The room was silent with what Delaney assumed was the shock of a principle that would never again be challenged.

  “But there are two sides to human impact. There’s the impact we have on the environment every time we leave our homes, and there’s the impact these excursions have on our own psyches. Both present significant risk, and both are avoidable. Our group came up with a term for these phenomena, and how we feel about them.”

  Onscreen, the words Impact Anxiety appeared in bold white letters against an ominous red background.

  “We’ve all felt it,” Syl said. “Any time you take a rideshare into the city to go to a new restaurant, you’re committing countless crimes against an exhausted victim—our natural world.

  “Then there’s the restaurant itself,” Syl continued, “which becomes a magnet for endless unnecessary trips by car and other vehicles. Then the food! How many animals died for that evening at the fashionable new brasserie? How many Amazonian acres were burned to create grazing land for the beef croquettes that give you a moment of fleeting pleasure? How many pesticides have been doused upon the wheatfields that make possible your senseless breadsticks?”

  He paused for effect. The effect was significant.

  “Then of course we get into our complicity with that restaurant’s heedless exploitation of Guatemalan banana farmers, for example. Bananaskam, of course, helped make us aware of this. And what of the Senegalese children sent to extract chocolate for your tiramisu? The fact is that every time we leave campus, we risk supporting exploitive, extractive, regressive and inherently violent practices. Here, we can vet what we bring onto campus, and what we use and consume. Out there, it’s far more difficult, if not impossible.”

  Much nodding took place.

  “From Stop+Lük, we’ve realized that we have to find alternatives to all this traveling by plane and car, and even by bus and train. By getting into that car or bus, for example, you’re supporting an automotive industry that has, and continues to, extract untold resources from the earth. Metal ore, rubber, aluminum, bitomium. These vehicles aren’t made from bamboo, after all. These are intensely exploitive machines that by their very existence are symbols of humanity’s aggression toward its mother.”

  Syl closed his eyes for effect. Delaney, worried that he might be taking it too far, looked around the room briefly, and saw an audience rapt and unquestioning. Syl’s eyes snapped open, as if he’d just gotten new signals from a more compassionate planet.

  “Last weekend was a perfect example,” he said. “One of our fellow Everyones, a wonderful person by the way,” and here he looked in vain for Delaney in the audience before venturing on, “had the seemingly innocent idea to bring a group of us to Point Reyes to see the elephant seals gathered there. Our group of expeditioners thought we were innocuous travelers on a solar-powered bus and thus incapable of harm, but we learned otherwise. First, the catering for said trip had not been properly vetted, and thus made us accessories to passive but no less significant hate crimes against the long-oppressed Palestinian people, and for that we can never be wholly absolved.”

  He paused, closed his eyes again for a meaningful moment, then forged on. “Second, a beautiful creature died under the wheels of our vanity that day. You have heard about this, no doubt. This creature, who we have named Athena, was murdered by our desperate need to go, to get somewhere, to be somewhere else.” He spat the predicates like epithets. “We wanted to put our feet in the sand. We wanted to see the seals in person. These were animals that had not, it should be mentioned, invited us to their habitat. We took a massive machine—fifteen tons of wanton privilege—and we invaded the natural domain of those seals. We did so with the violence, callousness and narcissism of a conquering army. And then, on the way home, we smashed a guiltless animal named Athena into oblivion.”

  Here Syl had managed to find a photograph of a sheep that looked eerily like the one they’d killed, though this sheep was alive and healthy and looked capable of intellectual rumination.

  “We have come to the conclusion,” he said, “that a trip like the one we took is morally wrong and impossible to justify. Had we eschewed this trip, we would have alleviated our Impact Anxiety. We would have stayed here that weekend, on campus, and by staying here, we wouldn’t have risked the near-inevitable damage we have when we rush recklessly from our homes into the world.”

  There was a vibration in the room, a putsch-lust. It seemed that the assembled audience was ready for revolution, a revolution led by a most passive and fearful human.

  “It was all wrong,” Syl said. “That day, we were no better than Custer or Columbus. We should not have been there, period. And no human should have been able to get there, full stop.”

  Applause shook the room. Syl, unaccustomed to such public approval, looked momentarily frightened by the noise. Finally the clapping subsided and Syl’s shoulders relaxed.

  “Now. What can we learn and enact on a larger scale?” Syl asked. “Let’s start with the highway—the kind of road that facilitated this uncivil destruction.”

  With hateful eyes, the audience looked at the screen, which presented a real-time drone’s eye view of an eight-lane freeway.

  “Humans made an immeasurable mistake when we built the highway,” Syl said, in a soft and contemplative tone. He was looking at his shoes, as if he himself had invented the road and now regretted it.

  “We made it too easy to travel great distances for our jobs, our errands and our touristic self-aggrandizement,” he continued. “Now the average human in an industrialized country travels thirty-two miles to work. Another six miles, round trip, to get groceries. Maybe another six miles to drive the kids to school. Our living and working and exploring has been spread out irrationally, which has led to the overuse of the automobile and bus, which has led to climate change, rising sea levels and potentially the collapse of civilization and the end of the species. But!”

  The audience laughed nervously. Syl smiled.

  “We have the opportunity, here at the Every, to at least set an example. How many of you commute to work?” he asked.

  About half the people in the room raised their hands.

  “I won’t ask how many of you drive yourselves to work in your own cars—I wouldn’t want you to assume that kind of social opprobrium. But how many of you take one of the Every buses?”

  The same hands that had been raised before, with a few exceptions, went up again.

  “These buses are of course spacious, luxurious and convenient. Most are electric. But they should be abolished.”

  A few clusters of applause broke out. Syl extended his finger, asking for patience. There was more.

  “‘What about trains?’ you ask,” he went on. Behind him a standard commuter train had been photo-filtered to look enormous and world-slashing. “Well, our trains are not without sin. They are not solar-powered, or powered by our sense of self-satisfaction. They, too, have consumed incredible energy in their manufacture, and at best they consume massive amounts of electricity, which, in this country at least, often still comes from fossil fuel—natural gas in particular—which is finite and which is extracted from under our feet at significant risk to our tectonic integrity. Trains should not exist.”

  Delaney watched the faces of the hundred-odd Everyones assembled. She hoped for the three waves of reaction, and they came in exactly the order she needed. The first was revulsion, rejection, given they’d heard an idea that would threaten their way of doing things, an idea that was even a bit cruel in its assessment. The second wave was the recognition that they, as Everyones devoted to eternal innovation and boundary-pushing, could not, outright or ever, reject any new notion, no matter how preposterous. The third wave was an earnest head-nodding that conveyed that they recognized the bold anomalation at hand, and that they would never deign to stand in the way of progress—and any new notion was inherently progressive. Satisfied that all three waves had passed through the eyes and minds of the assembled, Delaney turned back to Syl.

  “We know the truth,” he said. “We just have to affirm it and act on it. The truth is that we should be living close enough to our jobs such that no commute is necessary, period. We should either work where we live, or live where we work.”

  Syl let that sink in, and Delaney watched the Everyones’ faces assess what it would mean to give up their houses and apartments in Noe Valley and the Oakland hills and amid the leafy shade of Atherton. Realizing they were powerless to resist this idea, which was inherently virtuous, they applauded, outdoing one another in their enthusiasm for overturning all they knew. Delaney was certain she heard someone even say, “Hear, hear!”

  When the roar died down, Syl coasted to his conclusion. “I’m proposing,” he said, his voice gaining strength and power, “a five-year plan, which entails building 10,000 more EveryoneIn units, all on campus”—the screen displayed a crude animation of six-story complexes going up like stop-motion plant-growth—“and that, until then, a program of carrots and sticks be instituted, whereby those who commute at the expense of the planet are disincentivized, and those commute via foot or bike are rewarded. This would go for all errands, trips and jaunts. Your miles would be recorded, calculated and factored into your Personal Carbon Impact number.”

  Personal Carbon Impact: Delaney had given Syl that, too. She hoped Wes would not mind.

  “We’d start it all here on campus,” Syl continued, “in the hopes of rolling it out globally over the next few years. And our idea is that we will not only positively affect the planet, but we will significantly enhance our own wellness, too. Are you stressed about your daily impact on the environment? Stay where you are. Are you worried about frightening elephant seals and killing sheep? Stay where you are. Are you concerned about using gas, cars, roads, trains, and steel? Stay where you are.”

  Again applause overtook the room. Delaney couldn’t have been happier for him, and for the prospect of seeing the Every try to sell this notion of never again leaving the house. If that didn’t convince the world that the Every campus was not only power-mad but deranged, too, nothing ever would.

  Many names for Syl’s program were floated, but when someone yelled out the words Stay Still, and someone else—was it Shireen? It was!—suggested removing the space between those words (StayStill), and still someone else suggested spelling it as StåyStill—to better echo the Nordic aura of Stop+Lük—and someone else noted that if we were using fewer resources, wouldn’t we use fewer letters, in particular consonants? Finally StayStïl was settled upon, and there was great satisfaction all around.

  XXVI.

  APPLICATIONS FOR EVERYONEIN leapt a hundredfold in a day. No one wanted to be living off-campus (known now as Nowhere), unsure of their daily carbon footprint and terrified of being seen slinking onto campus (now Everywhere) from off-world each day, having defaced the planet in uncountable ways en route. The Every’s senior executives, not wanting to be shamed, swiftly and quietly moved onto campus, hoping to convey the impression they’d been living there all along.

  “I have to move in,” Delaney said.

  She and Wes were at the beach parking lot, with Hurricane in his stroller. He didn’t understand why he couldn’t at least be carried onto the beach. He shifted in his seat, whimpered, craned his neck to see the ocean.

  “You have to go?” Wes asked.

  “I’m already an outlier. If I’m central to this StayStïl movement, and then I don’t join, it’ll look hypocritical.”

  “Either you’re getting too good at this or you’ve lost your mind,” Wes said.

  Hurricane barked three times, each weaker than the last. He had begun barking at unreasonable moments, with no prompting.

  “And obviously it gets me closer,” Delaney said. “To know where the levers and buttons are.”

  “I don’t think they keep the levers and buttons in the housing pods,” Wes said. “I think you’ll probably find beds and sinks.”

  Hurricane barked again, but it came out like a wheeze.

  “Where are you rotating next?” Wes asked.

  “I actually don’t know.”

  “Your eyes are spiraling,” he said. “I don’t think you want to be there full-time. Those people are driving you mad.”

  “You know what it really was?” Delaney said. “It was the ecstasy of refusal. That just hit me. That’s what happened that day with Bananaskam, and now with all of this.”

  “The ecstasy of refusal,” Wes repeated. “Right. That’s it.”

  “And the embrace of the most radical refusal. That day in the cafeteria it was like an orgy of ending. No more bananas. No more papayas. The way they looked up the origins of fruit and then eliminated them from possibility. And now the end of travel, of cars, roads, planes.”

  “To be rid of something,” Wes said. He was crouched down, trying to make Hurricane more comfortable. “There’s a power there, too. This power to destroy. When we were kids, it was people. That constant erasure of people. Now it’s customs and practices, traditions, history. Or like your Thoughts Not Things work. That urge to wipe something off the earth. It’s like my zombie theory.”

  “It’s not like your zombie theory,” Delaney said.

  Wes’s zombie theory posited that in an increasingly crowded world, killing zombies was an acceptable way to express one’s hatred for the proliferation of the species. The popularity of zombie films and shows and games has everything to do with the feeling that there are only a few sane people left, and that those few have the right to end the suffering of all those caught between purgatorial semi-sentience and death.

  “To preside over the end of something, someone—it’s a kind of lust,” Wes said. “It’s like purging. You start with a room full of stuff, you finish with a clean white box. You hear the new slogan for Past-Perfect? The Past Can Be Perfected.”

  “The elimination of impurities,” Delaney said.

  “A killing of the unknown,” Wes said. “And I think it starts with Mae. She maintains her purity because she never goes anywhere or does anything. She’s never been disconnected. Outside of running the Every, she’s never actually done anything.”

  “When you do things, you risk doing them incorrectly.”

  “Because she fears doing anything wrong, she’s intellectually celibate. Never had an original idea.”

  Delaney sat with that for a moment, thinking of Mae’s sonogram. Her mind leapt to virgin births.

  “They say AuthentiFriend is ready,” Wes said.

  “To be released? An actual rollout?”

  “They’re planning to leak it in India. A lot of the coding’s been done there, so the Mumbai office started creating a Hindi version. I mean, all this has been happening for a month. They just told me. Why are you smiling like that?”

  “This is good,” she said. “I thought it would take longer. But the quicker this happens, the better. Don’t tell me you were attached to this? It was a fake app meant to embarrass the Every.”

  “Not attached, just disappointed in how fast it moved. This Holstein person is a force. Every week I get a huge update from her on the adjustments and improvements they’re making. There’s usually some language about how they want my input, but it’s like they’re yelling and waving from a speedboat while I’m standing onshore.”

  “So?”

  “It’s gone so far beyond what we started with.”

  “That’s good, right?” Delaney said.

  “But now it’s not a joke. It’s not a game or a dance app. They have real science in there now. Real sensors. Real AI. Actual scientists working on it. I actually think it works now—it can tell if someone you’re talking to is lying, is forthright, is comfortable, cares about you.”

  “This was the entire point, wasn’t it?”

  “I just thought of it as a gag,” Wes said. “Now it’s terrifying.”

  “It’s supposed to be terrifying!”

  “But it’s not supposed to work,” he said.

  They walked home, the wind at their backs. At the Shed, Delaney checked their mailbox and found one of Agarwal’s blue envelopes.

  Dear Delaney,

  I had to write because I just had a very enlightening lunch with a visiting academic from North Korea. She is a defector, of course, and she taught me much about the nature of information control. She lived under the world’s most restrictive information-flow structure, and she’s studied the system in China, too, and what she’s found is quite prosaic and quite terrifying.

  The prosaic part is that most people simply don’t have time to care or fight. That is, in a country like North Korea, the average person is barely getting by. They work perhaps sixty hours a week, and they cook and clean and take care of their children and try to find an hour here or there for recreation. In their spare time, which is scant, they consume highly censored television and what passes for the internet there.

  If a North Korean citizen had the will, they could presumably come into contact with information and truths from the outside world. But that would take an extraordinary and sustained effort, carrying with it considerable risk. And because discovering the truth about the world outside is not the number one priority—finding enough food and other foundational concerns are far more pressing and ever-central—few bother. It takes time, and money, and gumption, to even undertake the project of accessing prohibited information. So my friend estimated that less than 3 percent of the North Korean population even attempts it.

  China is freer but is not free. Again, it takes a great deal of will and effort to get beyond the information that the state wishes its citizens to have. So how does this impact your work at the Every? The Every continues to control the flow of information for most people. Most people live most of their online lives through the Every; the average user doesn’t ever need to leave the platform.

  Think of the power this situation gives them. Yes, we are still in a free society where anyone can write anything they wish. But how do people see these writings? If you spend most of your online life in Every platforms, you might see only that which they promote. You might be presented with a wide array of content, all of it approved by the Every, and in line with whatever ideology or business interests they have. This is not to say that a person in a democratic society could not access information that the Every is not endorsing.