touch her, to kiss her, to enter her. The marriage itself having been decided on as casually as a weekend at the lake house in Michigan, he still marveled that she returned his passion at night, she who was beautiful and smart and generous and ten years younger, when he was flawed and shamed and selfish and older and had failed badly at marriage once before.

She watched his eyes. There was a time, before they were together even, that she was certain she’d lost him. His preoccupation with AK’s killer had left him like a warehouse filled with empty boxes, with nothing inside yet no room for anything more. She had played along with his insanity in order to protect Justin, certainly, but also to protect Davis from his own madness, and also because she could think of no better way to be near him than to share the only thing that seemed to matter to him. Her love for him in those days was compartmentalized. She held little hope for it, and tried several times at relationships with more available men, but she always returned to the improbable dream that a life could be had with Davis Moore.