But when she started school, her parents began to worry. They ran an organic grocery in town and were at the store most days. After school, it was much easier for Delaney to simply bike home, and when her parents closed up the shop, they usually found Delaney home and alone—not playing sports, not with friends in town. Delaney spent a great deal of time by herself, they noticed, and when she didn’t bring classmates home for playdates, they fretted. She seemed so content to read, or stare into the fire, or sit on her bench over the rushing river, that they undertook a haphazard series of interventions and countermeasures. They had her tested. They had her socialized. They filled her afternoons with extracurricular activities at school and at their church. They filled her weekends with playdates at friends’ houses and at hers, and Delaney had no objections to any of these things. She enjoyed the pottery classes, the Spanish and guitar lessons. She made friends relatively easily and liked nothing better than to show these friends her dogs and her river and the horses on the other side of the bridge.

  But she still spent what they considered an inordinate amount of time alone, and out of love and concern for her well-being, and thinking that she needed to connect easily with friends in the medium of her generation, when she turned twelve years old, they bought her a phone. It cost $1,000, an expense they considered outrageous but necessary for her connection to her friends when not physically among them. She did not resist it.

  The device was so many things: it was a television, a telephone, a research tool, a limitless archive, a stereo, an arcade, an extraordinary still camera, a competent video camera, a portal to political movements, pornography and pederasts. Her parents later said—and they were not prone to exaggeration—that in the first month, Delaney spent eighty hours a week using it. Delaney explored only a fraction of its capabilities, first watching the entirety—thirty-three hours—of a vintage show called Riverdale. She watched six seasons of another, even older, show, called The Office. She finished Friends, Outer Banks, iCarly and All American. She discovered music, curating a playlist that soon grew to 1,130 songs. Her friends were not frequent texters yet, so the phone did not have any immediate effect on her social life. But instead of spending time on her bridge over the river, Delaney spent those hours in her room, rarely sleeping but never quite awake.

  After four months of observing her behavior, her parents instituted a regulatory system, whereby she could only use the phone three hours a day. She obeyed this while they were awake, but easily found secret hours after they fell asleep. She watched her shows from ten-thirty p.m. to one or two in the morning, and woke up at seven every day, fitting in another entertainment hour before school. She fell asleep in class frequently and was reprimanded. She finished her sixth-grade year far behind where she’d begun, with a baffled note from her homeroom teacher—“I’ve never seen such a sudden drop-off. Did someone die?”—and her parents spent the summer pondering radical solutions.

  The next few years were full of predictable skirmishes. Her parents devised restrictions and she found ways around them. They installed filters and she easily flouted them. They went to support groups and watched grave documentaries and came back with new restrictions, filters and strategies, none of which had any effect at all. And all this preceded Delaney’s entry to social media. The Circle’s endless and overlapping platforms tripled her engagement and deepened her addiction. By the time she was thirteen she was sending approximately 540 messages a day—most of them blurry pictures of herself in the corner of a screen; it was a thing. And texts. And brief dance videos. And, for a six-month period when an app called Fingrnls reigned, sending close-up photos of her fingernails bearing five-letter acronymic missives.

  Her parents, finally, intervened again, this time sending her to a detox camp in Montana, not far from her grandmother, JuJu—a former airline pilot, onetime bass fishing champion, and serial dater of far younger men. Delaney was supposed to spend a month there, without phones, with no connections at all beyond the eighteen other girls, generally her age. Their days were structured but not militant. It was not a boot camp. They worked the farm. They hiked. They rode horses, milked cows, birthed calves, fed goats. They rose with the sun and slept through the night, and after a month Delaney asked to stay through the year. She did so, visiting JuJu every weekend, loving the simplicity of it, the very few things in her life. In eighth grade, she rejoined her Idaho school, feeling happy and balanced and strong.

  Then something odd happened. Her school, which had been warning parents, since kindergarten, about the dangers of screentime and the atomization of the adolescent attention span, began an inexorable march toward full digital immersion. Her teachers did not assign her homework during school; instead, they posted the homework after school, online, and required students to complete it on CircleClass, an online platform known to collect all-encompassing data on every user. Her social studies teacher assigned videos that had to be watched online, while her English teachers required her to type her papers and submit them through CircleWrites, using that app’s semifunctional AI grammar and spellcheck functions.

  Delaney’s parents, who had given up wifi to keep their daughter offline, were squeezed. For a time, they took her to the library each night, to use the internet connection there, but the drive was thirty minutes each way, and finally they were forced to restart their wifi, and to dance again with the very addiction they’d successfully snuffed out. It was like curing their child of a meth dependency only to have her school require that its students maintain, at all times, a low-level high.

  Meanwhile, the school continued to warn about social media and the black hole of screentime. They prohibited phones in the classroom while allowing laptops, which the students easily jerry-rigged to show porn and pet videos. The educators lamented the diminishing attention span of their students and the obsessive digital contact from parents, while requiring that students have internet access to complete even the most basic tasks, and issuing every parental permission slip and directive through digital-only conduits. On Tuesday her parents would attend a school-sponsored evening devoted to teen tech addictions and how to break them, and on Wednesday her algebra teacher would assign two hours of homework that had to be done online. At an all-school assembly on Friday, a guest speaker would exhort the students to spend the weekend offline and away from all devices, and throughout the day, Delaney’s instructors would each assign weekend homework that could not be completed or turned in without looking at a screen.

  Delaney was irritable, always on edge, dinged eighteen hours a day by classmates wanting to compare notes, and innumerable representatives of her school following up, revising, amending, rescheduling, clarifying. She was sleeping less than five hours a night. Finally, after she was found slumbering midday in the school’s utility closet, they decided as a family that home-schooling was the only viable option. Back at home, Delaney slowly retrained her mind. In a few weeks, she could think for an hour straight. After a month, she could concentrate enough to read books, could form original thoughts that were not just slight variations or reactions to ephemeral text fragments. After three months, she retook her spot on the bridge over the river and reclaimed her mind.

  But no one expected the ecommerce site named after the South American jungle to get into the food business. Especially not the organic food sector. But they hit the grocery world like a mile-wide meteor, causing an extinction event for any small store that had the misfortune of existing where they had designs. The jungle’s organic grocery—FolkFoods—moved into town, and within eighteen months Delaney’s parents had sold their store and were working, whipped and ashamed and wearing green aprons, for the chain.

  Delaney was ashamed, too, and filled with rage. Her parents had given up. They justified their new existence as a holding pattern. They had seven years of mortgage payments left, at which point they had unlimited options. They could sell the home and live out any whim—relocation to an Amsterdam houseboat, a year in Yelapa, the Peace Corps in Uzbekistan. They talked rationally and even defiantly about their employer, and were determined to win the battle against their rapacious corporate invader, even if simply by taking their money, leaving and living well.

  But something happened along the way. Year by year they became less feisty, less critical of their new overlords. More than a few times, they referred to the store in the first-person-plural. Delaney watched them lose their fight, their spark. They worked ten-hour days and were underpaid. They were required to have devices on their persons at all times, so their work hours could be tracked to the minute and where they could be reached day and night for the most minor but relentless questions and updates and schedule changes. They were defeated, exhausted and, worse, they were less interesting. Because their devices dinged them a few times a minute, their minds were reshaped to the jittery, needy psyche that ruled the digital realm.

  Delaney was happy to leave. She went to college at Reed, doing her best to choose classes where she could maintain some real-world balance. Each semester, Professor Agarwal posted, Luther-like with paper and rough-hewn nail, a list of tech-resistant classes offered on campus—known as Agarwal’s Analogs—and Delaney threw herself at those, no matter the subject. She finished with a liberal arts degree and a plan to kill the company that had stolen her childhood and the will of her parents. But then she’d lost her nerve. She paled at the thought of giving more of her life to fighting a way of life preferred by her fellow humans.

  So she became a forest ranger, rotating annually through the Rockies, the Sierras, New Mexico and Oregon. In the trees and on the mountains, it was an entirely different world, utterly apart from tech takeover, until she arrived at her station one day to find that phones were mandatory for all hikers. FOR YOUR SAFETY, the refrain went, for it was far easier to count and control numbers, and to facilitate rescues, if all humans in any park or preserve were trackable and reachable. The new rules were not unexpected and the resistance was scant. Most people entering any park were bringing phones already; the only new twist was the enforcement and registry. After a few weeks, when no opposition was offered, Mae Holland made a gleeful announcement that her company had spearheaded—and would fund—the saturation of the campaign, which she called Find Me in the Natural World, complete with a series of digital posters made to look like the classic 1940s National Park Service advertisements. The Every would provide phones to any park visitors who didn’t have them, and their tracking apps would be added, free, to all hikers who had phones. Which was everyone.

  The day of this announcement, this call for surveillance in the woods, Delaney was at her station, halfway up Mt. Lassen, an expired volcano in northeast California. It was then that Delaney was re-radicalized. She stared down at the alpine lakes strewn around the base of the mountain, and she chose war. She pictured a conflagration, a revolution, a burning-down. What these companies had done was nothing less than radical speciation. In a few short decades they’d transformed proud and free animals—humans—and made them into endlessly acquiescent dots on screens. Citizens in cities had given up their liberties early in the twenty-first century, but the natural world had remained wild, and people could stay hidden, could move freely. But the last vestige of freedom—the ability to move through the natural world unobserved—fell away on a Friday, and no one noticed.

  Mae became Delaney’s enemy, the enemy of all that made humans vital. She needed to be toppled and Delaney had the vainglorious belief that she could be the one to do it. But she had no power screaming from the woods. She’d have to get inside and start cutting wires. She quit the forest service and moved to San Francisco. She took the entry-level job at Ol Factory—like Dan Faraday, Vijay and Martin were tickled by her exotic background. And though she liked her coworkers, liked them a great deal, in fact, there was an apocalyptic obedience at play there that she didn’t know if she could reverse. She and all staff had to acquiesce to trackers that counted their hours, their minutes, their keystrokes and measured their productivity (merits were daisies, demerits durians). Day to day, the consequences were minimal and seldom spoken. It was only when there was an assessment or dismissal that the data was awakened; then everything the underperforming employee had ever said or done was unearthed and examined and compared to averages, aggregates, standards and expectations. Vijay or Martin would see the data and shrug, would smile apologetically, helplessly. It was not, they were keen to emphasize, their decision.

  While at Ol Factory, while planning her side-assault on the Every, the final straw for Delaney was nothing involving the consolidation of wealth and power made possible through mass surveillance and the numerification of lives. It was a message from her father. “Sad news, Del. Grandma JuJu died last night.” This was followed by a tiny yellow face, looking like a Pac-Man in frontal view, with waterfalls of tears flowing from its wee eyes. Seconds later, her mother seconded the message. “So sad,” she wrote, and punctuated this with a slight variation on the first emoji—this yellow face was crying, too, but had little arms extended from its round body, and these hands were formed into fists that were trying to stem the tears. Her mother followed this face with the words, “She was a sweetie,” and this statement was helped by another tiny animated emoji, a cartoon grandmother tilting back and forth in a motion meant to be either rocking or dancing.

  Delaney’s devastation was many layered. She would never be able to correct this moment, the news of her JuJu’s passing not delivered by tearful phone call, or in person, or in any way fitting of thousands of years of human evolution toward increasing refinement. The news of her grandmother’s death was delivered by weeping Pac-Man. When Delaney confronted her parents, they couldn’t recognize the transgression. They pointed out—correctly, Delaney had to admit—that JuJu loved emojis, too.

  VII.

  “NOT TOO MANY PEOPLE START THIS WAY,” Kiki said. Kiki was Delaney’s acclimator, assigned to show Delaney the campus and get her settled into her first rotation. Kiki was no more than five feet tall, with hair the color of Neptune and the build of a woodland fairy.

  “I don’t take it for granted,” Delaney said. “I’m so grateful.” She was nauseous. Through three interviews and an orientation, Delaney still hadn’t been allowed onto the main campus. Instead she had been relegated to outer buildings and, for the orientation, the auditorium, with about a hundred other new hires.

  “I like your outfit, by the way,” Kiki said, “very retro! Hi!”

  Delaney had the sense that Kiki was no longer talking to her. She glanced at Kiki to find she was talking to her screen strapped to her forearm.

  “That is so good, honey! So good!” Kiki sang. On the screen, Delaney caught a glimpse of a small boy with a mop of black hair. They were in the shadow of Algo Mas, and Delaney reached out to touch its aluminum cladding just before it began its upward revolutions. There was chatter, almost impossible to confirm, that the first wave of suicides happened here, Everyones throwing themselves from the balcony of its penthouse, called the Aviary. It had since been closed.

  “Yes, you tell Ms. Jasmine how much I love that,” Kiki said.

  Delaney could hear nothing of the boy’s voice coming through Kiki’s earpiece, could only watch Kiki’s eyes dart back and forth, taking in her son’s face and surroundings.

  “Okay, hon-hon,” Kiki said, “I’ll check back in with you in a few.” She paused. “Just a couple minutes. I know the other parents are still there.” Another pause. “I’ll be back in ten. Okay. Bye-bye.”

  Now Kiki refocused on Delaney, and they began walking.

  “My son Nino. He’s five. He goes to the Every Schoolhouse. Have you seen it? Probably not—you just got here! It’s on the other side of campus, near the beach. It’s really a fantastic school, the scores off the charts …” Kiki trailed off and stopped walking. She tapped her ear. “Yes,” she said. “Thank you so much, Ms. Jolene.”

  And now she was back.

  “They really encourage parental participation, which I love. I love it. The parents each volunteer ten hours a week, which is pretty standard, but here they go above and beyond by inviting parents to sit in on the schoolday as often as they can. It gives the kids such comfort.” She focused on Delaney, then looked at the screen, then back to Delaney. “Where was I?”

  In the distance, Delaney could see a wide flower-shaped expanse of buffalo grass that she felt sure was the Daisy—she’d heard of the Daisy. The grass was an incandescent green, and was dotted with a menagerie of Everyones in bright clothing, but now Kiki had stopped.

  “Are you on OwnSelf?” Kiki asked.

  “No, not yet. I’m on HelpMe,” Delaney said.

  “Oh, I have to move you over to OwnSelf. I’m actually beta-testing a new iteration. It’s really extraordinary.”

  In anticipation of coming to the Every, Delaney had been using HelpMe for a few years; it was a relatively basic app that consolidated all your reminders, calendars, birthdays, appointments and even dietary goals into one place. Advertisers loved it. A user programmed in their desire to eat a protein salad once a day, and that desire would be sold to those selling protein salads. It was caveman-simple, worked for everyone, and was worth billions for the Every. It had been invented by two Manitoba teens in a weekend.

  “OwnSelf is so much more comprehensive, though,” Kiki said. “I think HelpMe has, what, twenty-five data points?”

  “Something like that,” Delaney said. Hers had twenty-two.

  “OwnSelf has five hundred, baseline,” Kiki said. “Mine’s got six hundred and seventy-seven, and one of my goals is to get to eight hundred by next month. And OwnSelf will actually get me there, right?” Kiki laughed, and looked at her screen and frowned. “I mean, that’s the point. It’s all about helping you attain your own goals.” Her oval dinged. “Oh wait.”