In the year 2011, the use and function of every known gene, human or animal, had been fully elucidated and then documented in books with black leather binding.  These books exited the laboratories in convoys of armored trucks, which took them straight to various checkpoints by the CIA.

Normally the CIA doesn’t ask anything to come straight to it.  Normally they ask for it to be delivered all roundabout, so as to cover all their tracks.  A straight delivery, Point A to Point B, was infinitely dangerous.

This was worth it.

Back in ovular rooms underground (ovals, it had been shown, inspired more productivity than other shapes; cubes inspired the least), the CIA began to dissect and experiment with the data.  They asked themselves questions:

What is the extent of free will?

How will we know if we find it?

If this were like this, would this still be like this?

Okay.  Now where do we go from here?

As it turned out, there was not a single aspect of human or animal life that was not, in some way, predetermined by genetics.  Gene 47778391112, for example, makes a white male think “I have to take a shit” not after he eats, not after he wakes up from a night of Mojitos, but after his first divorce before age 23.  If he is over 23 when his first divorce occurs, he thinks, “I have to write a novel.”  

Shits are still determined by the body, of course, but since genes determine when the body will decide to eat, the seeming autonomy of biology is exposed.

Ignore the brain behind that curtain!

Speaking of which, the brain became almost instantly regarded as obsolete.  Its primary focus seemed to be containing records of things which had already happened, creating the illusion of linear time and thus creating desire for things which could no longer be.  CIA theorists reasoned that, had we no memory, life would continue exactly as it already had, because memory was no longer believed to motivate counteractions.
Genes motivate counteractions.  Genes motivate hope and despair and hate and love.
CIA theorists also reasoned that, instead of figuring these things out for themselves, now was simply their time to receive the knowledge in a group setting in which all parties are over the age of 33, and the sun is not openly visible, and at least one male of any race contains a corn dog.  This is a consequence of Gene 518830001.
Curiously, this news proved so universally un-disturbing, and in fact comforting, that it was relayed to the world within a fortnight of its discovery.  For its nature of seemingly arbitrary, yet totally interlocking patterns, the discovery’s importance was condensed to one cumbersome word: Genetedestination.  

The public received it gracefully.  Some religious ones were thrilled, but only because it was their time to be thrilled after having watched a television in a group setting.  Many others killed themselves, but it was their time too.

CIA agents began to look up lottery-winning genes in the black leather-bound books, accelerate them in parrot specimens, receive the numbers, and sell them on the black market.  This was, in the American government’s eyes, perceived to be as harmless as stealing from the tip jar for a pack of cigarettes, and so was not entirely squelched or discontinued.  

The lottery gene was 4110124999348 for white males and black females over 40, and white males and Hispanic females under 40.  There were other lottery genes, but this one alone proved profitable enough that the CIA didn’t have to look up another one for over sixty years.  

What was not harmless about this practice, however, was that this is where the pattern begins to break down.  Even though it was their time to exploit gene 4110124999348, it was not gene 4110124999348’s time to be exploited.  When unfair lotteries began to be won, some people who were destined to receive wealth never did it, and as a result, some had less friends or compatriots and were therefore in group settings less often, and ate and drank and took drugs at different times than they were supposed to, and thus failed to create the conditions for certain genes’ operations.  When a gene’s time was passed unfulfilled, the gene broke down and the host would die.  This was accepted naively, however, as “just being his time.”  And it really was.  Even though it wasn’t supposed to be.

Slowly, this began to affect other people, people who would never meet this lottery-loser and have kids with him, and who subsequently would die, and whose kids would conceptually die, and whose friends and family would start to die, and whose neighbors and acquaintances would start to die, on and on, all as a result of unfulfilled genes.  
Then, as they began to die, murderers began to die, and drunk drivers and bad doctors, and so other people, whose time it already was to die, began to live, and reproduce, and repopulate.  These were a generation of people born out of free will, whose faulty genes often caused them physical discomfort or mental problems, but which nonetheless allowed them the true experience of free will.

At the height of their awareness, they would often proclaim the nature of this state to anyone who would listen, with desperation choking their voices.  Their credibility was exploded, however, in the face of their own mental instabilities as well as the obvious scientific fact that everything is predetermined.

The free-willed would often cry.

Crying would sometimes lead to suicide, and sometimes to great art, and in either case the people involved would do it as something to remember.

As a great artist once said, as he sipped a martini at his first gallery opening, “I did it before you, I win!”

As a great man once said as he tumbled off the Golden Gate bridge, “Fuck the world.”

As living began to lose its mystique, and extremist “free-willed art” began to dominate the world’s culture with its own fantastic intrigue, more and more people began to focus on dying.  It became the new thing.  That was one state, after all, that no one could know anything about.  It hadn’t been anybody’s time to invent a resurrection device, and it hadn’t been anybody’s time since Jesus to be properly resurrected.  Dying was the place everyone wanted to be.

And so people began to kill themselves, once again as a result of watching a television in an alone setting over age 31 if male, 56 if female, but 29 if Asian, regardless of gender, either on April 11th, April 17th, June 5th… etc.  The genes began to kill off their hosts with suicide just as they had killed so many free-willed with the very knowledge of their existence.

With suicide rates at an unprecedented high, CIA agents began once again to investigate.  Investigations, however, only led to knowledge and therefore to suicide, until the standards of the Agency were lowered to find more candidates.  Some of these candidates never understood the importance of the situation, and therefore never killed themselves, so it was at least a partial success.  

Gene 1111 guaranteed they would never understand.

Eventually, after the suicide surge of 2012, the free-willed were weeded out and life could resume peaceably.  There were no more disturbances, no more challenges to conventional knowledge, and thus no more actions out of place.  It was really a good thing, the world agreed.

George Orwell, meanwhile, was spinning in his grave.