Generosity

tunneled down by several orders of magnitude, landing in the nucleus of one of her nerve cells. There, in spectacular 3-D, the histone-wound coils of her DNA unzipped and bared their template surfaces to complementary strings of mRNA, which slipped into the ribosomes to be read by fleets of tRNA, each one porting its specified amino acid into the growing folds of a catalytic protein.

The molecular flyby gave Tonia vertigo. She watched the newly minted protein machines spin off the assembly line. As the sequence zoomed out, these catalysts began clamping and unzipping more DNA, igniting new genes, clipping and tamping together more RNA messages. Pulling back steadily by powers of ten, the sequence revealed the feedback loops of transmitters, receptors, and synapses that aggregated in ever-higher networks of neuronal chorus.

Just as Tonia forgot that she was inside an artist’s rendering, the animation zoomed out in a whoosh until it snaked back through the eyes of the deliriously happy woman, whose molecules had engineered her into something like the velvet rapture of orgasm.

The on-screen Schiff reappeared and said something clever that the off-screen Tonia tried not to hear. And before Tonia could follow the jump, her filmic alter ego was telling the story of twin boys, one raised in Minneapolis and the other in L.A. The two brothers never met until they were thirty-five, at which point they discovered that they shared a list of identical happiness triggers that included juggling, harmonica music, cedar trees, and the actress Felicity Kendal.

“Amazing,” Kenny Keyes said, shaking his head in awe. “That’s just killer.”

The on-screen Schiff said, Some researchers believe that the genetic contribution to our gladness thermostat may be as high as 80 percent.

The off-screen Tonia raised her hand. “Hang on a sec.” The film kept rolling. “Something’s been cut here. That whole segment about how quickly the hedonic set-point correlation falls off for fraternal twins.”

Pete Vitale nodded, on top of the objection. “We were getting several people saying it was complicated. Confusing.”

“But it’s important,” Schiff insisted. “We don’t want viewers to think that happiness is hereditary like height is.”

“What is it with you and height?” Kenny asked.

Vitale surveyed the group, even as they kept watching the segment. “Show of hands? Those for restoring the complications? Right. We run as is.”

By then the show had progressed to interviews with a neuroscientist, a positive psychologist, and Thomas Kurton. Talk of genes involved in extroversion, anxiety, and congeniality led to speculation about the “gladness thermostat.” Various predictions about gene-tailored happiness drugs seemed as groundless to Tonia as they had during filming.

By the time the scene with Thassadit Amzwar unfolded, Tonia feltill. All their clips of the manhandled, displaced Berber had been edited to eliminate any cloud or edge. The woman’s increasingly tumbled landscape had been cropped to just the smooth vistas. “This isn’t right,” Schiff said, without turning around. “We’re not doing justice to her. We have to use some of the rockier stuff, too.”

“We’re trying to tell a story here,” Garrett said.

“A story? You mean a fib?” But Schiff’s on-screen voice-over drowned Tonia out. The day may come, hostess Schiff said, when we will choose our children as carefully as we now choose our mates. We may select our natures the way we screen for a career. All the larger, qualifying, problematical follow-up had been clipped away.

The show ended with a rapid-fire, crosscut auction-various people saying how much they would pay for an imperturbably luminous outlook on life. The last face in the accelerating cavalcade was Thomas Kurton’s, repeating, Listen. The shot pulled back to reveal the man speaking on Schiff’s two-inch phone screen. The show host watched as the genomicist intoned again, Six hundred generations ago, we were scratching on the walls of caves. Now we’re sequencing genomes.

In the last shot, Schiff looked up from the minuscule screen, smiled her crooked smile, and asked the camera, If we accomplished all of that as frightened, negatively biased, misery-prone creatures, what might we accomplish when genomics takes us over our inborn limits?

In the cut to black, the few dozen people in the room began to applaud. Pete Vitale craned around from the row in front of Tonia and scanned the reactions. “Yeah? Pretty clean? No major surgery?” He stood and stretched, beaming. “All right. Thanks, all. Off to finishing. Remember: meeting on the transcranial-stimulation script at three. And everyone back here for the cyberwar brainstorming on Friday.”

“Pete,” Tonia said, and felt herself falling. “Pete. We have some major problems here.”

The crew kept filing out. Tonia herself barely registered her own objection. Vitale turned to look, sidesaddling away from her.

Tonia tried smiling. “You do realize this is total shit?”

The director stopped and turned, along with Garrett and Keyes.

“The way this has been cut, we are just fanning the unsubstantiated hype. If even one-tenth of this should turn out to be real, then we ought Don’t you think we should at least mention the challenges? We’re still a science show, right? Don’t you think we should restore some of those scenes with all the objecting researchers?”

The cluster of rearguard crew paused in the double doors of the theater at the scent of drama. “Tonia,” Garrett said, somewhere between peremptory and resigned.

“We’ve got Kurton himself having all those second thoughts. And that poor girl-she was ragged, Pete. This whole carnival is making her wretched. You’ve cut the interview to make her look-”

“It’s done, Ton. You heard everyone sign off.”

She saw, in clean animation, the assembly lines inside her cells thrown into wartime production. Even as it rose up in her throat, she wanted to know what caused this bile. These men she hated? But she’d hated them for years. Her public smackdown and humiliation of a few minutes ago? She wasn’t so vain. Some early parental moral inculcation that she’d managed to resist for decades? Late-onset honesty or scruples or guilt or any of a dozen other predispositions lurking inside her haplotype, just waiting like a heart attack or cancer to be pushed over a threshold and expressed full-blown? Why get righteous now?

Runaway branching feedback-who knew how? Everything, she decided: everything is caused by nothing short of everything else.

What she found so amusing about the unfolding scene was how well all the performers already knew it, even before she spoke her lines. They’d seen it too often to count, in every packaged narrative they’d ever consumed. They had her revolt pegged, long before she herself had seen it coming. The room filled with a deep, almost respectful compliance, everyone ready to play the parts that had been scored for each of them so long ago.

Pete Vitale asked, from a great way off, “You have problems with this work?”

“Tonia, don’t,” Garrett warned again.

“It’s cool,” Kenny said. “Let her blow. She can’t be the only one of us who never uncorks.”

But even the coffee-bearers and copyboys standing in the doorway already knew this story.

Schiff gave in to the warm, predestined familiarity of it all. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry to be so predict We don’t have to labor this. I can just cut to the credits here.” She turned and walked up the aisle and through the knot in the doorway, which parted, fascinated, for her.

Behind her, Garrett told Vitale, “You better go save your nest egg.”

Vitale called out, “Tonia, come on. Come back. We can recut anything you want.”

“Hey: bye-bye, baby,” Kenny said. “Who needs her? Bring on the clones.” And the last thing she heard as she slipped from the screening room was Keyes asking, “Bitch thinks her face can’t be replaced?”

For three crosstown blocks, Tonia Schiff hammers herself for her own long complicity. Five seasons perfecting a voguey pose in the face of anything iridescent. But the future has been feeding on her all along, as sure as any bloodsucker. As sure as she and her collaborators have fed on that ragged woman.

Every twelfth person she passes almost recognizes her. I glimpse her at last, skirting along at a panicked if aimless trot, reflected in five long panes of department-store glass. She glimpses herself-all she has ever tried for, the thing she’s wanted to be from birth. Blameless observer. But the blameless can’t afford to look. Just looking is