Next: A Novel (27 page)

“Furthermore, we have conquered personal space. Logos, brands, and slogans appear on ordinary objects from knives to tableware to computers. They appear on all our possessions. Consumers wear logos on their clothing, handbags, shoes, jewelry. Indeed, it is rare for a person to appear in public without them. Thirty years ago, if anyone predicted that the entire global public would turn themselves into sandwich boards, walking about advertising products, the idea would have seemed fantastical. Yet it has happened.

“The result is an imagistic glut, sensory exhaustion, and a diminution of impact. What can we do now? How can we move forward in the new era of technology? The answer may be heretical, but it isthis. ”

The screen changed dramatically, to a forest image. Huge trees rising toward the sky, shade beneath. Then a snowy mountain peak. A tropical island, an arc of sand, crystalline water, palm trees. And, finally, an underwater reef, with fish swimming among coral heads and sponges.

“The natural world,” Koss intoned, “is entirely without advertising. The natural world has yet to be tamed. Colonized by commerce. It remains virgin.”

From the darkness: “Isn’t that rather the point?”

“Conventional wisdom would put it so. Yes. But conventional wisdom is invariably out of date.

Because in the time it has taken to become conventional—to become what everyone believes—

the world has moved on. Conventional wisdom is a remnant of the past. And so it is in this case.”

On the screen, the reef scene was suddenly branded. Coral branches had lettering that readBP

CLEAN . A school of small fish wriggled by, each winkingVODAFONE, VODAFONE . A slithering shark withCADBURY curving across the snout. A puffer fish withLLOYDS TSB

GROUP in black lettering swam over convoluted heads of brain coral, withSCOTTISH POWER

printed along the ridges in orange. And, finally, a moray eel poked its head out of a hole. Its greenish skin pattern saidMARKS & SPENCER .

“Think of the possibilities,” Koss said.

The audience was stunned—as he had expected it would be. He pressed on with the argument.

The slide now showed a desert scene, with spires of red rock rising against a blue sky laced with clouds. After a moment, the clouds coalesced into a larger, misty cloud that hung above the landscape and said:

BP MEANSCLEANPOWER.

“Those letters,” Koss said, “are nine hundred feet high. They stand a quarter of a mile above the landscape. They are clear to the naked eye, and they photograph well. At sunset, they become quite beautiful.” The image changed. “Here, you see their appearance as the sun goes down—the lettering changes from white to pink, to red, and finally deep indigo. So it has the quality, the feeling, of being a natural element within the natural landscape.”

He returned to the original cloud image in daylight. “These letters are generated by a marriage of nanoparticles and genetically modified clostridium perfringens bacteria. The image is, in effect, a nanoswarm, and it will remain visible in the air for a variable period of time, depending on conditions—just as any cloud would. It may appear for only a few minutes. At other times, it may appear for an hour. It may appear in multiples…”

On the screen, the fluffy clouds became the BP slogan, repeated infinitely in cloud after cloud, stretching away to the horizon. “I think everyone will recognize the impact of this new medium.

Thenatural medium.”

He had expected spontaneous applause for this dramatic visual, but there was still only silence in the darkness. Yet surely they would be experiencing some sort of reaction by now. An infinitely repeated advert hanging in the sky? Surely it must arouse them.

“But these clouds are a special case,” he said.

He returned tothe underwater image, fishes moving over the coral reef. “In this case,” he said,

“signage and adverts are borne by the living creatures themselves, through direct genetic modification of each species. We call this genomic advertising. To capture this new medium, speed is of the utmost importance. There are only a limited number of reef fishes common to tourist waters. Some fish are more incandescent than others. Many are a bit drab. So we want to choose the best. And the genetic modifications will require patenting the marine animal in each case. Thus we will patent the Cadbury clown fish, the British Petroleum stag coral, the Marks and Spencer moray eel, the Royal Bank of Scotland angelfish, and gliding silently overhead, the British Airways manta ray.”

Koss cleared his throat. “Speed matters because we are entering a competitive situation. We want our Cadbury clown fish out there, before the clown fish is patented by Hershey’s or McDonald’s.

And we want a strong creature, since in the natural environment the Cadbury clown fish will compete against ordinary clown fish, and hopefully triumph over them. The more successful our patented fish, the more frequently our message shall be seen, and the more completely the original, messageless fish will be driven to extinction. We are entering the era of Darwinian advertising! May the best advert win!”

A coughfrom the audience. “Gavin, forgive me,” came a voice, “but this appears to be an environmental nightmare. Brand names on fish? Slogans in clouds? And what else? Rhinos in Africa that carry the Land Rover logo? If you go about branding animal species, every environmentalist in the world will oppose you.”

“Actually, they will not,” Koss said, “because we’re not suggesting that corporationsbrand species. We ask corporations tosponsor species. As a public service.” He paused. “Think how many museum exhibitions, theater companies, and symphony orchestras are entirely dependent on corporate sponsorship. Even sections of roadway are sponsored, today. Why shouldn’t the same philanthropic spirit be directed toward the natural world—which surely would benefit far more than our roads? Endangered species could be attractively sponsored. Corporations can stake their reputations on the survival of animal species, as they once staked their reputations on the quality of dull television programs. And it is the same for other animals that are not yet endangered. For all the fish in the sea. We are talking about an era of magnificent corporate philanthropy—on a global scale.”

“So, this is the black rhino, brought to you by Land Rover? The jaguar, brought to you by Jaguar?”

“I shouldn’t put it so crudely, but, yes, that’s what we are proposing. The point,” he continued,

“is that this is a win-win situation. A win for the environment. For corporations. And for advertising.”

Gavin Koss had done hundreds of presentations in his career, and his feeling for the audience had never failed him. He could feel now that this group was not buying it. It was time to bring the lights up and take questions.

He stared at the rows of frowning faces. “I admit my notion is radical,” he said. “But the world is changing rapidly. Someone is going to do this. This colonization of naturewill happen—the only question is, by whom. I urge you to consider this opportunity with the greatest care, and then decide if you want to be a part of it.”

From the back, Garth Baker, the head of Midlands Media Associates Ltd., stood. “It’s quite a novel idea, Gavin,” he said. “But I must tell you with some assurance that it will not work.”

“Oh? Why is that?”

“Because someone has already done it.”

CH047

There was no moon and no sound, except the booming of the surf in the darkness and the whine of the damp wind. Tortuguero beach extended for more than a mile along the rough Atlantic coast of Costa Rica, but tonight it was no more than a dark strip that merged with a black, starry sky. Julio Manarez paused, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dark. A man can see by starlight, if he takes the time.

Soon he could make out the palm trunks and debris scattered over the dark sand, and the low, scrubby plants whipped by the wind off the ocean. He could just see whitecaps in the churning seas. The ocean, he knew, was filled with sharks. This stretch of the Atlantic coast was bleak and inhospitable.

A quarter mile down the beach he saw Manuel, a dark shape hunched beneath the mangroves. He was keeping out of the wind. There was no one else on the beach.

Julio started toward him, passing the deep pits dug by the turtles in previous days. This beach was one of the breeding grounds for leatherback turtles, which came up from the ocean in darkness to lay their eggs. The process took most of the night, and the turtles were vulnerable—

in the old days, to poachers, and now mostly to the jaguars that roamed the beach, black as the night itself. As the newly appointed conservation chief of the region, Julio was well aware that turtles were killed every week along this coast.

Tourists helped prevent this; if tourists were walking the beach, the jaguars stayed away. But often the cats came after midnight, when the tourists had gone home to their hotels.

It was possible to imagine an evolutionary selection pressure producing some defense against the jaguar. When he was in graduate school, in San Juan, he and the other students used to joke about it. Were tourists agents of evolution? Tourists changed everything else about a country, why not its wildlife? Because if a turtle happened to possess some quality—perhaps a tolerance for flashlights, or the ability to make a plaintive, pained mothering sound—if they had something that drew tourists and kept them hanging around into the night, then those turtles would be more likely to survive, and their eggs more likely to survive, and their offspring more likely to survive.

Differential survival that resulted from being a tourist attraction. That had been the joke, in school. But, of course, it was theoretically possible. And if what Manuel was telling him was true…

Manuel saw him and waved. He stood as Julio approached. “This way,” he said, and started down the beach.

“You find more than one tonight, Julio?”

“Just one. Of that kind I was speaking of.”

“Muy bien.”

They walked down the beach in silence. But they had not gone far—perhaps a hundred yards or so—when Julio saw the faint purple glow, low to the sand, and pulsing slightly.

“That’s it?”

“That’s it,” Manuel said.

She was a femaleof perhaps one hundred kilos, a meter and a quarter long. She had characteristic shell plates, about the size of his palm. Brownish, streaked with black. She was half buried in the sand, digging a pit at the rear with her flippers.

Julio stood over her and watched.

“It starts and stops,” Manuel said.

And then it began again. A purple glow that seemed to emanate from within the individual plates of the shell. Some plates did not have the glow and were dark. Some glowed only occasionally.

Others glowed each time. Each pulse seemed to last about a second, rising quickly, fading slowly.

“So how many turtles like this have you seen?” Julio said.

“This is the third.”

“And this light keeps the jaguars away?” He continued to watch the soft pulsing. He felt that the quality of the glow was oddly familiar. Almost like a firefly. Or a glowing bacterium in the surf.

Something he had seen before.

“Yes, the jaguars keep their distance.”

“Wait a minute,” Julio said. “What is this?” He pointed to the shell, where a pattern of light and dark plates emerged.

“It only happens sometimes.”

“But you see it?”

“Yes, I see it.”

“It looks like a hexagon.”

“I don’t know…”

“But it is like a symbol, wouldn’t you say? Of a corporation?”

“Perhaps, yes. It is possible.”

“What about the other turtles? They show this pattern?”

“No, each one is different.”

“So this might be a random pattern that just happens to look like a hexagon?”

“Yes. Julio, I believe it is. Because you see the image on the shell is not so good, it is not symmetrical…” Even as he spoke, the image faded. The turtle was dark again.

“Can you photograph this pattern?”

“I already have. It is a time exposure, without the flash, so there is some blurring. But, yes, I have it.”

“Good,” Julio said. “Because this is a genetic change. Let’s review the visitor log, and see who might have done this.”

CH048

Josh.”It was his mother, on the phone.

“Yes, Mom.”

“I thought you should know. You remember Lois Graham’s son, Eric, who was on heroin?

There’s been a terrible tragedy. He died.”

Josh gave a long sigh. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. “How?”

“In a car crash. But then they did the autopsy or whatever. Eric had a fatal heart attack. He was twenty-one, Josh.”

“Was it in the family? Some congenital thing?”

“No. Eric’s father lives in Switzerland; he’s sixty-four. He climbs mountains. And Lois is fine.

Of course she’s crushed. We’re all crushed.”

Josh said nothing.

“Things were going so well for Eric. He was off drugs, he had a new job, he’d applied to go back to school in the fall…he was getting bald, was the only thing. People thought he’d had chemo.

He’d lost so much hair. And he walked stooped over. Josh? Are you there?”

“I’m here.”

“I saw him last week. He looked like an old man.”

Josh said nothing.

“The family’s sitting. You ought to go.”

“I’ll try.”

“Josh. Your brother looks old, too.”

“I know.”

“I tried to tell him it was like his father. To cheer him up. But Adam just looksso old. ”

“I know.”

“What’s going on?” she said. “What have you done to him?”

“What haveI done?”

“Yes, Josh. You gave these people some gene. Or whatever that spray was. And they’re getting old.”

“Mom. Adam did it to himself. He sucked down the spray himself because he thought it’d get him high. I wasn’t even with him at the time. And you asked me to give the spray to Lois Graham’s son.”

“I don’t know how you could think such a thing.”

“You called me up.”

“Josh, you’re being ridiculous. Why would I call? I don’t know anything about your work.You calledme , and asked where Eric lived. And you asked me not to tell his mother. That’s what I remember.”