Goleta could not keep his eyes off the curves, the muscled edges, the gleaming bulges and buttocks. Eye-tracking software later calculated 112 unique visits of Goleta’s irises to body parts of thirty-two unique members of the Every staff. There were fifty-four visits to male genitalia, forty-one unique visits to twenty-two Every breasts, and—interestingly enough—only seventeen unique visits to the faces of those owners of those body parts. Delaney felt for him. He’d never seen anything remotely like the feast of barely veiled flesh in the Cathedral of Wellness. Clearly he didn’t go to contemporary gyms. And hadn’t been in a French disco or on a Spanish beach. He was a sheltered and monogamous Midwestern man, and this was, compared to Iowa, a fever-dream bacchanalia. He stuttered. He soaked himself in sweat. He coughed, he looked at the ceiling and its calming mosaic depicting pre-genocide Native American life, but then returned, helplessly, to the feast of body parts.

  “I can’t watch anymore,” Ro said, and kept watching.

  “What time is it?” Goleta asked.

  It was clear he thought he could escape from the gym to his speech and salvage the day, but no such luck. He was told it was 11:15. He’d only been on campus twenty minutes, and the speech wasn’t scheduled till noon.

  “Maybe we should see something else,” he managed to say, and he stumbled from the gym. But the gym led to the volleyball court, in which ten men, wearing far less than those in the gym, were engaged in a sweaty game, and he had no choice but to watch, for his hosts had stopped, ostensibly to talk about the recycled plastic that stood in for sand. He nodded, squinted at the tiny shards of what had been bottles and cups and plates, but his eyes could not stop wandering.

  “Poor thing,” Berit said. “In way over his head.”

  “It’s not good to leer,” Preeti said, “but this makes me never want to go outside. You glance someone’s way and it’s recorded?”

  “I have to say,” Joan said, “this feels like a setup. This has the feel of a Gabriel Chu production.”

  “You think?” Ro said, and laughed.

  Halfway through the visit it was obvious that even Goleta, a former campaign manager himself, knew he was cooked. He knew his eyes were wandering, were darting and landing and groping, but he couldn’t stop them. He knew how all this would live, forever, online, and what this meant.

  Everyones continued to engage with Goleta, innocently greeting him, palm to sternum and even the occasional handshake, while his eyes continued to land on their bulbous regions. Meanwhile, one by one certain Everyones left his orbit and posted messages, video, photos, many using eye tracking on their cams, quickly confirming that Goleta, candidate for president, had just ogled their phalluses, their buttocks and breasts and abs and lats. In twenty minutes, edited versions of the footage began to appear, and compiled this way, with his oglings counted and punctuated with cash-register dings, the effect was catastrophic.

  It was 11:38 a.m. when Goleta’s handlers whispered to him—this was easily caught on SeeChange microphones—“We’re out. Regroup on bus.” And then he was gone.

  He didn’t give his speech that day, and never mentioned the Every again. He hadn’t even gotten to meet Mae. In days, his poll numbers plummeted, donations dried up. The clips of his eyes lost in a sea of bulbous and brightly displayed body parts were seen hundreds of millions of times, and in three weeks he was out of the race completely.

  The global debate about the ethics of eye tracking, which began that afternoon, was vigorous, but anyone hoping to hold back the advent of ETR was proven a fool. The unexamined glee with which it was embraced followed a familiar pattern. First hobbyists explored its limits, producing results both innocuous (which parent does your baby prefer?) and terrifying (which parent does your teenager prefer?). Heedless capitalists leaped in, apps and related products proliferating; first and most popular were those that built on the Goleta incident, enabling anyone with a self-cam to determine where the eyes of any other humans around them were landing. The software and hardware necessary had been built into Every phones for years; it was only a matter of activating it.

  In a rare formal statement issued through her feed, Mae Holland provided guidance. “Like every other progression from darkness to light,” she said, “ETR allows the truth to emerge.” She was in her glass office box, dressed in a white bodysuit sprinkled with faint purple sunbursts, staring unblinkingly at the camera. “What had been hidden is now known. What was in doubt will now be certain. And the more we know each other, and the more our behavior is seen and recorded and illuminated, the better we become. Overnight, there can be no doubt, countless lives have become better. Those who leer have been tamed. Those who ogle have been shamed. We’ve caught child predators, we’ve caught potential thieves and prevented assaults and soon we’ll thwart terrorists, too. The eyes are the windows to the soul, and they tell no lies.”

  She signed off, never having taken her eyes from the camera. It did not appear she would have trouble with eye tracking herself, but elsewhere in the world, some—or billions—would. Over the next few weeks, it became clear that because half of humanity’s iris scans had already been stored, their owners could be singled out within seconds. If a man ogled a woman at a New Jersey dog park, those eyes could instantly be paired with the offender’s name, and his family, employers, and the public would be duly notified of the transgression. A new wave of suicides ensued, the embarrassment and discredit being too much for certain caught and called-out persons, mostly men. In the first week, one hundred and seven humans in Tokyo took their lives, thirty-one by throwing themselves in front of trains, the scene of their eyeshame. Tens of thousands followed elsewhere on Earth, and a few hundred, nicknamed Oedipals, chose a middle path—they gouged out their eyes.

  Whatever the name for the offenders, eyeshame was the term that stuck to the crime. The Every resisted it, tried to push ocular offense, but eyeshame was more direct and descriptive. It was not strictly speaking a crime, of course; no laws prevented anyone from looking where they shouldn’t. But shame ensued, and shame was deserved, and shame was the internet’s currency and lever for change. As ETR spread without resistance among the vast majority of the species, there were occasionally calls to ban it, and trog areas did so preemptively and predictably, but otherwise, like most innovation in the twenty-first century, the spread was caterwauling, without organization or caution, and thus unstoppable.

  XXX.

  IT WAS ANOTHER REASON TO STAY INSIDE. A few billion people, who did not trust their own wayward eyes, huddled in their homes. People were accustomed to being inside anyway; the pandemics had given the human race much practice in isolation and fear. In the wake of the Goleta Pivot, sunglasses were quickly invented that thwarted eye tracking and saved people from eyeshame, but soon ETR was improved to see through all lenses. More people, called isos, chose to work from home, refusing to be seen, lest their eyes wander. Alessandro had become an iso, as had Dan Faraday. Isos used cartoon avatars for their teleconferencing, and many refused to speak with real-time audio, for fear of a misplaced word being recorded and tipping their Shame Aggregate. Meanwhile, enterprising developers created software that could discern eyeshame in old footage, and a half-million reputations turned to ash.

  Staying home was safer. Since the 1970s, houses had grown with every passing year, and ballooned during the pandemic years. In most developed nations, smart tech was required for all new construction, for a host of reasons that no one attempted to debate. Energy and water consumption was minimized and optimized, burglaries were near-impossible. More and more homes in neighborhoods had linked themselves, sharing surveillance footage, the locations of pets and pests, and more than anything, the threats of suspicious characters in their midst. Environmentalists couldn’t justify living in a trog home unless they were carbon-zero and off the grid, so they had become, every year, more the bastions of freaks and anarchists, the selfish and the insane.

  On campus, Delaney had more or less mastered her own irises. When meeting people in person, she began by focusing on the tops of heads; this worked wonderfully for days, until she was notified, via AnonCom, that her lack of eye-to-eye contact was being noticed. She developed a way of moving across Treasure Island quickly, stealthily, with eyes down, on her phone, or oddly elevated, focused on some far-distant destination. It was exhausting, her brain in an ever-present state of high alert. She was sure she’d developed the vibrating-pupil syndrome she’d seen in Everyone else, but she couldn’t know for sure; trembling eyes weren’t discernible by the eyes that trembled.

  The only place she could relax, to some extent, was in the Havel. The official workday always ended at 5, and she arrived home at 5:18. This gave her about forty minutes, usually, before Joan would arrive after working out. The solitude was key. After a day of AYS chatter—the Supples talked without end and there were no walls—she needed the time to form her own thoughts again, to bring eight hours of conversation and noise into some coherence and shape.

  “Start shower,” Delaney said, and went to her section of the communal closet for her robe. The HereMe assistant knew her voice, and her shower-heat and water-pressure preferences. She was entitled to six minutes of water a day, which she chose to split in two brief but restorative sessions.

  “End shower and I’ll mad,” she said, and then stood, naked, under the skylight, her skin awake everywhere to the touch of the breeze from the Bay.

  “Open curtain by my bed,” Delaney said, and crawled into her tube, feeling warm and comfortable in her robe.

  Delaney was getting accustomed to the conveniences of pod living, studying her own reaction with scientific detachment. She found, to her surprise, that there was little about the Shed she missed. She didn’t miss the drafts, the gaps in the 100-year-old floorboards, the squeaks, the ants, the occasional mouse. She didn’t miss the cold at night, the strange smell of the house, like a man’s stale sweat after a day of direct sun, or the scaly saltwater stench of the neighborhood as a whole. She didn’t actually miss shopping for food. She missed Hurricane, and the moms, and the smell of the ocean, but the pod was more civilized, and something in her physiology responded to it. The warm, soundless floors. The perfection of the cabinets, the reliability of the ice machine, the instant and unfailing hot water, the ylang ylang. Everything was in its place, nothing was ever broken, and her time was never spent on anything that should have been working but wasn’t. She grew to accept that she deserved this ease, these conveniences, and she padded barefoot through the pod with a sense of belonging that occasionally startled herself.

  In her tube, she wrapped her comforter around herself and peered out the window for her vole. The whole back-and-forth was never more than two or three seconds, and it was never clear to Delaney what the vole was seeking or getting. But each time it darted out it was a minor event, and its forays kept her entertained while she waited for her evening nap to pull her under.

  “Delaney?” It was Francis.

  Sometimes she didn’t get to sleep. Joan and Soren’s schedules were steady, and if anything, they were occasionally late (and were never early). Francis slithered into the pod at irregular hours, and with an uncanny ability to arrive wherever and whenever he was least wanted.

  “Yes,” Delaney said.

  There was little point in him asking or her answering. The pod-brain knew she was there, and Francis’s phone, among six other indicators, would also tell him who was in the pod. But it was impossible to know why Francis did the things he did.

  “You in your tube?” he asked.

  This, too, was a fact without an alternative. The rest of the pod was empty; he’d heard her voice emanating from her bed. Sometimes she felt for him. He had been born annoying, and seemed to know it. He was so eternally needy, and eel-like, and shifty-eyed, that his every compensation or adjustment only seemed more needy, less convincing, and more pitiable. The pod did everything they required and a hundred things they wouldn’t have thought of themselves, but somehow, each day, he found reason to send them a notice nudging them toward better domesticity. Um guys, said that morning’s message, bathroom floor extra-wet this morning. Someone could have slipped. And with a link to research about the alarming number of broken bones caused by bathroom-slippings.

  It wasn’t that he almost slipped. Or that he was tidy—he was not. It was, for him, a way of loving, or seeking love. No one talked to him willingly, and so his way of crossing the void were these reminders, questions, notices, these grave slippage findings.

  “Trying to take a nap,” Delaney said.

  “I picked up our shrouds on the way home today,” he said. “Do you want yours now? The research says they improve sleep and REM and idea-generation.”

  “Not just now,” Delaney said. “But thanks.”

  “Do you know when Joan’s getting back?” he asked.

  “No,” Delaney said, though she knew it would be about six, as it always was. “Trying to nap,” she repeated. “Sleep quota, you know.” She rolled over to face the window.

  The vole below was out in the open again, and this time stayed longer than she’d seen him before. Treasure Island had a fair amount of birds of prey, and occasionally the shadow of a red-tailed hawk would sweep over the green and Delaney’s breath would still until her vole was safe.

  “Hoping we can have a pod meeting later,” Francis said. “There’s a new plan for projects undertaken together. You hear about that?”

  “Maybe,” Delaney said. It was probably embedded in one of the thousands of messages she hadn’t read that day.

  “Good. You’ll be around?” Francis said.

  “I will,” Delaney said.

  “Have a good nap,” he said, and then rattled the fridge for the next three minutes.

  Delaney closed her eyes but saw Francis. She needed, she knew, to remain friendly with him. She expected PrefCom to be key to her murder of the Every, and wanted to rotate in with Francis soon. She tried to relax. She inhaled the ylang ylang. She tried to think of Idaho peaks but thought, instead, of the conversation she’d had with Francis about PrefCom. It had been a week ago, and when she’d asked him about the department, and quizzed him about his work, he was so startled and flattered he prattled on for ninety minutes.

  “PrefCom,” he had explained, “is a crucial companion to Joan and your work at AYS.” He briefly reminded Delaney that what he was about to say was covered by the blanket Every NDA and was being recorded, too. “At AYS you ask the consumer to reconsider. The Five Cs, right?” Delaney made a mental note to figure out what those were. She kept forgetting to ask.

  “You ask them to choose well,” Francis continued, “to be conscious consumers. When they become AYS members they agree to purchase within AYS parameters in exchange for steep discounts and exclusive offerings. Did I get that generally right?”

  He was exactly right and knew it.

  “Well, PrefCom is the stick to that carrot,” he continued. “If a consumer indicates, through their purchasing history, a taste for vegan food, and various Every partners have invested years in gearing offers to this preference, departures from this are painful for the workings of those partners’ business models. If the vegan suddenly starts ordering meat, then the customer profile that’s been carefully created over years or even decades is damaged. So PrefCom is a way to make consumers aware of the advantages of staying within their established preferences.”

  He wouldn’t go into much more detail about the ways PrefCom could right an errant consumer, but Delaney could make certain assumptions. The credit scores of the 1980s and ’90s eventually evolved into a more holistic Consumer Rating, in which that person’s predictability was factored in. Loyalty programs were subsumed and aggregated until the advantages of regular spending patterns were so great that there was obvious financial disincentive to deviate. Anyone could request their credit rating and get it from one of the three major assessing companies. But the exact numbers attached to Consumer Ratings were, in the Every era, opaque. The Every preferred to keep the numbers a mystery to each consumer, in the belief—Delaney assumed—that having them scared into compliant behavior was better than having them knowledgeable about the precise effects of their actions. Delaney gave up on her nap.

  It was after six now and she crawled out of her tube, knowing Joan would arrive momentarily. Joan was usually first home, fresh from the gym, smelling sweet and feral. Soren was usually back by six-thirty, and would want to know if anyone had thought about dinner. He was a gifted cook who said, every night, that he did not feel like cooking and was sick of everything they’d been eating for weeks and months. As he complained, he would begin tossing ingredients onto the counter with thumps and clicks. He would turn on the stove, and add a wok with a low tick—he was a loud chef, as if making sure his roommates knew the labor being expended—and he would drop a lasso of soy sauce in the wok. And when it was clear he was beginning, and there would be good food that night, Joan would play some song she knew he liked, something mindless but upbeat, and she would leap onto the counter facing him, kicking her heels into the cabinets.

  Delaney sat on the couch and checked the time. 6:07. She woke her phone. By now she knew the general parameters. There were about 120 all-Every messages a day that had to be at least eye-scanned. This took her about eight minutes. The 15,000 or so humans on the Treasure Island campus produced, daily, about 14,750 memos, notes, reminders and invitations, which Delaney’s AI auto-sorter cut down by 88 percent. The sorter would auto-decline all the invitations that conflicted with her own calendar settings and commitments. Her auto-sum skimmed longer messages and boiled them down to their essence, usually less than twenty words. These would go to her Actual Essence (AE), which would filter the messages through her own custom filters for relevance. Her settings, for example, filtered out anything related to sports, childcare, pet care, yoga, and kayaking. These messages would not be deleted, though—they would appear, to the sender, as if she had opened and read them. Wes had given her an app which remembered friends’ birthdays and sent them original, personalized messages the night before the birthday, so as to be first. For zings and pops, again Wes had set her up with an auto-smile algorithm, which would scan Everyone social media accounts and smile at things she was known to like—marmots, mudskippers, three-legged dogs, Idaho, trees, mountains and anything like that she figured people would figure she’d like. At the end of any given day it would seem, to any aggregating algorithm, that she’d read about 8,250 messages and sent about 750 smiles.