“They’re both out,” Joan said. She’d appeared at Delaney’s side. “It’s just numbers.”

  “But Syl? After all his acclaim?” Delaney said.

  “The algos don’t see it,” Joan said. “He spent too much time giving talks and not enough time on measurables. He’s interesting and prominent and all that, but he lost track of what can be tracked.”

  Far away, she spotted someone waving to her. She waved back, squinting to discern who it was. Winnie. Winnie? She seemed cheerful. Maybe she wasn’t among the culled?

  “Is the list public?” Delaney asked.

  “Is the list public? How long have you been here?” Joan said. She sent Delaney the list, and Delaney searched for Winnie. There was no Winifred Ochoa among the deëmployed. She looked up to find Winnie waving again. Delaney waved again, too, relieved.

  “I’d never want to fire someone,” Joan said, looking up at the passing blimp. Its screen directed the deëmployed to a counseling app called Going Nowhere, or GoNo. “Berit is gone, by the way,” Joan said. “She and I were both happy that it didn’t have to be personal. There’s twelve of us, so someone had to go. The numbers are the numbers. This way she and I can still be friends.”

  “Right,” Delaney said. “Such an elegant system.”

  Joan’s eyes searched Delaney’s. “It is an elegant system. You try firing someone.”

  “That’s what I said. Elegant system.”

  Syl and Fuad had left their perch on the berm, and a breeze from the Bay blew through the grass where they’d been, erasing whatever imprint they’d made.

  A text from Wes came through.

  “Can you meet me at my moms’ tomorrow?” he asked.

  Delaney had seen animals die. Wolves and foxes and coyotes caught in traps. She’d hit two deer in her time in Wyoming, and both times she’d had to help them find the next world. In Oregon she once came upon a black bear dying from an arrow shot through his back. Teenagers with a crossbow, she figured. They were ten miles from a road, and they both knew he wouldn’t survive. So she sat with him until his breathing stilled.

  She knew Hurricane’s death was coming, and didn’t want to be there when it happened. But Wes was asking for her, and as grim as the trip would be, she welcomed a reason to leave campus.

  The moms had moved to The Pinnacles, a smartpartment complex just across the water from the Every, in the Mission Bay neighborhood of San Francisco. After Gwen’s fall (in the kitchen, wet tile, broken hip, then sepsis), Social Services had determined that their trog home was grossly unsafe for two women in their early seventies, and had arranged for them to move to a mixed-age, mixed-income development where they would have ready access to on-site medical care.

  Delaney arrived in the early evening. The construction was so new the manufacturer’s stickers were still on the floor-to-ceiling streetfront windows. When she approached the entrance, she heard the buzz of the door unlocking; the moms had told their HereMe that she’d be coming, so the doors could open automatically upon her approach. She didn’t know what floor they lived on, or what apartment, and she didn’t need to. The elevator opened and took her to the seventh floor, and an illuminated sconce pulsed by their door, guiding her to them.

  “Del,” Ursula said, and hugged her. She looked haggard but smiled warmly. “Come see Gwen. She’ll cry.”

  The apartment was spacious and full of light and in many ways resembled Delaney’s pod. The appliances were the same, the fixtures, the ceiling lights, the painted concrete floors. Sitting in what seemed to be a cross between a hospital bed and overstuffed recliner, Gwen held out her hand and Delaney took it. She looked ten years older, utterly helpless, but her eyes were enraged.

  “I’m so ashamed to look this way,” she said.

  Now Delaney’s eyes welled. Wes emerged from a back room, sniffling—though Delaney sensed this was for Hurricane.

  “This place isn’t so bad,” Ursula said. “First of all, it doesn’t smell of fish. Only now do I realize how much our old place reeked. I swear we must have reeked, too. What kind of life was that, two old ladies walking around smelling like fish? Where’s the dignity in that?”

  “We didn’t smell of fish,” Gwen said.

  “Anyway,” Ursula continued, “it took some time to get used to this place, but I don’t miss the headaches. The old house—between the bad wiring, the drafts, the spotty water, the constant repairs. I don’t know, I feel like I have about three extra hours a day.”

  “Which we fill doing nothing,” Gwen said.

  “We do plenty,” Ursula said.

  “I can’t smell the ocean. The windows don’t open.”

  “You want fresh air? The sky’s full of smoke,” Ursula said.

  There were wildfires burning a hundred miles north, and the smoke had just reached the city.

  “They don’t let us leave,” Gwen said.

  “The residents here have agreed to collective carbon neutrality,” Ursula explained, and raised her fist to show her oval. “So the building tracks overall carbon footprint. It just means we don’t make decisions on excursions unilaterally.”

  “Excursions! They don’t let me walk around the block!” Gwen wailed, her voice cracking.

  “You have a fractured hip, hon. You can’t walk right around the block anyway,” Ursula said. “And every trip is a carbon moment.” She turned to Delaney and whispered, “We’re learning.”

  “We’re dying,” Gwen hissed. “They have me as a suicide risk.”

  “Just based on searches, habits, neural patterns, Mom,” Wes said. “It’s just a tool to help you and your doctors.”

  “If you wanted to help me,” Gwen said, “you’d let me leave. I’m a prisoner here.” She turned to Delaney. “You were always so sane. Do you say shit like carbon moment?”

  “Hush, you,” Ursula said, and swatted Gwen’s knee. “We haven’t figured out how to fill the time,” she said to Delaney. “But OwnSelf is helping. Are you on it?”

  Delaney’s throat went dry. “Yes,” she managed to say.

  “Gwen’s skeptical, and I was too, at first, but I’ve actually found it to be a godsend,” Ursula said. “Gwen’s got medication she has to take at certain times, and between that and just feeling productive here, it helps me sort out the days. I’m learning classical Portuguese online. Did Wes tell you?”

  “He hadn’t,” Delaney said.

  “There’s this Everyone named Roderick. He has a club for all things Portuguese. Have you met him?”

  “Heard of him,” Delaney said.

  Gwen was staring toward the window. Not through the window, but at the window. At the glass.

  “And then there’s the shopping. No shopping anymore. Have you seen one of these?” Ursula pointed to the smartfridge. “Of course you have. Anything that doesn’t come to the door we can get at the store on the first floor. So food’s taken care of.”

  “I miss my garden,” Gwen said.

  “There’s one on the roof, but—” Ursula said.

  Wes went to the door. “Actually, I’ll take Delaney up there to see it.” He turned to her. “We’ll be back in a few minutes,” he said, and she followed him to the elevator.

  On the roof, it was windy and overcast and the acrid smell of the wildfire was far more pronounced. Wes led Delaney to an enormous cooling fan which spun with a loud thrumming fury. Delaney understood—this was the one place in the building they wouldn’t be heard.

  “Gwen seems sad,” Delaney said.

  “She’s getting better,” Wes said. “I actually think this place is good for them. Or will be good for them. They’re adjusting.”

  “I hope not too much,” Delaney said.

  Wes’s face darkened. “They’re in their seventies, Delaney. They can’t take care of a run-down shack forever. We’re lucky the accident wasn’t worse. People die like that.”

  “Okay,” Delaney said. “You’re right. She’s safer here.”

  “She is. Don’t be a smartass,” he said. “And they’re saving money. Their expenses are half what they were. Remember, they’re on a fixed income. You know what their power bill was last week? Seven dollars. Water was four bucks. Nothing’s wasted here.”

  “It sounds wonderful,” Delaney said.

  “Fuck, Delaney,” Wes said, and spun away. “I’m pretty tired of your self-righteous individualist bullshit. There are issues larger than getting to run the water as much as you want. I’ve evolved a lot since all this began. I’ve learned a lot. They gave us a breakdown between the carbon footprint in the old house and this one, and I have to say the old house was just irresponsible. Indefensible. That kind of living is cloaked in the language of personal freedom, but in the end it’s just selfish. It’s anarchic, really. It’s anti-community. It’s anti-social. It’s anti-human.”

  Delaney couldn’t speak.

  “Don’t give me that look,” Wes said. “I might as well tell you now. I can’t be part of your plan anymore.”

  “Obviously,” she said. “You were so quick to surrender.”

  “I’m not surrendering. I’m planning to take bad ideas and make them better. And I’m going to improve the good ideas.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “People listen to me. They respect me there. I can improve things. I already have.”

  “Like with Friendy.”

  “We’ve made it far more humane.”

  “Wes. My god. It’s a horror.”

  “They wanted to add a feature for kids,” he said. “So parents could tell if their kids were lying to them. It was being specifically reconfigured to the irises and facial musculature of kids, all the rhythms of their speech. I put a stop to that.”

  “That justifies your existence there?” Delaney was sure he’d lost his mind.

  “Neither of us is operating from a place of purity and honor,” he said. “Your approach is predicated on deceit. Your very existence there is a lie.”

  “But I have a plan,” she said.

  “Do you? It hasn’t worked so far. Every terrible idea you’ve fed them—that we’ve fed them—has been embraced inside the Every and out in the world. How are you calling that success?”

  “It’s building to something. The outrage will grow.”

  “There is no outrage, and it’s most assuredly not growing. You’re making the company stronger.”

  “It’s bending. It’ll break.”

  “It’s not bending and won’t break,” Wes said.

  Delaney worried that this was likely true. “But don’t you see that you moderating things there is working against what I’m trying to do?” she asked. “That kid-trust thing—if it had been released at its most offensive, it would have started a conflagration.”

  ‘“Really? You think so? People have been tracking their kids for twenty-five years. They put chips in their fucking bones, Delaney! You think an app that determines whether kids are lying is some bridge too far? For anyone?”’

  “Then why did you curb it?”

  “Because I saw it as an evil. I did.”

  “All the more reason to blow the place up,” Delaney said. “You think you’re going to catch every evil thing before it happens? You’re one of twelve thousand people in that place. And don’t you think they’ll catch onto your game soon enough? They’ll identify you as a pollyanna and you’ll be neutralized. They’ll call you a Product Philosopher or put you on the ethics team, and you’ll never be heard from again.”

  “Which is still better than your plan.”

  “Then help come up with another plan.”

  “I don’t want to,” he said.

  “You don’t want to?” Delaney asked.

  “I don’t believe you’ll succeed,” he said. “All along, we thought we could steer it off a cliff. That there would be some new app that would be too far, too corrosive and inhumane. But you and I both know it won’t happen. There is no cliff.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Delaney said.

  “You have to believe it. And we have to stop adding to the madness. Our ideas are too good. Too horrible. People love them. So we have to stop.”

  “No,” she said, though much of her really did want to stop.

  “You won’t succeed,” Wes said. “And actually, I don’t think you should succeed. Just standing here talking to you, something clarified in my mind. And it’s that your plan is worse than theirs. Yours is weirdly self-serving and ineffectual.”

  “Are we done?”

  “Delaney, no, we’re not. I’ve been wanting to tell you that stuff like Friendy—it’s minor. It’s small potatoes compared to the climate impact the Every has. There’s only one entity on earth that really has the power and reach to turn around catastrophic climate change. You smell the fires? You notice the sky is orange? Have you been watching the sea levels? Any meaningful impact will have to be enacted on a global scale, and there are no countries, no organizations that have remotely the power that the Every does. If they disappear, the power vacuum will only invite a new kind of chaos. There’ll be no attention paid to an ethical supply chain. I don’t know how you could have spent so much time at AYS and not realize the good they’re doing. Stop+Lük has already reduced carbon by 22 percent. The people of Kathmandu can see the Himalayas again. Respiratory problems are down 74 percent. The impact the Every can make in weeks is more important than whatever little privacy offenses they commit.”

  “Like the end of freedom and free will.”

  “I’m not excusing that. But I’d call it the end of the society of the self, and the birth of a more communitarian one.”

  “The tidal rise in suicides?”

  “Then we get into population growth.”

  “Don’t say the suicides are good for the planet.”

  “I’m not. I’m not,” Wes said, and looked at his sandals. “I’m not. I’m just saying that the planet is at war for its survival. And during wars, we need war powers. You have to remember that the Every was bombed and we still don’t know who did it.”

  “So?”

  “So I’m beginning to like the idea of a world without bombings. Without crime. Without violent death or the possibility of it. And to get there, we need a streamlined decision-making process. Coordination. We can’t have a multilateral mess.”

  “So you’d give unlimited power to the Every.”

  “There would be checks, of course. But Del, you have to acknowledge that they get stuff done. They bring order.”

  Wes looked from the rooftop toward the wildfire smoke coming from the north. “The Every has a plan to fight fires with drones, but they can’t get it through the FAA. Drones could bring water to places where people can’t get to. It’s ridiculous to watch the planet suffer because of bureaucracy and sloth. Just seeing how my moms’ lives are simpler, easier now—it makes me think there’s a symmetry here. We eliminate so much of the chaos of life, so much of the struggle, so much of the unnecessary running around, driving, shopping, choosing, throwing away, overspending, overconsuming—this goes hand in hand with a more sustainable way of life.”

  “And those who can’t be part of this new system die off.”

  “If they choose to, sure.”

  Delaney had nothing to say. He was right, and he was wrong, and she could not convince him. They would always be friends but were no longer allies.

  “That’s new from you, Wes—that kind of callousness.”

  Wes scoffed spitefully. That, too, was new.

  “What?” Delaney said.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “What, Wes?”

  “See, just that,” he said. “You’re not so nice yourself. You’re not so pure. And you’re not so trustworthy.”

  In the yawning silence, as Delaney took in the violence of his words, she knew he’d used Friendy on her. Every bone within her turned to water.

  “Jesus, Wes,” she said.

  He looked into her eyes, then at the floor.

  “What did I score?” she asked.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “It just helped me see some things.”

  Delaney was ruptured, ruined and she didn’t care about anything. And then there was Hurricane. She’d come to say goodbye, and it was as good a diversion as anything, so she walked past her friend and to the elevator and went down to see the old dog.

  When they entered the room, Hurricane tilted his head just enough to focus on her. He was lying on a faux-fur mat in the corner, under a tinted window. His ribs protruded, rising as he breathed. Delaney crouched before him and reached out to stroke his head; his fur was brittle as he leaned into her touch.

  “He won’t go outside,” Wes said. “I tried to put him in the stroller but he growled.”

  “He’s so tired,” Delaney said. And I am tired, too.

  “The moms wanted to put him down,” Wes said, and stroked his graying snout. Delaney took Hurricane’s paw and rubbed the leather pads of his tiny toes.

  “Will you stay an hour?” Wes asked.

  Delaney lay down in front of Hurricane, looking into his tired eyes. Wes arranged himself against the wall and put Hurricane’s head on his lap. Hurricane’s eyes closed immediately, as if in profound relief. Wes closed his eyes, too, and stroked Hurricane’s fur, and they heard Hurricane’s breathing grow slower until it reached an almost beautiful steadiness, like the push and pull of a gentle tide. And finally the tide went out and did not return.

  XXXVII.

  DELANEY SLEPT OVER, on the floor, waking up in the cold silver morning with a blanket draped across her. Wes and Hurricane were gone. The moms, too. It was a Sunday, and Delaney thought to stop at the post office box on her way back to Treasure Island. She went to the basement of the Pinnacle, hid her phone in a crack in the foundation, and borrowed one of the moms’ bikes. It gave her at least a chance of making the trip unknown. She kept her head down, trying to stay uncammed, until, at Geary and Masonic, she ran a red light and got shammed. The cam’s flash immortalized her crime, and, for good measure, a teenaged boy filmed her from the sidewalk.