Wes’s eyes went distant again. “Damn, I’m hungry.”

  They ate at a nameless noodle place on Haight, another trog haunt. They sat at the bar, eating and watching Stever, the proprietor, clean the stove under a sign that said WE ARE OBLIGATED TO TELL CUSTOMERS THAT THIS ESTABLISHMENT HAS NO CAMERAS. EAT HERE AT YOUR OWN RISK. Stever’s real name was Steven Han, but a decade earlier, a grizzled Haight-Ashbury denizen with a ragged-velvet pageboy cap had begun to call him Stever, and he adopted it, thinking its insouciance blunted the pain of his dreams deferred. Stever had a degree in Russian literature from Berkeley, and couldn’t believe he was running his Chinese parents’ noodle shop. He took out his frustrations on the oven and stove; he cleaned them hourly and with great prejudice.

  “Stever, you should take it easy,” Wes said. “It’s been what? A month since the hernia?”

  Stever burrowed his eyes into Wes.

  Wes’s mouth dropped open. “Oh shit. Was that a private thing?”

  Stever moved his tongue around his mouth; it was something he did when he was too angry to speak.

  “Sorry, man,” Wes said. “Jesus. My brain. It doesn’t—it lets me down. But Delaney doesn’t care. Delaney, do you care about Stever’s hernia?” He turned to Delaney, who was trying to remember what a hernia was. “She probably doesn’t know what a hernia is. Stever, where are you going?”

  He’d disappeared into the back room.

  “You’re right,” Delaney said. “You can’t be the one. You can’t keep a secret. Mainly because you can’t remember what you’re supposed to keep secret.”

  Wes seemed content with this assessment, given it had absolved him of becoming a spy.

  “Now I’m thinking if I can just kill emojis, that would be enough,” Delaney said.

  “You see the Secretary of State use a few today?” Wes asked. “He was celebrating the anniversary of glasnost, and he used a dancing rainbow. On the official state account. Our species has no dignity. No path to dignity.”

  “That reminds me,” Delaney said.

  “No,” Wes said.

  For years Delaney had been cultivating a social media persona that would make her candidacy for an Every job seem probable. Even to get the first interview, she knew they’d probed every post she’d made since grade school. Her years off-grid as a park ranger necessitated she develop and maintain a hyperactive digital self. She registered hundreds of frowns and smiles each day. She commented, rated and, for the last year or so, she’d thrown herself into taking selfies while posing as Popeye the Sailor Man.

  “You’re not doing Popeye again,” Wes said.

  “People post at least twenty a day,” she said. “I’ve done eleven.”

  Wes let his head drop to the counter.

  Delaney couldn’t have Wes in the photo, and Stever didn’t allow Popeyes inside. So she walked out of the restaurant and removed a tiny corn-cob pipe from her pocket. She put it between her teeth, tilted it up and leftward, and took a selfie. She sent it to her 3,209 followers and returned to the bar.

  “How many of those have you sent, total?” Wes asked.

  “Since the beginning? Like six months ago?” Delaney looked at her phone. “Four thousand, two hundred and ninety. They tell you when you’ve missed a day.”

  The popularity of Popeyes had lasted longer than Delaney had thought possible, far outstripping its predecessors—planking, icebucketing, elbow-earing, top-hatting, tongue-depressing. Each day for six months now, Delaney had sent her friends and relatives twenty or so Popeye pics and they reciprocated. The Every had begun the trend, had engineered it to gather location data and examine sundry data points about human behavior, and a billion people had been only too happy to comply, because the fun of taking pictures with a corncob pipe between one’s teeth was impossible to resist and, in its own small way, united the world’s people.

  “Done?” Wes asked.

  When it was time to pay, Stever made up a number. He had no fixed prices, no calculator, kept no track of sales tax. They paid in cash—Stever only took cash—and left.

  “Let’s walk,” Wes said. “Phones off.”

  They turned off their phones, removed the batteries, and Wes produced a magnetic bag he’d engineered himself. It blocked all signals going in or out. They tossed their phones inside.

  “We taking the dark route?” Delaney asked.

  “We should,” Wes said, and they passed under a large sign. You are entering a path without surveillance cameras. Citizens choosing this path assume associated risks. SFPD. The city had a patchwork of such sidewalks and roads and trails, making it possible to walk more or less across the city free of the camera’s gaze. It was one of the few cities with such areas, given they invited crime, and suspicion of crime.

  They walked in silence until they were in a deeply wooded part of the park, all around them the smell of wet pine and puddles.

  “I know it must be strange and intense,” Wes said. He leaped to touch an overhead bough—something he did. He was a child, and was rewarded by a small shower of dew and pine needles. “But you’re not infiltrating the mob,” he said, shaking his shoulders like a dog. “The worst thing that can happen is they fire you, right?”

  The path ended at the Great Highway, where they turned their phones back on. They walked along the oceanfront, and noted a nickel-bright necklace of stars over the sea.

  “Those stars,” Wes said. “I wish I knew what those were called.” He waited a moment. “You don’t know them, either.”

  “I do not,” Delaney said.

  “One of us should,” he said. “Right?”

  Delaney lay in her bed that night, looking through her tiny window at a half-hearted cloud. Wes slept in the next room, their two mattresses separated by little more than drywall. She could hear him arranging himself around Hurricane—the swirl of bedsheet, the whoop of his comforter given air and settling down upon man and dog.

  “Night,” Wes said from the other side of the wall.

  “Night,” Delaney said, and knew his next words.

  “Love you,” Wes said.

  It had seemed strange, so unreasonable, the first time he’d said this, a year and a half ago. At that point they’d only known each other six months. His was a brotherly love, she knew—he’d never hinted at more—but why have it be love at all? She’d been gobsmacked the first time he said the words through their paperthin wall. She’d reflexively answered, “I thank you,” and then was up half the night trying to make sense of it.

  The next morning, unprompted, he explained it. His moms, he said, were loving, were devoted, but never said the words, but he liked the words, especially in the dark, before sleep. He liked to say them and hear them, he said, so as a boy he’d begun to say them to himself, turning his head one way then the other: Love you/You too.

  “And I do love you,” he’d said to Delaney, “so I say it.” He’d assured her that she didn’t need to say it back, given how unusual it was in her world (she was from Idaho) for two friends, roommates, to say such things to each other. But she found she wanted it, too. She so coveted the words, counted on them, thought during the day of these unacceptable words he’d say to her through the wall at night.

  “I love you,” he said that first night.

  “I thank you,” she said that night and every night thereafter.

  IV.

  “I LIKED YOUR POPEYES,” Jenny Butler said. “Can I see your pipe?”

  Delaney had fallen in love with this woman, her second interviewer, in minutes. First the accent; she was from Mississippi and Delaney had never known such a person, such a musical manner of speaking, the way pipe became pahhhp. And her face, fleshy and dimpled, and her eyes, always wide, always amazed. She was known by all as Jenny Butler.

  “So many Jennys here,” Jenny Butler explained. “You’d be surprised. Especially among us”—here she whispered conspiratorially, cupcake frosting on her teeth—“the over-forties. The Julies are the same way. Have you met Julie Zlosa? Probably not. We just call her Zlosa. And the Michelles! There are far too many Michelles.”

  Jenny Butler was gregarious and unfiltered and instantly Delaney knew she would sail past this second interview without incident. Delaney had hoped this one would be inside the Every gates, but again she found herself at the base of Yerba Buena, this time with a SpaceBridge scientist, sitting at a cupcake shop that, like every other storefront on the island, seemed to have been erected moments before, and only for the purposes of some Everyones’ momentary presence.

  “Should we do a Popeye together?” Jenny Butler asked.

  They inserted their pipes between their teeth, pressed their temples together and took the picture. As they checked the result—very cute, they both agreed, dignified even—a black motorcade sped past, en route to the Every gates.

  “I think that’s the UN Secretary-General,” Jenny Butler said. “What day is it? Wait, don’t tell me.” She snuck a glance at her oval. “Yup, that would be her. She’s asking for money. They always are. Not that Mae Holland is Ted Turner.”

  Jenny Butler winked at Delaney, then her face fell. “You might not know who that is. Ted Turner? He gave a hundred million to the UN. Or was it five hundred?”

  When Delaney told her she did know who Ted Turner was, Jenny Butler’s face opened again into a toothy smile.

  “Relief!” Jenny Butler said, stretching the word into a long and beautiful shape. “You never know. The weird gaps in people’s knowledge now. No ten people know the same ten things. I bet you were young when the Release went down.”

  The Release had happened only ten years earlier. In a hack presumed to be orchestrated by Russia, the complete email histories of over four billion people had been made public. Just as with the hack of Sony by North Korea, jobs were lost, reputations ruined, marriages crushed and friendships shattered. The emails were passed around gleefully by tens of millions, and the media—its last, lost patrols—printed and discussed those emails that revealed hypocrisy or corruption by the powerful, the wealthy, the famous, and many others who were none of those things.

  And after six months of handwringing, recrimination, a few thousand murders and perhaps a half-million suicides, the world forgot about the Release, and what it said about our means of communication and who stored and controlled it, and simply accommodated it, kneeling before new masters. From then on, every message written by every human was assumed to be subject to exposure—to be permanently searchable and public.

  “You know,” Delaney said, bullshitting in a way she suspected Jenny Butler would know and appreciate, “I was already careful with my way of expressing my feelings, my thoughts. The Release, I think, just made everyone more aware of the power of their words.”

  Jenny Butler sat back and squinted at Delaney. “Well said. Okay, speaking of releases, now that we’re Popeye pals, what did you think of the movie?”

  Delaney took a bite of her cupcake, hoping it would allow her to nod in agreement with Jenny Butler and be absolved of expressing a more developed opinion. There had been a movie made about the Circle—when it was still called that name—by a talented director and starring actors of consummate skill and renown, and yet the movie, despite its pedigree, was considered unsuccessful and was seen by few. The company, like an autocrat who survives an assassination attempt, emerged only stronger.

  “What did you think of it?” Delaney parried. She and Wes had practiced this: whenever possible and especially when a question might send her into dangerous territory, she turned the questions back to the questioner. It flattered, it deflected.

  Jenny Butler held up her forefinger as she chewed. Her nails were painted but chipped, like the outer tiles of a space capsule damaged upon re-entry. “Are you kidding? I loved the movie,” she said. “I mean, I know not everyone around here was thrilled about it, but still, it’s a movie about the place where I work! I’m from Mississippi, so that’s still a big deal. It was the first time my mom was actually impressed.”

  This second interview was a staple of Every culture. Colloquially known as Random Meets Random, it was an idea borrowed by Mae Holland, and was a notion Delaney actually admired—perhaps the one notion put forth by Mae that Delaney did not consider the work of a kind of soulless, conscienceless, world-ending secular antichrist.

  Random Meets Random meant that everyone at the Every, from engineer to founder to sous chef, had to participate, even if only once a year, in an interview for an entry-level candidate who had passed the first screening. Thus a random Everyone would interview a random candidate, regardless of their fields of expertise. A PR manager might interview a coder, a data scientist might meet an aspiring art director. In this case, Jenny Butler was an astrophysicist and Delaney was a libarts generalist who was happy, she told Jenny Butler, to bloom wherever she was planted.

  “So you worked on the last Mars driller?” Delaney asked, and Jenny Butler stopped chewing to stare incredulously at her.

  “How did you know that?” she asked. “You couldn’t have presearched me, because they don’t tell you who your Random might be. And you didn’t do the thing where you pretend to go to the bathroom to look me up on your phone.” Delaney smiled, then Jenny Butler seemed to doubt her version of recent events. “You didn’t go to the bathroom, did you?”

  “I just know who you are,” Delaney said. Jenny Butler’s division, SpaceBridge, was founded by Eamon Bailey but was not, it was assumed, beloved by Mae Holland. SpaceBridge was not entirely practical and not at all profitable. Bailey had used discretionary Every billions to send rovers to the Moon and Io, to mine passing asteroids, to capture and return ice from Saturn’s rings—a few dozen highly unnecessary missions that Delaney had found magical and which caused her some moments of conflict. If she brought down the Every, these space-exploration projects would quickly end, for there was no company with the Every’s cash—and certainly no company with a Bailey willing to spend it simply to know the galactic unknown. Mae Holland had expressed superficial fealty to these endeavors and the philosophy behind them, but no one pretended these sorts of things would happen were it up to her alone. Her interests were earthbound.

  “But I don’t know what you’re doing now,” Delaney said. “Are you allowed to say?”

  Delaney knew that a candidate could only fail this second interview by failing to show interest in the interviewer’s work. That was the twist, the only twist, of Random Meets Random. Though it was, ostensibly, about the Everyone getting to better know the candidate, it was more a test of that candidate’s curiosity about the Every and its people. A poor candidate would ask the Everyone no questions. A very poor candidate would ask about money, or benefits, or vacation, or some reductive, mercenary concern.

  “Well, there are two things, very different,” Jenny Butler said. “They’re not secrets, really, so I can tell you. The first is just a side thing—an app that calculates the month and year of your death. It’s outside my usual field, but I had the idea one day and everyone was very supportive. Have you heard of this already?”

  Delaney had ceased breathing. She shook her head, no.

  “It’s 91 percent effective,” Jenny Butler said, “but we’ll be able to get that number up a bit. This doesn’t cover people dying of freak accidents, things like that. But based on lifestyle, diet, habits, genetics, geography, and a few hundred other inputs, we can zero in pretty well. The month, for sure—and we’re getting closer to knowing the day. I found it a great comfort when I did mine. We could do yours.”

  “To find out when I’ll die?” Delaney said.

  “What are you doing for the rest of the day?” Jenny Butler asked.

  “Don’t you already know?” Delaney said.

  “Ah, good one,” Jenny Butler said. “But seriously. We’d only need a few hours.” Before Delaney could answer, Jenny Butler sent and received a flurry of texts, only to find that between scheduling squeezes and Delaney’s lack of security clearance, it was not to be.

  “Well, another day,” Jenny Butler said, and then rolled directly into a long soliloquy about a Mars rover team she was on, how superior it was to the Japanese and European versions, and to the twice-failed Chinese models. It took Delaney fifteen minutes to recover from the thought that this bright-eyed astrophysicist with the charming accent could blithely create, as a side project, an app—an app!—that would remove much of the mystery from human life, and was now talking about the next Mars launch.

  Eventually Delaney steadied herself enough to ask questions, to seem fascinated and admiring. At the end of their allotted hour, Jenny Butler was so taken with Delaney, and so convinced of Delaney’s genuine interest in the work of SpaceBridge and launch trajectories and landing velocity, that she invited Delaney to the launch, two months hence, of a new explorer headed for Mercury.

  “Whether you’re working here or not,” Jenny Butler said, grabbing Delaney’s hand and gripping it tight, “you will come as my guest.”

  V.

  “JENNY BUTLER IS A LOVER OF ALL MANKIND,” Carlo said, and quickly corrected himself. “Humankind.” He blushed desperately. Delaney was careful not to react but nevertheless was astonished: an error like that was almost unheard of among public-facing Everyones.

  Next to Carlo was a green-eyed, unblinking woman named Shireen who did not seem to notice or care about his error.

  “Jenny Butler’s the absolute best,” Shireen said. Her eyes were not only open wide but her pupils seemed to be trembling.

  “And!” Carlo went on, grinning, clearly overjoyed that his error was forgotten or at least forgiven, “what Jenny Butler said about you was just ridiculous.” He looked at Delaney and she noted the same thing: his pupils were trembling. They conveyed something between total engagement and low-level terror.