Delaney hit herself with a pillow, then yelled into it.

  “I’m assuming these complaints are mandatory,” Wes said. “AI identifies what should be the average, so Winnie’s just hitting her quota. Otherwise she’d be flagged for an anomaly. Yep, I just checked your own AnonComs. You’re below average on those. Did you do any AnonComs today?”

  “I didn’t know I had to,” Delaney said.

  “Looks like twelve is what they expect. Find twelve things that upset you about your coworkers each day and you’re fine.”

  Delaney was exhausted. She stood, walked two steps to the doorway that separated her bedroom from Wes’s, and turned back to him. “So what do you think, will I find a way to take down this company while incinerating strangers’ pictures and wedding dresses?”

  “I think you’re on your way,” he said.

  She closed the door and fell into bed, dizzy from the day. She could hear him tapping on the other side of the drywall.

  “You got another AnonCom,” he said. “At 11:03 p.m. Your score went down to 84.6. But I think it’ll hold there for tonight.”

  “Now please stop,” she said.

  He stopped. “You going to sleep?” he asked.

  “Trying,” she said.

  Delaney heard him arrange himself with Hurricane, the two of them scratching and thumping, and finally there was the whoosh of his comforter taking to the air and settling upon dog and man.

  “Night,” he said.

  “Night,” she said.

  “I love you,” he said.

  Totally unreasonable, she thought. Just unneccesary and odd.

  “I thank you,” she said.

  X.

  A WEEK WENT BY AND DELANEY had sent a thousand irreplaceable possessions to the fire, issued the requisite number of specific and inconsequential AnonComs, and otherwise adopted Winnie’s cheerful affect toward their work of destruction. It was banal, routine, accompanied by Winnie’s chatter about her kids and husband, and her husband’s friend, Luke, who Winnie insisted was a stone-cold fox and, even better, didn’t know it. At regular intervals, she and Winnie got up to exercise in place, high-stepping and desk-pedaling, and then went back to scanning and incinerating.

  After work each day, Delaney went home and she and Wes left their devices at home and walked to the waterfront, Hurricane’s leash taut. He yearned to leap to the sand and couldn’t understand why they were walking on the concrete when, just beyond the wall, the limitless beach beckoned.

  “You think I should chip him?” Wes asked.

  Delaney shrugged. A permanent chip in Hurricane’s tibia in exchange for the right to run leashed in a circle on the sand? There were no good choices.

  “So I take it you haven’t seen the right wires to cut?” Wes said. “I notice that the Every is still standing.”

  “I’m establishing trust,” Delaney said. “False sense of complacency. Playing the part. Establishing a—”

  “Got it,” Wes said. “So: no plan.”

  “I will feel bad when the Every dies,” Delaney said. “People like Winnie losing their jobs.”

  “There are other jobs,” Wes said. “Less incineratey jobs.”

  “But for a mother of three like Winnie, the benefits are phenomenal. And she clocks out at five on the dot. All her machines stop working the moment she puts in eight hours.”

  “Right. A million lawsuits citing unpaid overtime died the second that software was invented. And she gets paid handsomely.”

  “How would you know?” Delaney asked, but of course he knew.

  “Give me some credit,” Wes said. “Did you even read your onboarding docs? Everyone’s salary at the Every is accessible to any other Everyone. Radical transparency. Did you know she got a DUI when she was eighteen?”

  “Wes, stop.”

  “It’s all there. You didn’t look? Every address she’s ever had. Anyway, when the Every dies, something will replace it,” he said.

  Delaney thought about this. The Every, or its component parts, had aggregated power over twenty-two years, and with the seemingly once in-a-lifetime blending of minds, the Three Wise Men, two of whom, now, were rarely spoken of. Could it be replicated? After Delaney freed the world from the Every’s death-clench, would some other tech python simply take its place? It seemed unlikely. But with Tom Stenton gone, they were more vulnerable; he was a dead-eyed shark that never tired—and had been key to the company’s relentless consolidation of power. Ty Gospodinov was a fragile idealist, a sometime critic of what the Every had become, and no one had seen him in years; he’d been given an unlimited budget to pursue his hope of living forever. Bailey, a self-described autodidact dilettante, was actually interested in other people, in knowing them, connecting them, improving them. But his side interests, like space travel and searches for famed shipwrecks, were all costly and impractical. Mae had somehow synthesized the most potent of all their traits, and had an unflagging focus they all lacked. She rarely left campus, didn’t dabble in philanthropy or politics; she had no family ties; she was always public but never showy, embodying, with startling consistency, a life lived online and utterly open to view.

  “You see Bailey?” Wes asked.

  “He’s not there. They say semi-retired, but he’s not there, period.”

  “Mae? Any sign of her?” Wes asked.

  “I saw her feed. She was on campus today, but nowhere near my department. Thoughts Not Things is sort of the Allentown of campus. She doesn’t visit, doesn’t call.”

  “She’s embarrassed,” Wes said. “She hasn’t had an idea in ages. I think she’s ashamed to be too out there until she does. She hasn’t done a Dream Friday in years.”

  Delaney had almost forgotten the 3-D ultrasound. “And she’s pregnant, apparently.”

  “But—” Wes went mute.

  Delaney explained what she’d seen her first day, and together they replayed Delaney’s thoughts on the matter. Wes stared at the dunes to the south, trying to figure it out.

  “She uses the same medbeds as everyone else?” he asked. “Actually, that makes sense. She would use the same facilities. That’s her.” His index finger was extended, as if he intended to begin counting the facts, but then abandoned it. “But the rest of it—leaving the screen up wouldn’t happen. She would have personally refreshed it before leaving. Which means it would have had to be re-activated by accident. Some glitch. Which is so unlikely.”

  “So someone did it on purpose,” Delaney said.

  “Which is a thousand times less likely,” he said. “So now I’m thinking it was intentional. Something someone meant you to see. A test of some kind.”

  “On my first day.”

  “When else? You know how fucking weird they are.”

  Delaney walked a few steps with that notion. A gust from the Pacific sent a jittery spray of sand their way. Hurricane sneezed.

  “It’s the kind of thing Stenton was into, apparently,” Wes said. “Does anyone mention him?”

  “Not yet,” Delaney said. “He’s still in China.”

  “I know he’s in China!” Wes said. “He can’t stop failing over there. No one has ever failed so loudly and often.”

  By all accounts, when Stenton left the Every for Huawei, it constituted the most galling betrayal in the history of the industry, and immediately rang the bells of a dozen regulatory and anti-espionage agencies. Mae and Bailey had felt well-covered in terms of patents—and oddly, Stenton was never quite on the inside when it came to the most prized products in the pipeline. Still, fears abounded that Stenton had taken some unknown patchwork of Every IP to China—and not just to China but to Huawei, the Every’s largest competitor in the making and marketing of phones. The only seeming upshot of this was that since his arrival, Huawei’s fortunes had slumped. Following his advice, Huawei had slashed the features and price for their phones, hoping to harvest, or create, a bargain-minded market that did not care for, or need, the Every’s $2,100 phone. Stenton had, though, been proven wrong so far. Huawei’s phones were less expensive but were considered flimsy toys. They broke. Their fit and finish was cretinous and crude.

  “Their phones are too light,” Wes said.

  Everyone thought their phones were too light, and this was Stenton’s doing entirely. He’d been hellbent on making Huawei’s phones featherweight, spending hundreds of millions on lighter batteries, lighter plastic, lighter semiconductors—but as it turned out, people did not want their phones light. They wanted to sense their heft, to know they were there.

  And they certainly did not want them cake-cone fragile. Stenton’s Huawei phones broke when dropped, broke when sat on, broke when exposed to cold and heat. They felt cheap and they were cheap, and ultimately they were not wantable objects. When Stenton’s three-year Huawei phone calamity played out and was proven disastrous, the schadenfreude in the Every, and in California generally, for such a traitor of the values of quality—for there really was pride in the objects designed (not made) in the Bay Area—was extreme and unhidden. Each Huawei stock-price tumble, each rebuke of Stenton in the Chinese press was wonderfully satisfying and poetically just, and any fears that Stenton was a brilliant Prometheus bringing Every-fire to Beijing—or at least Guangzhou—were unfounded.

  Stenton’s mercenary life choices stood in stark contrast to those of Eamon Bailey, who became only more likeable the further he was nudged aside by Mae. The less he was involved in the day-to-day, the more obvious it became that his primary interest had been in knowing and sharing for its own sake. Making the systems work elegantly had been Ty’s purview, and the monetization had been Stenton’s. Bailey was the mouthpiece, the trustable uncle who actually thought, on balance, Every tech was improving lives, connecting far-flung families, was democratizing all of humanity’s accumulated learning, was making billions feel less bewildered, less oppressed and less alone. His side projects, like the asteroid-walkers, the solar blimps, the cross-country hyperloop, continued, though Mae had reportedly shortened the leash on all non-core endeavors.

  “Is Bailey’s crazy library still there?” Wes asked. “The one with the fireman pole? What about the tank with the transparent shark?”

  Delaney did not know about the state of the shark, or Bailey’s library, and this frustrated her. She’d read a few books on being undercover, including Donnie Brasco’s, and most of the narrators warned against complacency—becoming too accustomed to the surroundings, too sympathetic to the players. She’d spent more time thinking about Winnie and Winnie’s kids, and their health plan and college options, than she had studying and dismantling the company’s intricate machinery of doom. She was going to fail.

  Meanwhile, Wes had stopped walking. Hurricane was again caught between them, straining at the leash.

  “Okay, shit,” Wes said, as if he’d just concluded a strenuous dialogue with his conscience. “I can’t keep secrets. They asked me to come in and interview.”

  “What? Who did?”

  “Your workplace. The Every.”

  “You?” Delaney said.

  “I know. I’m a fucking idiot, but yes, me.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” she said, though she had meant it exactly that way. “But you didn’t apply, did you?”

  Immediately Delaney knew what happened. Wes had helped with her AuthentiFriend presentation. He’d done most of the actual programming and design. Shireen and Carlo had liked the app, and it had been discussed in elevated quarters—maybe even at the Gang of 40, among the company’s top minds. The Every did not hesitate to hire anyone exhibiting both talent and initiative, given the two were rarely found in the same person. The ambitious rarely had ideas, and the talented were often lazy or impossible to be near. How could she bring in an accomplice and name him, show him, announce him, and then expect the Every to forget his existence? Of course they called him.

  “I don’t have to go in,” he said.

  “Do you really want to?” she asked.

  “Even if just to see the place,” he said.

  Delaney was suddenly furious. “You’re planning to take the money of a company that represents the most obvious monopoly the world has ever known?”

  “I’d be taking a little bit of their money. Actually, a lot of their money. It wipes out all my college—”

  “The company that stole childhood from you and me and a billion other children?”

  “My moms would resent that, I think. You forget I grew up in a trog—”

  “The company that’s coddled dictators around the world, which sells surveillance software to every autocracy? That’s enriched its founders and stockholders on the backs of unpaid billions who are studied and—”

  “I see this as a way to get that unpaid labor back,” Wes said. “At least for me.”

  “The company that made possible the end of American democracy and the rise of illiberalism here and abroad. Putin and Bolsonaro, who have been in office, what, a hundred years now—”

  “Charismatic men with some good ideas,” Wes said.

  “Don’t joke. Every country has their own digital secret police. Any dissent is squashed before it can begin.”

  They continued on, a swirling wind at their back. Hurricane rushed to chase a pair of crows from an overflowing garbage can.

  “Listen,” Wes said. “I can help. Gather intel.”

  “I don’t want your intel. You’re not good at this. I’m not good at this, but you’ll be terrible. You can’t lie and you can’t keep secrets. If you take a job there, then I have no chance at pulling this off. You’ll be the worst spy, and I’ll be compromised within a week.”

  “Compromised?” Wes said. “You’re not an actual spy, you know. You can’t be compromised when you’re just, you know, you. And I haven’t gotten the job yet.”

  Delaney saw the potential for Greek tragedy. He would be hired, would endear himself, would find his loyalties split. Though at first he’d remain neutral, letting Delaney do her thing so long as he was not an accomplice, eventually he’d see Delaney as not a whistleblower but as a sociopath trying to take away the livelihoods, security, pensions and happiness of tens of thousands of Every employees, many of whom he liked very much as humans.

  “This is so wrong, Wes,” she said. She wanted to run and scream.

  “Delaney. One year at that place kills all my debt.”

  “A week ago you were planning to be on the outside, remember that? You were setting up triple satellite firewalls so you could work from out here, and help blow all this up …”

  “I still want that,” Wes said.

  “Do you hear yourself? You want the company to be taken down, but you’re going to accept a job there and develop an app we both know is species-ending?”

  “Okay. I know how that sounds, but I also had a different idea. Which was, hear me out: would you consider waiting a few years?”

  Delaney couldn’t speak.

  “Don’t look like that,” he said. “You know it’s logical. It’s just more methodical. You want revenge now, but the better way is slower and more thorough. We both work there a few years, sock away some money, and then, once we know the workings of the place, together we kill it from the inside. Or outside. Whatever you think.”

  Delaney knew what he was saying was perfectly rational. It might even improve their odds of success—to work there unnoticed, gaining trust and access while also together saving a few hundred thousand dollars for the inevitably lean times when, after their takedown, they would be unemployable.

  “No,” she said. “Just because you’re suddenly soft and mercenary, it doesn’t mean I wait.”

  In the dimming light, they stood and stared at each other. Delaney was wrecked. Her closest friend was sabotaging her sabotage.

  “I’m hungry,” Wes said, “and it’s getting dark.”

  “You go home,” she said. “I need to walk.”

  Wes and Hurricane headed back, and Delaney found the next set of steps down to the sand. The wind had picked up and she needed its resistance. She’d walk all the way to the Cliff House, she thought. Or dare to go barefoot in the shallow surf. It couldn’t be over 50 degrees this time of year, but she wanted the shock of it.

  “Hello,” a voice said. A figure in a dark jacket stood at the concrete stairway. Another sort of beach monitor. Without Hurricane, Delaney felt no need to slow down. As she took the first step toward the sand, though, the man went into action.

  “I’ll need to see your phone or oval,” he said.

  When she asked why, a white beam shone in her face. The man was holding his phone up to her, filming her, its light an assault.

  “New city ordinance,” the man said. “There have been drownings on this beach and a string of thefts. To enter the beach you need to register with either your phone or oval. This protects you and others.”

  He spoke the words in a practiced monotone, filming all the while. Delaney had no tracking devices with her, so wouldn’t be allowed on the beach. She also knew every second she was on camera was a risk; she’d be shammed and the Every would know. As he filmed, she kept her chin down and her face in motion, hoping this might thwart easy facial recognition. This encounter, she knew, would certainly be flagged by AI. Her only vague hope was that it wouldn’t be linked to her name.

  Delaney quickly turned away and hustled to the sidewalk.

  “Thanks for your compliance!” the man sang to the back of her head.

  As she walked home, Delaney fumed. This was the Every’s doing—another public space brought within their field of surveillance. She was angry, too, that she knew nothing about this new restriction. But how could she have? There was no longer local news. Starved of advertising and attacked as inherently exploitive and predatory—people no longer trusted filters, curators, observers and intermediaries—journalism had died quietly and alone.

  When Delaney got home, she found Hurricane in the bathtub, Wes kneeling over the edge with tweezers and gauze.

  “Glass,” he said. “Just after we left you.”

  Hurricane took his paw back and when he put weight on it, he squealed. He’d pushed the shard in further.