“I like it,” said a new man, reaching across them for a celery stalk. His features were sharp, birdlike, his eyes restless. He wore a gun-metal gray catsuit with multiple zippers and pockets, under which various devices and antennae sprouted and bulged. Carrying a banana in one hand and his new stalk of celery in the other, he made their duo a trio with agonized nonchalance.

  “Francis,” he said, lifting his chin to Delaney. Delaney took in his outfit, sweeping her eyes over his pocketed torso while careful to stop at the waist.

  “How are you, Francis?” Fuad said with the faintest hint of wariness. “This is Delaney.”

  Francis ate his banana in two bites and threw the peel into a large compost pile situated meaningfully in the middle of the eatery. Delaney caught his bony posterior, celebrated in gray lycra, and looked away.

  “Very well, thank you,” Francis said. He opened a zipper on his right forearm, exposing a sleek phone, a model Delaney hadn’t seen. “You’re new, I assume,” he said. “Your last name is?”

  “Wells,” Delaney said.

  His fingers busied themselves on his phone. She and Fuad had no choice but to wait for Francis to complete the operation, the two of them engaged in the tragic everyday byproduct of the time—watching a fellow human tap on a screen, waiting for the result. While they waited, Delaney had a quick tingle of recognition. Hadn’t there been a sexual liaison between a Francis and Mae Holland? The Francis in front of her looked at least forty. Mae must be in her mid-thirties by now, so yes, this could be him. It might have been the light, but Delaney saw a few feathers of gray hair near his temples.

  Now Delaney’s face appeared on his little screen. “Delaney Wells? I love it. It says you’re a roamer.” With Delaney standing in front of him, he read about her for a full thirty seconds before finally looking up. “Very interesting. Log cabin.”

  “Francis is with PrefCom,” Fuad explained.

  “Oh,” Delaney said, a bit too enthusiastically. She’d wanted to meet someone from Preference Compliance—the darker, stricter, more punitive side of Are You Sure? PrefCom enforced brand loyalty and consistent consumer behavior through an array of punishments and disincentives. PrefCom was the fastest-growing division on campus and, Delaney thought, one of the key vehicles she could steer off a cliff.

  She looked at Francis again and knew it was him. He’d filmed a sexual encounter with Mae, years ago. It had happened on campus, when Mae was new to the company. It had sparked a debate about who owned such footage, and ultimately Mae had had to live with it; once in the world, all video, all photographs, all documents, belonged to the world. How could Mae, a proponent of radical transparency, object to the posting of a moment meaningful to this man? Delaney was sure this video was still up, accessible to all.

  “Your presentation was very provocative,” a new voice said. Yet another man joined their group, this one much older, almost sixty, with an accent Delaney took to be German.

  “Thank you,” she said. He introduced himself as Hans-Georg. He wore frameless glasses over his small pale eyes, which seemed both amused and disappointed. His hair was long and dark, streaked with gray, falling mythically to his shoulders. He wore a simple flannel shirt, loose-fitting jeans and immaculate white tennis shoes. He seemed in all ways to be in the wrong place, in the wrong decade.

  “I, too, am a roamer,” he said. “Rotater? Which is correct?” He looked to Fuad for help.

  “Either,” Fuad said. “You both are rarities here. I’m almost envious, in that you get to see every corner of this place. Few do.”

  “Perhaps because I came so far, I am given these privileges,” Hans-Georg said. “I know there are other Germans here, but I think I’m the only one from Weimar. I know Bailey is a Goethe enthusiast. I’m sorry, was a Goethe enthusiast. That was terrible. Ugh.”

  Delaney had been prepared to meet the Germans. The campus, she’d read, was recently flooded with them. She assumed it was an effort to appease German regulators; if the Every employed thousands of Germans here and abroad, perhaps their government would ease up on their neverending regulatory war.

  “Excuse me, though, Delaney, but I have to ask,” Hans-Georg said, “do you worry that encouraging young people to stay on their phones even longer each day will provoke more scrutiny for the Every?”

  “The unmeasured life is not worth living,” Francis said. “Pascal.”

  Delaney smiled at Francis. He was gloating. The quote, or misquote, seemed to be something he was ready to insert into any conversation. Hans-Georg appeared to know the mistake, too, and chose to smile and return to his question for Delaney.

  “So soon after VRotTot, it seems like poking the bear, no?” he asked.

  VRotTot had been a very expensive pilot project, years in the works, that had sought to acclimate children to the disorienting effects of virtual reality by equipping them at infancy with helmets to be worn while awake and asleep. Parents had been promised higher IQs and probable admission to elite universities, but pediatricians had raised a holy rancor and the program was abandoned, billions lost.

  “Interesting,” Delaney said, stalling. She needed to pivot back to the food, and then escape.

  “Have you had these?” she said, indicating the pyramid of drinkable balloons. “So good.”

  “I have,” Hans-Georg said, and sighed while looking at the feast.

  “Too much?” Francis asked him. Hans-Georg shrugged amiably.

  “Hans-Georg grew up in East Germany,” Fuad noted. “They didn’t have such choices back then.”

  “Yes,” Hans-Georg said. “I remember going to Berlin with my aunt. This is after the wall fell. I’d never been in the West. I remember standing in front of a bakery, looking in. There were so many beautiful things! Fifty types of cookies, dozens of different cakes. Every sort of croissant and muffin, and every kind of bread. Pretzels! Chocolate-covered pretzels, pretzels with raisins, with cinnamon, with salt. And marzipan! I had never seen marzipan, though I’d heard about it from the ballet, with the rat with many heads … how do you say it in English?”

  “The Nutcracker,” Francis said.

  “Yes!” Hans-Georg said. His eyes were merry. “So we stood outside the bakery, too nervous to go inside. And I looked up at my aunt, and she was crying.”

  Francis nodded, his mouth set in a satisfied smirk. “That’s why the wall came down. People wanted choices. They wanted a free market.”

  “I’m sorry,” Hans-Georg said, smiling politely while his eyes turned wistful. “You misunderstand. She was crying because of the waste. It was evening when we stood outside that bakery window, and she knew all of that wonderful food would be thrown away. To her, it was shattering.” Hans-Georg looked at the buffet as if it, too, contained unimaginable gluttony.

  “Too much choice,” a new man said. He was sturdily built, dressed in a short-sleeved bodysuit. His arms, roped with muscles, were crossed in front of him like blades.

  “Too much,” Hans-Georg said. “This is what my aunt said. ‘Why do we need so many things?’”

  The new man was listening to Hans-Georg but was staring at Delaney.

  “She saw it as a kind of Western corruption,” Hans-Georg continued, “a symptom of excess and folly. She had been a member of the Party, sure, but she had a point. There was too much then and there’s too much now. I’m sorry Gabriel. I’m monopolizing Delaney.”

  “Gabriel,” the new man said, and nodded.

  “What do you think?” Gabriel asked Delaney, and the intensity of his stare caused her to look away.

  “About choice?” she asked. Francis drifted from the conversation, and Fuad left, too, though in a decidedly different direction from Francis. Gabriel’s eyes never left Delaney. He took no notice of their exit.

  “Yes, choice,” Gabriel said.

  “It’s the burden of our time and the root of most planetary malaise,” Delaney said.

  Gabriel’s head tilted back and forth like a pendulum, as if to say, Maybe, maybe not, but well said.

  “Yes, yes!” Hans-Georg said. “Exactly. Gabriel’s research has found much the same thing.”

  Hans-Georg provided room for Gabriel to elaborate, but Gabriel said nothing; he continued to stare at Delaney as if she were someone he’d known long ago and was trying to place.

  “Gabriel’s main finding,” Hans-Georg said, “was that choice is one of the primary stressors for the last three or four generations. Millennials, Gen Y and Z—it’s not just fear of missing out. It’s the paralysis of unlimited options. Am I correct, Mr. Chu?”

  Now Delaney placed this new man. He had seemed familiar to her from the start, but Delaney had been unsure why. Now she knew that the unflinching man standing near her was Gabriel Chu. His reputation was global. He’d founded U4U.

  “You’re Gabriel Chu,” Delaney said, and he shrugged. This was, she assumed, a bit of a game he played—humbly introducing himself as Gabriel, and letting the realization come slowly.

  This man, Delaney knew, was one of the truly dangerous people at the Every. Ramona Ortiz could make all travel a crime against the planet, but Gabriel Chu seemed capable of turning a billion minds into paste. He’d obliterated all personality tests, made a mockery of Myers-Briggs, laughed heartily at Walter Clarke and Wilhelm Wundt. About Freud, he’d said, “His work has the intellectual heft of a streetside astrologer.” In a widely seen meme, to Freud’s followers he’d said, “You keep your dream diaries and lewd little stories. I already know the future of humankind.” Other than that, he seemed like a down-to-earth guy.

  “Have you ever done one of his surveys?” Hans-Georg asked Delaney.

  Now Gabriel’s mouth tensed; he seemed interested in knowing the answer.

  “Of course,” Delaney said, and Gabriel’s face softened. “All the time. They’re addictive.”

  For years, Delaney had eyed U4U with a mixture of respect and horror. Their personality quizzes, all of them titled innocuously and positioned as fun and frivolous, were wildly popular. What kind of coworker are you? Are you a closet authoritarian? Could you be more productive as a Buddhist? What does your moisturizer say about your ability to seek true happiness? The quizzes varied from short and whimsical to intricately involved and purportedly scientific. U4U, originally a standalone app, was a hit, and their surveys, some branded and some anonymous, were shared widely, and Gabriel Chu, the founder—with a PhD in clinical psychology—became a kind of public intellectual. His short talks on personality and its fluidity were watched by millions and led more users to his surveys. With each, the user’s score would be tabulated, proving they were a culinary connoisseur or commendable parent or recommendable lover.

  When U4U was bought by the Every for $2.1 billion, much of the world was shocked, given the surveys had seemed middlebrow and innocuous, but Delaney assumed the worst and was eventually proven right: the surveys were extracting the kind of behavioral information that otherwise the Every and its clients could only infer or guess at. Because they were done for fun, and because they asked dozens or hundreds of deeply personal questions, the surveys revealed the users, who were consumers, at their most unguarded. Information that many people wouldn’t offer in a clinical setting they willingly provided in a survey they filled out for entertainment.

  “When I did my clinical internship,” Gabriel said now, “I worked with students in their teens and twenties. Mostly college students. And the vast majority of the people we saw in the clinic complained about the same thing: the stress and paralysis of unlimited options.”

  “Imagine,” Hans-Georg said, his voice an awed whisper. “Under the Soviets, all people wanted was more than one kind of bread. But now that we have choices, we are oppressed by them.”

  “People want three choices, not sixty,” Gabriel said. “And for a vast array of categories, they want no choices at all. For example, we found that of 1,000 respondents, only 77 wanted to choose their mattress. The rest just wanted one that was comfortable and affordable and well-sourced. The stress comes in thinking you’ll get yours home and realize it’s inferior, or you paid too much, or it was made by sweatshop children.”

  Kiki appeared. “There you are!” she said, pointing at Delaney. Kiki always knew where Delaney was, and yet was always surprised to find her. She nodded to Gabriel and Hans-Georg. “I need to talk to this one. She hasn’t done a Welcome2Me! Yours was fun, Hans-Georg. Didn’t it involve classical music?”

  “It did,” he said. “Debussy, yes.”

  The word Debussy did not register with Kiki. She tapped her oval. “Right,” she said finally, pulled Delaney toward the exit.

  “I hope we can talk again,” Gabriel said. “Maybe, during your roamings, you can roam into U4U. Both of you.” He looked to Hans-Georg and did an admirable job of conveying that the invitation was being extended to both of them. But his eyes lingered on Delaney as she retreated.

  As they took the stairs to the ground level, Delaney took in Kiki’s outfit. She wore a form-fitting red top with a feathered pattern. Her leggings were made to look like a mermaid’s lower half—scaled, sea-green, almost phosphorescent. Her waterpack had been adorned with a dorsal fin, which bounced menacingly as she galloped down the steps.

  “Fish and feather?” Kiki said. “This is one of AYS’s new faves. I love it. Made in Greece, by ex-felons. Follow me.”

  Delaney made a mental note to find out what AYS was, then realized Kiki was talking about Are You Sure? She knew Are You Sure?—the sunnier, more stylish counterpart to PrefCom. Are You Sure? was ubiquitous, an all-powerful consumer conscience. When you were about to purchase an environmentally unfriendly jacket, for example, you’d get a dialogue box. “Are you sure?” it would ask, and list a better alternative.

  They walked, and Delaney’s peripheral vision tried to make sense of the half-fish, half-bird slinking along next to her.

  “So, Welcome2Me. It’s time,” Kiki said. “We like new Everyones to think of a way we can better get to know you. We’ve found that usually there’s this incredibly slow trickle of interpersonal contact that occurs over a year or two, which is just too long and not quite right. We’ve discovered through the work of Dr. Chanapai … Do you know her?”

  Delaney thought Kiki would appreciate being, between the two of them, the sole knower of the work of Dr. Chanapai, so she said she did not.

  “Well, she explains that newcomers to any culture should immediately celebrate their arrival, and celebrate the culture they’re bringing to this new, second culture. So we ask newcomers to celebrate themselves. Maybe you share a culturally significant dish, or if you have a talent, you might sing or play a mini-concert. People have done karaoke, all kinds of things. A guy from Indiana made a mini–corn maze, though there were some complaints after that one. You’re from Idaho. Do they have corn mazes?”

  Delaney’s oval vibrated, though she had not set it to vibrate. She looked down. Greetings, the message read. It was from Francis. In order to improve my interactions with Everyones, he wrote, I’m asking new acquaintances to answer a few questions to rate my interpersonal skills. Delaney scrolled down. There were thirty-two questions. 1. Did you find me approachable? 2. Did I maintain adequate eye-contact? For each question, there were five emojis to choose between, from a fanged devil to a grinning angel.

  “Delaney?” Kiki said.

  Delaney looked up. “I’m sorry. Corn mazes? Not that I know of.”

  Now Kiki was looking at her phone too. Her face fell with every line of text. Finally she looked up.

  “You okay?” Delaney asked.

  “It’s fine,” Kiki said, her lip quivering. “Just got a major sham. I was in an old photo near a guy who was just convicted of assault—a bunch of assaults. And I guess this went up yesterday and I didn’t know. I have no idea how I didn’t know. I should have known. So twenty-four hours go by and I haven’t denounced him and explained why I was in the photo.”

  Another ding came from her phone. “They found a text from me to him. I can’t remember this guy! It was eighteen years ago. Why was I texting him?”

  “What does it say?”

  “‘Hi Paul. Kiki here.’”

  “I don’t think you should worry about that,” Delaney said.

  “I’m not. Well, I mean, it’s just coming at a bad time. My Shame Aggregate just isn’t where it should be. I try to be a good person but then these things pop up and …” She sniffed and ran her hands over her face.

  Delaney looked at Kiki, feeling that the best thing she could possibly do would be to tuck her under her arm and flee.

  “I’m sorry,” Kiki said, straightening herself and dabbing her eyes. “We need to get your things straight. Welcome2Me. No corn mazes.”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Delaney said.

  Kiki’s oval dinged. “Hi Nino! No. Mama’s not crying …”

  Delaney looked away, trying to give Kiki some privacy, and her eyes alighted on a pair of men in ankle-to-shoulder lycra. Theirs, though, was somehow thinner than any she’d seen before; it was nearly sheer. On one of the men, she could see the dark swaths where hair proliferated underneath.

  Now Kiki was back. “Good, so maybe something else,” she said. “Maybe something forest ranger-y. Something outdoorsy but not scary like corn mazes?” she asked. Her face tensed for a moment, as if picturing the filth and chaos of the natural world. “Or maybe at the Every but about the outdoors? You can show pictures. Someone once showed Moana. I think that person was from Fiji, so—”

  “I’ll think about it,” Delaney said.

  “And it doesn’t have to be huge. Maybe just forty people. That’s a nice sampling. And those forty people can spread the word of all you’re bringing to campus.”

  “I’ll come up with something,” Delaney said.

  “We’re just so happy you’re here,” Kiki said. “I am especially. You’re a good listener, and you don’t judge.”