“Well,” Delaney said, “this is my favorite place in the world. I guess it helps me forget any residual pain.”

  “But this is totally off-grid!” Mae said, and stamped a few times in the white dust, settling into her boots. “Without your directions, I never would have found it. It doesn’t even have a name!”

  Delaney wanted to say That’s why I love it, you monster, but she only smiled. She prepared herself for a few hours of pretend, where she would feign friendship, candor, allyship.

  “You know what I’m going to say next,” Mae said.

  “Why not share it, right?” Delaney said.

  “Sharing is caring,” Mae said, and turned her torso left and right in a kind of stretch. “I know it’s facile but isn’t it true? The Dalai Lama said, ‘Share your knowledge. It is a way to achieve immortality.’”

  Delaney was sure someone in the Reading Room had provided that. “Well said,” she said. “Maybe you’re right. We’re walking to one of the prettiest waterfalls you’ll ever see. Are you ready?”

  “Do I need anything else?” Mae asked. She had the passenger door of her car open, and inside, Delaney glimpsed enough equipment and food to establish a small colony.

  “Nothing,” Delaney said. She pointed to the backpack at her own feet, which contained water and sunscreen and raisins, not much more. “It’s an hour walk up, an hour back. We’ll survive.”

  “One of us, anyway,” Mae said. “I haven’t hiked since I was about ten. Is it this way?” She walked ahead to the trailhead and then stopped. “Sorry. I’m so used to leading. You should.”

  “No, no. It’s an easy trail,” Delaney said. “You can lead. Or we can take turns.”

  “You know what?” Mae said, “Let’s walk side by side. I’ll walk in this grassy bit next to the trail. It’s softer here.”

  There was a jagged rock in front of Mae, as big as a football, and just when Delaney was sure Mae would trip over it, she jumped over it as nimbly as a deer. In every way, Mae was far more able than Delaney had expected. Her social skills, her wit, her agility. On the first upward leg of the trail, she kept up with Delaney without difficulty, even while walking a tougher path. More than anything, she was shocked that Mae had come digitally naked. Delaney looked for any device and found nothing—no bodycam, no phone, no oval, no earbuds, nothing. Twice now Mae had gone dark to spend time with her.

  “So I wanted to run something by you,” Delaney said.

  “Okay,” Mae said, and took a long stride over a fallen log.

  “Can I speak freely?” Delaney asked.

  “Of course,” Mae said, though her mouth pinched just a bit. “We have consultants come in every month, Delaney. I can’t be offended. And you’re not charging me half a million dollars a day.”

  “Okay,” Delaney said. “I’ve been kicking around an idea that might help the Every and its customers. But it’s not just an app or a platform or a button. Not that there’s anything wrong with those things,” she added.

  “Okay, I’m intrigued,” Mae said.

  “Well, I’ve spent six months rotating at the Every, and as organized as it is, I think it could be more so. There are so many departments and programs that aren’t linked so much, but should be.”

  “Okay,” Mae said, as if she’d been told that the Every campus was located on an island, and that much of the company’s revenue came from advertising. Delaney knew she had to get beyond the obvious and into the world-saving.

  “And I believe if they’re linked,” she continued, “and if you use the full power and reach of the Every’s data, and of the real-world assets you acquired when you bought the jungle, and if you truly embraced the direction humanity is trending and where it desperately wants to go, you might just save the world and perfect the species.”

  “Now it’s my time to stop,” Mae said. Delaney stopped, too, and Mae gave her an agogged look. “You’re good. You know that? I’m thinking you know that.” She took a long sip of water. “Go on,” Mae said when she was finished, and pressed ahead.

  “Personal Carbon Impact,” Delaney said.

  “Wes Makazian’s project? He was your old roommate, right?”

  “He was.”

  “What was in the air out there in your old place? A lot of ideas from one trog shed.”

  Delaney skipped a breath. She assumed Mae might know they’d lived trog-style, but she knew about the Shed? But of course she knew. Even a trog shed could be photographed from the street, from above. In an instant she’d have access to photos, floor plans, building history, utility bills.

  “Right now,” Delaney said, “the PCI isn’t public, but it’s on its way to being public.”

  “And you object?”

  “No. It must be public to have impact. There’s the social opprobrium aspect, which is only half of it. When the PCI is public, people will feel shame if their number’s high, but that doesn’t necessarily change their behavior. That’s the stick, but you need the carrot.”

  “And what would the carrot be?”

  “Well, financial incentives are stronger than social opprobrium. We have the loyalty programs that motivate billions to buy through our portal. But we don’t use them enough to shape better behavior.”

  “You were at AYS though, right?”

  “Right. But that’s more suggestive than coercive.”

  “That’s what PrefCom’s for.”

  “Yes, but we’re still just managing an inherently chaotic system. We’re helping people with their choices. We’re trying to predict their movements and purchases. But what I’m suggesting is the control of choices in the first place.”

  Mae had stopped again, under a stand of Douglas firs. “Can we sit?” They found two opposing logs on a flat area off the trail. Mae flicked a few pieces of moss off the bark and sat down. “You were saying: control choice,” she said.

  “Right,” Delaney said. “Gabriel Chu talks a lot about the paralysis of decision-making. We’ve had three generations now for whom the greatest stress in their lives is choice. And I’m convinced that people simply don’t want it. It’s not that they want fewer choices. It’s that they want almost no choices. And more than anything, they want no bad choices. Think of mustard,” Delaney said.

  “Think of mustard, right,” Mae said. “I did not see that coming.”

  Delaney laughed. “It’s just a good representative product that proves the madness of the market. Right now, there are more than two hundred types of mustard in the U.S. alone.”

  “That can’t be true.”

  “Two hundred and twenty-eight. I researched this. And a lot of these manufacturers make terrible mustard. Even when the mustard’s good, a huge percentage of it goes unsold. In general, these companies start up, they make their mustard, they fail, and then throw everything away. The cumulative waste for just this one industry boggles the mind. Now think of clothing. Tomorrow some designer will dream up a new kind of shirt, and this shirt will be hideous. But the designer, and his manufacturer, will think the shirt wonderful, and a half-million of these shirts will get made, go unsold and end up in landfills.”

  “Again,” Mae said, “I think we’re doing quite a lot to discourage these things. We steer people away from bad products. AYS and PrefCom—”

  “Yes, but what if we didn’t even make these things to begin with—millions of things every day, that used precious resources, only to be thrown away?”

  “You were at Thoughts Not Things,” Mae said.

  “I was. So I incinerated thousands of unnecessary objects. Which was a start. But this was after they were made. But most of them never should have existed. What if we could control production and demand with surgical precision, and make only those things that we know would be used or consumed? What if we could include the consumers in the process of deciding what would and what wouldn’t be manufactured?”

  “Surveys?”

  “Not just surveys. Ah look, an eagle.” Delaney pointed to its silhouette, tracing an elliptical orbit above the treeline. Mae offered a perfunctory glance and turned back to Delaney.

  “More,” she said.

  “Before that mustard is made, we test it with our own channels. Concensus, for example. We ask, Do you want a new mustard that tastes the same but has a new label? People say no, and we say we won’t carry it. Or we find that it doesn’t meet our environmental standards or whatever, so it’s not made.”

  “Why wouldn’t they just make it anyway?”

  “Because we control 82 percent of ecommerce, which is 71 percent of all consumption,” Delaney said. “If we stop them before they begin, none of those resources are wasted. All of those plants and spices and preservatives it would have taken to make that mustard, and all that glass and paper to package it, all those boxes and pallets, and all the trucks and gas and roads to transport it—all that would have gone into a failed product are spared, and humans have one less unnecessary choice.”

  “And we decide,” Mae said.

  “Right,” Delaney said, “and then we stand at the gate. It’s like the guards at the front of the Every who prevent the shitty gift baskets from entering. Same principle. Bad stuff never gets through, and soon it’s pointless to make it.”

  “And the things that do get made?”

  “We give people what they want. Which is less. Three types of mustard. We vet all three, they all meet our standards for environmental responsibility, and we use AYS and PrefCom to help consumers make the right decision. Fewer choices. Everyone rejoices.”

  “You come up with that just now?”

  “I did,” Delaney said.

  A long moment passed. Delaney thought Mae might have a notebook and pen on her person, but this was not the case.

  “We can end all the things we don’t like,” Mae said.

  “Exactly,” Delaney said. “Think of wine. There are twelve thousand wineries in the U.S. They make about a hundred thousand types of wine. It’s far too much.”

  “Just thinking about all those choices gives me hives,” Mae said.

  “So we eliminate most of them,” Delaney said. “I’m sure most of that wine is bad. And all that water they use!”

  “Manufacturers will kill us,” Mae said. “Like what happened with the travel industry. The airlines were not happy with Stop+Lük.”

  “This will be the opposite,” Delaney said. “They’ll love us. At least those we choose. If there are only three mustards, and demand remains stable, then the manufacturers have predictable revenue, and the prices drop. You agree to buy one jar of mustard a month, and the cost is less than half it is today.”

  “Wait. Why?”

  “Because the manufacturers no longer have to factor in waste. Think about something even more regular. Breakfast,” Delaney said. “A consumer has kids, and the kids eat the same two cereals ninety percent of the time. But right now, they pay retail for these two boxes once a week. But no one should pay so-called retail prices ever again.”

  “I’ve said this forever,” Mae said. “But they continue to do so.”

  “You’ve convinced a lot of consumers,” Delaney said. “But now you have to convince the manufacturers. Let’s say a cereal producer makes 500,000 boxes of cereal a week. They’re sent to 40,000 stores. Two-thirds of the boxes are sold, and the other third are eventually thrown away. The manufacturer’s overall pricing has to account for all that waste. Everyone manufactures far more than what they sell. It’s far worse for produce. That’s a terrible and outdated way of doing business. And it destroys the world. Almost half the world’s resource consumption is not even consumed.”

  Mae scoffed in grim recognition.

  “So imagine this,” Delaney continued. “Imagine if that cereal manufacturer is simply sending most of their product direct to consumers—either through their own warehouses or ours. They manufacture to order, because the customers have committed to buy two boxes of cereal a week for a year, for five years. Now the company not only knows how many boxes of cereal to make, they know precisely where to send them. They save all the money they usually spend on making cereal, shipping it all to stores and throwing so much of it away. So consumers get cheaper goods, because the makers don’t have to factor in the unsold products.”

  “Or retailers at all,” Mae said. “We’re the retailer.”

  “Basically, we’re the only retailer,” Delaney said. “Half the stores were killed by the pandemics anyway. Let the rest die.”

  Mae’s eyes went wide. “Right. They become homes, parks. Let nature reclaim every mall and shop.”

  “Simpler this way,” Delaney said.

  “We’re tracking consumer preferences already. Why wouldn’t we be the conduit between all demand and all production? We decide.”

  “And we have the infrastructure to take everything from factory to front door,” Delaney said. “When we bought the jungle, we got the logistics and distribution systems—the planes, the trucks, the warehouses, the vans. And I’m assuming that’s why you’ve been buying the shipping companies.”

  “Right, right,” Mae said, though the slightest tremor in Mae’s voice betrayed that perhaps there had been no grand design at all.

  “You could scuttle half of those ships tomorrow,” Delaney said. “The vans, too. Because you’d eliminate all the world’s unneeded stuff. The clothing shipped from Myanmar only to be shipped back. The cheap toys from China that end up unsold and thrown away. Limitless choice is killing the world.”

  Mae looked up. “I like that. Did you come up with that?”

  “It’s actually hanging from the rafters at the AYS offices.”

  “And they’re still involved?”

  Delaney was sure Mae was doing cost-cutting in her head, eliminating this expensive department and many others.

  “I think they’d still do some of the curation,” Delaney said. “And then we eliminate all the cheap and poorly sourced products. We thin the herd. Fewer choices. Which alleviates Impact Anxiety.”

  “No one wants a shirt made in a sweatshop that pollutes the local water source. Or bananas in Boston in October,” Mae said.

  “Right. Those goods no longer have a marketplace. And the stress we all feel when faced with a hundred brands of socks, for example—that’s gone.”

  “Because we decide,” Mae said.

  “Right,” Delaney said, and took note: those words, We decide, were important to Mae. “We decide,” Delaney said, “and then the companies are manufacturing only what they know will sell.”

  “It really works for both sides,” Mae said.

  “And it saves the planet,” Delaney said. “And if anyone wants environmentally irresponsible goods, we hit them with their Personal Carbon Impact data. That’s public, and instantly their Shame Agg jumps. They buy a four-pound steak made possible by the burning of the Brazilian rainforest, their PCI takes a beating.”

  “And if you have a high PCI, there are societal penalties. Hard to get a job maybe. Or housing. So companies stop making that stuff, and they get in line. And then when they do, and we’re all in sync, they have certainty,” Mae said.

  “Right,” Delaney said. “Stabilization of revenue, of profits. A factory that can predict two or three years of demand is infinitely more stable. Jobs are secure. Again, you’re no longer guessing or hoping what consumers will do. They’re making commitments.”

  “Almost out of duty.”

  “Well, the planet is collapsing,” Delaney said. “This might be the only way to save it. We should only make what we need, right? Buy thoughtfully. Shop from home.”

  “And it all goes through us,” Mae said.

  “There’s no one else that could do it,” Delaney said. “This works with Stop+Lük. And StayStïl. You’re eliminating most of these unnecessary little trips. All of those car-miles eliminated. One delivery driver coming to the neighborhood as opposed to twenty-five people driving to a hundred different stores.”

  “Fewer cars, less pollution, accidents, fatalities.”

  Delaney looked up the trail. If they didn’t get moving soon, they’d be hiking the steepest parts of the path during the hottest part of the day. “Should we keep going?”

  They continued, passing through lupine and arrowleaf balsamroot, and Delaney had a terrible thought. It might have been the endorphins, but she was beginning to believe what she was saying. All through the trip home from Agarwal’s, she’d struggled with the fact that her plan actually would reduce waste. Would create order. Would drastically limit the unnecessary exploitation of land, energy, animals. But it would also give the Every historically unprecedented power. It would make the Dutch East India Company look like a lemonade stand. What she had just described would surely mean the end of much of what makes a human free. It would be a doorway to far tighter restrictions on movement and choice. But it did have perhaps the best chance to slow the catastrophic warming of the planet. It would usher in a new, ever-more obedient era in the human procession, but our reckless freedoms and thoughtless whims were precisely what brought the planet to the brink. And with Wes on hand, she thought, with Agarwal in the fold, there seemed at least a passing chance that they could maintain some balance at the Every, carve out some space for idiosyncracy, for private thought. Maybe this was the only way—that only a monopoly could save the world.

  “Do you have a name for it? Your whole system?” Mae asked.

  “I’m toggling between Consensual Economic Order and Predictive Economy. PredEcon,” Delaney said. “For a while I was just calling it Freedom from Choice.”

  “Ah. I like that, too. The liberation of it.”

  Then Delaney saw it—the waterfall. She pointed it out to Mae.

  “See the little white feathers floating off the cliff?”

  Mae squinted up at it. “I see it. We’re climbing that far?”

  “It’s really just a dozen easy switchbacks. Easy,” Delaney said. “And the view will get better all the while. We’ll make it.”

  “So Consensual Economic Order,” Mae said.

  “Or benevolent monopoly,” Delaney said.

  “I like that. Benevolent,” Mae said.

  Delaney had another idea. She’d come to the trail with two, a double-helix, really, two systems that would work in concert to finally put the planet and its people in order. But she hesitated in explaining the second. Couldn’t she leave it at this new economic paradigm? The second notion would complete the changing of the species, the hyperevolution that had begun at the cusp of the twentieth century. But it had stalled, and why? Because this final step hadn’t been explained properly. What the hell, she thought. She’d be the one.