“Time for the onboarding doc. Let’s head over here,” Kiki said, and brought Delaney to a small building, ivy-covered, a twin to the one where she’d met Shireen and Carlo.

  Inside, the room was empty, and Delaney exhaled elaborately.

  “Last bit of housekeeping,” Kiki said, and handed her a tablet. “The final onboarding doc, which we ask that you read carefully. Obviously the eye tracking knows what you’ve read, so …”

  Kiki made for the door. “Initial every page and sign at the end. I’ll come back in thirty minutes,” she said, and left.

  Delaney woke the tablet and Mae Holland’s face appeared, filling the screen. “You made it,” she said, and her eyes widened, as if she was both proud and a bit surprised. “You’re joining us, and we couldn’t be happier.” It was a recording, but still, Delaney found herself briefly star-struck. Mae still looked like a newbie herself—those bright dark eyes, that olive skin, as smooth as a river stone. “We are so grateful you chose us, and I can’t wait to see you on campus. If you see me, stop me and say hello!” She smiled, and Delaney took her in—the high cheekbones, just short of severe, that nearly lipless mouth. The lights upon her were perfect, setting her skin aglow, her eyes elated. Then she was gone, replaced by the onboarding document.

  The sentences were fascinating, written with the strangely florid and willfully capitalized style common to the industry. “You are invited to bring your most Joyful Self to campus each day.” “Your personal Fulfillment is our goal.” “You are Seen Here.” “You are Valued here.” “Touching, including shaking of hands or Hugging, is de-approved unless between signers of Mutual Contact Agreements.” “This is a plastic-free campus.” “This is a fragrance-free campus.” “This is an almond-free campus.” “Paper is Strongly discouraged.” “Smiling is encouraged but not mandatory.” “Empathy is mandatory.” “Guests must be announced 48 hours in advance.” “Vehicles that burn fossil fuels require an Exemption.” “This is a Collaboration zone.” “This is a Sacred place.” “Everyones with children under five are encouraged to bring them to Raise Every Voice.” “Non-company hardware is de-approved.” “Downloading of non-vetted Software is de-approved.” “All correspondence on company-provided devices is subject to screening.” “Attendance at Dream Fridays is required Because They Are Awesome.” “Attendance at Thursday Exuberant Dance is not required but urged because it is next level.” “This is a beef-free campus.” “This is a pork-free campus.” “Until further notice, this is a salmon-free campus.”

  The second Delaney was finished, Kiki’s face appeared in the doorway. “Your medical intake!” she gasped. “You should have had it done by now. What time is it? We can get you in.”

  She hustled Delaney out and into the light.

  “We’re going to the Overlook?” Delaney asked. She’d read about the Overlook, and could see it, like a white spiral exoskeleton, on the hills above Treasure Island. What she’d read painted it as a mecca of tranquility—a place where Everyones could get unparalleled healthcare in a spa-like setting with astounding 360-degree water views.

  “No, no,” Kiki said, and looked briefly up at the array of white buildings in the distance. “The Overlook is for … It’s not for basic intake, it’s for … Wait. What time is it? Hi honey!”

  She was with Nino again. “I’m sorry, hon-hon, Mama’s working. And you have your own assessment today, so you stay till four.” Kiki’s eyes welled. “This helps Jolene know how you’re doing. It helps Mama, too. Nino?” She tapped her ear and turned to Delaney apologetically. “Just a sec.”

  “Oh, hi Gabriel. I didn’t realize you’d cut in. How are you?” Kiki was looking assiduously at the cement underfoot. “Yes. Got it. Of course.” She tapped her ear again and smiled at Delaney.

  “I’m assuming you had your DNA sequenced?” Kiki asked.

  “For college, yes,” Delaney said. It had been required at most schools, first state then private—insurers had forced the issue.

  “Good, so just have to get the vitals, blood, X-rays, things like that,” Kiki said, and they walked briskly to the clinic. Kiki’s rubbery legs carried her ahead of Delaney and, finding Delaney falling behind, periodically she stretched her hand back, her fingers open like a star, her rings twinkling in the sun.

  When they stepped inside the clinic, Delaney saw no humans. There was no reception desk, there were no doctors. The medical professions had been decimated by doubt and litigation, with the vast majority of patients preferring AI diagnoses over those of humans, which they considered recklessly subjective.

  “Okay, it says you’re scheduled for Bay 11,” Kiki said, and took a moment to reconcile the map on her armscreen with her physical environs.

  Delaney looked down the hallway and saw the numbers ascending toward 11. “I think it’s this way?” she said.

  Kiki looked up and, after a painfully long time examining the hall, its numbered rooms, smiled with relief. “Great. You go on and I’ll come back when you’re done.”

  Delaney walked down the hall, past the other bays, most of them containing a human lying on a medbed, the rooms dim but for the bright reflections of the patients’ interiors on the wallscreens.

  When she entered Bay 11, the room was empty but the wallscreen was alive with a series of neon pictures—three-dimensional visualizations of an embryo in a womb. The detail was astonishing, far beyond anything Delaney had seen before. This must be proprietary software, she assumed, something being tested on campus. The embryo was larger than life, perhaps three feet high, its eyes enormous, covered with a pink vellum, its tiny watery heart fluttering like a kite in high winds. The image was left over from whomever was last here, Delaney assumed, and before she could stop herself, she was scanning the screen for the name, and the moment before the screen went dark, she found it. Maebelline Holland.

  Stunned, Delaney held her breath. She listened for anyone outside the door, anyone nearby. There was no one. She stepped into the hallway, stupidly looking for Mae Holland herself. The hallway was empty, and Delaney returned to the medbed. She thought about leaving. Seeing what she saw put her in some jeopardy, she was sure. Would she be expected to tell someone what she saw? Would the room’s many cameras already know? To reveal it was an invasion of privacy—medical information like this being still unpublic—but to not reveal it: wasn’t that a problematic elision?

  The screen came alive again. It was a recording of a woman in a white coat, a stethoscope around her neck and a clipboard pressed to her torso. “Hello Delaney,” she said. “I’m Dr. Villalobos.”

  The rest of the intake was unsurprising. Because Delaney’s medical history was digitized, the Every simply had to add her data to their own database and update a few metrics. As the medbed scanned her, Delaney cycled through the possibilities. It seemed highly improbable that there was another Maebelline Holland on this campus. But it also seemed unlikely that the CEO of the Every would have used this nondescript medbed, let alone leave this most personal information onscreen for the next visitor to find. Above all, it was impossible that Mae Holland was pregnant. Her life was lived with unrivaled transparency; she was still fully Seen. To be true to those principles of the Seen, she would have broadcast her first visit to any doctor, her first knowledge of her pregnancy; anything less would breed suspicion, would perpetuate corrosive secrecy. And beyond that was the issue of carbon impact. Population growth activists had become more vocal and their questions—must you? should you? have you any right?—were seeping into the mainstream. If anyone would debate these questions openly, and seek a kind of customer consensus about her own babymaking, it would be the face of the Every.

  So she could not be pregnant. That embryo being truly inside Mae Holland was not possible. But Delaney had no way to find out. It was one of the few pieces of medical data still outside Right to Know laws. During the second pandemic, new laws were rushed through all over the world, giving all citizens the right to know who had a virus and where they likely got it. It only seemed right, and contributed to the general well-being and slowing of the spread. And what about lice and mono? HIV and herpes? No one had a right to spread these afflictions—pinkeye!—and everyone had a right to know who was afflicted. Public registries became the norm, and the idea of keeping medical information private became indefensible. It put others at risk and thwarted scientific progress.

  But pregnancies were still secret, or the law treated them as such. Delaney couldn’t even search “Mae Holland pregnant,” because the typer of those words would immediately be known. The second wave of the Right to Know laws had codified a person’s right to know, in real time, who was searching for them and what information they sought. The searcher, to be sure, also had the right to know who was watching their searches, creating a two-way mirror effect, which occurred a billion times a day, of a searcher searching while the searched watched the searcher searching.

  Could Wes do the search? Delaney wondered. And if this was indeed the truth—that Mae was carrying a child—she had concealed it. And if the head of the Every had purposely hidden this information, how could Wes access it? If anyone could find a way, he could. He had all the necessary tools of a hacker, but his brain was strange, too—his was a nonlinear mind that found back doors and side doors and crevices and cracks that wouldn’t occur to anyone else.

  “Okay, all set,” Dr. Villalobos’s recorded self said.

  Delaney got dressed, and while buttoning her shirt, had a series of thoughts, none of them more rational than any other. She thought this could be a set-up, a test of how she would handle such sensitive information. But if so, there was no right response. Such a private matter should have been private in the first place. This was the unnecessarily awkward position Mae herself had sought to eliminate—the keeping of secrets, the sowing of distrust and fostering of conspiracies. Delaney had no choice, really, but to wait. As unorthodox as it was, perhaps Mae was simply waiting for the right time to reveal that she was bringing another human into the world.

  VIII.

  THE MOMENT DELANEY ENTERED the foyer, Kiki’s face appeared. “All set? We’re heading for the Reformation,” she said. Delaney, still dazed, followed her out of the clinic and into the light.

  “This is a more retro part of campus,” Kiki said as they walked through a corridor of hangars and warehouses. “The building we’re going to used to be airplane storage for the Navy, but was strategic for us because it abutted the old unused subway line. So we repurposed the tunnels for our trains. Follow me.”

  They entered a vast open-plan steel building that resembled nothing so much as a nineteenth-century factory. Delaney almost expected to see vacant-eyed children fixing rusting machinery.

  “After it was a plane hangar this was actually a steelworking …” Kiki said, then was unable to think of the noun—plant? factory?—that might properly end the sentence. She pretended that the word was implicit or unnecessary, though, and distracted herself and Delaney by taking in the cavernous space. It had room for three commercial airliners and a fleet of buses, too. Bright bolts of fabric had been strung from the steel beams, in an effort, no doubt, to bring a festive mood to the grim industrial space, but because the undulating fabric had already absorbed whatever black dust still dropped from the building’s ancient ceiling, it made the scene look somehow more tragic.

  “Are you on right now?” Kiki asked, gesturing to Delaney’s cam.

  “Oh no,” Delaney said, “I was told to turn it off for the med-eval …”

  “Right, good,” Kiki said. “You can go on again, if you want.”

  Years ago, Delaney had bought and began to wear a cam, in anticipation of her Every infiltration, and to her surprise, the experience had been distinctly underwhelming. She realized her life was generally unremarkable and unwatchable. And when it was approaching interesting, she found, true to Mae’s insistence, the camera on her chest forced her to behave better. The catty comment she wanted to make did not make it past her self-censor. The double-dip she contemplated with her celery stick at the baby shower (client of Gwen)—this was thwarted by the expectation that it would be caught, examined by strangers with mouths agape, made part of her permanent history. So she modeled the behavior she wanted from herself. She was less interesting, surely, and less funny—for humor does not easily survive the intense filtering that the twenty-first century made mandatory—but she was also kinder, more positive, more generous and civil.

  “Delaney?”

  A thin pink man stood before her, with a yellow flame of hair extending diagonally from his forehead. Delaney smiled and in greeting he placed his hand on his chest, a hand as pale and delicate as a capuchin monkey’s. She glanced downward, just beyond the hand, fearing another penis, but was happy to find the pink man was wearing a sarong.

  “Delaney. Welcome,” he said, closing his eyes and smiling beatifically. “Taavi,” he said, and pointed to a badge that verified his claim. “You know something about our work?”

  “I do,” Delaney said.

  A shadow of irritation passed over the pale eyes of the pink man.

  “Well, too bad,” he said. “I’m required to give you the whole spiel, to make sure the record shows you got it.” He pointed to the cam hung from his neck.

  “That’s my cue,” Kiki said. “I’ll check in with you EOD.” She took Delaney’s wrist, squeezed briefly and meaningfully, then sheered off with alarming speed. “Hello Nino!” she sang as she disappeared.

  “Between 1990 and 2025,” Taavi said, and began to walk, “the personal storage industry in this country grew from about 2,200 locations nationwide to over 520,000. These storage campuses occupy, on average, three acres, which means about a million acres are being used for ugly boxes containing useless boxes. This of course constitutes an environmental catastrophe. The land on which these ugly boxes stood had previously been open land, farms, pasture, backyards, public parks. And every time a storage unit popped up and got noticed, more people got the idea they needed to save every last piece of plastic or lint they’d ever possessed.”

  Taavi stopped at a screen, where a map of the United States throbbed with red dots. “So people rented these storage units, and the storage unit developers built more to serve skyrocketing demand. Soon enough every town had one, two, ten of these storage complexes.”

  The dots on the screen doubled, tripled.

  “We became a nation of hoarders. And just when we might have gained some self-awareness and even shame about our hoarding, the television shows about storage units appeared, and that grew the market again. It was ludicrous. I mean, a TV show about storage units?”

  Delaney laughed, and Taavi paused and closed his eyes to absorb her laughter, as one would the warmth of the sun.

  “This was, for a time at least,” he continued, “primarily an American phenomenon. But like so many crass and insufferable trends, they start here and proliferate elsewhere. Canada was next, and within a decade they had a million acres of storage boxes, too. Then Australia. Then an odd smattering of other countries—Croatia, Turkey, South Africa. In Brazil they clear-cut rainforests for this nonsense,” he said. They had arrived at an empty workstation.

  “Anyway, we had to turn back the tide,” Taavi said. “That’s the origin story for Thoughts Not Things. Have you used it?”

  All around them were carts full of photo albums of varying age and condition.

  “For my mom and dad, yes,” Delaney said. Her parents had tried to send their albums here, but Delaney had thwarted the plan. She scanned the photos herself and saved the albums in a storage unit halfway to Boise.

  “You read and signed the onboarding docs,” Taavi said, “so you know this. But now that we’re at the workstation I’ll just point out the obvious. Let’s have you sit.”

  Delaney sat. The chair was perfect.

  “You’ll see that there are pedals under the desk, with adjustable resistance. You can pedal like a bike or use it like a stairmaster. The equipment of course knows when it’s being used, and that data is yours. You know the health guidelines. You shouldn’t sit more than sixteen minutes at a time, so you’ll get reminders to stand, stretch, walk around.”

  “Wonderful,” Delaney said. “I’d totally forget otherwise.”

  “It’s been so lovely to meet you.” Taavi turned to a woman sitting in the next workstation. “You’re Winnie?” he asked, looking only briefly in her direction.

  “Yes, Winnie,” the woman said, standing and waving to Taavi and Delaney. “Welcome, welcome,” she said.

  Winnie was in her mid-forties and dressed much like Delaney, in jeans and a cotton blouse. And with the baton passed, like Kiki before him, Taavi peeled off and with remarkable alacrity returned to whence he came.

  Winnie was a stout woman with deep dimples and dark, shining eyes. She smiled brightly at Delaney. Her hair was black and curly, pulled back into a wooly ponytail. A tiny Texas flag had been taped to her monitor, and next to her desk was a small plastic aquarium containing a pimply and bulbous lizard.

  “That’s Ricky,” Winnie said. “He’s a leopard gecko.”

  Her eyes searched Delaney’s torso until she saw the cam. Her cheerful face fell just enough to seem utterly drained of joy.

  “So you’re Delaney!” she said, performatively.

  “I am,” Delaney said.

  Winnie touched her ear. “From Idaho!”

  They went this way for a time, with Winnie receiving information about Delaney via her earpiece, and Delaney confirming it.

  “Well then,” Winnie said finally, and cracked her knuckles. “It’s probably best just to watch what I do, right?”

  Delaney rolled her chair into Winnie’s workstation and sat behind her. Her breath was shallow and quick.