“David’s getting a little worried,” Chloe said. “He’s wondering if we should get some Harvard people lined up.”

“Definitely not!” Jane said. “I’m handling this.”

Chloe tugged at her lower lip, a sign that Jane had sounded annoyed rather than authoritative, thereby further undercutting herself.

David Trask was the show’s executive producer and saw “Harvard people” as the solution to every problem, as if having an endowed chair, whatever that was, was enough to make up for being pretentious and phlegmatic. Why David was communicating through Chloe, instead of talking to her directly, was a question she’d have to ask when she had a free moment. Chloe had come to the station straight out of Wellesley College four months earlier. She was intelligent—you couldn’t deny her that—and so full of energy and ideas you wanted to cap her, like a well, to control the flow.

Chloe was wearing a black suit with a Mandarin collar and bell-bottomed pants, all made out of a tastefully shiny material that probably contained rubber or some other unwholesome, impractical material. No doubt her monthly wardrobe allowance exceeded Jane’s mortgage. Her shoes were big lumpy things with immense soles that made her walk with a heavy-footed gait, as if she were about to slap on a pair of skis and hit the slopes, but even they didn’t detract from an overall appearance of gorgeous malnourishment that had men throughout the building finding reasons to pass by her desk several times a day. Genetic engineering eventually would produce human beings very much like Chloe: satiny blends of the best physical features of every race with perfectly proportioned faces and figures, human beings with such a scrambled background that racial biases, stereotypes, and quotas were rendered irrelevant in their presence. Her father was a Korean, African-American, Italian lawyer who worked as a diversity consultant for a multinational, and her mother was a former model or dancer or something show-offy, part Colombian, part Chinese, part Native American. Despite all of the advantages wrought by her looks and her upper-middle-class upbringing, Chloe saw the world entirely in terms of villains and victims, and seemed to have equated victimhood with strength and moral superiority in a manner Jane found increasingly common among the young people, male and female, who came to the station. The fact that she’d risen to assistant producer in four months didn’t seem to register as evidence of her own good fortune. Jane suspected that Chloe, like most college grads of her generation, was bulimic, but there were bloated, premenstrual, post-lunch moments when she envied her even this messy but efficient affliction.

“I can’t believe that airline pilot canceled,” Chloe said. “We should do a show on people whose lives were ruined by flight cancellations—missing job interviews, weddings, important deaths.”

“I hate missing important deaths,” Jane said. “It ruins your day.”