For the bus ride, which Delaney estimated would be ninety minutes, she had prepared a mix of happy journeying music, which she activated as they pulled out of the campus gate. The first song was by Otis Redding, and the first message came via her phone. Woman-hater, it said, with a link to an unsigned and evidence-less post hinting that he had been unkind to an ex-girlfriend who he’d met shortly before the bay and the dock and the sitting. Thanks for the early-morning pick-me-up! the writer said, meaning that Delaney had ruined the day and tacitly endorsed Redding’s newly alleged misogyny. Delaney skipped to the next song, Lana Del Rey’s “High by the Beach,” and then quickly figured it was too big a risk so skipped ahead. The third song, the Muppets’ “Movin’ Right Along,” was unknown to most on the bus, and survived its three-minute length, during which a handful of passengers furiously tried to find a reason the song was complicit in evil committed or implied. Delaney skipped the next song, by Neil Diamond, thinking any Jewish singer dubious in light of the Israeli sandwich debacle, skipped songs six and seven (from Thriller), briefly considered the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” but then remembered Phil Spector, and so finally settled on a young Ghanian rapper she’d recently discovered. His first song was hunted down quickly in a hail of rhetorical buckshot—as a teen, the rapper had zinged a borderline joke about his female trigonometry teacher—so Delaney turned off the shared music, leaving everyone, for the next eighty-one minutes, to their earbuds and the safety of their individualized solitude.

  When they reached the rolling green hills of Petaluma, and could see the horses and sheep lolling about, a smattering of geese in a seasonal pond, a scrum of cows poking their heads through a crooked fence, Delaney felt a kind of pride. She was not from here, but she knew country like this, and was proud of how well her home state and her adopted state had preserved open land like this, even amid frenzied development and the temptations of untold billions. They were on the homestretch, she thought—from here on out it was only beauty, and stunning natural phenomena, and when they arrived to living miracles of wayward and illogical evolution, nothing more would be required of her but staying out of the way.

  Her phone dinged; a group texting session began. For a vegan, this is the Holocaust, the first message said, and the flood began. Didn’t know we’d be traveling through miles of animal bondage. Delaney tried to conjure a response but the messages came without pause. This is Trigger Valley for me. Delaney looked back among the passengers and saw one young woman being comforted by another, their faces turned away from the window. An Everyone named Syl was sick in the bathroom. That’s two ppl sick so far, read a text from Syl (he was texting from the toilet). This driver needs to slow down, said another. Another had a helpful thought: Then again, perhaps better to speed through this animal abattoir?

  They passed Petaluma but Delaney knew there were many farms to come. Only dairy farms coming up! she wrote, and the pile-on began. Not your milk! I actually don’t drink milk; I’m lactose unpopular, Delaney wrote, thinking that news, and her half-gag, might help. The volley continued. These cows shouldn’t have their udders yanked all day so humans can drink what’s not theirs. Again Delaney looked back to the passengers, thinking she might meet eyes with her fellow humans and find some common ground, but the eyes were downcast, fingers tapping, and so she faced forward again, counting the minutes till they parked at the beach.

  Playa 36 was, like so much of coastal California, wholly unspoiled and baffling in the easy availability of almost untouched splendor. The bus parked in the sand-swept lot, next to the redwood visitors’ center, and there, no more than forty feet away, were a hundred elephant seals—females, males and calves—all lying on the beach, scootching and basking and honking audaciously. The sky was azure and dotted with throwpillow clouds. There were gray-green hills behind and cliffs left and right, and before them was a beach full of enormous fleshy mammals, all of them impossibly ugly and vulnerable and loud.

  Delaney stood by the bus door as the passengers stepped off and into the mulchy smell of the seals, thinking that any complaints about music, or the wrongful exploitation of cow’s milk, or even the problems presented by Israeli sandwiches, would evaporate in the face of these miracles of nature so undisturbed and close at hand. Her phone dinged. There’s a lot of sand. She looked around. Who was typing? I forgot to apply sunblock. This was from Syl, the man who had been sick in the bathroom twenty minutes earlier. Me too, said another Everyone. I’m heading back to the bus till I get covered up. Syl wrote again: Hope we didn’t already get cancer.

  Delaney herded the rest of group to a brown-haired ranger whose nametag read Matt Cody. Middle-aged, pink and unassuming, he was dressed in green pants and a green jacket and a green hat and wore no sunglasses over his dark, heavy-lidded eyes. He had an appealing, slump-shouldered way about him, and looked over Delaney’s group with a wide, crooked smile wholly sincere and welcoming—as if he were about to enjoy meeting them all very much.

  “Big group!” he said. “Welcome, welcome. I’m Matt Cody, or Ranger Matt, if you’re feeling formal. You have come on a fantastic—”

  “Is that them there?” an Everyone said. Her entire face was squinting.

  “It is. As you’ll see—” Ranger Matt began to say.

  “There’s no, like, barrier? Are they dangerous?” said a second Everyone, already backing away.

  A third, looking at her phone, added, “This says they can cover thirty feet in ten seconds.”

  There was a swirl of talk about the fact that, outside of a few orange cones, there was indeed no barrier between the humans and the elephant seals, most of whom weighed in the thousands.

  “Are we okay to be here?” asked a young Everyone, her eyes wide, her feet pointed to the bus.

  “Folks,” Ranger Matt said. “You are most welcome to be here. See, around you, there are other people present, too.” He swept his hands left and right, and the Everyones looked at the other humans for what Delaney was sure was the first time.

  “Why do we have to be so close?” asked another Everyone.

  “There should be clearer boundaries,” noted another.

  “You can be anywhere you’d like to be,” Ranger Matt said, now smiling broadly, “as long as you stay off the beach.” Delaney was sure that he had deduced the group for what they were, and had adopted a cheerfully wry manner.

  The Everyone named Syl sneered. “I mean, it seems like an invasion of their …”

  “Their privacy?” Ranger Matt said, suppressing a smile. “Yes, I can imagine you all are very concerned about that.” And as if he knew exactly the trouble he was about to get into, he forged ahead with more mischief in mind. “Would anyone like to know what’s happening here?”

  A few timid hands were raised half-mast. Delaney raised hers, trying to get his attention and indicate herself as leader of the group and co-conspirator with him. He didn’t take the hint.

  “Good then,” he said, and clapped his hands together in a manner almost dastardly. “What you see here are about forty adult male elephant seals. They’re called bulls. You’ll also see about twenty adult females. The little ones have been born over the past five or six weeks. The mothers have been feeding their calves all that time, but in the last week or so, the females have begun returning to the ocean. They leave their babies here, and now it’s up to the calves to find their way to the water, to get in, get away, and teach themselves to swim, to eat, and to survive. Most will not survive.”

  “Some of these pups won’t live?” Syl gasped. He had large, expressive eyes, and the posture of a gnarled tree.

  “That’s right,” Ranger Matt said. “Sometimes three-fourths of the pups will die. Some are eaten by sharks. Some drown. Some starve. A few might die right here on this beach.”

  “Oh god!” a hushed voice said, and was joined in horror by a dozen others. Four ran immediately to the bus and stayed there. Six more went aboard to offer support and solidarity to the four.

  “Back in ’98,” Ranger Matt continued, “El Niño drowned about eighty-five percent of the pups before they learned to swim …”

  There were groans and tears. More Everyones retreated to the bus, to be out of earshot of whatever horror Ranger Matt might report next. With only fifteen or so Everyones still outside, Delaney saw a vaguely familiar face, behind large sunglasses and under a large floppy hat. “Hans-Georg?” she said. She had no idea he’d been on the bus.

  “Delaney,” he said, and shook her hand warmly. “This is marvelous, just marvelous,” he said, in his wonderful German accent. “This I have never seen! Look at them! The way they roll, and play, and—what is the word?—bleat?”

  “Bleat, yes,” Delaney said. She was so happy that someone was enjoying this, was seeing it the way she saw it. Her phone dinged. It was her parents, sending her a toy. They’d begun sending dozens a day, or they had programmed their phones to send her phone dozens a day. Thinking of you! it said, with an explosion of teeny fireworks. She looked back to Hans-Georg, wanting very much to run into the neighboring hills with him.

  “Thank you so much for bringing me, all of us here,” he said. “I will never forget it.” With that, he stepped away, closer to the beach, his hands clasped behind his back as if he were roaming a museum. He seemed to be communing with the sand, the sea, the seals, the wind and sun—all at once, absorbing its rough majesty with radical openness and without fear.

  Elsewhere, a few hearty and curious Everyones took pictures and looked through Matt’s binoculars, asking follow-up questions, but the rest of the group was not wholly sure what to do. Those still outside the bus took a few pictures of the seals, and took pictures of themselves in front of the seals, and took many Popeyes with the seals as backdrop, and took a number of group pictures of themselves in many different poses and configurations and filters. This lasted eight to ten minutes; after that they were at a loss. Two went into the visitors’ center and one used the bathroom. No one else left the parking lot. Outside of the few curious questioners of Ranger Matt, no one wanted to know more about the seals they’d been driven ninety minutes to see, and one by one, the Everyones on the bright windy beach returned to the cool and dim bus, and they shared their feelings via their phones, feelings which were universally confused. The consensus was indignation, at Ranger Matt for telling them things they were unprepared to hear, and then at Delaney for exposing them to Ranger Matt, and to also sand and sun and wind, and large free creatures, for which they had also been unprepared.

  After twenty-five minutes, only Hans-Georg and a few other Everyones were still near the beach. The rest of the party was stewing in their seats on the bus, so Delaney asked the driver, who was in the visitors’ center buying a book for his kids, to start the engine. No one had touched their sandwiches. There hadn’t been time to remove them from the bus’s storage compartment.

  The complaints, both signed and anonymous, began on the ride home and were universally apocalyptic. The young woman who had been shocked by the elephant seals’ abandonment of their young explained that a friend of hers, a human, had also been abandoned by her mother. Had she known this excursion was going to be so horror-filled—first seeing Petaluman animals in bondage and then exposing the Everyones to this ranger person gleefully explaining the failures of mammalian mothers—she never would have come. Because it would not do to stamp the embers of her rhetoric, others blew oxygen into her fire. Inappropriate at best, one said, thinking herself the most reasonable. A top-to-bottom atrocity, said the next. There was soon a thread about how perhaps Welcome2Mes in general should be discontinued. And field trips. And forest rangers. And parking lots. Something about parking lots got the Everyones to a higher plane of anguish, and the weeping began. The crimes of the world being too many and too cruel, and parking lots being somehow entwined with the worst of these crimes, the bus erupted in wailing and consoling-without-touching. Had enough of this kind of mess, wrote an Everyone. Never again means never again, wrote another.

  And all this was before the bus hit the sheep.

  XXII.

  DELANEY HAD SUNDAY TO HERSELF, so she stayed in bed till the walls of her room glowed white. At eleven she sat up and spent another hour staring at the window in the upper corner of her room, catching the occasional glimpse of a seagull. In the shower, Delaney remembered a dream she’d had at dawn. In it, Mae Holland was pregnant, bursting, and was sitting in a glass box, her legs spread. Then Mae pointed to the shadows between her spread legs and beckoned Delaney to enter. But in the way dreams make certain things clear to the dreamer, it was clear that Delaney was not being invited to see the baby, but to become the baby. It seemed at least plausible to Delaney that she was going nuts.

  Throughout the morning Delaney heard Wes thumping through the house, making his presence known without wanting to knock. Finally he knocked and his crooked mouth smiled down at her.

  “I’m done. I’m out,” she said.

  “Did the sheep live?” he asked.

  Delaney shrugged. The night before, when she’d gotten home, she’d told Wes briefly about the trip, the complaints, the sheep whose latter half had been clipped by the bus. An Everyone had set up a camera at the veterinary office where they’d brought the sheep, heretofore unnamed and destined for chops, but now known as Athena and imbued with complex emotions and the hopes of all of those unhappy souls who had boarded the bus and regretted it. Athena was getting the best care, but after being struck by a fifteen-ton bus traveling at forty-four miles per hour, the prognosis was not good.

  “I’m only sad I didn’t get to know her,” Wes said.

  “Please,” Delaney said.

  “She seemed like a fascinating sheep.”

  “Stop.”

  Wes disappeared and reappeared seconds later with an envelope.

  “You got another letter yesterday,” he said, and dropped it on the bed. It was Agarwal again. Delaney didn’t know if she had the strength. She opened it, though, hoping that hearing Agarwal’s voice, even if scolding, might give her courage to continue.

  Dear Delaney,

  With nothing to lose, allow me to blather. I tried for years, unsuccessfully, to bring the word technoconformity into the lexicon. Perhaps such things are always organic, and can never be engineered. But, forgive me, I was a teenager in the eighties. We were so comically anti-authority, anti-corporate, anti-conformity that I remember harboring a seething anger toward even my local 7-Eleven.

  Yours was the most conformist generation in history, and the two generations after yours were more conformist still. I do not like saying that. But think of it. You all own the same phone. You have willingly given all your personal data to what is the most monopolistic, control-hungry corporation ever to plague the world. As a generation you are so empathetic, so intelligent, so politically active. You boycott companies (and people) over comparatively minor things. But this company—the company where you now work—which more than any other has the power to control so much of what we know and buy and do, a company which represents the greatest and most insidious concentration of power and wealth in human history—you give them a pass. I don’t understand it.

  Yours,

  Agarwal.

  Delaney felt worse than before. She got under the covers and put a pillow over her head. Her phone dinged; she’d forgotten to turn it off. A throbbing warning said she was late in filling out PESSes for everyone on the bus; they had, happily enough, already submitted their assessments of her. She didn’t look. She put her phone under her mattress and, numb and despairing, she slept, on and off, till Monday.

  Alessandro said he was sad to see her leave TellTale. She’d stayed there two weeks, working primarily on the study of jokes in comedic films—how many were ideal, how many were too many (54; 77). Delaney said she was sad to see herself go.

  “But I’m happy that you’re only making a lateral move here,” he said. “Iris Tracking is closely related to our work at TellTale, as you can imagine. Maybe if you like what Eric’s team does, too, you’ll stay on our side of campus. We need more like you.”

  After his last sentence, panic overtook his face. The words more like you hung in the air, as both he and Delaney examined them for offense. They sounded wrong in some way, and Delaney could understand his alarm. But after a few seconds, as they each scanned the word-triptych for toxicity, they found the cluster clean, and Alessandro—who for a moment was teetering on the edge of employment abyss, forced out of his job and made leprous for future hirers—relaxed.

  They made a short journey together, from one end of Kitty Hawk to the next, and when they arrived, a very tall man with a tremendous beard—a sort of waterfall of black lichen—was waiting.

  “Eric,” he said, and stared long at Delaney, his eyes amused. “Reed?” he said, and pointed to himself. “Lewis and Clark.”

  Delaney had no clue what this person was saying.

  “Libarts schools of the Northwest!” he said, and laughed hoarsely, painfully—as if he’d been making himself laugh all his life and his lungs had finally given out.

  This seemed a more logical connection than the one Alessandro had forged between Reed and Kenyon, and yet it surprised Delaney how much some Everyones identified with their colleges, and with those colleges that in vague ways resembled their own colleges.

  Eric turned to Alessandro. “Just affirming: This a comprehensive NDA situation?” he asked.

  “It is,” Alessandro said. “I’ll come back in ten. And remember the Bailey event at noon. That gives you all thirty minutes.”