But how many people will? How many people live in a state of aggressive truth-seeking? The answer is few. Remember when I tried to get your fellow students riled up about surveillance on campus? I had few takers. This makes your generation, and the ones before and after yours, a tasty morsel for autocrats and tyrants.

  The world is undergoing a movement toward authoritarianism, Delaney, and this is about order. People think the world is out of control. They want someone to stop the changes. This aligns perfectly with what the Every is doing: feeding the urge to control, to reduce nuance, to categorize, and to assign numbers to anything inherently complex. To simplify. To tell us how it will be. An authoritarian promises these things, too.

  I know people roll their eyes every time I mention Erich Fromm, but forgive me. Remember when he noted the young SS soldiers who felt liberated by Nazism? They wanted to be told what to do. They were free from freedom. The limitless choices of the world were suddenly made for them. Order was promised. The streets will be clean, the lawbreakers will be gone, your days will be predetermined, and the unknown will go away.

  In related news, I have cancer. Metastatic melanoma, which has a certain music to it, no? It’s Stage 4, but they are optimistic, so I am optimistic. Is it hypocritical of me if I choose not to think about it? Anyway, more news on that when I get it.

  Agarwal.

  Only Agarwal would write a three-page letter and mention her cancer as an afterthought. Delaney ached to write her back, to fly to her, but knew she couldn’t. Instead, she put in her own application for campus housing, and received, minutes later, a message from Joan: I have a bed for you. Delaney was aware by now that there were a thousand ways senior or semi-senior Everyones circumvented processes and leaped lines, and it was wholly unimportant to her how Joan had managed to slip Delaney into the newly added bed in Joan’s pod. On campus, pods with one occupant were converted to doubles. Doubles were converted to triples, triples became quads. It was one way to meet the demand before new buildings could go up.

  Syl was now something of a prophet, elevated to the Gang of 40 and essential to climate conferences around the world, all of which would henceforth be held virtually. Syl and Ramona Ortiz began streaming an advice program from campus called Where Not to Go and What Not to Do (WN2G+WN2D), during which citizens Everywhere and Nowhere asked questions about the environmental viability of leaving their homes.

  “My daughter plays volleyball. There’s a regional conference four hours away, and the only way to get there is on the interstate. Is it ethical to go?”

  The answer was no. The answer was almost always no. Greenhouse gases were inevitable, and every time we take a road, they explained, we support road-building and the larger travel-industrial complex. When Syl and Ramona could not be absolutely sure of the environmental impact, they focused on Impact Anxiety, which was far more effective as a deterrent. Their refrain, which became a popular rallying cry around saving the planet by not leaving home, was, Do you really want to risk it?

  The pod contract Delaney signed was much like her onboarding document—a manic hybrid of legalese and manifesto, self-help and willful capitalization. The Pods are experiments in Best-Practice Habitation. Whether you’re an Optimizer or a Communitarian, EveryoneIn hausing plans are the pinnacle of ease and Togetherment. There were pictures of sunrises seen from fluffy white beds. As with any Scientific Experiment, controls are key. The contract had a soundtrack, which Delaney recognized as early One Direction. Your total commitment to this Experiment is necessary for it to succeed in yielding Comfort, Mindfulness, and Actionable Data. There were 403 questions about Delaney’s habits, allergies, eating and sleeping schedules, entertainment preferences, noise tolerance, feelings about germs, and taste in color palette and shower temperature. Your pod is yours to modify within Certain Parameters. You are an individual of Infinite Creativity, so make it yours! Speaking of Creativity, recent evidence points to 10 Hours as ideal for idea-generation, so to that end each Sleeping Tube is equipped with white noise and pink noise, as well as UV lights and Natural Light (when possible), and Ylang Ylang diffusers. Delaney closed her eyes. The willful capitalization saddened her, dragged her soul downward. She opened her eyes and read on. Please see attachment for list of prohibited items and materials. Outside food, medicines and Hygienic products are unallowed without an Exemption. To request an Exemption please contact your Pod Coordinator. Attendance at Thursday Night Ultra-Exuberant Dance (THUD) is not mandatory but is encouraged. Get your bad Self down! About pets: We love Pets! However …

  There were more pages, 77 more pages, and because she could not sign the contract if the eye trackers found she’d skipped a word, Delaney had to read them all.

  She arrived on a Tuesday with two suitcases. At the front gate, her possessions were inspected by Rowena in her glass pyramid, and duly edited. Rowena kept Delaney’s disposable razors, her shampoo and conditioner—anything containing or contained by plastic—and pointed her to the Havel where she’d live. (All the dorms were named after dissidents, freedom fighters, revolutionaries.) “The Vaclav Havel is between the John Brown and the Cesar Chavez. If you get to Michael Collins,” Rowena said, “you’ve gone too far.”

  Online, Delaney had seen countless pictures and video of EveryoneIn hausing—their spelling—but in person her new pod was both smaller, much smaller, and far more full of riveting detail, at once elegant and whimsical, equal parts Zaha Hadid and Peter Pan. There were no right angles and no shape was repeated. Every cabinet door was made of bamboo and was a different, off-kilter parallelogram or trapezoid. The refrigerator was enormous and its glass door displayed its bright contents in highly organized fashion. Packaging did not exist. Snacks were available in righteous silos on the quartz countertop. Turmeric chickpeas, mushroom jerky, cauliflower crackers, ginger popcorn—everything was stored in airtight glass and tin containers. In the bathroom, toothpaste and soap were available in large pump-activated dispensers. The pod was a corner unit, with double-paned floor-to-ceiling windows, which looked out onto the Daisy, the Bay, two of three nearby bridges, and the jagged white mountain range of downtown San Francisco.

  “You’re here already,” a voice announced. A series of squeaks followed. She turned to find a man in bright pink sneakers.

  “Soren,” he said, placing his palm on his chest and bowing slightly. Tall, balding, with rounded shoulders and no discernible chin, he looked and sounded like an inflatable man. He wore a snug but ill-fitting bodysuit that bunched around his ample stomach and inward-facing knees—as if he’d hastily put on a larger man’s wetsuit. Over this, covering his thighs like a mini-skirt, was a kilt.

  “You were supposed to move in tomorrow, right? What day is it? HereMe?” He stepped toward the kitchen, and his shoes squeaked with every step.

  “Tuesday,” Delaney said.

  “Today is Tuesday,” HereMe said.

  Delaney had noticed this among many Everyones. They were never disconnected, but their relationship to the calendar was tenuous. No one seemed to know what day of the week it was, and had only the vaguest sense of where they were in any given month.

  “Have you found your bed?” Soren asked. “They just built it.” He crossed his arms, and Delaney noted a string of tattooed words on each forearm. IF YOU DO IT, OWN IT, one line said. This one was oriented to be read by whomever Soren was facing. The other line was, to her eye, upside-down—to be read by Soren himself. It said the same thing: IF YOU DO IT, OWN IT.

  “That’s me there,” he said, and pointed to a lower bunk, really a long plywood tube fronted by a round wooden door. It looked like the home of a giant gopher. “I’m a light sleeper so I need the door. Here’s yours,” he said, and brought her around to an entry point she hadn’t noticed. Like his tube, it was about eight feet long and three feet high. But hers was situated against the floor-to-ceiling window.

  “See if you fit,” he said, and Delaney inchwormed into the box. She found it both stifling and vertigo-inducing; she imagined it would be like sleeping on a car dashboard, facing the windshield, four stories up.

  “It’s wonderful,” she said.

  “Glad you like it,” Soren said. “Sorry you have a window.”

  “Does it get bright?” she asked.

  “There should be a curtain,” he said, “at the end there?”

  She found the curtain and pulled it closed. The suffocating feeling was now complete. She was in a coffin, against a window, four stories up.

  “I love it,” Delaney said, and crawled out as quickly as she could.

  “All the sleep monitors are already in there,” he said. “What do you average?”

  “Seven hours?” she guessed, and he blanched at her vagueness. “But I haven’t checked my updated average today,” she said, correcting herself. “Yesterday it was 7.81.”

  “I’m at 7.94,” he said. “So I guess we both have work to do. The company’s been really devoted to making sure people are sleeping more—at least ten hours. That’s the benchmark for max creativity. Did you smell the ylang ylang in there? It’s a neuromodulator, much better than lavender. It lowers your heart-rate and blood pressure.”

  “Right, right,” Delaney said. “Ylang ylang. So important.”

  “I’ve gotten used to it,” Soren said. “Ideally your brain starts associating ylang ylang with sleep, so when you smell it, your body will relax. What else? Oh. They say no screentime two hours before bedtime, but no one really obeys that one. The fridge, though, will lock at ten. Drinking and snacking before sleep has been pretty well proven to inhibit true rest. For me that’s been a godsend. I can’t be around unlimited options. Speaking of which, can I get you anything?”

  “I’m just a little thirsty,” Delaney said, and looked for a glass.

  “No glasses here,” Soren said. “But the sink has a fountain.”

  Delaney discovered the fountain, took a drink and looked for a paper towel. She didn’t bother to ask, and just wiped her mouth with the cuff of her shirt.

  “Thank you,” Delaney said.

  “It’s best to just eliminate the bad choices, right? That’s why I can’t deal with the city,” he said, and Delaney smiled gamely. “I’m an addict. Booze, pills, porn. This place saved me. I know this will seem Spartan at first,” he said, glancing around the room. “Maybe it is. But you can get anything you need here. You just can’t get everything you want. Or anything you think you want. Are you a drinker?”

  “Not so much,” Delaney said.

  His eyes closed in relief. “You’re free to do anything you usually do along those lines,” he said. “But obviously I don’t drink. Joan and Francis don’t drink here in the pod. I didn’t tell them not to, but anyway, they don’t. And you can’t get pills. They probably told you that much, if it wasn’t obvious.”

  “Right,” Delaney said, and then thought, Francis? Not that Francis, dear god.

  “My last vice was porn,” Soren said, and Delaney wondered how that could possibly be kept from him, given its online ubiquity.

  “I made sure my screens are fingerprint-activated,” he said, and she could deduce the rest. His prints were linked to filters and blockers. Wherever he signed on, the filters kicked in and porn was blocked.

  “I actually rigged it so HR knows if I’ve been porning. It just helped to have some barriers,” he said, and downed the rest of his water in one swallow. “I wasn’t so bad off. I could control myself as long as it wasn’t so easy to get. So … exercise? Are you a jogger?”

  He swept his eyes over her and then, realizing his offense, pretended to be examining the entirety of the kitchen. “Water polo? Crew?” he asked. He’d noticed her shoulders.

  “I jog some,” she said. “I used to do some rock-climbing.”

  “Idaho, right? And then you were living in the city?” He said the words in the city with palpable suspicion. “Did I hear you lived in a trog place? What was that like?”

  “It was terrible,” Delaney said. “Chaos.”

  “I can imagine,” he said. “My college dorms were based on EveryoneIn designs, so I didn’t have to adapt much once I got here. How often were you shopping for food and stuff?”

  “Almost daily,” she said, and made an exhausted face.

  Soren whistled. “I haven’t been off-island in maybe two years. I don’t know if I could survive.” His half-smile implied he meant to be kidding, but wasn’t sure if he was kidding.

  “I’m sorry,” Delaney said. “I forgot to ask what you do here.”

  Soren’s head tilted involuntarily. “You haven’t presearched the people you’re living with?” He seemed more amused than accusatory.

  “Sorry,” she said. “It’s been moving so fast—”

  “No, no,” he said. “It’s fine. It’s just interesting. New. It’s been a while since I had to answer that question. What do I do here? Well, usually people know me initially as the smart-stop-sign guy.”

  “You invented the smart stop sign?” Delaney asked.

  Soren laughed and lowered his head. “Guilty.”

  A smart stop sign had been installed on Delaney’s rural dead-end street in Idaho and had driven her parents to distraction. There was no traffic on her street, absolutely no need for a stop sign, so they rolled through it, as did everyone else. But when a smart stop sign was installed, it forced her parents and neighbors to make a full and maddening stop every time they went to town or returned, six times a day, even though no other vehicle, ever, was competing for primacy of the intersection. After accumulating a thousand dollars in tickets the first month, Delaney’s father had destroyed the stop sign in the dead of night, but it had been promptly replaced; the city had become enamored with the revenue it generated.

  “My dad wanted to kill you,” Delaney said. “I wanted to kill you. You probably got a million death threats.”

  Soren lifted his head, suddenly grave. “I don’t think you meant to say those things, Delaney.” His voice was rehearsed, his eyes imploring. He glanced at his oval and Delaney understood. Her sentences would look sick once transcribed.

  “Of course not,” she said, her mind shopping for the right amendment to avoid a ding—a significant one, she expected, given the implication of murder. “I was kidding,” she said, trying to sound as jocular as possible.

  “I understand,” he said, his eyes smiling approvingly. “Yes, people were upset at first. But the world has gotten used to them, and they’ve saved lives. Like seatbelts. I actually think they just get people used to respecting laws, even small ones. That’s what Kant Kan was about from the start—making the enforcement of the law objective and universal, not subjective and occasional.”

  Delaney searched her mind. Kant Kan? She hoped Soren wouldn’t mention the categorical imperative.

  “People didn’t want to think about the categorical imperative,” he said. “So Kant Kan became KisKis—Keep it Simple.”

  Ah, Delaney thought. She’d heard about that one.

  “I know KisKis,” she said. “You did the automatic tickets for speeding, too? I got a few of those.” Tickets were issued automatically, and fines deducted instantly from the drivers’ bank accounts.

  “That one saved 20,000 lives last year,” he said. “I know it sounds so basic, but why make laws if we don’t have an organized way to enforce them? And it frees cops to do more interesting work.”

  “Makes sense,” Delaney said.

  “You want something else to drink?” Soren opened the fridge, revealing two rows of drink-globes, piled and ordered like bright marbles.

  “Anything,” she said, and he tossed her a pink one.

  “KisKis is such a non-confrontational idea,” he went on. “When rules aren’t universally observed, we have disorder and people die.”

  “So you’re still with KisKis?” she asked.

  “Not really. I moved over to Sunlight last year. It used to be called Brighten the Corners. Then it merged with Reach.”

  “Reach was the program where they bring the internet to unmet people?” Delaney asked. Immediately she regretted it. The program had been controversial and her question sounded judgmental.

  “I wasn’t part of the South Sentinel Island group,” he said, his mouth drawn tight. “Those folks are gone and that program was discontinued.” Delaney remembered now. They’d sent a team to a remote island in the Indian Ocean, where they’d been quickly killed by the locals, an unmet tribe, who evidently didn’t want wifi.

  “Right, right,” Delaney said, and Soren regained his smile.

  “Basically we find places in cities and countries that aren’t seen, and we see them. We set up cameras and sat-views of the rural and out of-the-way places where otherwise bad stuff can happen.”

  “So, cameras in national parks, things like that,” she said.

  “Yup.”

  “Wonderful,” Delaney said. It was you, she thought.

  “We set up a nice array at Playa 36,” he said. “Which is another good thing that came from out of your, you know, field trip. Now people can see the elephant seals without going there.”

  “What a cool idea,” Delaney said, her organs burning.

  “Every year we get closer to 100 percent saturation,” he said, and hopped up to sit on the counter, where his fleshy thighs spread like an oil spill. “And my hope—and this was Stenton’s thinking, too—is that the moment we have cams seeing every inch of the globe, two things happen: travel is unnecessary, and crime ends. The travel part is easy. Instead of going to Playa 36, just call up the cams we have there. Crime, though—that’ll be paradigm-shifting. It won’t be possible.”

  “Or any perpetrator is easily caught,” Delaney noted.

  “Right,” he said. Soren had picked up an apple and was inspecting it for the ideal place to bite. “But I think, within a generation, crime won’t be thought of anymore. There will be no point in attempting it. That’s why that moment of global cam saturation matters so much. I call that day final crime.” He plunged into his apple with a prolonged crack.