“Goddamnit,” Wes said. “See? Do you see?”

  Delaney paced through the living room, hearing Wes through the half-open door. “Fucking beach monitors!” he yelled. “Tell me to chip a dog!” The causal relation was tenuous, but Wes’s version, Delaney knew, was forming. Hurricane couldn’t run on the beach, so he was forced to walk the glass-strewn pavement, where a lime-green sliver cut him to the bone.

  In an effort to release some of the tension in the Shed, Delaney went to open the window, and, on the sill, amid Wes’s crude clay sculptures, there was a perfect black globe, a plastic orb dotted with a hundred pinprick holes.

  “What is this?” she yelled. She knew what it was. It was a smart speaker—one of the Every’s, a HereMe. She brought it into the bathroom. Hurricane looked up, deeply confused, his bloody paw in Wes’s hand.

  “Is this what I think it is?” she asked. “When did you get this?”

  “It’s not on,” Wes said, with exhausted condescension. “I knew you wouldn’t approve. They sent me one yesterday. I thought you’d seen it.”

  Delaney was dizzy and sick. She picked it up, shook it, having no idea why. “How do you know it’s not on?” she said.

  “Because among the two of us, only one knows anything about these devices. Can I help my dog? Do you care? It’s not even charged. It has no batteries and hasn’t been plugged in. I just liked the way it looks. Don’t shake it. And—”

  Delaney went to the window over the toilet, opened it, and threw the globe over the neighbor’s fence. It shattered on the driveway.

  “Jesus, Delaney!” Wes yelled.

  She’d never done anything so rash in her life. But the prospect that the device had been recording everything they’d been saying, that her work would be undone before it even began, because her moron-accomplice had brought an actual spying device into their home—it took her to desperate places. She retreated to her room.

  Delaney’s phone dinged. It was a survey from Everything Outside, which she took to be the privatized version of the Department of Parks and Recreation. She hadn’t heard of this entity. “Please rate your recent interaction with us!” There were five options, starting with a happy yellow face and descending to a red-faced one with eyes clenched in fury. She sent a happy face; she had no choice.

  Later, Wes appeared in her doorway, the white stem of a lollipop extending from his mouth.

  “Sorry,” he said, the stem bobbing, “you’re a lunatic, but I can see why you’d be upset. Not to the point where you’d destroy something like that, but I should have told you.”

  “Can you at least take that out when you talk?” she asked.

  He removed the lollipop and regarded it, as if apologizing to it for removing it from its cozy residence. “I should have told you as soon as they contacted me. I know this. And I can see how it could be a wrench in your plan. But I should at least see what they have in mind. That much is just common sense, right?”

  “You can’t work high,” she said.

  He put the lollipop back in his mouth. “Delaney. I know that.” With his mouth full, he sounded high.

  “No edibles, no sprays. Nothing,” she said.

  “I know. I know they do drug tests and—”

  “No,” she said, “they don’t do tests. They know every aspect of your entire physiology at all times. Haven’t you read about this? It’s how you get their healthcare.”

  “They allow pets, though,” he noted, holding the now-naked lollipop stem in the air like a baby scepter. “I’m bringing Hurricane. He’ll sleep at my feet.”

  “I can’t stop you,” Delaney said, while thinking of ways she might be able to stop him.

  “I have to say, Pia’s pretty excited, too,” Wes said. “She said she was proud of me. I don’t know if she ever said that before.”

  “I can’t believe this,” Delaney said.

  Wes chomped on the hard remains of his lollipop. Delaney had never seen him so pleased with himself.

  “Who knows,” he said. “They might not hit me back.”

  Delaney knew this was not true and could not be true. The Every did not leave loose ends.

  XI.

  BUT THEY DID NOT CONTACT WES on Wednesday or Thursday. Delaney went about her work these two days, digitizing and turning to paste hundreds of heirlooms, oil paintings, middle-school science projects, about twelve thousand photos, then sending their digital versions to clients from around the world with rudimentary and often incorrect captions made by an insentient system. The work was repetitive but just varied enough to induce a kind of hypnosis that Delaney found soothing. And Winnie rarely stopped talking.

  On her desktop screen there was a grid of camera feeds—at least thirty-two by Delaney’s casual count. Each of Winnie’s children wore a cam, and their feeds each occupied one box, their schoolrooms another ten or so, her husband’s cam and workplace another six, with at least a dozen monitoring her home, her parents’ home, and what seemed to be an elderly relative in an assisted living center. There were no moments in any day that Winnie didn’t know where each of her children was, where her husband and parents were and what they were doing. If anyone did something out of the ordinary, AI would flag it and she could play it back to see if it merited her attention or correction.

  “You have your parents on cams, I hope?” Winnie asked her. “They must be getting older …”

  Delaney was so startled to be asked a question that it took her a moment to answer. “I do,” she said. It seemed noncommittal and banal enough to discourage any follow-up.

  “You know, I’ve been meaning to tell you that you can keep in touch with them here. Have you done any participating today?”

  “Not yet,” Delaney said.

  “Let’s get ten minutes in,” Winnie said, and lunged for her phone. Delaney got hers.

  “We do anything we want?” Delaney asked.

  “Company stuff, personal stuff, anything,” Winnie said. “It’s important to keep up with your personal relationships. They really emphasize that here.”

  Winnie had turned her back to her and was gone, her face unusually close to her phone, thumbs flying. Delaney churned through her feeds and accounts. Her mom sent her a picture of a neighbor’s new car; she sent back a smile. Rose, their mail carrier, sent a photo of her son’s new girlfriend holding a baby; Delaney sent a rainbow. Ads for tampons appeared, and for guns and gum and a heat-saving kind of double-paned glass. A college friend sent a minivid of a volcano currently erupting in Chile. Unsure if a smile or frown was appropriate, Delaney found and sent an emoji of a worried-looking unicorn. On her Every feed there were 311 notices from that day alone. She sent them into Wes’s auto-churn app and moved into her news feed. A minivid of a couple being carjacked and shot to death in Ukraine appeared and thereafter was part of Delaney’s mind. It was followed by a survey: Would you like to see more like this?

  “Oh look,” Winnie said, and she pointed to one of the boxes on her screen. A handsome man was speaking in front of a phalanx of American flags. “Have you watched him? Tom Goleta?”

  Delaney had been following him closely for months. Goleta was a presidential candidate who posed—as much as any political entity could—an existential threat to the Every. Word was he’d be coming to campus in a few weeks.

  “He’s very tough on this place,” Winnie said, as she sent a bin of porcelain cups and plates to the fire. “I can’t figure out why Mae invited him here. Doesn’t that seem unwise?”

  It was no longer exotic to have a gay presidential candidate. In fact, since the advent of the Indiana mayor—never president but now a senator—no presidential election had been without one. Though, to be sure, every gay candidate had been in a certain mold—mild, married, Midwestern. Tom Goleta was all of these things, and added a fourth M—Methodist. His résumé seemed precision-sculpted to create the ultimate Every foe. He had been a formidable trial attorney, then a consultant, then a deputy head of the FCC, then on the antitrust task force that had exposed collusion between the world’s six remaining oil conglomerates. He ran for Senate with no prior election experience and won by eight points against an admittedly aging and error-prone Republican opponent who could not pronounce quinoa.

  Goleta was one of the few politicians who had not succumbed to going Seen. For ten years it had been the norm, whether the constituents wanted it or not. To broadcast one’s days, one’s meetings and hearings and campaign events spoke of transparency: I have nothing to hide, so watch me. Only a smattering of leaders were still dark, and most were anti-tech crusaders. Goleta insisted his interest in the Every was not that of a crusader, and that his frequent allusions to monopolies and the near-certain applicability of anti-trust legislation was not a crusade. But when he decided to run for president, the Every emerged as a central focus of his platform; his attacks, even if rhetorically mild, had a populist flavor and played particularly well in the thousands of towns that had acre-sized data centers in their midst that employed few or no locals in their construction and staffing or maintenance, and somehow found a way to avoid all taxes.

  Delaney craned her head to look at Winnie’s screen. Goleta’s parents hailed from two of the hemisphere’s calmest places—father from Belize, mother from Davenport, Iowa—and his demeanor was preternaturally at ease. He seemed never nervous, never unloved. His jaw was strong, his eyes sensitive, all-seeing. He was always noticing someone in the crowds around him, someone who might need a moment of connection with him, a few seconds they would not forget. In the video Winnie wanted Delaney to see, he was standing in front of a hundred young voters outside the latest iteration of Antioch College.

  “My people have been in the U.S. since 1847,” he began. “My great-great-grandfather, a white man, was a typesetter for an abolitionist newspaper in Alton, Illinois. Because he would not leave his post, would not leave that press, he was killed by a pro-slavery mob. I have his diary, and it says some interesting things about the standards he lived by as a typesetter. He actually refused to typeset pro-slavery sentiments—that goes without saying—but he also refused to typeset lies. It’s in his diary. ‘To typeset a lie is a crime. It’s taking a back-alley whisper and making it a national scream.’”

  Winnie paused the video and turned to Delaney, her jaw slack. “And his husband is hotter than he is.” Delaney was unsure if Winnie had missed the central message of the video, or had simply moved on to more prurient interests. Winnie spent a minute finding a few choice photos of his husband Rob, a city planner, whose Nordic masculinity somehow made Goleta, who looked like he could lift a car, seem anemic by comparison. Winnie unpaused the video.

  “Now we have the Every,” Goleta continued, “which has no problem disseminating any lie you pay them to. They’ve distributed countless lies about me and Rob, about our families, about Rob’s military service, about my religion. I think that’s wrong, and I think my great-great-grandfather would find that wrong, too. The idea that the Every is like a phone company, and is only carrying messages on wires with no obligation to the truth, is so dishonest it does not warrant a retort. They are publishers, for two reasons: one, the messages they send are seen by masses of people—sometimes billions—and two, they disseminate the printed word in a way that is permanent. Period. That is radically and inarguably different than carrying private spoken messages from one person to another, as the phone company once did. It’s the difference between a note passed between two kids in class, and a kind of skywriting that can be seen instantly by everyone in the world, and that’s everlasting. And if you disseminate untruths, you are liable for any and all damage that lie does. This is such a simple application of libel law that it’s flummoxed lawmakers and regulators for decades now. But it’s time to act. I don’t care if it’s social media or some wiki. If you provide the platform to spread these lies, you are accountable. I will hold you accountable.”

  Again Winnie paused and turned to Delaney, her eyes agog.

  “How do we counter that?” she asked.

  Delaney had no answer. Over the years, members of Congress, and governors, and presidential candidates long before Goleta, had tried and failed—had immolated in towering fireballs—while attempting to take on the Every. Invariably that candidate would find themselves on the wrong end of scandal. Invariably there would be mountains of evidence made conveniently available to social media and attorneys general. Digital messages would emerge containing unpardonable beliefs, statements, photos, searches. Invariably a digital mob would come for them and amplify these flaws and transgressions. With a hundred other battles to wage, more approachable dragons to slay, it had been years since any politician had suited up to fight the Every.

  Just as Delaney was contemplating Goleta, and how he might do the job she intended to do—but far more effectively, publicly, and permanently—Winnie extinguished the screen.

  “Dream Friday!” she said. “Your first one!”

  XII.

  DELANEY AND WINNIE were among the last to find seats in the auditorium, and the moment they sat down, Winnie commenced knitting—she had brought her knitting—what appeared to be a shirt for a miniature person with an extraordinarily short torso. Delaney was tempted to ask just what Winnie was making, or who in her life would fit into this garment, but the silence the knitting had engendered was welcome. There was the occasional tick of the needles, but otherwise her movements had the silent agility of a praying mantis.

  The room was full, with thousands of Everyones in attendance, most carrying on murmured conversations while attending to one or another personal screens. Delaney scanned the audience and quickly recognized two men shuffling from the aisle into middle seats, wearing matching Every-issued waterpacks. It was Vijay and Martin, her bosses at Ol Factory. Delaney had heard nothing of their work since the company had been acquired, and now they looked defanged, dazed, made useless. The Every was full of founders who had been bought, only to have their creations killed or buried, forgotten. Delaney stared at them as they took their seats. Someone leaned over to say hi to them, and they smiled faintly. They seemed utterly at peace, no longer ambitious, free from work and the responsibility to create.

  A petite woman strode onto the stage. She wore a crimson bodysuit, with an enormous copper necklace, seeming to be a kind of sun-splash, covering her chest.

  “Hello Everyone,” she said, throwing her rubbery arms up, her hands spinning at the wrist like plates atop narrow poles. There was modest applause, with pairs of Every heads meeting, whispering variations on “Who is that?”

  A voice behind Delaney answered, a bit too loudly, “Victoria de Nord, I think. You remember her?”

  Victoria de Nord was taking in the muted applause like it was a ten-minute ovation at Cannes. Finally she arrived at center stage and, with hands behind her back, she spun slowly left and right, as if overwhelmed by the applause, which had tapered quickly from polite to muted to a few confused taps of palm to knee.

  “I’m Victoria de Nord, but you probably knew that,” she said. She smiled and spun left and right again. She seemed wholly unaware that no one knew who she was.

  “How are we all doing today?” Again she paused for an uncomfortably long time, scanning the crowd, as if her question might actually yield actionable answers. Delaney had grown fond of Winnie, in her way, and had found Jenny Butler and Dan Faraday and even Kiki and Carlo and Shireen likeable to varying degrees, but witnessing Victoria de Nord, Delaney remembered how unctuous the leaders of this company could be, and vowed to remind herself of this ridiculous person if ever her commitment to revolution flagged.

  “Welcome to Dream Friday!” Victoria said, and again looked left and right for what seemed like hours. Murmuring among the audience began, as Everyones, accustomed to more stimulating and time-conscious presentations, began to wonder if this were some sort of test. It should have been Mae Holland on this stage, making this introduction, but she was noticeably absent. She was unquestionably the face of the Every, and it was assumed that she made the most consequential decisions. And yet, with the exit of Stenton, the sidelining of Bailey and the wholesale disappearance of Ty Gospodinov, the Every lacked a visible and vocal leader, and seeing this—someone like Victoria who could be nudged onto the stage, a mistake acknowledged by all involved—proved Wes’s point, that Mae was shy about, ashamed even, to appear in a forum like this without a new idea.

  “Today we’re delighted to have with us Ramona Ortiz,” Victoria said, and the audience, knowing Victoria would soon leave the stage, exhaled collectively and loudly.

  “We all know Ramona from her groundbreaking startup, Enlightened Traveler,” Victoria said, “which the Every brought in-house three years ago. She’s got some big ideas for the future of travel, and …”

  The rest of Victoria’s introduction was painfully long and pointless, but eventually she ceded the stage to a woman wearing black tights, a black skirt and a cream top. Her name appeared in large sanserif white letters on the screen behind her: Ramona Ortiz. Her thick straight hair was cut short, almost Beatlesque in its rounded volume, and had been dyed a neon red. The look, almost impossible to pull off, Delaney thought, worked effortlessly on her. She strode onto the stage with a busy, almost distracted confidence, as if she were stopping by for a moment on her way somewhere more pressing.

  “So I’m here to talk about—what else—travel,” she said. “As you know, travel has been my life. Six years ago I started Enlightened Traveler …” She waited for applause. At first it was muted, but the manners of the audience kicked in and the clapping filled out to a respectable ovation.

  “Thank you,” she said and then said it again, “thank you”—unnecessarily, for the applause had evaporated. “Enlightened Traveler was meant to encourage environmentally responsible travel, and facilitated users making better travel choices by curating the most eco-friendly airlines, accommodations and outfitters. Three years ago, my company was acquired by the Every, where it’s made over 2.2 million ecologically progressive trips possible.”