XXIX.

TOM GOLETA WAS POPULAR among the Supples. His online appearances were increasing in frequency and ferocity as the day of his visit to the Every campus drew closer. The Supples watched his speeches together and afterward debated the efficacy of each new broadside.

“Monopoly,” he said during one, staring into the camera, his flawless forehead pinched in consternation. He’d mastered the thirty-second speech, clearly and sometimes even lyrically written, delivered in shirtsleeves, his forearms flexing strategically. “It’s as un-American as communism, as treason, as mass incarceration. Every one of these things are affronts to liberty. Monopolies drive out the small business-person. They kill the Mom and Pop store with cruel efficiency and no remorse.”

Delaney pictured her parents’ grocery store. They let her run free there. She remembered the milk-spill smell of the storeroom, the impossible colors of the bell peppers and mandarin oranges. She remembered climbing the bags of coffee in the basement, she remembered her parents putting her in charge of giving Smarties to any child who wanted one. The store was disorganized, often messy; the signage was loopy and the prices only occasionally profit-making. Everything about the store was inefficient, but the customers all loved it anyway—until FolkFoods did everything her parents had done better, quicker, and cheaper.

“If we agree that the United States is a country built on free enterprise,” Goleta continued, “then we have to agree that monopolies are the enemy of free enterprise.”

The camera pulled back, revealing that Goleta was indeed standing on a Main Street, once adorable, now a graveyard of boarded-up stores. “The Every killed this Main Street, just as it killed a thousand more. And why? Because we allowed a monopoly to grow like an invasive weed and kill every other living thing.”

Now the camera pulled closer again.

“A monopoly is an autocracy in business clothes. And the Every is a monopoly. I’m Tom Goleta, and I’m running for small business. For free enterprise. For freedom. For president.”

“I don’t understand,” Joan said. “I thought he was a Democrat. Since when do Democrats denounce Communists?”

“I think it’s brilliant,” Ro said.

Delaney agreed. Somehow Goleta had reclaimed the words free enterprise, which had been more or less trademarked by conservatives since the 1960s.

“Who cares about monopolies when we’re facing the death of the planet?” Berit said. “This is an argument from a different century. It’s untethered capitalism that’ll end our species. Isn’t that obvious?”

“But all this is so unnecessary,” Joan said.

“What is?” Gemma said.

“Campaigns in general,” Joan said. “Hundreds of billions of dollars are wasted, when the outcome is almost entirely pre-determined by party affiliation. Mandatory voting was a half-measure.”

“She wants AYS to get into politics,” Berit explained to Delaney. She was now wearing sunglasses with star-shaped lenses. Finding them unacceptable, she dropped them out the window. “You register your party, you vote that way always. If you stray, you get an Are You Sure?”

“Or a visit from PrefCom,” Ro said.

“Why not?” Berit said. “Political affiliation is already part of your preference profile. Why not have it like an auto-pay?”

“Auto-vote,” Delaney said.

“Right. It would make democracy far saner,” Berit said.

“You automatically vote your party line, up and down,” Joan said. “Whoever has more voters registered, wins. You know where you stand at all times.”

“What about undecideds? Independents?” Ro asked.

“Euthanize them,” Joan laughed. “Seriously, this country loses far too much productivity to these chaotic elections, all this bullshit. Two years for every presidential campaign. It drives us all mad.”

“When’s Goleta coming again?” Berit asked.

“Friday,” Joan said. “I got us good seats.”

It was hard to know, though, who had thought of the idea first. Goleta announced that he would be visiting the Every campus, and he and his campaign presented it as if he had made the request in the form of a demand, with the Every cowed by his power to acquiesce. A counter-narrative emerged in the days leading up to the visit, which posited that the Every had made the first overture, and was seeking to make friends with Goleta, to sway or seduce or bribe him (in the perfectly legal form of a donation), as they had thousands of elected and non-elected leaders for years, and with universally positive outcomes.

In any case Delaney was baffled. Goleta was formidable, and very quick on his feet, and the last thing he would do in his maverick-styled campaign would be to come to the Every campus without a plan and a message. Anything but a “Tear-down-this-wall” sort of speech would be anathema to his campaign, which put much weight on his crusade against monopolies, algocracies, and everything associated with the Every. But the Every had never hosted such a speech, and they were brilliant at eliminating risk, especially on campus. Inviting an assassin into their home was uncharacteristic and seemed unwise.

“I’m trying to parse this,” Berit said.

Goleta traveled in a solar-powered bus, and from the AYS tower, they were able to see it pause briefly at the gate before being guided in. The itinerary known to Everyone was to include first a brief tour, live-streamed but otherwise intimate and without media, and then, at noon, a speech on the Every lawn, where all staff were invited, and selected local officials would be present. In the morning, a few hundred white chairs had been set onto the kelly-green lawn, a podium facing them all. From a distance it all seemed as innocuous as a small-town wedding.

“It’s a campaign. What’s the question?” Ro said. She was testing a kind of tea made from kelp. After a sip, she made a face and set her cup aside.

“I can’t understand what’s in it for the Every,” Berit said. “We’ve never hosted a candidate. There’s no upside. We give money to everyone, play every side. So why this now? Why pick this one person?”

“Has Mae said anything about it?” Helen asked.

“Nothing beyond this-is-happening-stay-tuned,” Joan said. “Anyway, the speech isn’t for 90 minutes. Let’s try to accomplish something before that.”

For half that time, they did. Then the dings began.

“Oh Jesus,” Helen said.

Delaney looked at the time. It was just after 11:30 a.m. and she’d gotten dozens of notices via audio and screen. She rushed to the window to see Goleta’s truck leaving.

“I don’t understand,” Ro said.

Over the next hour, via hundreds of video clips and eyewitness accounts, they pieced it together. Goleta had arrived at 10:44, twenty-four minutes late—somewhat significant, given the punctuality that reigned on campus. Greeted by ten of the lesser-known members of the Gang of 40, Goleta and his entourage were led through the new edible garden by three of its caretakers, two men and a woman, and stopped briefly at a dragonfruit plant, touching its leaves and saying encouraging and innocuous things. Altogether, between the camera crews, Everyones and Goleta’s own staff, there were about sixteen people gathered. But Goleta seemed increasingly distracted.

“He’d never seen all the dicks,” Helen said.

Things began to get complicated. Witness messages were gentle at first. “Check out Goleta checking out Farmers Yuri and Dion.” “Goleta sees some other organics he’d like to pluck.” These comments were not seen by many and were unknown to the candidate’s staff. The tour continued, around the rainwater pool and then through the expanded Cathedral of Wellness, and there, amid its glass and ferns and ceilings re-creating Miwok village life in mosaic, all of Goleta’s political dreams died.

Footage of his eight minutes in the gym, surrounded by forty-seven men and women (mostly men; the internet counted) dressed in standard Every shape-hugging clothing, was tragic.

“Poor man,” Berit said. “His eyes like waterbugs.” She popped a pink-lemonade globe into her mouth and crushed.

Goleta could not keep his eyes off the curves, the muscled edges, the gleaming bulges and buttocks. Eye-tracking software later calculated 112 unique visits of Goleta’s irises to body parts of thirty-two unique members of the Every staff. There were fifty-four visits to male genitalia, forty-one unique visits to twenty-two Every breasts, and—interestingly enough—only seventeen unique visits to the faces of those owners of those body parts. Delaney felt for him. He’d never seen anything remotely like the feast of barely veiled flesh in the Cathedral of Wellness. Clearly he didn’t go to contemporary gyms. And hadn’t been in a French disco or on a Spanish beach. He was a sheltered and monogamous Midwestern man, and this was, compared to Iowa, a fever-dream bacchanalia. He stuttered. He soaked himself in sweat. He coughed, he looked at the ceiling and its calming mosaic depicting pre-genocide Native American life, but then returned, helplessly, to the feast of body parts.

“I can’t watch anymore,” Ro said, and kept watching.

“What time is it?” Goleta asked.

It was clear he thought he could escape from the gym to his speech and salvage the day, but no such luck. He was told it was 11:15. He’d only been on campus twenty minutes, and the speech wasn’t scheduled till noon.

“Maybe we should see something else,” he managed to say, and he stumbled from the gym. But the gym led to the volleyball court, in which ten men, wearing far less than those in the gym, were engaged in a sweaty game, and he had no choice but to watch, for his hosts had stopped, ostensibly to talk about the recycled plastic that stood in for sand. He nodded, squinted at the tiny shards of what had been bottles and cups and plates, but his eyes could not stop wandering.

“Poor thing,” Berit said. “In way over his head.”

“It’s not good to leer,” Preeti said, “but this makes me never want to go outside. You glance someone’s way and it’s recorded?”

“I have to say,” Joan said, “this feels like a setup. This has the feel of a Gabriel Chu production.”

“You think?” Ro said, and laughed.

Halfway through the visit it was obvious that even Goleta, a former campaign manager himself, knew he was cooked. He knew his eyes were wandering, were darting and landing and groping, but he couldn’t stop them. He knew how all this would live, forever, online, and what this meant.

Everyones continued to engage with Goleta, innocently greeting him, palm to sternum and even the occasional handshake, while his eyes continued to land on their bulbous regions. Meanwhile, one by one certain Everyones left his orbit and posted messages, video, photos, many using eye tracking on their cams, quickly confirming that Goleta, candidate for president, had just ogled their phalluses, their buttocks and breasts and abs and lats. In twenty minutes, edited versions of the footage began to appear, and compiled this way, with his oglings counted and punctuated with cash-register dings, the effect was catastrophic.

It was 11:38 a.m. when Goleta’s handlers whispered to him—this was easily caught on SeeChange microphones—“We’re out. Regroup on bus.” And then he was gone.

He didn’t give his speech that day, and never mentioned the Every again. He hadn’t even gotten to meet Mae. In days, his poll numbers plummeted, donations dried up. The clips of his eyes lost in a sea of bulbous and brightly displayed body parts were seen hundreds of millions of times, and in three weeks he was out of the race completely.

The global debate about the ethics of eye tracking, which began that afternoon, was vigorous, but anyone hoping to hold back the advent of ETR was proven a fool. The unexamined glee with which it was embraced followed a familiar pattern. First hobbyists explored its limits, producing results both innocuous (which parent does your baby prefer?) and terrifying (which parent does your teenager prefer?). Heedless capitalists leaped in, apps and related products proliferating; first and most popular were those that built on the Goleta incident, enabling anyone with a self-cam to determine where the eyes of any other humans around them were landing. The software and hardware necessary had been built into Every phones for years; it was only a matter of activating it.

In a rare formal statement issued through her feed, Mae Holland provided guidance. “Like every other progression from darkness to light,” she said, “ETR allows the truth to emerge.” She was in her glass office box, dressed in a white bodysuit sprinkled with faint purple sunbursts, staring unblinkingly at the camera. “What had been hidden is now known. What was in doubt will now be certain. And the more we know each other, and the more our behavior is seen and recorded and illuminated, the better we become. Overnight, there can be no doubt, countless lives have become better. Those who leer have been tamed. Those who ogle have been shamed. We’ve caught child predators, we’ve caught potential thieves and prevented assaults and soon we’ll thwart terrorists, too. The eyes are the windows to the soul, and they tell no lies.”

She signed off, never having taken her eyes from the camera. It did not appear she would have trouble with eye tracking herself, but elsewhere in the world, some—or billions—would. Over the next few weeks, it became clear that because half of humanity’s iris scans had already been stored, their owners could be singled out within seconds. If a man ogled a woman at a New Jersey dog park, those eyes could instantly be paired with the offender’s name, and his family, employers, and the public would be duly notified of the transgression. A new wave of suicides ensued, the embarrassment and discredit being too much for certain caught and called-out persons, mostly men. In the first week, one hundred and seven humans in Tokyo took their lives, thirty-one by throwing themselves in front of trains, the scene of their eyeshame. Tens of thousands followed elsewhere on Earth, and a few hundred, nicknamed Oedipals, chose a middle path—they gouged out their eyes.

Whatever the name for the offenders, eyeshame was the term that stuck to the crime. The Every resisted it, tried to push ocular offense, but eyeshame was more direct and descriptive. It was not strictly speaking a crime, of course; no laws prevented anyone from looking where they shouldn’t. But shame ensued, and shame was deserved, and shame was the internet’s currency and lever for change. As ETR spread without resistance among the vast majority of the species, there were occasionally calls to ban it, and trog areas did so preemptively and predictably, but otherwise, like most innovation in the twenty-first century, the spread was caterwauling, without organization or caution, and thus unstoppable.