Dan Faraday smiled. Every candidate, Delaney was sure, came wearing all possible Every products. It was not pandering. It was an obligatory ante before the game began. Dan motioned Delaney to cross the street, entering the public promenade.

  Forgive me, Delaney thought. Everything from here on out is lies.

  II.

  FOR NOW, DELANEY’S TASK was to charm Dan Faraday so outrageously that he recommended her for a second, more thorough interview. There would be at least three after that. Some Every employees, she’d heard, had been interviewed twelve times over six months before being hired.

  “We can talk and look around,” Dan said, his eyes amiable, reasonable, seeming incapable of anything but calm deliberation. “If you see some food or beverage you want along the way, we can stop and sit.”

  The tiny neighborhood around the Every campus, a string of ostensibly private-sector businesses catering to tourists there for the view, had the look of a hastily assembled film set. There was a dimly lit architectural firm devoid of people, and brightly decorated but depopulated pastry shops and vegan ice cream parlors. The streets were largely empty but for the occasional pair of people looking precisely like Delaney and Dan: actual staff member—or Everyone—interviewing potential employee, or Everyoneabee.

  Delaney, rarely nervous, was rattled. She’d spent years assiduously building her profile, her digital self, with meticulous care, but there were so many things she couldn’t know if they knew. More pressingly, on the way to the campus, Delaney had been shammed. On the subway platform, she’d dropped a wrapper, and before she could pick it up, an older woman with a phone had filmed the crime. Like a growing majority of tech innovations, the invention and proliferation of Samaritan, an app standard on Everyphones, was driven by a mixture of benign utopianism and pseudofascist behavioral compliance. A million shams—a bastard mash of Samaritan and shame—were posted each day, exposing swervy drivers, loud gym grunters, Louvre line-cutters, single-use-plastic-users, and blithe allowers of infants-crying-in-public. Getting shammed was not the problem. The problem was if you got ID’d and tagged, and if the video got widely shared, commented on, and tipped your Shame Aggregate to unacceptable levels. Then it could follow you for life.

  “First of all, congratulations on being here,” Dan said. “Only three percent of applicants make it this far. As you can imagine, the AI screenings are very rigorous.”

  “Absolutely,” Delaney said, and winced. Absolutely?

  “I was impressed by your résumé, and personally appreciate that you were a libarts major,” Dan said. Libarts. Dan had either invented this or was trying to popularize it. As if unsure how it was going over, he pinched the end of his shirt-zipper. “As you know, we hire just as many libarts majors as we do engineers. Anything to propagate new ideas.” He let go of his shirt-zipper. It seemed to be his way of holding his breath. As he formed and uttered a sentence, he held the zipper; if it came out okay, he relaxed and let it go.

  Delaney knew about the Every’s openness to non-engineers, and relied upon it. Still, she’d gone to great lengths to make herself uniquely appealing even among that math-weak category.

  Two years ago, Delaney had moved to California and had worked for a startup—Ol Factory, it was called—whose mission was to bring smells into gaming. Their most successful release, Stench of War!, brought the smells of diesel, dust and decaying flesh into the homes of teen boys worldwide. She assumed that Ol Factory was plumping itself for Every acquisition, and she was proved correct when that deal was finalized, eighteen months after she joined. The founders, Vijay and Martin, were brought to the Every and given nothing to do. Delaney, being relatively new to Ol Factory, was not automatically brought with the acquisition, but Vijay and Martin were determined to get Every interviews for anyone at Ol Factory who wanted one.

  “Your background and point of view, actually, are just what we look for,” Dan said. “You’re disobedient, and we strive to be, too.” Disobedient was a recently favored word, replacing mutinous, which had replaced insurgent, which had replaced disruption/disruptor. Dan had the zipper in his fingers again. It was as if he wanted to unzip it completely, to break out of this shirt, like a child chafing at an itchy sweater. The sentence having cleared his internal censor, he let it go.

  They passed a shop that purported to sell hardware, and was full of hardware, beautifully arranged, but free of customers or staff.

  “I’ve always admired that about the Every,” Delaney said. “You planted your flag on Titan while everyone else was contemplating the Moon.”

  Dan turned his head to her and Delaney knew the combination had landed. His eyes were warm and admiring, and then they narrowed, signaling a transition to more serious terrain.

  “We read your paper,” he said.

  Delaney’s face burned for a moment. Though her thesis was the centerpiece to her candidacy, and, she was sure, much of the reason she’d been granted an interview, she hadn’t expected to get into it so quickly. She’d assumed this first interview was simply a sanity check.

  She’d written her college thesis on the folly of antitrust actions against the Circle, given whether or not it was a monopoly was immaterial if that’s what the people wanted. She coined the term Benevolent Market Mastery for the seamless symbiosis between company and customer, a consumer’s perfect state of being, where all desires were served efficiently and at the lowest price. Fighting such a thing was against the will of the people, and if regulators were at odds with what the people wanted, what was the point? She posited that if a company knows all and knows best, shouldn’t they be allowed to improve our lives, unimpeded? She made sure the paper was disseminated online. It had been mentioned, she came to know, on various internal Every staff threads and had been referred to, briefly but significantly, in a rare EU ruling that went the Every’s way.

  “The salient points in what you wrote were discussed a lot around here,” Dan said. He’d stopped walking. Delaney marveled at how quickly her armpits could become dank swamps. “You articulated things that of course we believed to be true, but we’d been unable to get the ideas across effectively.”

  Delaney smiled. The Every was the company most crucial to the dissemination of the world’s ideas—in the form of words and audio and video and memes—and yet the company had absolutely no clue how to explain itself to governments, regulators and critics. The Every’s leadership, especially since the forced semi-retirement of Eamon Bailey, erstwhile barker and evangelist, was perpetually tone-deaf, arrogant, and occasionally outright offensive. They had never seemed sorry for any regulatory crime, nor chastened by any misery-causing use of their products. The Circle had disseminated hate a million times a day, causing untold suffering and death; they had facilitated the degradation of democracy worldwide. In response, they formed committees to discuss the problem. They tweaked algorithms. They banned a few high-profile hatemongers and added poorly paid moderators in Bangladesh.

  “The way you framed the antitrust struggles we’ve had,” Dan continued, “through the lens of history—it was very enlightening, even for someone like me, and I’ve been here since the beginning.” His voice had gone wistful. “You have a very fine mind, and that’s what we solve for here.”

  “Thank you,” Delaney said, and smiled to herself. Solve for.

  “How was it received by your thesis advisor?” Dan asked.

  She thought of her professor, Meena Agarwal, with a stab of regret. Delaney had taken Agarwal’s course, “Free Things > Free Will,” her sophomore year, and had fallen boundlessly under Agarwal’s influence, coming to believe that the Circle was not only a monopoly but also the most reckless and dangerous corporate entity ever conjured—and an existential threat to all that was untamed and interesting about the human species.

  Two years later, when Delaney asked Agarwal to advise her thesis, she readily agreed, but was shocked when Delaney turned in a 77-page treatise on the anti-entrepreneurial folly of regulating the Circle. Agarwal had given Delaney an A. “I grant you this grade for the rigor of the argument and research here,” Agarwal wrote, “but with profound moral reservations about your conclusions.”

  “I did well,” Delaney said.

  Dan smiled. “Good. There’s still some respect for intellectual independence in academia.”

  Delaney and Dan turned a corner and almost ran into another first interview in progress. A stylish young Everyone was walking with a man who appeared to be at least fifty but was trying frantically to look more vibrant and necessary than his age might imply. His glasses were orange-framed, his button-down black and shiny, his sneakers new and electric green. His interviewer was a lean young woman in silver leggings, and Delaney was sure she saw the woman’s eyes meet Dan’s and open wide for a microsecond in mocking distress. Dan gave her a tip of his imaginary top hat.

  “We’re committed to hiring without regard to age,” Dan said, and Delaney wondered if he saw her, at thirty-two, as fulfilling a kind of anti-ageist quota. “Older candidates have so much life experience to draw from,” he said, and swept his eyes across Delaney’s shoulders, as if she kept her wisdom there.

  “Shall we?” he said, and guided Delaney toward a playground, designed by Yayoi Kusama and paid for by the Every. Adults welcome! a sign said, and then, below and in parentheses: If accompanied by a child. Delaney glanced at the small print, which emphasized the importance of Play (always capitalized) in the creative life of adults.

  Capital-P Play was last year’s management theory, following multitasking, singletasking, grit, learning-from-failure, napping, cardioworking, saying no, saying yes, the wisdom of the crowd > trusting one’s gut, trusting one’s gut > the wisdom of the crowd, Viking management theory, Commissioner Gordon workflow theory, X-teams, B-teams, embracing simplicity, pursuing complexity, seeking zemblanity, creativity through radical individualism, creativity through groupthink, creativity through the rejection of groupthink, organizational mindfulness, organizational blindness, microwork, macrosloth, fear-based camaraderie, love-based terror, working while standing, working while ambulatory, learning while sleeping, and, most recently, limes.

  “How were things at Ol Factory?” Dan asked, sitting on an enormous rubber mushroom. Delaney sat opposite him, on a llama made of recycled plastic fibers.

  Delaney knew that the easiest mistake she could make now would be to criticize her former bosses. “It was outstanding,” she said. Outstanding, she’d heard, was a word beloved at the Every. “They treated me well. I learned a world every day.” Learned a world. She’d never uttered this phrase before. But when she glanced at Dan, he seemed to approve.

  “I liked that acquisition,” Dan said. “The numbers were big but the talent was …” Delaney was sure he normally would have said outstanding, but she’d stolen the word. He found an alternative: “… stellar. What did you think of the acquisition price?”

  “Talent is expensive,” she said, and he smiled. It was the only right answer, because there was no logic to the numbers. The Every had bought Ol Factory, a three-year-old company with twenty-two full-time employees and no profit, for just shy of two billion dollars.

  “Well put,” Dan said.

  There did not seem to be a point in any purchase, for any tech buyer or seller, unless the price was a billion dollars. Delaney had paid attention to Ol Factory’s revenues, and was unaware of any incoming funds that exceeded $23 million in the totality of the company’s existence. And yet the price the Every paid to purchase the company was $1.9 billion. This was much like the unprofitable headphone company that went for $1 billion, and the unprofitable VR firm that went for $2.8 billion, and the unprofitable nonviolent gaming firm that went for $3.4. The numbers seemed based on little more than the roundness of the figure and a wonderful logic loop: if you paid a billion, it was worth a billion—a bold notion unburdened by a thousand years of business accounting.

  “I haven’t met Vijay and Martin,” Dan said. He was swaying now, and Delaney realized that his mushroom had a flexible stalk. She wondered if her llama might be similarly malleable. She tried. It wasn’t.

  “I believe they’re in the Romantic Period,” he said, waving a hand in the general direction of the campus. Somewhere in there, Vijay and Martin were installed. She liked them a great deal, and assumed they were now miserable, as were every team of founders-who’d-sold-out, and would be for the five years they’d agreed to stay while vesting, after which they would peel off and start family foundations.

  But the billion-dollar acquisitions kept the world of tech alive and dreaming, and the smartest entrepreneurs were those who recognized that preparing oneself for Every acquisition was far easier, and far more logical, than either staying private and trying to make a profit—Sisyphean madness—or going the treacherous and unpredictable route of an IPO.

  “I know your title changed a few times, so can you talk about your role at Ol Factory? Doesn’t have to be linear,” Dan asked. “Can I?” He stood up and indicated he wanted to switch to Delaney’s llama. Delaney left her llama and took his mushroom-seat.

  “It was amorphous,” she said, and saw a flash of admiration animate Dan’s eyes. Another word he liked. He was easy, she realized. For years, the Every, through its auto-fill algorithms, had squeezed out thousands of words, favoring the most-likely over the lesser-used, and this had had the unexpected effect of rendering wide swaths of the English language nearly obsolete. When a word like amorphous was used, the ear of an Everyone was surprised, as if hearing an almost-familiar song from a largely lost time.

  Delaney laid out her employment history at Ol Factory. She’d come in as an executive assistant, more or less, and for a while after that was called Office Manager, though the job was always the same in that it encompassed everything. She arranged for the snacks and lunches. She arranged for the maintenance of the offices, kept everyone fed, hired and directed the gardeners. She put on every event, from brown-bag office meetings to Presidio retreats to Martin’s wedding on the peak of Mt. Tamalpais (for which she’d had to hire a team of paragliders willing to fly in tuxedos). She explained all this to Dan, with total honesty but hoping to impress upon him that she did not want to plan parties and handle catering at the Every.

  “I did do some of the interviews for new staff,” she noted. “Just the initial sanity checks.” She smiled knowingly at Dan, hoping he would appreciate this attempt at connecting tasks common to them both.

  He smiled back, but perfunctorily. She’d hit a nerve. And she’d hit nerves before. The Everyones she’d met, six or seven of them at bars or dinners, were invariably normal humans, every one of them idealistic and very often brilliant in some way, and most of them capable of candor about their work and lives. But there was, with each of them, a line that was not crossed. She would be chatting amiably with them for twenty minutes about the many questionable or ridiculous aspects of life within the Every, or its occasionally positive but usually disastrous impact on the world, and just when Delaney felt that this Everyone was free to say and think as they pleased, some subject, some sentence, would go too far, and this new Every-friend would retreat to a more formal, defensive posture. The word monopoly was not spoken. Kool-Aid was not said. Any comparison, even in drunken jest, between Jim Jones, or David Koresh, or Keith Raniere, and Eamon Bailey—the Circle’s co-founder—was considered in poor taste and not remotely apt. The mention of Stenton, another of the company’s Three Wise Men, who had left the Every to form an unholy alliance with a public-private company in China, soured any conversation beyond repair. Knowing what to say about Mae Holland, now the Every’s CEO, was hard to know.

  Mae had begun, ten years ago, in the Circle’s customer service department, soon becoming one of the company’s first fully transparent staffers, streaming her days and nights, and because she was utterly loyal to the company, and also young and attractive and reasonably charismatic, she rose through the ranks with startling speed. Her detractors found her dull and exasperatingly careful. Her fans—far greater in number—considered her mindful, respectfully ambitious, inclusive. Both sides, though, agreed on one thing: she hadn’t brought a significant new idea to the company in all her years there. Even after the merger with the jungle, she seemed perplexed with what it all meant and how the companies might be threaded together for maximum benefit.

  “Ol Factory was how many people?” Dan asked.

  Delaney knew Dan knew this number, and that if she herself didn’t know the exact number of employees, it would paint her as either someone who didn’t care about her fellow staffers, or as someone who couldn’t count.

  “Twenty-two and a half,” she said. “There was one new dad who was working part-time when we were acquired.”

  “They had a good life-balance there, do you think?” Dan asked. He was pulling on his shirt-zipper again.

  Delaney told him about the many days they took lunches outside, the thrice-yearly retreats (which she planned), the one warm Friday in June when Vijay and Martin sent everyone to the beach in Pacifica.

  “I like that,” Dan said. “But given you started at such a small place, do you think you’d like working at a much larger company like the Every? We’re looking for a certain degree of absorbability.”

  “I do,” she said. Absorbability.

  There had been nineteen suicides on this Every campus in the last three years, mirroring a global uptick, and no one wanted to talk about them—chiefly because no one at the Every seemed to know why, or how to stop them. Even the number nineteen was debatable, for there was no local news, there were no journalists—all of that wiped out by social media, the advertising apocalypse and, more than anything else, the war on subjectivity—so any knowledge of the deaths at all was pieced together from rumor and quickly muffled accounts by those on the Bay who’d seen a body here or there washed ashore. That was one of the ways Everyones often chose—they threw themselves to the sea rising all around them.