after Ricky Weiss was sentenced, but the stalking charges against him became front-page news in the suburban papers. That brought him notoriety, and not just the shaming kind he expected. People sympathized with him. He had lost his daughter and his wife, and for the love of God he’d been shot himself by a religious zealot, and maybe he had crossed some ethical lines with his mysterious “study” of Justin, but no one suggested he’d been a danger to the boy, no one except for Martha Finn in her restraining order (which remained in place until Justin was eighteen).
In place of his practice, Davis accepted generous fees to speak at seminars and dinners and fund-raisers. He became a regular pundit on the Sunday television roundtables as the violence at fertility clinics became more intense and the ethics of cloning were debated with increased frequency on the front pages of newsweeklies. At the age of fifty-six and with no patients of his own, Dr. Davis Moore had become cloning’s most distinguished spokesperson.
Of course, he could never admit publicly the real reasons he quit his practice. For one, he was exhausted, weary of the violence that had now taken four of his close friends in the profession, and too tired to cope with new clinic security – the armed guards, the gated parking garage, the metal detectors, the name badges, the bomb- sniffing dogs, the drills, the threats, the bimonthly evacuations and the subsequent “all clear’s.” Even here at the conference uniformed guards stood by the exits, making and remaking every attendee, memorizing faces, and quantifying risk.
Davis also felt guilty. Guilt over the bodies of Anna Kat and Jackie and even Phil Canella, whom he never even met. Guilt over the trauma he’d caused the Finn family. Guilt over Justin, a boy who never should have been, and guilt over Eric Lundquist’s discarded DNA, the blueprint of a boy who should have been but never was.
The conference was sponsored by the California Association of Libertarian Scientists. Traditionally, they lobbied Congress on any issue related to “researcher rights,” but over the past year, as the anti-cloners in Washington gained support (up to forty-three percent in some polls), CALS had become almost exclusively a cloning advocacy group.
“Our guest tonight has made many sacrifices in the name of science,” began the introduction from a Berkeley-educated medical doctor named Poonwalla. “He has been persecuted, prosecuted, and has even taken a bullet for the causes all of us in this room hold dear. But you can’t keep a good man down, especially a good man who has right-thinking, free people like you on his side. Ladies and gentleman, from Chicago, Dr. Davis Moore.”
Davis stood up and smiled and shook hands with Dr. Poonwalla. As he took a breath and began, Davis thought of three true statements: This speech wasn’t especially good. He was a hypocrite for giving it. This audience would love it.
“There is a computer game, maybe some of your kids play it. Actually, about forty percent of the adults in this room play it every week, if the adults in this room are typical and the statistics I read in the paper are worth a damn. Worldwide, they say five thousand new players sign up every day. The game is called Shadow World.”
A murmur of recognition pulsed from table to table. Everyone had heard of Shadow World. It was the most popular multiplayer game in America. At several tables, husbands elbowed wives and wives elbowed husbands as if to say, He’s talking about you, hon. Couples who played the game together, and there were many, squeezed hands.
“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
