“If you are being surveilled,” Agarwal was roaring through her megaphone, “you are not free! A human being watched cannot be free!” Students hustled past, earbuds installed.

  “There is no safe amount of asbestos or surveillance,” Agarwal yelled. A graduate student, studying anthropology, began filming her.

  “This college has no right to film you, anywhere or anytime!” Agarwal implored. Now students were making a wide berth around her. “Students, I beg you to wake up.”

  No one woke up. The vast majority of her fellow college students had been subject to cameras in every classroom since preschool. Their parents had known their whereabouts every moment of their lives, and they had never thought it cumbersome—had never known an unsurveilled life.

  Now, holding Agarwal’s letter, Delaney wanted badly to go to her, tell her of her plans, to conspire with her. But she knew Agarwal would try to talk her out of it, favoring protest, the writing of papers, the supporting of reformers like Goleta. She would find Delaney’s gambit insane and impossible.

  Delaney looked over to Wes’s chair and found him gone. She opened the door to the Shed and the wind whipped it against the wall with a bang. “Sorry!” she yelled. She found Wes sitting on his bed, staring at his screen with mouth agape.

  “What are you watching?” Delaney asked.

  He turned his tablet to her. The screen held a watery image. It seemed to come from a head-mounted digital camera, showing someone surfing or paddleboarding.

  “So?” Delaney said.

  “So this is Bailey.”

  Delaney scanned the screen and found a description below the video feed. “Come surf with Gunnar and me!” the text said. “In Nicaragua.”

  “Did you know he was in Nicaragua?” Wes asked.

  “No,” Delaney said. “I don’t know if anyone has been thinking about his whereabouts at all.”

  “On Saturday afternoon,” Bailey’s caption continued, “I’ll be trying out some radical new sensory-transference software. As many of you know, we implanted a device in my thalamus designed to allow others to feel what I feel. In this case, of course, it’ll be my son Gunnar. Gunnar suffers from cerebral palsy, so surfing in Nicaragua is not a possibility for him. He’ll be at home in California, but he and I will be connected, via satellite, such that he will feel the sensations I feel: the volume of the waves under me, my speed as I descend a swell, possibly even the smells and sounds I experience. This could be a major breakthrough for all. It’ll certainly be interesting for Gunnar and me. Join us. —Bailey.”

  Delaney looked for the viewer-counter, and saw that it was <1000. The Every had, a few years before, given those posting videos the option of using rounded numbers, to diminish the watcher-chasing that had plagued the format from the start. The less-than symbol, though, had a tragic effect, making every watcher-count somehow a disappointment, forever less-than.

  “There’s a comments section,” Wes said, “and that’s almost empty. I think there’s only a few dozen people watching. If that.”

  “Do you have the audio on?” Delaney asked.

  “Sorry. No,” Wes said, and activated the volume.

  Immediately Bailey’s distinctive voice blasted through. “Here we go, my friends. What a day on the water!”

  The view from Bailey’s camera was unsteady. He seemed to be paddling on his knees through choppy waters, about two hundred yards from shore. A khaki-colored beach was visible in front of a stripe of green forest and, far beyond, the black slope of a primeval volcano.

  “For those of you just joining, I’ve been out here for about twenty minutes now,” Bailey said, his breathing loud, “trying to beat the crowds.” Here he panned from the water to the beach, where there were no humans whatsoever. He let out the slightest chuckle. “And I think I’ve found a nice little break. I’ve caught a few decent waves, and did my customary shredding of said waves, much to the entertainment of the vast audience at the beach.”

  Above the beach, Delaney could now see a troubled sky, with darkness at the corners of the frame.

  “The weather, as you can see, will soon be unfavorable,” Bailey said, “and thus there are no spectators, intentional or not. No bystanders, no dogwalkers, no beach combers, nothing. But we don’t care, do we, viewers? No, we do not. We are breaking new ground here, and I can’t wait to see what Gunnar thought of all this.”

  “Still only a few people watching,” Wes said. “It’s bizarre.”

  “If any of you have been watching from the start,” Bailey continued, “forgive me for repeating myself. But what we’re trying to do is test some new tech that allows two people, very far away from each other, to feel the same things. In this case, as I rise and fall on the ocean, waiting for the right wave, my son Gunnar is at home, and the sensors he’s wearing will trigger the same feelings in him, primarily by manipulating his own thalamus—he’ll feel like he’s rising and falling on the sea, too. I’ve gotten some help from our muscle precision optimizing group, so I want to give a shout out to them. With their help, along with that of our experience transference team, Gunnar’s brain and body should be able to make sense of the different inputs and should be able to create a facsimile experience. It’ll be the first time we can share this sport, a calling, really, one that’s given me immeasurable joy in my life.”

  “Did he mention MPOs?” Delaney asked. “I thought they banned that.” Muscle precision optimization was a catch-all term for nanotechnology that improved—perfected, really—eye-brain-muscle coordination. A tennis player using it could place a ball in the exact same spot a hundred times out of a hundred. Errors were virtually impossible.

  “Professional sports banned it,” Wes said, “but Bailey’s in Nicaragua. Now I’m guessing this is why he chose to do this demo down there. The thalamus-implant, too—not legal here.”

  “Not yet,” Delaney said.

  “Now, just as an FYI,” Bailey said onscreen, “I should say that though we’ve tested this many times on the Every campus, this is the first field test where the sensors are under open-ocean conditions. That’s all I can say. I feel like I’m buzzing from head to toe with a strange vibration that’s new to me, and I find it very exciting.”

  The camera’s point of view changed a bit then, and went lower, closer to the water. “As you can see, I’m resting for a second, because I’ve been out here a while, and I am, after all, a fifty-seven-year-old man. There’s a bit of a drift here, with the wind coming from the south and taking me down the beach pretty quickly. I think if I paddle in a little, I’ll move a bit out of the current that’s currently—get that? Currently? The current that’s currently taking me …”

  Now the camera’s view was shaky, the frame jumping a bit from side to side and up and down, water periodically soaking the lens and then washing down its surface.

  “He’s really far from the beach,” Wes said.

  “Is that bad?” Delaney did not know how to surf, and didn’t know how far was too far.

  “Well, maybe not so far for a young guy, but he’s pretty damned far out. A current like that can take him a half a mile in seconds.”

  And as they watched, they heard Bailey paddling, but saw the shore grow smaller with every moment. Quickly it became a thin yellow rope, then the faintest gray thread.

  “Nadia, can you see if you—” Bailey said. His breath was labored, his words clipped. “Maybe adjust the sensors? I need the battery—”

  A wave seemed to swamp Bailey and his camera. For a few long seconds the lens was underwater. Then it emerged again.

  “Turned off—” Bailey managed to say. “I’ve got the craziest migraine coming on. Nadia?”

  Now the camera was very close to the water, and at an angle.

  “I think he’s lying on his board,” Wes said.

  “Stevie, my head feels like it’s imploding,” Bailey said. “I’m thinking the sensors are having some bad reaction to the salt water. Stevie, can you just shut it off? Better do that and I can get into—”

  His voice broke off.

  “The microphone died,” Delaney said.

  “No, listen,” Wes said, and turned up the volume as high as it would go. They heard the waves tapping at the hollow board. Another moment of silence passed.

  “We should call someone,” Delaney said.

  “Us?” Wes asked.

  The microphone roared alive again. “Nadia!” Bailey grunted. “Call an SOS. Something’s wrong. Call—”

  The camera angle tilted and then plunged underwater. A second later it was up again, showing the white sky, the jagged waves. Then underwater again.

  “Jesus Christ!” Wes said. “They won’t turn it off, will they?”

  “No,” Delaney said, and she knew it was true.

  The Every never stopped broadcasting, never took any video down. It was their interpretation of the First Amendment, and their status not as a publisher but as mere conduit. If you turned on your camera, that was your prerogative. If you watched, that was also your prerogative. If you chose to stop watching, up to you. Never did the Every interfere.

  For years, there had been pitched battles between the Every and various governments around the world, who had weakly protested when bullies broadcast their conquests, when murderers streamed their killings, when terrorists beheaded and incinerated soldiers and innocents. Other companies caved and tried to keep ahead of the abuses, hired thousands to monitor and delete, but soon these companies realized that every horrific video was immediately copied dozens of times and disseminated in hundreds of different ways, the most wretched examples copied so many times they could never be removed.

  When Mae Holland assumed power she put an end to the belief that the Every could or should be the censor to the world. The era was new, and violence and death would be broadcast, period. The next step—and the Every was certainly at work on it, on a hundred fronts—was ending crime and taming our id and choking off the desire to see these horrors in the first place. The key was not in supply, she said, but in demand. You couldn’t, after all, turn off the spigot, lest you stanch the flow of all that was good. The same cameras that were occasionally used to broadcast evil were used, a million times a day, for preventing it, reporting it, holding perpetrators accountable. Purse-snatchings, red-light runnings, cop shootings, racial profilings—every violation of human rights was liable to be caught on camera, and the perpetrators brought quickly to justice. The occasional misuse of the technology was an unfortunate byproduct of the new paradigm, but it was, Mae thought—and most thought—an acceptable tradeoff for the increased safety felt among most of the planet’s people. The observed world, the filmed world, the recorded world, was a safer world.

  But then there was something like this, a live-streamed death. Around the world, people had died on camera tens of thousands of times—hundreds of times a day. Many times it was planned, as family members gathered virtually around ceremonial deathbeds. Usually, though, these deaths were caught by accident—car crashes, freak occurrences, people carried away by mudslides or shot in drive-bys. But something quite like this had never happened—the excruciatingly slow-motion death of a peaceful and prominent citizen.

  Eamon Bailey’s camera remained on and broadcasting for the 32 minutes he continued to breathe, and for the seven hours and eleven minutes he floated in rough seas. Wearing a wetsuit designed to float, he’d been separated from his surfboard and had drifted west, then north. Though his position was known—his sensors could pinpoint his location—a series of squalls had prevented anyone from mounting an effective search.

  When his body washed ashore, his camera continued to broadcast video from the beach, the horizon crooked, the sand a volcanic black, while gulls occasionally came to inspect Bailey’s face. The foamy surf overtook the lens occasionally, one time sending a fleet-footed crab across the frame, the auto-focus doing an admirable job of sharpening on the crab’s right pincer and inquisitive antennae before another wave came to take the curious creature away again.

  Bailey was finally found by a pair of Nicaraguan teenagers who’d been watching the broadcast, had recognized the beach as near their homes, and had, on a bet, walked down to see if the dead man on the screen was a dead man in real life.

  XIV.

  BAILEY WAS GONE, and Delaney knew she and every Everyone would be expected on campus on Monday. She arrived at 8 a.m. to find, under a bright cloudless sky, hundreds of bouquets and wreaths set against the outer gate of campus, with about fifty people wandering up and down the candy-colored memorial. A pair of Every staffers were photographing the bouquets and wreaths and gifts, and soon after, they were removing anything plastic or non-biodegradable for speedy incineration. Delaney heard Everyones and civilians talk about Bailey’s age, and the likelihood of aneurysms. A dog grabbed a purple octopus someone had left—Bailey’s spirit animal, he’d once noted—and ran down the sidewalk with it. When he thought he had time and opportunity, the dog tore it open and spilled its white stuffing all over the street.

  On campus, Everyones sat in small groups on the lawn, all of them wearing slightly more demure bodysuits. One older man even wore a suit and tie. They leaned against one another and peered down at phones and tablets; amateur memorial videos had begun to pop up. Those who had known Bailey in childhood sent adorable photos of him on a banana-seat bicycle.

  Social media chirped about Gunnar, his thoughts and feelings, but it did not seem likely that Gunnar would be issuing his own statement, which many zingers and posters felt not fair for someone so central to this drama. If the idea was to let Gunnar feel what Bailey was feeling, did Gunnar experience death, too? At least in some secondary but still horrifying way?

  Delaney found Jenny Butler, her Random, sitting alone under a lemon tree planted high on an artificial berm, and approached her slowly. When Jenny Butler heard her footsteps, she turned suddenly, and her face lit up. In a flailing series of gestures, she got up, embraced Delaney, and begged her to sit with her.

  “Bailey hired me,” Jenny Butler said. “He was my Random, just like I was yours. Can you imagine?” Her Mississippi lilt was intensified in grief; she stretched imagine into a gorgeous arc. “He loved being the Random, he told me. He genuinely loved people—you know this, right? It wasn’t an act. Everything he did, he did because he was fascinated by every single person. It was almost a curse. Every person he met, he thought was just indescribably interesting and unfathomable and full of possibility and …” She was overtaken by sobs. Delaney squeezed her shoulder.

  “That’s why he did that stupid thalamus implant,” Jenny Butler said. “He didn’t want any boundaries between any two people.” She looked up, collecting herself, and finally sighed.

  “But I think there could be a limit,” she said. “To the interpersonal connections. To our … porosity. Maybe we do need boundaries. Secrets. Even physiological secrets. I mean, the man is dead because he couldn’t keep anything to himself.”

  Delaney almost said Sharing is caring, but decided against it.

  “Anyway, thank you. I’ll miss you,” Jenny Butler said.

  “What do you mean?” Delaney pictured her throwing herself into the sea as some kind of suicide tribute to Bailey.

  “My department’s dead,” she said. “All the space projects are dead, or will be soon.”

  Delaney hadn’t thought about it, but knew she was right. Mae did not buy personal submarines or get enthused about orbiters and space-mining and the colonization of Mars and Io.

  “But whatever,” Jenny Butler said. “I wouldn’t have done any of this without him. I applied for a job in marketing, right? But he saw on my résumé that I’d studied aeronautical engineering years before, and so we talked about that for the whole hour. Then he brought me back the next day to talk to his SpaceBridge team, and a week later he’d made room for me there. I mean, who does that?”

  Mae had returned from ForwardRetreat—an annual summer-camp-style gathering of artists and influencers she organized and sometimes attended—and was broadcasting her day. In a black bodysuit and gray pashmina, she walked along the flowered fence outside campus, keeping her hands folded in front of her in a vaguely ministerial configuration. She nodded silently, eyes closing in agreement, as mourners told her all that Bailey meant to them.

  Inside, she led informal gatherings in different departments where the only task was to add to Bailey’s legend, to celebrate him, and to that end, there were endless stories that mirrored or exceeded Jenny Butler’s. It seemed that Bailey had personally hired hundreds, had paid down countless college loans, had sent flowers to the grandparents of junior staffers and helicopters to find lost pets.

  As the day went on, there were tributes from the current president and two predecessors, a hundred or so CEOs and dozens of heads of state—with a special eulogy given by the Every’s custodial staff, who Bailey had made the best-paid in North America. Bailey, it appeared, had never made an enemy. That was Stenton’s role; he shadowed the memorial silently, trying to stay out of the way, but his spectral presence, his furtive glances, had the opposite effect: people were unnerved and hoped he would soon leave. Meanwhile, online, the footage of Bailey’s death had been condensed into ever-shorter versions for various news purveyors. Humorists and trolls had then repurposed the footage into a music video, set to early-era Beach Boys, and a fake promo for the Nicaraguan Tourism Board.

  The next few days were unstructured for most, certainly for Delaney. Kiki, her guide, told her the week would be “unusually loose,” and it was. Delaney was free to wander the campus on Monday and Tuesday, attending grief-groups and participating in a half-dozen vaguely sporty activities Bailey had enjoyed, from lawn bowling to jarts (safety jarts) and nonviolent larping. It wasn’t until late Wednesday that Delaney received an apologetic, even sheepish, text from Kiki, asking if she was feeling up to continuing the conversation about the app she’d mentioned in her interview.