“You hear about the art students?” he asked.

  She had. A growing number of undergraduate and graduate art students were lobbying for the app to be given equal or greater power than the subjective assessments and grades traditionally given by their professors. Fairness and Objectivity in Beauty, these students insisted in a fast-moving meme, quickly nicknamed FOB. Humans are error-prone knots of biases, they insisted, and should not be involved in determining what was beautiful or good.

  “That British talent show is moving to an algorithm,” Wes noted.

  “No one wants to be judged by a human. Too painful,” Delaney said. Baseball umpires had been replaced years ago, given computers were better at calling balls and strikes. Then diving judges, gymnastic judges, figure skating. No one resisted. The subjective was being hunted to oblivion.

  “Let’s head out,” Wes said, and they began weaving through the crowd, toward the exit.

  “How’s Pia?” Delaney asked. They passed a table offering fake fur coats, ziplock baggies, wet-wipes and eggs.

  Wes’s face smoldered. “So you know.”

  “Know what?”

  “Why did you ask about her right after I brought up Hermosa?”

  “No reason. Jesus. I just asked.”

  Wes squinted at Delaney. He’d never done that before, a sort of truth-assessing. Satisfied, he went on.

  “You know they’re testing a version of Hermosa for human beauty. You heard of FaceIt?”

  Delaney had not.

  “You will. It uses the same tech, same principles, same scale. And Pia’s rating wasn’t what she expected. Don’t smirk. I know you never liked her, but she’s devastated.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t smirk.” She reached out to him, took his hand in hers. He examined the cluster of fingers as one would a tangle of snakes. She let go.

  “I didn’t create the app,” she said. “I mentioned it to one guy.”

  “I know. Alessandro. I know Alo pretty well now. One day he said it’s not supposed to be used to judge the physical beauty of living people, but the next week he introduced FaceIt.” Wes looked up at the white sky. “Pia got a 628.” His voice broke on the 8. He really believed this number. Delaney wished she had another friend, another Wes, the previous Wes. She and this proto-Wes would have a good laugh about all this.

  “Wes, c’mon. You and Pia can’t take it seriously. It was a joke.”

  “Of course she takes it seriously!” he said. “The science is actually good. Alessandro incorporated every beauty standard, every micro-measurement of symmetry and proportion. And Pia bought the deluxe package, where every deviation from the ideal is explained. It’s tough, Delaney. Most of it is stuff she can’t change. Did you know her eyes are laterally uneven? And too close together? That her breasts are considered conical and the tissue not dense enough?”

  “Wes. Listen to yourself. How can you buy into this?”

  “Del, how can you not? It’s like not believing in science. I’m an engineer. This is science.”

  “But it’s not science!” Delaney said. “Everything isn’t science! Fucking hell, Wes. Beauty’s the most subjective thing we have.”

  Wes stopped at a stall selling cassette players and turntables. Nothing fucking connected or connectible read a sign above. An 8-track player was asking $2,000, a Discman twice that. Next to it, a box of Krispy Kreme donuts sat in a Lucite box. Likely still edible, read a sticker. It was going for $180.

  “Anyway,” he said, “once the number’s in your head, there’s no erasing it. I did yours, too, from a photo.”

  “Don’t tell me.”

  “722.”

  “Fuck, Wes, what is happening to you?” Delaney knew this number would never leave her. “Why would you tell me that?”

  “You said it was meaningless, so why do you care?”

  Delaney’s mind cycled. She was happy hers was higher than Pia’s, then ashamed that she cared—that she believed for a moment that a machine could judge her beauty or anyone else’s. Then happy again hers was higher than Pia’s.

  “Anyway, she’s getting surgery,” Wes said. “Her nose is too wide, so that’s the easy part. The surgeon says he can get her into the 700s.”

  They stopped at the last booth, called ONLY STRAWS. True to its word, it only sold straws, most of them plastic, some of them decades old. There were models for the budget-minded and the extravagant.

  Delaney took Wes’s elbow. “Wes, you two have lost your minds. Did you tell her she’s beautiful?”

  “I do! I have! Every day. You know this. But these are words, and they’re just mine. FaceIt is consensus. It’s definitive. She won’t be happy till she’s in the 800s. At least. It’s a long road.”

  Delaney knew that if Pia was going through this, millions, tens of millions, of others were, too. She had to stop it, stop everything. Or just quit, flee, leave this city, leave all cities, hide in the mountains, never connect again. She looked into Wes’s eyes and saw, for the first time, that they were trembling.

  “How are the moms?” she asked.

  “Fine. Gwen’s retiring. Forced into it, actually,” Wes said. “There were only a few trogs left in her field anyway. She and Ursula might move to Liberia.” As the last trog nation, Liberia provided steep tax benefits for skilled tech refugees willing to emigrate.

  “And Hurricane?”

  “He’s holding on. He just stares out the window,” Wes said. “He has a place, just inside the front door, where he sits in the sun and looks outside. I don’t know if he’s content or waiting to die or what.”

  “Sorry you couldn’t keep him on campus.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Wes said, meaning he no longer blamed her. “It’s been a relief not to have to watch you tie your shoes. For Hurricane, too. It’s been a real weight off him.”

  They planned to connect again in a month, same place. Wes crossed the street before they reached the post office. He didn’t want to take any chances—a government building was a government building, and the likelihood of tracking was high. They waved a quick goodbye. Delaney lowered her sunhat and went inside.

  Instantly she spotted the cams; there were no federal buildings without them. But these were pointed in useless directions—at the acoustic tile ceilings, into a dim corner. Someone had taken pains to make them ineffective without disconnecting them. Delaney waited in line behind an elderly woman holding a box she’d packed and addressed. There was one young and bearded clerk behind the counter, safe behind what appeared to be bulletproof glass.

  The threats against the USPS had been growing for years, fueled by Mae Holland herself, who declared open war on paper mail in the name of safety and decency. “This is the last safe haven for terrorists and white supremacists,” she declared. Since the beginning, the Every had done the very minimum to thwart the efforts of the far right, and yet Mae found in this segment a useful bogeyman. Digital media could be scanned and hate discovered, she noted. But paper mail was inherently opaque, and thus the perfect vessel for its dissemination. There was no evidence of terrorism being conduced via the USPS, but enough people took the bait to make the agency the target of a wide range of cranks and counterterrorists.

  When Mae proposed the abolition of the post office, it received widespread support. The agency was perpetually broke, used by an ever-shrinking clientele. When historians pointed out the Founding Fathers’ repeated references to a federal post as key to a healthy democracy, she pulled back and focused on something more palatable and achievable—the reading of the mail en route. The Every proposed the rolling out of new paper and envelopes—not unlike the European air mail formats—that could be machine-read during normal processing. The Every even offered to pay for all necessary software, machinery and cloud storage of the contents.

  “No humans will be reading your mail,” Mae assured the public. “But if the machine-readers are triggered by certain keywords, then that mail will go through a second-level, human, scrutiny.”

  The program was piloted in Kansas, with the hearty support of Governor Pompeo, who saw the processing as a useful bulwark against domestic terrorism. The rollout’s results were mixed. Of some 320 million pieces of mail processed in Kansas in the first eight months, fully 12 million were flagged for human scrutiny. There was not nearly enough staff to do this, of course. One of Pompeo’s advisors was outed for pricing offshore processing; there was a Malaysian contractor who had claimed his employees could read and assess 500,000 pieces of mail a week. But having U.S. mail sent to Malaysia for examination seemed burdensome and possibly, said some, unethical.

  “This is a happy day for domestic extremists,” Pompeo said when the program was abandoned. “And a sad day for the safety of our republic.” The defeat wounded him, and was reportedly an ever-present thorn in the side of Mae Holland.

  Delaney rented her post office box without incident and was given a small silver key. On her way out, she tried the lock. The tiny door of her box opened with a happy squeak, and inside her little compartment she found a pink slip of paper. It was bulk mail, metered; someone had paid to have copies slipped into every box.

  “You are COMPLICIT,” it read in bold letters. “You are GUILTY. What are you HIDING? What FILTH and TERROR are you SENDING through THIS INFERNAL SERVICE? The … Postmaster Educates Demented Oppressors …”

  The missive went on for a while, full of biblical recrimination and conspiracy gibberish, but was unsigned. She folded the flyer and stuffed it into her back pocket.

  As she was locking the box, a clerk on the other side slipped in another pre-paid circular. In a sober font and without all-caps, it began, “Dear Friend of the USPS, if I am elected, I will fight to maintain this crucial pillar of democracy. We all have the rights to privacy in our communications, digital or analog ….”

  She flipped it over. Tom Goleta for President.

  XXIX.

  TOM GOLETA WAS POPULAR among the Supples. His online appearances were increasing in frequency and ferocity as the day of his visit to the Every campus drew closer. The Supples watched his speeches together and afterward debated the efficacy of each new broadside.

  “Monopoly,” he said during one, staring into the camera, his flawless forehead pinched in consternation. He’d mastered the thirty-second speech, clearly and sometimes even lyrically written, delivered in shirtsleeves, his forearms flexing strategically. “It’s as un-American as communism, as treason, as mass incarceration. Every one of these things are affronts to liberty. Monopolies drive out the small business-person. They kill the Mom and Pop store with cruel efficiency and no remorse.”

  Delaney pictured her parents’ grocery store. They let her run free there. She remembered the milk-spill smell of the storeroom, the impossible colors of the bell peppers and mandarin oranges. She remembered climbing the bags of coffee in the basement, she remembered her parents putting her in charge of giving Smarties to any child who wanted one. The store was disorganized, often messy; the signage was loopy and the prices only occasionally profit-making. Everything about the store was inefficient, but the customers all loved it anyway—until FolkFoods did everything her parents had done better, quicker, and cheaper.

  “If we agree that the United States is a country built on free enterprise,” Goleta continued, “then we have to agree that monopolies are the enemy of free enterprise.”

  The camera pulled back, revealing that Goleta was indeed standing on a Main Street, once adorable, now a graveyard of boarded-up stores. “The Every killed this Main Street, just as it killed a thousand more. And why? Because we allowed a monopoly to grow like an invasive weed and kill every other living thing.”

  Now the camera pulled closer again.

  “A monopoly is an autocracy in business clothes. And the Every is a monopoly. I’m Tom Goleta, and I’m running for small business. For free enterprise. For freedom. For president.”

  “I don’t understand,” Joan said. “I thought he was a Democrat. Since when do Democrats denounce Communists?”

  “I think it’s brilliant,” Ro said.

  Delaney agreed. Somehow Goleta had reclaimed the words free enterprise, which had been more or less trademarked by conservatives since the 1960s.

  “Who cares about monopolies when we’re facing the death of the planet?” Berit said. “This is an argument from a different century. It’s untethered capitalism that’ll end our species. Isn’t that obvious?”

  “But all this is so unnecessary,” Joan said.

  “What is?” Gemma said.

  “Campaigns in general,” Joan said. “Hundreds of billions of dollars are wasted, when the outcome is almost entirely pre-determined by party affiliation. Mandatory voting was a half-measure.”

  “She wants AYS to get into politics,” Berit explained to Delaney. She was now wearing sunglasses with star-shaped lenses. Finding them unacceptable, she dropped them out the window. “You register your party, you vote that way always. If you stray, you get an Are You Sure?”

  “Or a visit from PrefCom,” Ro said.

  “Why not?” Berit said. “Political affiliation is already part of your preference profile. Why not have it like an auto-pay?”

  “Auto-vote,” Delaney said.

  “Right. It would make democracy far saner,” Berit said.

  “You automatically vote your party line, up and down,” Joan said. “Whoever has more voters registered, wins. You know where you stand at all times.”

  “What about undecideds? Independents?” Ro asked.

  “Euthanize them,” Joan laughed. “Seriously, this country loses far too much productivity to these chaotic elections, all this bullshit. Two years for every presidential campaign. It drives us all mad.”

  “When’s Goleta coming again?” Berit asked.

  “Friday,” Joan said. “I got us good seats.”

  It was hard to know, though, who had thought of the idea first. Goleta announced that he would be visiting the Every campus, and he and his campaign presented it as if he had made the request in the form of a demand, with the Every cowed by his power to acquiesce. A counter-narrative emerged in the days leading up to the visit, which posited that the Every had made the first overture, and was seeking to make friends with Goleta, to sway or seduce or bribe him (in the perfectly legal form of a donation), as they had thousands of elected and non-elected leaders for years, and with universally positive outcomes.

  In any case Delaney was baffled. Goleta was formidable, and very quick on his feet, and the last thing he would do in his maverick-styled campaign would be to come to the Every campus without a plan and a message. Anything but a “Tear-down-this-wall” sort of speech would be anathema to his campaign, which put much weight on his crusade against monopolies, algocracies, and everything associated with the Every. But the Every had never hosted such a speech, and they were brilliant at eliminating risk, especially on campus. Inviting an assassin into their home was uncharacteristic and seemed unwise.

  “I’m trying to parse this,” Berit said.

  Goleta traveled in a solar-powered bus, and from the AYS tower, they were able to see it pause briefly at the gate before being guided in. The itinerary known to Everyone was to include first a brief tour, live-streamed but otherwise intimate and without media, and then, at noon, a speech on the Every lawn, where all staff were invited, and selected local officials would be present. In the morning, a few hundred white chairs had been set onto the kelly-green lawn, a podium facing them all. From a distance it all seemed as innocuous as a small-town wedding.

  “It’s a campaign. What’s the question?” Ro said. She was testing a kind of tea made from kelp. After a sip, she made a face and set her cup aside.

  “I can’t understand what’s in it for the Every,” Berit said. “We’ve never hosted a candidate. There’s no upside. We give money to everyone, play every side. So why this now? Why pick this one person?”

  “Has Mae said anything about it?” Helen asked.

  “Nothing beyond this-is-happening-stay-tuned,” Joan said. “Anyway, the speech isn’t for 90 minutes. Let’s try to accomplish something before that.”

  For half that time, they did. Then the dings began.

  “Oh Jesus,” Helen said.

  Delaney looked at the time. It was just after 11:30 a.m. and she’d gotten dozens of notices via audio and screen. She rushed to the window to see Goleta’s truck leaving.

  “I don’t understand,” Ro said.

  Over the next hour, via hundreds of video clips and eyewitness accounts, they pieced it together. Goleta had arrived at 10:44, twenty-four minutes late—somewhat significant, given the punctuality that reigned on campus. Greeted by ten of the lesser-known members of the Gang of 40, Goleta and his entourage were led through the new edible garden by three of its caretakers, two men and a woman, and stopped briefly at a dragonfruit plant, touching its leaves and saying encouraging and innocuous things. Altogether, between the camera crews, Everyones and Goleta’s own staff, there were about sixteen people gathered. But Goleta seemed increasingly distracted.

  “He’d never seen all the dicks,” Helen said.

  Things began to get complicated. Witness messages were gentle at first. “Check out Goleta checking out Farmers Yuri and Dion.” “Goleta sees some other organics he’d like to pluck.” These comments were not seen by many and were unknown to the candidate’s staff. The tour continued, around the rainwater pool and then through the expanded Cathedral of Wellness, and there, amid its glass and ferns and ceilings re-creating Miwok village life in mosaic, all of Goleta’s political dreams died.

  Footage of his eight minutes in the gym, surrounded by forty-seven men and women (mostly men; the internet counted) dressed in standard Every shape-hugging clothing, was tragic.

  “Poor man,” Berit said. “His eyes like waterbugs.” She popped a pink-lemonade globe into her mouth and crushed.