Chapter one

Tuesday, November 2, 2032

"Janey, we've all been so worried about you. I'm glad you're home."

Him again.

His familiar voice rumbled from the kitchen as Janey Reynolds entered her apartment, tired from work and dance class and longing for the single can of hard seltzer she knew remained in her refrigerator. She rolled her eyes. As hard as she'd worked to avoid the toxic typhoon that was the 2032 election, she recognized President Kevin McCarthy.

The lights and climate system activated automatically as Janey crossed the few short steps into her small kitchen.

"Because it appears you've recently suffered a loss, I want the Reynolds family to know: My prayers are with you and yours," intoned the president. He sounded soothing enough-almost solicitous.

Yes, there he was. A nine-inch President McCarthy perched on Janey's quartz countertop-a hologram, projected by Rupert, her smart-home manager. Rupert was polite, knew Janey like a brother, and lived in a plastic case the size of a jam jar. The holo-president wore a blue suit and stood with hands clasped. His eyes followed Janey around the space.

"Rupert . . ." Janey began through clenched teeth. She unclipped her CoviCop sensor and tossed it on the counter with her antibody passport. The CoviCop blinked a steady green. She shrugged her work bag off her shoulder and let it flop to the floor.

"As you know, Janey, it's election day," said the president, seeming not to hear her. "So, I want to remind you of my administration's view on the punitive and unfair estate tax your family may face. Re-elect Vice President Stefanik and me, and we'll be working for you every day on this and other issues that matter to you."

Janey was at the fridge, rummaging for that cranberry hibiscus seltzer.

"And as you haven't voted yet, Janie," appealed the president, taking a step across the counter toward her, "do it now. Or any time before 9 p.m. Use your nearest convenient smart device to vote for McCarthy-Stefanik and our slate of great Republican candidates in . . ."

McCarthy paused for a fraction of a second, the only really overt flaw in his delivery, as the algorithm powering the digital display nailed down Janey's location.

" . . . Highland Park, Denver, Colorado."

Behind the refrigerator door, Janey popped the can open and gulped.

"I'm personally counting on you, Janey, to help me secure America, and keep us all safe from foreign health threats. Thank you. And, again, the Reynolds family has my personal sympathies."

"Rupert!" snapped Janey. "Enough!" President McCarthy flickered out, and Rupert launched some music in his place. It was dark outside now.

"Hello, Janey." Rupert's low, slightly playful baritone filled the room. There were tiny wireless speaker-camera combos everywhere. "There's nothing on your schedule for tonight. Are the lights OK? Would you like suggestions for dinner?"

Janey sank onto the sofa, fingering impatiently through the custom data feed on her Starbucks infoslate. She was a little irritated with Rupert, to be honest. She thought she had made it crystal clear that he was to block all that election stuff. She had finally succeeded in keeping most of it off the infoslates, meaning some acid squib of propaganda made it past the goalkeeper and into her field of vision only three or four times per day. But Janey also knew she was pitted against numberless smarter assailants, and her upgraded smart apartment bristled with vulnerable, hackable data channels. She resented the president tracking her movements; she guessed her stop at St. Patrick's just now, to light a candle for Mom, had inspired McCarthy's sorry-for-your-loss stuff. But so far as she knew, there was no way to make him stop.

In earlier days Janey had tried, gamely, to function as her own editor, as early internet theorists had urged. But winnowing truth out of the political precincts of social media was futile. Everybody, real or bot, seemed to think everybody else was a fascist or a moron or a snowflake or something, and Janey was pretty sure she was none of those things. Chiseling away to get at lucid reality was not exactly impossible, in the same way that flying to Singapore for breakfast was not truly impossible. But it required so much time and concentration that the effort had ceased to seem rational.

She felt abused. She had been horrified to see President McCarthy materialize unbidden and call her name from the bathroom wall infoslate while she washed her hair. (Now she draped a towel over the thing.) The former vice president, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, had briefly taken over her Honda's smart speedometer, promoting border liberalization and asking for a donation as Janey hummed out to the airport, late for a flight. She had been in the middle of a presentation at work, standing before a roomful of execs she wanted to impress, when a profane, unbidden anti-Duckworth spam video hijacked her smart MojoLens, practically blinding her before she could pluck the thing off her head. Mark Cuban, Mike Pence, and Hillary Clinton, the latter well into her 80s but still arch, lucid, and opinionated, had all commandeered her refrigerator screen. Hillary had somehow deleted her grocery list and all the week's e-discount coupons, too.

Janey had been horrified to see the president materialize on the bathroom infoslate while she washed her hair.

If it was really Hillary, because bad-news malware had done the same thing to Janey before. It could have been a coordinated cyber-campaign to make her hate Democrats. Janey knew it had become virtually impossible for the casual consumer to tell which messages were authentic. It had been this way since 2025 at least, though the confusion had begun in the 2010s, when she was growing up. Eventually, she figured it was easier to assume everyone was lying than to evaluate, one by one, a raging fountain of charges, assertions, and entreaties.

In principle, Janey was not opposed to politics. It was not that she did not care; it was that caring took up far too much headspace, and the rewards for such immense effort were far too hypothetical and puny. A decade ago, she had made a firm decision to cut it all out of her life, for two good reasons.

It was not that Janey did not care about politics. It was that caring took up far too much headspace.

The first reason was the maddening ubiquity of suspect, often vicious content in this era of the Internet of Things. (Janey had complained to her friends that she suffered from an overdose of POT, or Politicians on Things.) The general tone was bad enough: Janey recoiled from social media's gutter sensibilities. It was worse that this stuff spurted from every data conduit in her life. It rolled in via the infoslates, home security systems and appliances, smart plumbing and electric systems, Janey's chipped and connected smartcoats and the anklet she wore in dance class, her car's system health monitors, the screens on ATMs and gas pumps and fast-food ordering kiosks that identified her and called out whenever she drew near . . . there was just no end to it. In 2032 the old, airy, facile advice from media and tech elites to be your own editor had curdled into absurdity. It was like telling food shoppers to treat all ingredient lists and nutrition labels as fiction and perform their own independent enzymatic analysis on every item in the store.

As far as Janey was concerned, politics in 2032 was a big bouquet of ruptured sewer pipes, flooding her apartment and car and nearly every public setting with bullshit. She could not turn every tap off-nobody could-but she had sworn to do her damnedest to try.

Her second reason for boycotting politics was more personal. She knew there was no link, zero link, between the politicians' promises of security and prosperity and what happened in real life, and she had a dead father to prove it.

Back when the coronavirus reached the United States in early 2020, Dad was a ruddy, tireless, beloved supermarket manager in central Texas. A pillar of his small city. The number of confirmed cases grew. Reporters on TV and online were alarmed, Janey in her college dorm in Boston even more so. But not Dad. On FaceTime, he pointed out calmly that the government said things were under control-and everyone who wanted a test could get a test. This was no bigger than flu season, he said. Texas was a long way from New York or Seattle, he said. Relax, Dad said. He flew off to a company recognition thing in Orlando.

Janey tried to relax. But that FaceTime would be the last time she saw Dad. A week later, in the second week of March, her campus suddenly closed. Frantic university admins bundled Janey aboard a charter bus to Logan Airport as the world caved in around her. The bulletins piled up. The NBA ended its season, March Madness was canceled, Wall Street was crashing, Tom Hanks had the virus, and then Mom called.

Mom was frantic. Out of nowhere, Dad had developed major COVID-19 symptoms. Fighting for air, wracked with chills, no sense of taste or smell. He was in the ER, but the hospital had no test kits. Soon he needed a ventilator, but the hospital had only two ventilators for eight candidates. An aghast Janey flew back to Texas, willing the plane forward as she listened on her iPhone to government briefers saying...