XXII.

DELANEY HAD SUNDAY TO HERSELF, so she stayed in bed till the walls of her room glowed white. At eleven she sat up and spent another hour staring at the window in the upper corner of her room, catching the occasional glimpse of a seagull. In the shower, Delaney remembered a dream she’d had at dawn. In it, Mae Holland was pregnant, bursting, and was sitting in a glass box, her legs spread. Then Mae pointed to the shadows between her spread legs and beckoned Delaney to enter. But in the way dreams make certain things clear to the dreamer, it was clear that Delaney was not being invited to see the baby, but to become the baby. It seemed at least plausible to Delaney that she was going nuts.

Throughout the morning Delaney heard Wes thumping through the house, making his presence known without wanting to knock. Finally he knocked and his crooked mouth smiled down at her.

“I’m done. I’m out,” she said.

“Did the sheep live?” he asked.

Delaney shrugged. The night before, when she’d gotten home, she’d told Wes briefly about the trip, the complaints, the sheep whose latter half had been clipped by the bus. An Everyone had set up a camera at the veterinary office where they’d brought the sheep, heretofore unnamed and destined for chops, but now known as Athena and imbued with complex emotions and the hopes of all of those unhappy souls who had boarded the bus and regretted it. Athena was getting the best care, but after being struck by a fifteen-ton bus traveling at forty-four miles per hour, the prognosis was not good.

“I’m only sad I didn’t get to know her,” Wes said.

“Please,” Delaney said.

“She seemed like a fascinating sheep.”

“Stop.”

Wes disappeared and reappeared seconds later with an envelope.

“You got another letter yesterday,” he said, and dropped it on the bed. It was Agarwal again. Delaney didn’t know if she had the strength. She opened it, though, hoping that hearing Agarwal’s voice, even if scolding, might give her courage to continue.

Dear Delaney,

With nothing to lose, allow me to blather. I tried for years, unsuccessfully, to bring the word technoconformity into the lexicon. Perhaps such things are always organic, and can never be engineered. But, forgive me, I was a teenager in the eighties. We were so comically anti-authority, anti-corporate, anti-conformity that I remember harboring a seething anger toward even my local 7-Eleven.

Yours was the most conformist generation in history, and the two generations after yours were more conformist still. I do not like saying that. But think of it. You all own the same phone. You have willingly given all your personal data to what is the most monopolistic, control-hungry corporation ever to plague the world. As a generation you are so empathetic, so intelligent, so politically active. You boycott companies (and people) over comparatively minor things. But this company—the company where you now work—which more than any other has the power to control so much of what we know and buy and do, a company which represents the greatest and most insidious concentration of power and wealth in human history—you give them a pass. I don’t understand it.

Yours,

Agarwal.

Delaney felt worse than before. She got under the covers and put a pillow over her head. Her phone dinged; she’d forgotten to turn it off. A throbbing warning said she was late in filling out PESSes for everyone on the bus; they had, happily enough, already submitted their assessments of her. She didn’t look. She put her phone under her mattress and, numb and despairing, she slept, on and off, till Monday.

Alessandro said he was sad to see her leave TellTale. She’d stayed there two weeks, working primarily on the study of jokes in comedic films—how many were ideal, how many were too many (54; 77). Delaney said she was sad to see herself go.

“But I’m happy that you’re only making a lateral move here,” he said. “Iris Tracking is closely related to our work at TellTale, as you can imagine. Maybe if you like what Eric’s team does, too, you’ll stay on our side of campus. We need more like you.”

After his last sentence, panic overtook his face. The words more like you hung in the air, as both he and Delaney examined them for offense. They sounded wrong in some way, and Delaney could understand his alarm. But after a few seconds, as they each scanned the word-triptych for toxicity, they found the cluster clean, and Alessandro—who for a moment was teetering on the edge of employment abyss, forced out of his job and made leprous for future hirers—relaxed.

They made a short journey together, from one end of Kitty Hawk to the next, and when they arrived, a very tall man with a tremendous beard—a sort of waterfall of black lichen—was waiting.

“Eric,” he said, and stared long at Delaney, his eyes amused. “Reed?” he said, and pointed to himself. “Lewis and Clark.”

Delaney had no clue what this person was saying.

“Libarts schools of the Northwest!” he said, and laughed hoarsely, painfully—as if he’d been making himself laugh all his life and his lungs had finally given out.

This seemed a more logical connection than the one Alessandro had forged between Reed and Kenyon, and yet it surprised Delaney how much some Everyones identified with their colleges, and with those colleges that in vague ways resembled their own colleges.

Eric turned to Alessandro. “Just affirming: This a comprehensive NDA situation?” he asked.

“It is,” Alessandro said. “I’ll come back in ten. And remember the Bailey event at noon. That gives you all thirty minutes.”

Though the days since Bailey’s death had been thick with tributes to him, this day the whole campus would come together on the Daisy for what was billed as a celebration of his life.

“Got it,” Eric said. He was the tallest person Delaney had met at the Every, and perhaps the tallest person she’d ever seen up close. She put him at seven feet. The lichen-beard somehow made him look taller. “Six ten,” he said. “You didn’t look it up?”

Delaney laughed nervously, and felt a surge of gratitude that Eric was not wearing revealing leggings. Could there be a different set of rules for men of his height? She followed him into a dim room bright with blue screens.

“Sit,” Eric said, indicating an ergonomic stool before a standard screen. He handed her a human version of the kind of blinders worn by horses.

“Recognize these?” he asked, and sat next to her. She was surprised to find that while seated, his head was at the same level as her own. His height must be in his legs, she thought, and then a foul smell assaulted her. It was like a window had been opened to a sour breeze. It was him. Delaney briefly smiled, thinking that of all the things the Every attempted to solve for, this—body odor—had escaped them. There was no app.

“Can you put them on?” he asked.

She put the device on her head, and indeed the headset acted like a horse’s blinders, restricting her peripheral vision.

Though she couldn’t see him, she sensed the re-arrival of Alessandro. He placed a tablet in front of her, and she reached down to quickly scroll to the end and sign it with her finger. Eric and Alessandro burst into laughter.

“You can’t do that here!” Alessandro said. “You’re at the center of all the world’s eye-tracking research. You have to read every word!”

And so Delaney read every word of the non-disclosure agreement, while Eric and Alessandro debated which of them knew Delaney would try to sign the document without reading every word. They decided, finally, that they both knew what Delaney would do, and that it was very funny, how they saw it coming, what she would do. All the while, Delaney noted that Eric’s personal odor heightened every time he spoke or moved, and seemed to double in potency every time he laughed his hoarse, painful laugh. When she was finished reading, a green light appeared in the upper-right corner of the tablet’s screen, and now she was permitted to sign. She signed, Alessandro took his leave, and Eric cleared his throat.

“It’s not just you. We do that with every new person in the department,” he said. “There’s no better way to demo the tech—how it works, and how it’ll be used. Do you know the science behind it?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Can I give you the basics?” Again he did not pause. “Look at the screen in front of you. Just whatever your eye is attracted to.”

The large monitor came alive with crudely animated shapes and pictures. She looked at an orange triangle, a picture of a cat sitting in a tree, a series of sperm-like squiggles swimming diagonally across the screen.

“As you sit in front of the monitor,” Eric said, “an infrared light is being directed toward your pupils. This causes reflections in your pupil and your cornea. The vector between the cornea and the pupil is tracked by the infrared camera, and this way we can determine what you’re looking at. This also gives us the ability to track when you get fixated on something, what order you look at things—that kind of hierarchy is so crucial to study—and what things you come back to.”

“So it’s recording what I look at and for how long,” Delaney said.

“Exactly,” Eric said excitedly, and a burst of odor surged from his perimeter.

“But isn’t this illegal?” she asked.

He stiffened and Delaney knew she’d made her first error of tone. She tried to course-correct. “I mean, didn’t some people sue?”

“They did,” Eric said, and now his odor was alive, an invisible predator stalking the air between them. “And there are laws in some cities and states that limit their use. But there are millions of systems already in place. It’s been used for years within the Implicit Association Test, the Stroop Test, and of course within the gaze contingency paradigms.”

“Of course,” Delaney said, nodding solemnly.

“It’s critical in diagnosing autism and a host of other neurological disorders,” Eric said. He was growing calmer.

“So necessary,” Delaney said.

“The problem people have is with some aspects of neuromarketing. I don’t think it’s right to secretly implant sensation-monitors on shoppers. I objected to that in a bunch of posts that were circulated widely here at the Every.”

Delaney nodded earnestly. “Yes, I think I saw those,” she said, and again cursed herself. Surely he had some way to know what she’d seen?

“But using eye trackers,” he continued, now back to a comfortable place of explaining methodically, “just to figure out what people are looking at and for how long—that’s only logical. It started with marketing. Advertisers want to know what you look at. What you respond to. This serves the makers of ads, sure, but it serves the audience, too. A bad ad will be ignored, whoever made it will find a new line of work, and you won’t see any more like it. But when something’s successful, the eye will go to it, and stay there, mapping it in greater detail, and then whatever it was that attracted and kept the viewer’s attention can be replicated.”

“It’s the perfect symbiosis,” Delaney said, and finally she saw Eric smile. “It’s the only meaningful way to determine what someone’s actually seeing, reading and responding to.”

“Well, right,” he said, and Delaney felt he’d finally begun to like her again. “The utility of this tech for advertisers drove its progress in the first place. But then film and TV asked for data, and that was huge. It was kind of hilarious, because with the first test group we did, we discovered that this one very highly paid actress was actually being avoided by most eyes. She would come onscreen and the eyes—seventy-seven percent of them—would dart away like she was an infection. You can be sure that that data affected her future salary negotiations.”

Delaney smiled, then thought she should be more emphatic in her approval of his joke. “Ha!” she said.

“So apply the same idea to any movie or show. Where does the eye really gravitate to? Explosions, breasts, abs—this was obvious enough. But it gets more subtle. Certain clothing tested high, certain cities, decor, facial expressions, animals, children. If you knew what I knew, you’d know how seriously it’s already affected filmmaking. By any chance have you noticed a pretty dramatic increase in the number of toddlers and medium-sized dogs in contemporary film?”

“I have!” Delaney lied.

Eric nodded. “And fewer heavy people. Fewer romantic scenes between people over 65. Fewer scenes in Baltimore and the Middle East. That’s the easy stuff, to be honest,” Eric said. “But the thing I’m most excited about is education. I taught for a year after college. Ninth graders outside Denver.”

“So cool,” Delaney said.

“Anyway, I’d assign reading every week, just ten or fifteen pages, but I had no real way to determine whether any student read anything. When we gave them all e-readers, we at least knew which pages they flipped to, and for how long they spent on each page. But kids could game that, too. At the end of the year, I had a student actually show me how he flipped through Tolstoy, timing the tapping of his e-reader, while watching videos of Brazilian motorcycle accidents. He had one hand on the reader while his eyes were on his phone!”

“Terrible,” Delaney said.

“But imagine if that e-reader had eye tracking. You’d know if the student was reading every word. You’d have a generation that not only was assigned Anna Karenina, but actually read it.”

Delaney assumed the syllables expected of her were “A-maz-ing!” so she sang them loudly to Eric, and with feeling.

“I know, right?” he said. “We just need to saturate. I mean, I guess we already have saturated. The last three years or so, all of the Every’s phones and monitors have shipped with eye-tracking hardware and software installed. It’s just a matter of activating it. Oh, we better go.”

The celebration of Bailey’s life was tastefully executed. It had been weeks since his death—enough time for the shock to wear off and a proper tribute to his life to be planned. His widow, Olivia, had asked that it take place outside, so the campus had been transformed into a kind of mournful Coachella, with tributes in person and via satellite and a rousing version of “Light and Day” by the surviving members of the Polyphonic Spree. Three U.S. vice presidents were present, as was every head of state in the G8. A surf circle, typically formed on water to honor a fallen comrade, was approximated on the lawn, with an original poem written by Laird Hamilton, the noted big-wave surfer (ret.), and read by Kelly Slater, the noted freestyle surfer (ret.). It was, as Bailey would have wanted, a party with him as the theme, and it succeeded brilliantly. It was very funny, too, the only two elements steering the mood elsewhere being the brief and devastating tribute by Gunnar, and the presence, silent but impossible to ignore, of Stenton.

“We were always friends,” he later told the Every News Network, the company’s internal propaganda organ. “When I had an opportunity abroad, he urged me to take it. If you know anything at all about Eamon Bailey, it’s that he believed in radical self-actualization. Holding back any person from any experience was simply not him.” Later, Stenton toured ECon, and was filmed saying goodbye to Bailey’s lair, outside of which he passed, and briefly paused before, the iconic portrait of himself and Bailey and Ty Gospodinov. The reaction to his presence was uniformly polite, though in many cases Everyones who had been at the company long enough to know his history there were baffled and quietly horrified.

The rest of the day was a free-for-all, with the entire campus urged to celebrate Bailey in their own way. Delaney got a PESS reminder from Eric, finished it, and found Hans-Georg sitting on a low hill at the edge of the campus, under an apple tree. Positioned as he was, with his unruly hair and white socks pulled nearly to his knees, she thought of Isaac Newton.

“Hello, Delaney,” he said, “do you have time?” He put a leatherette folder next to him and urged her to sit on it.

“Did you know him?” he asked. Delaney said she had not.

“I met him once,” Hans-Georg said. “In Weimar. He came for a conference on connectivity. Something like that. I was in college and asked a question at his panel. He went on for fifteen minutes, and then found me afterward and talked to me for twenty more. He knew more about Goethe than I did, and I was doing a thesis about him. He was a generous person, a genuinely curious person.”

“And loved to talk.”

“I actually had to break off the conversation! I had to go to work. But what struck me was that his way was pure. His detractors, the people who question his motives, didn’t realize that he really believed that tech could solve anything—that connection was all. It’s the other forces that …”

Hans-Georg looked around him, and then into the boughs of the apple tree above him. Delaney was sure he wanted to say that it was people like Stenton, like Mae, whose task it was and is to monetize the curiosity of not just Bailey but all the people of the world. Stenton had been behind the Right to Know laws of the 2020s and disintegrated all barriers to information, including any and all damning data about the enemies of the Every. Hans-Georg, evidently not feeling safe to talk freely, changed the subject.

“Thank you for the excursion to see the elephant seals,” he said.

“You’re welcome,” Delaney said, wholly taken aback.

“I think there might come a time when the rest of the group can look back on the trip fondly,” he said. “But group dynamics, combined with the hermetic seal enveloping so many now …” He drifted off, recognizing the risk in such a line of conversation.

“How have your rotations been?” he asked. Delaney said as little as she could. He said he’d just finished a week at Algo Mas. “It was overwhelming,” he said, his eyes wide. “Stunning what they’re doing there. The extent. Did you know there are sixteen subterranean floors? What you see above-ground is just a fraction of the operation.”

Again Delaney knew he was withholding most of what he wanted to say. He seemed shaken.

“And it’s merging with behavioral sciences,” he said. “You probably knew that.”

Delaney didn’t know that, but it was unsurprising. The unsecret goal of Algo Mas had always been to not just track and influence human behavior but to dictate it.

“Well then,” he said and hastily stood up. He looked nervous, as if suddenly realizing he’d said too much or stayed too long. “I wish you a peaceful day.” He put his hand on his chest and bowed slightly. He took three steps down the hill before turning back.

“My folder!” he said. “Almost forgot. I’m so sorry.”

Delaney rose to her feet and brushed a few stray blades of grass from it. When she handed it to him, he bowed again and then looked up at her conspiratorially. “Curious about what’s inside?” he asked.

“Sure,” Delaney said, though she hadn’t thought of it until then.

Hans-Georg looked around and then flashed it open, just long enough for Delaney to see that it contained only one piece of paper, a yellowed piece of handwritten sheet music.

“Something my grandfather composed,” he explained. “It’s just a piece of a song. I have the only copy. I don’t think it would mean anything to anyone, but to carry it around this place means everything to me.” He turned and went down the hill again, weaving through the mourners on the Daisy.

When he disappeared, Delaney turned to find a wholly original face. Its eyes were large, catlike, its forehead a high unblemished dome. Its hair was black with streaks of cerulean blue. The face nodded at Delaney as if seeing her close-up confirmed all her previous assumptions. As if they were about to get to work.

“Joan,” the face said. Delaney took this to be her name.