“It does, very much,” Delaney said.

  “I assume, because you are here, you are, or were, a reader?” he asked. It occurred to Delaney that Gregory really had not researched her, and was asking her questions in order that he might know more about herself. It was jarring.

  “No, I don’t presearch people before I meet them,” Gregory said. Again he’d read her mind. “I ask them questions and learn about them from their answers. I realize how radical that is.”

  Delaney wanted to ask him why he was working at the Every, but again he knew her thoughts.

  “What am I doing here then,” he said, removing the interrogative aspect of the sentence and stating it like the most obvious next topic.

  “I was Bailey’s college roommate,” he said. He paused long enough that Delaney was forced into speaking.

  “I’m so sorry for the loss,” she fumbled. “For your loss.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “We were close. We met as freshmen, and I used to write his history and English papers. When the Circle grew, he realized the need for close readers to pore over every word in every meaningful company communication, and he called me. You’ve been to eye-tracking perhaps?”

  Delaney said she had.

  “They confirmed what Bailey had suspected, which was that people were reading less than half the words they saw. Even in text messages, there was a new tendency to get the gist, and of course in contracts and sensitive documents, the gist does not suffice.”

  “No,” she said.

  “Remember when Mueller issued his report? It was 448 pages. About two million people downloaded it. For those who downloaded it to be read on e-readers, of course we were able to deduce how many people read every page. Would you like to guess the number?”

  “Twelve?” Delaney said.

  “Very impressive,” he said. “But the actual number was eleven. And five of those readers were in one family in Bend, Oregon. Remember the second report, the one that summed up the first was much shorter, but only seventy-three people read this abridged version.”

  “I read it,” Delaney said, and instantly regretted saying so. She still didn’t want to be noticed, here or anywhere.

  “It was quite delicious,” Gregory said. “Wall-to-wall crimes of all varieties, and yet it was not read. The documentary was watched, of course …” He drifted off for dramatic effect. “But back to Bailey. He gave me free rein and gave me this room and a budget to hire a team of readers. My rules were that this room remain free of all incoming or outgoing signals, that I run it exactly as I wish, and that I never have to speak to Tom Stenton. In turn, Bailey’s request was that this department turn any document around within a reasonable amount of time, usually within forty-eight hours, and that we eliminate all outgoing errors. Are you a grammarian?”

  “I believe I am,” Delaney said.

  “What is a gerund?” he asked.

  “A verb in noun form. The i-n-g form,” she said.

  “Close enough,” he said. “You may or may not have noticed an overall degradation of the language, and a proliferation of errors of spelling and grammar in even the most official documents?”

  He didn’t wait for an answer, just led her back inside, opening the door with the hush of heavy glass. “Of course you have. I don’t want to believe otherwise. Now, I thought the best way to give you a sense of the range would be for me to simply tell you what everyone is reading today. Fair enough?”

  He led her to a wingback chair of yellow wool, in which a large man sat. He was wearing a pageboy hat.

  “Marcus is reading a 256-page contract between the Every and a supplier of cobalt. This has been read by a number of company attorneys and outside consultants, but the attorneys miss a lot. Given the proliferation of auto-fill and AI in the legal profession, lawyers no longer know how to write. Some ninety percent of contract boilerplate is now generated by algos and AI, with only minor human intervention or augmentation. This can lead to ghastly problems.”

  Marcus nodded and they moved on to a fortysomething woman in a puffy black coat, a wool blanket over her legs.

  “Brenda, who is always cold, is reading a pre-publication galley of a book, to be released in three months, by a popular technology columnist. It contains a chapter about the Every and all its terrifying power.” He said the last two words without any affect. “It will be Brenda’s task to see if this book presents any real threat, though of course no book of its kind ever has, given these books are rarely read. You’ve met Alessandro, I assume?”

  “I have,” Delaney said.

  “Thank you Brenda,” Gregory said, and they crossed the room and found a wary-eyed woman who had been hidden behind a bookshelf. She had shaved half her head and was wearing a City Lights T-shirt.

  “Minka is reading the work of Italo Calvino. Mae Holland is meeting the Italian prime minister in Sun Valley, and her team asked for a lesser-known Calvino quotation—something that would indicate she’d done more than a cursory internet search of his name and his famous quotations. Minka has read six of Calvino’s books in the last three days and has so far compiled a list of twenty-two options. When she’s done, Minka will winnow the list down to seven. Mae’s team asked for seven.”

  They thanked Minka, and Gregory led Delaney to a wall of glass, behind which sat two preternaturally calm people in their fifties.

  “You’ll see two people in our sound-proof pod. That is Larissa and Fyodor. Larissa has been with us for many years, and she’s brought Fyodor, a noted expert on Russian literature, on as a consultant. They’re examining four versions of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. One is the original Russian publication. The second is the latest human-generated translation into English. The third was translated by AI and its characters and plot improved through FictFix. This morning they were sixty-seven pages in, and had indicated that thus far, our AI-FictFix version had improved upon the human-generated translation, a fact I found fascinating and which will likely eliminate much of the profession of editor, archivist and translator. Do you have questions?”

  “No,” Delaney said, but there was the obvious one.

  “What will you be reading?” Gregory asked. “That is the obvious question. Given you are a visitor—not to say interloper—I urge you to seek out what pleases you. Does that sound agreeable?”

  No one but Gregory spoke to Delaney that day or the next, and she was invited to roam the room and the stacks. There were two levels below the Reading Room containing papers, books, newspapers, academic treatises.

  If only to be alone, she wandered the lowest levels, feeling like she was in some nineteenth-century archive assembled by hoarders. The organizational system was difficult to grasp. There were sections of boxes and bins, each with an author’s name or topic on the outward-facing side. There were file cabinets based on subject—anti-trust, privacy, libel, pornography, fascism, warrantless data collection. And then on tables and without label, there were unbound manuscripts, crudely printed manifestoes and self-printed screeds. No one in any of the rooms took the slightest interest in Delaney, so she meandered, picking papers up, examining them, putting them down.

  And then she found the box called OwnSelf Studies. It was an unremarkable box, looking precisely like all the rest, and without any whiff of self-importance. Inside, though, were documents labeled SENSITIVE AND PROPRIETARY and NDA Req’d—see Jacob. But because Gregory had insisted that anything in the Reading Room was open to her, she took the box to an empty corner of the room illuminated by a shaft of natural light. RANDOMIZED STUDY, read the cover sheet of the first packet, and in smaller type: EFFECTS OF LONG-TERM OWNSELF USAGE AMONG SUBJECTS AGES 34–47.

  Her heart thrummed. She flipped to the middle.

  “Subject 277 was found today at the bottom of the stairwell, unable to discern how to get to the second floor. Her OwnSelf had not been updated. Subject was conscious of the humor in the situation, but was still unable to conjure a way to get to the second floor without OwnSelf guidance. She laughed about her failure, and was quite apologetic. When offered the chance to cease the OwnSelf experiment, she could not make that decision, either.”

  Delaney looked up, certain she was reading something forbidden. But no one was paying her any mind. She flipped to another page.

  “Subject 112 presenting with acute mania and insomnia. OwnSelf had set modest sleep-hour goals but Subject 112 has been unable to meet these, despite multiple interventions. Subject’s stress levels then increased, and insomnia was exacerbated. This cycle continued until she was admitted to Overlook by her direct reports.”

  This could only be Kiki, Delaney assumed. And if it wasn’t Kiki, it was someone like Kiki, and there were dozens like this, not just at the Every but all over the world, people who had ceded so much control over their lives that they’d lost the mind-map that could take them from the first floor to the second.

  The next day, Delaney found a loose sheaf of papers written by Mercer Madeiros, whose name rang a bell but whom she couldn’t place. He’d written something called On the Rights of People in the Digital Age. She began reading it when she felt a presence nearby. It was Gregory.

  “If that’s of interest, we just got this,” he said, and handed her a gray box containing a brick of freshly printed white pages. The cover sheet said Bending and Breaking by Meena Agarwal, PhD.

  “You heard of her?” Gregory asked.

  “I have,” Delaney said, and hoped to say nothing more.

  Gregory paused for a second longer than was comfortable. “Well, she’s quite compelling,” he said finally. “You should read this. It’s new. I think we might have one of the only copies. Maybe the only copy.”

  Beyond the letters Agarwal had sent, Delaney hadn’t read anything new of hers for years. She’d been careful not to look Agarwal up online, and even ordering Agarwal’s papers had represented untenable risk. So to find herself being encouraged to read Agarwal inside the confines of the Every sent Delaney into an out-of-body experience. Afraid she’d be caught any moment, Delaney jumped to the middle.

  “Each year, we spend more time examining each other, judging each other, mentally murdering each other. And we wonder why the pills continue to get stronger. We are numb and want to be number.”

  Delaney looked up. No one had moved. No one seemed at all interested in what she was reading, and yet she felt sure she was being watched. She skipped ahead.

  “We are a species in contraction. The age of exploration has given way to the age of introspection.

  “Of fear. Of caution.

  “We seek nothing,

  “We invent nothing,

  “We forgive nothing.

  “A species that sits still, in a circle, staring at each other, cannot survive. We sit in constant judgment of each other, and thus we are a species in decline. Nothing great can be created in such a climate. An authentic human life cannot be lived this way. We become more tame and fearful every year, every day, and every hour brings another thing we cannot do or cannot say, and in all cases, the penalty for violators is that they are thrown away—a kind of digital capital punishment. Every new generation purports to be more empathetic, and yet every new generation is less forgiving. And of course, with every coming year, technology ensures that no errors go unrecorded.”

  Delaney looked up. Sunlight was shooting through the subterranean door and casting a watery reflection on the ceiling. Though she trusted Gregory’s assurances, she searched the ceiling for cameras. But she was still alone, unwatched, unseen. She flipped ahead in Agarwal’s manuscript.

  “The question now is whether we have become a different species. Never before has humankind evolved so quickly and so uniformly. Globalism has enabled the Every to touch nearly every human on the planet at the same time. Never has it been possible to introduce a movement, or goal, or product, and have it reach every person the same day. And in my research we’ve never been a more pliable species. The ready adoption of virtually any new application has almost no historical precedent.

  “This leaves a very small group of non-adopters who struggle to participate in society in analog ways. But with every passing year, the ability of these resisters to function in society becomes more challenging, if not impossible. Children need the latest hardware and constant connection in order to get an education. Seniors depend on algorithms to receive pills. Cash and paper will soon be outlawed, and every transaction and communication will be digital and thus public and tracked and open to interpretation, speculation and judgment. Though they try, trogs in the end are no more politically powerful or culturally influential than the Amish.”

  Delaney did not believe her unsurveilled reading could last. Again she looked around the room, expecting to find a camera she hadn’t noticed before. The ceiling’s acoustic tiles were full of tiny holes. Surely they could rig a camera in one of those? She flipped to the end.

  “I want to have hope, though,” Agarwal wrote. “Monopolies have been broken in the past, tyrannies have fallen. Usually these entities go too far, and always there is someone who sees this and has the power to not just ring the bell but actually stop a flood of lemmings from following each other over the cliff and into the sea. I have spent decades now trying to think of just how this message could be conveyed—how I could convince the species to turn back. But I have failed. I’ve stood at cliff’s edge for generations now, and watched thousands leap. Whether they heard me or not I don’t know, but in any case they sailed over the edge.”

  This was new, this despair in Agarwal’s prose. Always there had been outrage, and fury at the prevailing apathy of her students and humankind, but Delaney never knew her to be resigned, despondent. Was it the cancer? With a sudden dread she worried Agarwal would end her life. Not for a moment did she rule it out. Agarwal was the type to do it; she’d get hold of one of those Swiss euthanasia kits. Delaney’s heart awakened. She had to see her. How?

  Then she knew. She was already going to Idaho. She’d make a detour. A ten-hour detour, but not impossible. She could do it undetected. She could surprise her. She could simply arrive unannounced. They’d embrace. They’d touch each other’s mutilated hair. Delaney would apologize for her silence and they’d plot the end to the Every. It was time.

  Delaney looked up. The clock said six. Gregory was at the door, shaking himself into a heavy coat. He glanced toward Delaney, winked almost imperceptibly, and left.

  XLIII.

  DELANEY FLEW TO BOISE AND took a bus home to Ghost Canyon. She walked the two miles from town, and when she approached the door to her home, she heard an unfamiliar sound: her parents were fighting. They were at the back of the house, and for no reason she could justify, she crept around the side of the house so she could eavesdrop. She leaned against the wall near the living room, next to an open window.

  “It’s just insulting,” her father yelled. “Disrespectful.”

  “There isn’t any insulting happening. Or disrespectful,” her mother said. “There’s nothing at all. There was only golf. He asked me to play, I played. You don’t play.”

  “I could play,” her father boomed.

  “You’ve never played. You want to start now?”

  “Yes. I really do.”

  “You lie,” her mother said.

  “No,” her father said. “No. This is about you lying. You’re not going to turn it around. Just admit what I already know.”

  “I’m not admitting something because some app told you I lied. I’m shocked you’d take the machine’s word over mine.”

  “I’m not,” he said. “It just confirmed what I suspected.”

  “What? That I’m having some fling with Walt?”

  “I didn’t say you were! I only said there was something more to this golf business. It’s disrespectful to me. You purposely made sure I wasn’t there.”

  Delaney sunk lower against the wall. She needed to tell them what she’d done—that Friendy was a gag, that it meant nothing, could do nothing—but that was not quite true anymore. It worked, or at least was able to sense certain discrepancies, certain elisions, tension in the mouth, a telling posture. Something mildly, distantly inappropriate had happened with her mother and Walt, she was sure of it. The situation had invited suspicion and Friendy had confirmed it. Her father was right. But was her mother right, too? Was she entitled to this, golf with flirtatious undertones at age sixty-one? So the harm was what? The crime was what? The crime was a private moment—something apart, something for herself after thirty-seven years of marriage. But there was no more nuance, no more give, no more gray. Only absolutes.

  Delaney entered the house through the back door and her parents went pale. They’d never fought in front of her before. She put her finger before her lips and they quieted. She unplugged their HereMe and tucked it, and their phones, into a closet, under a stack of linens. When she turned from the closet, ready to tell them everything, the police had already arrived. It had all happened as Karina and Rhea—as Delaney herself—had designed.

  After an hour of explanations, of Delaney defending her parents, of the three of them trying to tell the police that what the AI had heard, and what the police themselves had access to, was not the whole truth of their marriage, the police left, having issued a court summons and insisting on the re-activation of their HereMe. Delaney’s parents would thereafter be subject to what the police called heightened observation. As the police were wrapping things up, Delaney went to bed. Her hope was to feign sleep, so she could escape quickly later in the night. But they came to her door and did not leave till she sat up.

  “We’re so embarrassed,” her mother said.

  “Mortified,” her father said. “This isn’t how we wanted to greet you. Especially after not seeing you for so long.”

  “But you saw me a few weeks ago,” Delaney noted.

  Her parents looked at each other. “Oh hon,” her mother said, “we didn’t come in person. Did you think we were there? In the hospital?”

  “That was a video visit,” her father explained. “You thought it was us there with you? That is so sweet. The tech has gotten so good.”