Generosity

guess.”

She rubs her finger slowly across the chill glass, obliterating all graphs.

“Have you come across Norbert Schwarz’s work? It’s classic. Subjects fill in a questionnaire about life satisfaction. But the subject must go into the next room to make a copy of the questionnaire before filling it in. One group finds a dime sitting on the copy machine. Their lucky day. The control group finds nothing.”

Stone grips a plate. “Don’t tell me.”

“I’m afraid I have to; it’s science! The lucky group reports significantly higher satisfaction with their entire life.”

He grins, shakes his head, and plunges his fists back in the hot water, now tepid to his accustomed hands.

“Don’t take it so hard.” She grazes his shoulder with her towel. “Works with a chocolate bar, too.”

He lifts his hands from the water and presses his soapy palms to his cheeks. “We’re pathetic.”

“We’re beautiful,” she replies. “We just have no idea how we feel or what makes us feel that way!”

“So feeling good is really that cheap?”

“Not cheap.” She traces out a quick hieroglyphic on the upper arm of his waffle shirt. “ Affordable. And easier than we think.”

Easy is exactly the problem. He turns and faces her, holds her eyes for the first time all evening. “And Thassa?”

“And Thassa.” She gazes off into a ceiling corner full of cobwebs he missed in the afternoon’s scrub-down. “She must carry around one hell of a chocolate bar.”

At the evening’s end, mother and son don coats, scarves, hats, and gloves. Outside, the snow is thin but gathering, a taste of things to come. The boy sticks out a king crab claw and shakes Russell’s hand. He promises to show Stone his life in Futopia, anytime. Bundled, the mother turns to Stone, slips one padded arm around his middle, turns her head away, and pulls him into her. She lays her right ear on his clavicle and listens.

He plays dead. The one time Grace was this gentle was right before she left.

Dr. Weld breaks the embrace. “Merry Christmas,” she says. She looks up at him, wincing. She waves an erasing mitten in the air. Don’t worry, it says. Means nothing. A dime’s a dime. Grab it when you see it.

No one at Truecyte searches for the story. They come across it by data mining, scouring the Web with automated scripts and prospecting bots. The company’s intelligent agents race from server to server at all hours, extracting patterns and converging on the next genetic trends before they’ve even materialized.

Nodes, clusters, trackbacks, memes Truth follows bandwidth, as sure as use follows invention. By now, the idea is a commonplace: only that massively parallel computer, the entire human race, is powerful enough to interpret the traffic that it generates. No single expert can calculate the outcome of tomorrow’s big game. But the averaged aggregate guess of hundreds of millions of amateurs can come as close as God.

In this way, a self-assembling network of page traffic presents itself daily to three graduate-student interns trained to prowl around each morning’s tidal pools and pull out shiny things. If two out of the three of them tag the same story, it goes to Kurton’s own news aggregator. And for an hour every morning before dawn, the inventor of rapid gene signature reading mulls over the day’s trove of stories.

He consumes the feeds, looking for new upheaval, the same constant upheaval that has carried him this far. He still remembers the Boethius that his ex-wife made him read at Stanford a third of a century ago, insisting it would make him a better person: no one will ever be safe or well until Fortune upends him.

As Kurton reads, he drags various links into tree branches in his visual concept-mapper, trees that start out as bonsais but-tended and grafted and trained toward the light-grow into redwoods.

People who read stories about subjective well-being also subscribe to posts about affective set point.

People who subscribe to posts about affective set point are also interested in genetic basis of happiness.

People who follow genetic basis of happiness.

comment and respond to/.

spend many page minutes with/.

rate highly/.

frequently link to.

one of several mutually quoting accounts of Kabylia’s outpost in Chicago, stories that spread the keyword hyperthymia like a pheromone trail.

He reads the Reader story and feels the journalist’s excitement. This Kabyle woman has grown up in a vicious free-for-all that makes the stoic Boethius look like a bed-wetting schoolboy. And despite the worst that environment can contribute, her body pumps out the standing gladness that should be every human’s birthright.

Hunch’s role in science has never embarrassed Kurton. And he has a hunch that this woman may be the missing datum that Truecyte’s three-year study needs. If she isn’t, the study will only be strengthened by learning why. He checks with his schedule keeper, who tells him he’ll be at the University of Chicago in the second week of January, for a debate with an Australian Nobelist in literature who believes that scientific investigation has killed the world’s soul.

With six clicks, Kurton finds a contact for the immigrant student. He composes an e-mail, using a Tamazight greeting that he picked up on one of his trips to Morocco. He tells her about his work in understanding what makes humans happy, and his hopes for using genetic information to heal the future. He describes how much his lab has already learned by exploring people like her, and he says how much she would contribute to the study. Everyone alive would love to know a little more about how you tick! He mentions that he’s coming to Chicago and asks if they might meet when he’s in the city. He gives her five ways to contact him. And his e-mail software automatically appends, beneath the obligatory block of personal data, his signature quote:

. whatever was the beginning of this world, the end will be glorious and paradisiacal, beyond what our imaginations can now conceive.

– Joseph Priestley

PART THREE WELL PAST CHANCE

For the point is this: not that myth refers us back to some original event which has been fancifully transcribed as it passed through the collective memory; but that it refers us forward to something that will happen, that must happen. Myth will become reality, however skeptical we might be.

– Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10 ? Chapters

And on a May night in the near future, Tonia Schiff will land at Tunis-Carthage International. Seen from the airport shuttle, the dense glow surprises her. So much flickering enterprise up so late, refining fresh surplus into new necessities. Tunis glitters as furtively as any of the earth’s two-hundred-or-so- million-inhabitant cities. This one just happens to be four thousand years old.

The science-show host wakes up in the Centre Ville, feeling that she’s landed by