“I have to admit,” Delaney said, “I had a feeling that Ol Factory might be acquired sooner or later, so I’ve had time to think about coming here. Not that I would presume to be hired. But I have had time to ponder it, and savor the prospect.”

  Delaney’s purpose in joining the Every was to kill it. She’d waited years for the chance to work at the company, to enter the system with the intent of destroying it. Her college paper had been the beginning of her on-again, off-again subterfuge. Even then she knew she’d need to appear to them an ally, a confrere they could welcome inside the gates. Once inside, Delaney planned to examine the machine, test for weaknesses, and blow the place up. She would Snowden it, Manning it. She would feel it out and Felt it. She did not care if she did it in the civilized, covert, information-dump sort of way her predecessors practiced, or through a more frontal assault. She intended to harm no one, never to graze a physical hair on a physical head, but somehow she would end the Every, finish its malignant reign on earth.

  Dan dismounted his llama and checked his oval again. He began to jog in place, picking up the pace until he was a blurry mess of knees and fists. This went on for two minutes, no more, at which point a celebratory sound came from his oval, and he stopped.

  “Sorry,” he said to Delaney, panting. “It’s a promise I made to my wife. It’s why I went vegan, and why I have to do cardio when the oval says it’s optimal. She died last year.”

  “Oh God. I’m so sorry,” Delaney said.

  “Have you gotten an MRI recently?” Dan asked her.

  She hadn’t. Dan had pulled up his sleeve, revealing his phone, attached to his forearm, a popular new style. He scrolled through what seemed to be thousands of videos of the same woman in a home with blond floors, in a hammock on a verdant slope, kneeling in a rose garden. She looked far too young to be gone.

  “This is Adira,” he said, as the thumbnails sped by. He seemed to be trying to decide which one to show Delaney, a person whom he had just met. “She was already Stage 4 when they found the tumor,” he said, and looked up at the Bay Bridge, at a tiny car catching the light as it sped silently westward. “Anyway. She made me promise I’d stay ahead of things, health-wise. I urge you to do so, too.”

  “I will,” Delaney said, utterly blindsided. Dan, she was certain, actually cared about her and her health, and this felt like a cruel trick.

  He continued scrolling. Delaney prayed he would not choose a video, that he would not ask her to watch it. But he did.

  “She was a big runner,” he said, and Adira came alive on the screen. She had just finished a race, and was standing with her arms folded over her head, pacing, smiling, with the number 544 pinned to her tanktop. Delaney hoped she wouldn’t have to hear Adira’s voice.

  “Sorry,” Dan said, and turned up the volume.

  “Did I just do that?” Adira asked, heaving, smiling.

  “You did,” an offscreen voice said. It was Dan’s. He sounded so proud. “You did it, my sweet,” and the footage ended.

  Dan’s finger tapped the screen and scrolled again, looking for more moments in Adira’s life to show. He seemed to have everything there, all of Adira, in the phone strapped to his arm, and Delaney stood next to him, watching him search and search for more.

  III.

  “I CAN’T DO IT,” Delaney said.

  “Why?” Wes said. “Because his wife died?”

  “Yes. Among other things.”

  “Did he ask if you rowed crew?”

  People did this often. It was something about her height, her shoulders. People asked about crew, volleyball, sometimes basketball. She was at least four inches taller than Wes, a fact that didn’t seem to bother him, or even cross his mind. He’d never mentioned it.

  “No,” Delaney said. “It’s just that he was normal. A normal person. I didn’t see that coming.”

  “We talked about that eventuality. That you might like people there,” Wes said. “Are you dressed?”

  Wes Makazian stood at the door, wiry and angular and bowlegged, and with his dust-colored hair—really a tumbleweed—he brought to mind a nineteenth-century cattle rustler. His eyes were small and bright, his mouth and teeth comically oversized; when he smiled, he looked like a small but happy whale.

  “See me?” he said. “I’m dressed.”

  In life generally, Wes preferred not to wear long pants, or shoes, and spent most days—weeks—in drawstring shorts celebrating the Utah Jazz, a team for which he had no allegiance. He’d found a T-shirt he liked, too, bearing the face of Olof Palme, assassinated leader of Sweden, and because the dead man’s face obscured Wes’s toddler-tummy, he bought eight of them, and was rarely seen in anything else.

  “Is it cold out?” Delaney asked.

  “Is it cold out,” Wes repeated. He had a hoodie on under his Palme shirt. Wes, and Olof, turned to the dog. “She lives by Ocean Beach and she asked if it’s cold out.”

  Hurricane, Wes’s middle-aged dog, looked up at Delaney, his eyes pleading. Delaney could get ready in minutes, but Wes and Hurricane were never not ready. Delaney grabbed a sweater and pushed her head through.

  “Please don’t put on the sneakers,” Wes said.

  Watching her lace up her shoes filled Wes, and even more so Hurricane, with spiraling woe. As she began, Wes turned away and Hurricane danced in circles, his claws clicking like tap shoes on the whitewashed floors.

  “What about sandals?” he asked. “Or velcro?”

  Delaney skipped the double knot she usually applied to each shoe.

  “Happy?” she asked.

  They pulled the door closed and passed the window of the main house. Wes’s mother, Gwen, was in the kitchen, doing someone’s taxes. She didn’t look up.

  Wes and Delaney lived by the Pacific in a tiny backyard unit they called the Sea Shed. The Bay Area had become a comically unaffordable place, with landlords throwing ludicrous rent numbers into the air, each ask a call almost always answered by new and naive money. But here and there, vestiges of the old San Francisco could still be found—odd attic units, converted garages, windswept cottages in the backyards of aging hippies refusing to gouge young tenants. Delaney had found such a place deep in the Outer Sunset. Near the Doelger Fish Co and smelling profoundly of it, the cottage came complete with furniture, a washer-dryer, and a thirty-six-year-old man named Wes. The main house was owned by Wes’s mother and her wife Ursula. “I live with my moms,” he told her before she moved in—a line she’d heard him deliver a hundred times since.

  As the driveway met the street, Gwen hailed them from the front door. “Lemonade, please,” she yelled. A homemade lemonade vendor had recently set up near the beach. He would be chased out by health officials soon enough, but until then the moms always asked Wes to bring some back. Gwen waved to Delaney.

  “Don’t,” Wes said.

  “Hi Gwen!” Delaney said.

  “Keep walking,” he said. “We’ll be here for an hour. Hi Mom!”

  Delaney got along brilliantly with Gwen and Ursula, but they didn’t know what to make of her. They were awake to unseen narratives, so they were disinclined to believe her relationship with Wes was chaste. They nodded gamely when told she and Wes were only friends, but they believed something else. They trusted few people and fewer systems. That’s why they lived in a trog house, and why Gwen saw her work as a tax accountant as a form of social protest; her clients all paid their fair share.

  Rose, the mail carrier, appeared. Delaney said hello and moved on; she knew Rose and Gwen would forget entirely about the mail and talk about their gardens. This, this needless chatting while on duty, was the kind of thing—there were so many things—that drove anti-trogs over the edge. The inefficiency, the opacity, the waste. Nothing was as wasteful and nonsensical to them as the post office. All that paper. All that money lost, so many tens of thousands of unnecessary jobs, trucks, planes, dead trees, carbon. After she killed the use of cash currency, and all paper and paper products (she’d bought a dozen paper mills so far, just to shut them down), it was Mae Holland’s mission to end the post office, the sacred cow of all things trog.

  Trog was a term with subjective connotations. Originally considered a slur against tech skeptics, those same skeptics reclaimed the word and wore it proudly, and soon it was applied by all sides to anything resistant to tech takeover. The Sea Shed contained no smart devices; nothing was permanently (or easily) connected to the internet. They could choose to get online via satellite but only with a maniacal attention to security and anonymity. Such living had become exceedingly rare and far more expensive. Insurance rates for trog homes were always higher, and the fight to outlaw trog housing altogether was entering its second decade. Citing a litany of dangers, Every lobbyists had successfully made it illegal to house children in trog homes; the law was soon expected to encompass all people and all dwellings. The neighbors, most of them anyway, were suspicious—a frame of mind supported by the Every. The company had acquired a series of apps where neighbors could share gossip and fear, and the apps’ algorithms elevated all posts that questioned just what might be going on in these unconnected homes. In most cities, there were neighborhoods holding out, though; San Francisco’s was called TrogTown, and the Every made sure it was perceived as a den of filth, crime and bad plumbing.

  Delaney and Wes were on 41st Avenue now, the road bending down toward the sea. Hurricane was straining against his leash.

  “I don’t know what I was thinking. I’m not a spy,” Delaney said. “I have no training for this kind of thing.”

  “Training?” Wes said. “What training would prepare you?”

  Wes was that rare but not unprecedented thing, a talented coder who lived off the grid—a tech trog. And because he had separated himself socially for much of his life, his worldview had remained that of a high-minded teenager: bad was bad, good was good, rebellion inherently noble. It took Delaney seven months before she trusted Wes enough to tell him of her plans, but he immediately understood and urged her on.

  “I can’t do it,” Delaney said. “Thought I could, but I can’t.”

  Wes stopped. Hurricane pulled more determinedly against his tether. He was seven in human years, his muzzle showing gray, but he was a runner, always had been, and tearing across the hard wet sand near the ocean was his joy. He was a mutt, but Wes—and anyone who saw him run—was certain he had greyhound in his blood.

  “Maybe we can destroy it from the outside,” she said.

  Wes grinned. His eyes bulged with inspiration. “We can!” he said. “I’ll send a strongly worded letter. And you can stand beyond the gates with a picket. Maybe one of us writes a novel.”

  “Stop,” she said. “I can’t go back. The problem is guile. The people who work there are guileless.”

  “But they collectively do harm,” Wes said.

  “But my existence there would be founded on deceit.”

  “While you intend to save the world,” Wes said. Pleased with himself, he began walking again, much to the relief of Hurricane, who was on the verge of self-asphyxiation. At the beach, Wes unleashed Hurricane and the dog took off, spitting sand in his wake. He ran for an hour solid, every day, and any day without a run he was agitated, restless, erratic even. He chewed on wires and ate Delaney’s shoes and looked achingly through the blinds.

  “They already set up the second interview,” Wes said. “You’re halfway in.”

  This was not true and they both knew it. Delaney looked at the sea. The surf was coming in like an army of merry mops.

  “I was thinking about learning how to sail,” she said. “And how to use a lathe. We had two pandemics and I never learned to use a lathe. I could run a movie theater! The Alexandria’s still closed. Or tapestries. I’d love to weave a tapestry.”

  “Tapestries,” Wes said, looking to the sea. “I can see you doing tapestries.”

  When Hurricane finally tired he loped back to Wes and dropped theatrically at his feet—his way of saying he was ready to go home.

  At the stairs from the beach to the concrete promenade, they encountered a woman in a black windbreaker, reflective stripes on her arms, a kind of bumblebee assistant.

  “Hey folks,” she said. “Just making sure you’re aware of the changes to the beach policy in regards to pets. Is your dog chipped?” She craned her head left and right, assessing Hurricane from above. “We’re asking everyone,” she added.

  “He’s not,” Wes said, attempting to control his annoyance.

  The woman chewed her lower lip. “Well, starting next week, all dogs within city limits must be chipped. For your safety and theirs. In case he gets lost?”

  “He won’t get lost,” Wes said.

  The woman rolled her eyes. “The portion of the beach available to chipped pets will be between the two markers you see here.” She swung her arm toward the beach, where an area about as big as a two-car garage had been set aside. “And leashes will be required.”

  “Chips and leashes,” Wes repeated.

  “For your safety and the rest of those who want to enjoy the beach,” the woman said.

  Wes glared at her briefly, then looked away. She was wearing a high-res cam around her neck, so any scowl or foul word would be caught and noted. “Thank you,” he said, and they walked on.

  Once out of earshot, Wes exploded. “Fucking christ!”

  Ocean Beach had been the last place in the city, the last place for fifty miles, where dogs were allowed to run off-leash. He glanced at Hurricane, who seemed worried at Wes’s tone of voice.

  “When I was growing up, you could have bonfires here,” he roared. “You could surf or fish without a permit. You could run, swim, screw, do whatever. Why? Because this place is vast! It’s like five miles long. There’s room for anything. Fuck!”

  Far offshore, ocean rain blurred the sky above the Farallon Islands.

  “You have to kill this company,” he said. “Ultimately it all comes back to them. Kill the Every and we have a chance.”

  Delaney didn’t know what to say.

  “I need distraction,” Wes said.

  They dropped Hurricane off at home and went to Free Gold Watch. It was a retro arcade on Waller, a block from Haight and a stone’s throw from the panhandle that ended Golden Gate Park. NO CAMS read the sign on the door. HERE BE TROGS. Inside, a half-dozen people played pinball and Centipede. Delaney had never been able to figure out who worked at the place. There never seemed to be anyone in charge, and yet the space was always functioning and clean. Wes put a quarter into an undersized Galaga.

  “You want in?” he asked. Delaney shrugged. He put in a second quarter. Delaney leaned against the wall and, through a mirror, watched a man in a Damned T-shirt play an Old West target-shooting game.

  Wes died quickly and made room for Delaney.

  “How’s Pia?” she asked.

  Pia was Wes’s ladyfriend. His word—ladyfriend. She’d lived with Wes when Delaney had moved in, and for their first week together, Delaney had found Pia brilliant and witty. As a child, Delaney and every girl she’d grown up with had wanted to be a marine biologist, and Pia was an actual marine biologist—always slingshotting herself around the world following fellowships (was currently in Chile). Eventually, though, it became clear to Delaney that both Wes and Pia were under the impression that Pia was the world’s most alluring woman. Delaney heard the tales daily, the implication being that no human could meet Pia Minsky-Newton without loving Pia Minsky-Newton. Pia was fine looking but to Pia and Wes the blinding glory of her face was a constant burden. Her hair, which was on the stringy side, was, in Pia’s eyes and Wes’s, Kennedian, and her bust, which seemed average to Delaney, was, in their view, a continental shelf that inspired the relentless leering of the world.

  “She’s good,” Wes said, “but there’s this guy Karl in her program who’s been basically throwing himself at her. He wrote her a song—”

  “Is she coming back for Christmas?”

  “I think so. For a week. Your turn.” Wes ceded the machine to Delaney and she promptly got herself killed.

  “You have to go back. Do one more interview,” he said.

  “I can’t be the one. I can’t be a spy. I don’t even dress up for Halloween.”

  “Don’t you have an ex-boyfriend who went undercover? The fish and game guy in the neon wraparound sunglasses? Dirk?”

  “Derek. You know his name was Derek.”

  Derek, sartorially indifferent but deeply sincere, had become an undercover agent for Montana Fish and Game. He posed as a buyer of bear and moose and out-of-season elk; the work was surprisingly dangerous.

  “You know what he said the key was to lying under pressure?” Delaney said. “If they ask you a question that will necessitate a lie, they’ll be able to tell if you answer that exact question—they’ll read the lie immediately. But if you answer a different question, one you form in your mind, all the things that give away the lie, your eyes, mouth, facial muscles, won’t be addressing the lie. They’ll be in service to this different question you’re answering—which you’ll be able to answer truthfully.”

  “Thank you for that disgusting word salad,” Wes said. “I understood nothing. But I’m happy for you. Sounds like you have it figured out. You have a lying strategy, so you’re golden.”

  “But I have nothing to offer them. You’re the coder. Why don’t you do it? I’d be your assistant.”

  Wes let his ship drift into a missile. He looked at Delaney while the explosion rumbled onscreen. “This was your plan, Del. You’ve been planning it for years now. You can’t just give me your dream. Plans for subterfuge and overthrow are not transferable.”

  “But it would be so easy for you. You get in there, write some … What do you call it?”

  “Code.”

  “Really? Just code? Okay. You write some code, blow the place up from within.”

  “There is no code that will blow the place up,” Wes said. “You know this. That’s because it’s not about the code, or the software, or even the people who work there. The way you end that place will be something we haven’t thought of yet, something you’ll only realize once you get inside.”