“I’ve actually never trained anyone,” Winnie said. “I’m only seven months into the job myself. I was doing graphic design for restaurants, basically. Menus and websites, right? Then my cousin sent me a listing for something here, something about scanning, and it paid about three times what I was making, so …”

  Winnie looked judgmentally at her feet.

  “That’s awesome. I’m so excited,” Delaney said.

  Winnie brightened. “Well, obviously this place is incredible. The benefits are insane. I have three kids. You have kids?”

  “Not yet!” Delaney said.

  “Well, they have all these early-college programs here, these savings plans …” Again Winnie seemed to be having an argument with some part of her that struggled with her existence at the Every. Delaney decided she’d been some kind of counterculture type at some point—maybe before the kids? Her forearms were dotted with tiny tattoos that looked like a swarm of bees or beetles.

  “So where should we start?” Winnie asked, wholly adrift.

  “You know,” Delaney said, “just pretend I’m not here. I can pick up on things pretty quickly, and if I have a question I can stop you.”

  Winnie let out a happy sigh. “Thanks. Thanks. The woman who trained me was so organized and methodical, and I honestly couldn’t do what she did. She’s actually head of the department now, but isn’t down here a lot anymore. Did you meet her? Aneet?”

  Delaney said she had not met Aneet, and again urged Winnie to go ahead with her work; she didn’t want her to fall behind on whatever quotas she was supposed to meet. Somehow the word quota seemed appropriate in a place like this, which seemed designed for the manufacture of steel stools or the riveting of wings to jets.

  “Okay, here’s where I’m at,” Winnie said. She stood, and lifted the cream-white lid on a low-slung device, revealing what appeared to be an enormous piece of glass, easily three feet by four.

  “Scanner?” Delaney asked, looking at the familiar lights and oddly old-fashioned machinery under the glass pane.

  “It is,” Winnie said. “The hope is to scan as many pictures as you can at once. I mean, obviously there’ll come a point where robots can do this, but right now the work is still confusing to them, I guess, and sometimes too delicate. Look.”

  She pulled a photo album from the cart next to her desk. The cover depicted Ft. Lauderdale in the 1960s. Its plastic pages crackled as she opened it.

  “First you have to see what you’re up against, right?” She flipped through the book, the photos mostly small color pictures of a 1970s Christmas populated by a family of large-haired persons. The photos had rounded edges, and like most of the snapshots from the era, all of the action was taking place in the bottom third of each frame.

  One by one, Winnie carefully transferred the photos from the album, peeling them slowly, the mild adhesive leaving trails of yellow, and placed them face-down onto the scanner bed.

  “You know that game Memory?” Winnie asked. She stared at Delaney and seemed very interested in the answer.

  “We called it Concentration, I think,” Delaney said. “Where you have all the cards face-down and you turn them over one by one?”

  “And try to get matches, right,” Winnie said. She looked wistfully at the scanner. How Winnie had not been fired—this was perplexing. She had no sense of urgency, and seemed to lose her train of thought after every third word. “So then you drop the cover,” Winnie said suddenly, and closed the lid clumsily.

  An urgent ding sounded from Winnie’s computer, followed by another from her oval.

  Winnie’s eyebrows bounced. “Sixteen minutes. Time to move around,” she said, and then began marching in place, her knees as high as she could manage while wearing snug denim. With every fourth step, Winnie did a kind of twisting motion at the waist, with her elbows high. Then she returned to marching. Delaney had not been invited to join, so she simply sat and looked into the rafters.

  Finally Winnie sat down and directed her attention to her screen, where perfect digital representations of all eighty pictures appeared. With some screentapping from Winnie, the photos were individuated, oriented, and laid out in a grid. Winnie told the program to scan for faces, and the people in the pictures were identified and a sidebar appeared, showing all of the photos, 1–83, in which each of the people were represented.

  “The client gave us a list of people,” Winnie explained, “and now the AI is finding each.” Names appeared below each photo—Dad, Mom, Grandpa, Eloise, Barky.

  Another ding came from Winnie’s wrist. Winnie glanced down and laughed. “Can’t believe I forgot.” She reached for a thermos and drank from it. “Water,” she explained. “Four liters a day. I used to wear the waterpacks, but it was upsetting my posture.” She swallowed for a troubling amount of time, and finally her oval dinged with satisfaction. Winnie put the thermos back.

  “Okay, now the pictures are in the system,” she continued, “so you can do a thousand things with them. I can send all this to the client now, and let them go hog wild with genealogy or more detailed labels. With PastPerfect, the computer can figure out when each shot was taken, and that’s important to a lot of people. The AI can do captions, and that’s surprisingly popular. ‘Grandpa at Christmas.’ ‘Uncle Phil at Christmas.’ That’s a free service and basically everyone opts for that. After we send them back, the clients can alter or improve the captions, but most people don’t bother.”

  Winnie had lifted the scanner’s lid and was absent-mindedly gathering the photos again—without the care she’d put into their arrangement on glass. Once she’d gathered them all into a sticky pagoda of curled paper, she dropped them into a large bin resting on the conveyor behind Winnie’s desk. The bin contained thousands of photos of all sizes and ages, weddings and christenings and holidays, presumably, everyone now mixed together, humbled and democratized and destined for pulp.

  “You can fit ten thousand in here,” Winnie said. “You’d be surprised.” Winnie tossed the puffy-covered album, with its lurid Florida sunset, into a different bin. “The albums you can’t recycle,” she said defensively. “We would if we could. But we can’t. They get incinerated. Whoa. It’s lunch. You hungry?”

  On the way to the cafeteria, they passed a labyrinth of conveyors, murmuring and clicking, winding through workstations. Mae Holland had bought the company that designed and built most of the world’s airport conveyors—a strange purchase, everyone agreed, but for the past five years she’d been buying a dizzying array of real-world companies, companies that grew food and built cars and planes, and so this purchase, at $44 million, tiny by Every standards, did not attract undue attention.

  Now Delaney could see the bins moving, stuffed high with photo albums but other things, too—summer dresses, wicker baskets, 1980s-era stereos and soiled baby blankets, all moving through the building before leaving through a rubber-flapped door.

  “I’ll teach you that part, too,” Winnie said. “It’s basically the same thing we’re doing, but with larger objects, the kinds of things that created the need for this storage-unit craze in the first place. The objects get a 3-D scan so thorough that the object could be easily recreated if need be. But face it, most of this stuff is junk. And if we can somehow convince people to let go of it by giving them a 3-D scan of their childhood bed or their dead son’s trophies, then we can get rid of the objects, and end the hoarding that will end the world.”

  “So the conveyors take the stuff back to the client?” Delaney asked.

  “God no,” Winnie said. “Aren’t you listening? That’s why we’re on the subway line. The stuff gets on train cars and heads east, then downstate for incineration. Danish style.”

  Outside Copenhagen, two sisters, whose father had been an industrial-waste management exec, had invented a carbon-neutral incinerator that reduced almost anything to a durable black paste that was mixed into certain kinds of concrete. It had become especially popular with California prison-construction firms.

  “People don’t know how to decide what to keep or not to keep,” Winnie said. “So they keep everything. But we try to give them a better choice. We take a picture, and the stuff goes away. One less thing in the world.”

  IX.

  “AND THE AFTERNOON?” WES ASKED. He was sanding down a wart on the inner side of his big left toe. It was a weekly ritual, and a reason he wore only sandals. He could not wear standard, roofed shoes.

  “And in the afternoon,” Delaney said, “I scanned the photographic memories of thirty-eight people, had an algorithm caption these photos, making them somehow more anonymous, and then I tossed these hundreds of original and irreplaceable photos into a large bin to be recycled by another machine and turned into prison paste. And Winnie did this, too, but slower.”

  Wes nodded, assessed his work, and began sanding again. “Tell me,” he said, “of this Winnie.”

  Winnie was not, Delaney noted, the kind of world-beating uber-human one would expect within Every walls, but instead a married mother of three, for whom an Every salary and health plan, and four weeks of vacation, and maternity leave, paternity leave, bereavement leave, and a college-savings plan, and two-week all-ages kids’ summer camp—also free—was utterly unattainable anywhere else.

  “Eventually we had to coordinate our movements,” Delaney said.

  “I don’t understand,” Wes said, and then stared at the wall for a long second. “Oh wait. I know. The company’s using motion sensors to gauge how fast you’re working. Do you have any kind of foreman in the department? A supervisor?”

  Delaney hadn’t thought about it, but now she realized there was no such person in Thoughts Not Things.

  “That means the AI is handling the supervising,” Wes said. “And I’m guessing the staff prefers it that way. It’s objective and can be gamed. They know where they stand at all times. So Winnie asked you to slow down?”

  “She said things like Be careful, and Make sure you get it right. But I didn’t catch on. Finally she wrote the words Slow down please on the inside of an old wedding dress heading for the fire.”

  “Is anyone going faster than you in the department?”

  “No one. When I figured out Winnie’s note, I looked around and saw that basically everyone was moving at the same pace.”

  “Right. That’s the only way it works for them. The AI is comparing everyone against each other. A fast outlier would set new expectations and throw off the system. But if everyone’s in the same general range, then no one’s noticed.”

  “We work so slow,” Delaney said. “It’s unreal.”

  “At least they gamed the tech. Have to respect that. So you very slowly turn the world’s beloved pictures and objects into paste?”

  “That’s the photos. With the other objects, we do a 3-D scan and then they go onto these conveyors, and the conveyors dump them onto these train-cars, and those go to the incinerator. Which is out in Fremont apparently, in the former Tesla factory.”

  “So you scanned what, exactly?” Wes asked.

  Delaney tried to remember the other objects she’d scanned and sent to their doom. A pair of cowboy hats. An antique medical bag made of alligator skin. An intricate box kite clad in striped silk. The collected work of Nat King Cole on vinyl. Maybe a hundred letters, most of them handwritten and in their original envelopes. For the first handful of objects, Delaney had felt some sadness, knowing she would be the last person to touch these once-precious things. After an hour, though, she felt nothing. There were too many things in the world—too many to care about any one of them in particular.

  “Can we look at your dashboard for the day?” Wes asked.

  “No,” Delaney said.

  Wes grabbed her work tablet. “Too late. Okay, Overall, an 86,” he said. “Is that good?”

  Delaney didn’t want to care, but she cared.

  “Eighty-six seems low,” he said.

  She stared at the ceiling. Occasionally there were lizards on their ceiling. None tonight.

  “Six AnonComs,” he said. “Those are anonymous complaints from coworkers, I assume? How can you already have six complaints? What did you do?”

  Delaney had no idea.

  “Most of them are given codes,” he said. “You got three 11s. What’s an 11? Oh, here it is. ‘Lack of interpersonal awareness.’ You got an 8, too, which means you caused discomfort for a coworker. Wait. You got two 8s. Those are ‘mini-discos.’ Is that mini-discomforts? I bet it is. It also says you’re late in filling out Personal En counter Satisfaction Surveys for a bunch of people. PESSes. You should pick up the pace on those. Looks like Kiki needs one. And Taavi, Winnie … Delaney? Are you listening? You’re churning?”

  Delaney was churning. Churning was an obligation at home, too—the Sisyphean task of posting, smiling, winking, frowning, rainbowing, sending and receiving Popeyes, shopping and pretending to shop, and watching microvideos of people slipping on wet grass or falling off mountains. To seem normal to the Every, she had to churn. A college friend living in Bali sent her a Popeye; she was in a white bikini, surrounded by a cerulean sea. Delaney sent a smile. A cousin in Seattle sent a request for microfunding; she was starting what she called a digital winery. Delaney directed $20 to her and got a pulsating star in return. Her mother sent a sham of a neighbor leaving her recycling bin on the curb all week; Delaney sent a double-sham accompanied by a stern-faced emoji.

  “Go on,” she said. “I can hear you.”

  “This dashboard has at least a hundred health metrics,” Wes said. “Did you know your heart-rate peaked at 10:32 a.m.?”

  “I remember that,” Delaney said.

  “You want to hear about your minute ventilation?”

  “Absolutely I do,” she said.

  “You know what minute ventilation is?”

  “Well, yes,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about it all day.”

  “You don’t know what it is. It’s how much you breathe in a 60-second period. Ideally you move around six or seven liters of air a minute. Want to know how much you averaged today?”

  “No. Yes. Fifty?”

  “Six-point-one. I don’t know if that’s good.”

  “I bet it’s good,” she said. “It sounds ideal.”

  Delaney was asked to frown at the recent imprisoning of a Tunisian dissident, so she sent a frown. Nike was having a sale on leggings; she sent a smile. Another Popeye came through, this one from her mom in Idaho. Delaney found a Lisa Simpson emoji with bulging eyes and sent it to her. In return, her mom sent her a gif of fireworks exploding into a rainbow. Delaney had long ago subscribed to a Russian car-accident video service; a new video came through of a multi-vehicle collision outside of Minsk. She watched it at double time and sent both a smile and a frown. A friend in Chicago regularly sent short videos of her cats projectile-defecating; Delaney watched the newest—this cat seemed to be very happy after release. Delaney sent the friend the same firework-rainbow her mother had sent her.

  “Did you know you can watch your day at work?” Wes said. “Look.” He’d already called the footage up. Delaney was viewable from twelve angles arranged in a grid.

  “Ah, look at you and Winnie exercising. Are you pretending to pass a medicine ball between you? That’s fun. And now you’re marching in place. Look at you! That knee elevation!”

  Delaney reached over and closed the window. Wes called up another spreadsheet.

  “They have everything here,” he said. “They have all the companies the Every bought this week. ‘We welcome new family members!’ it says. You know how Apple used to buy one company a week? The Every’s doubled that. Says here they just bought a Canadian paper mill. Wonder why.”

  “To shut it down,” Delaney said.

  “Oh right. That must be the same for Carter Plastics. They took on a blimp maker, too. I like that. That must be Bailey. Whoa, they bought Maersk—the shipping company. And did you get this text from your parents? They cc’d me. ‘Welcome to the Every! Now the whole family’s in the family!’ What does that mean?”

  “They work for FolkFoods.”

  “Oh god. You all do work for the same company! That is really depraved. How did I not put that all together?”

  Delaney had no idea. The gaps in what was obvious and what Wes saw were often baffling.

  “When did they buy Nestlé?” he asked. “I must have missed that. You heard about Pillo, the mail-order prescription company? That went for twenty-two billion. You’re not listening.”

  “I am listening.”

  “This is weird. They also bought a company that teaches AI to read lips. That actually happened. In real life. So do you want to hear more about your day and how you fell short?”

  “You know I do.”

  “They have minutes sitting, minutes standing, words spoken. Wait, minutes of laughter? It says you’re under-average for Laughter minutes. They capitalize the L but not the M.”

  “That reminds me,” Delaney said. She went to the feed of a college acquaintance, once a comedian, who had just announced he was making a short film about the spread of online disinformation. In the announcement, he misspelled disinformation, the FCC, and his own name. Delaney sent him a smile and $20.

  “You also got a ToT. Terseness of Tone,” Wes said. “At 3:32 p.m. Who were you terse to at 3:32?”

  It had to be Winnie. She hadn’t talked to anyone else in the afternoon. Winnie had asked Delaney to watch a video of her son—was it Fabian?—catching a football during gym class. Delaney had been lifting a marble bust to scan it before incineration, and had grunted “In a sec” while heaving it onto the glass.

  Winnie had said nothing to Delaney about it, and when Delaney was finished sending the bust to its doom, she’d watched the football video and had expressed amazement at young Fabian’s catch. But Winnie had still registered the complaint.

  Wes squinted at the screen. “It says, ‘I understand she was under stress that moment but my feelings were de-elevated.’ Did you know you were de-elevating Winnie at 3:32?”