the floor. She looked at the glass in her hand. This one was empty now, too. The network had a two-drink maximum for talent, unless intoxication had been prescribed for the sake of a storyline. If a star tried to go for a third drink—Jacqueline attempted it constantly—a stagehand would be dispatched to crouch-run past the talent in their own home, swiping the glass the moment it was set down.
If she were at home, she would have to stop.
But she wasn’t at home, Marlow thought, holding the gaze of the waitress coming toward her. She didn’t have to stop.
* * *
She woke the next morning in her own pajamas, tucked as primly into the guest bed as if she had fallen asleep reading. But her hairline was drenched and her stomach was throbbing as if it had its own pulse. And her mind—she groped, but her mind was blank. The hours between Honey’s speech and the dawn taking reluctant gray shape outside her window—they had fallen into a hole.
She sucked in her breath and tried to put the night together.
People started to figure out who she was, even with the mask. They wished her luck evading the hunt. They shared their Hysteryl stories. “I started taking it after I didn’t win homecoming king, which was bullshit,” one guy said. “This other dude who hated me totally rigged the system.” He paused and finished his beer. “Joke was on the other dude, anyway. My parents had the same crown made for me custom.”
At some point, she got boxed into the kitchen by two men, both stocky and thick-browed, cut from the same pattern.
“What are you doing here?” one said. “Mom would kill you.”
“What are you doing here, Barry?” the other retorted.
The first one shifted closer and hissed, “I’m not Barry in here. It’s Shane.”
A woman with a terrible voice sang over the music, her own song, in a corner. She faced the drapes.
Someone turned to Marlow and said, “I think you’re mental, but you should still hit this.”
Marlow took whatever it was, something slim and black and rocket-shaped, and sucked from the slit. The air she took in tasted earthy and sour.
In the center of the room was an all-white cardboard model of a planned privacy community, a place where people would give up tracking each other, where they would take off their devices and literally keep their thoughts to themselves. “It just looks like a town,” a twentysomething blonde girl said, distressed, and Marlow laughed without knowing why. Within a few minutes, she and the blonde were drinking mojitos with their elbows linked. “I think I could really do it, though,” the blonde said when they lowered their glasses. “Go totally private.”
Her tall friend tossed her hair and said, “Yeah, right, Jenna. You don’t even know your address without your device. Can’t see you doing the full 404.”
“404,” Marlow had repeated. She knew it meant something to her, but the thought was trapped behind cloudy glass. “What does that mean?” she said.
The tall one began to answer—but then Jenna, the blonde, stumbled into the model, her palm crushing a whole street flat.
Honey mingled, reprising her pitch in pieces all night. She waved a shrimp tail, empty of the curl she had sucked down already, and reminded people that if they liked how they felt tonight, and if they wanted to feel this way all the time, they should join one of the fifty gated communities currently being built. Living there would feel, Honey promised, like being totally off the grid. No more devices. No more federal internet. All interactions with the government—taxes and the like—would be handled discreetly by the main office, a service built into the residents’ HOA fee, alongside mowing and snow removal.
“A privacy town in every state,” Honey said. “Sea to shining sea. David can explain more about packages and pricing.” There was also a more affordable option, Marlow heard David say as he took over: you could keep living where you were and simply give up communication as you knew it. For $1,399, you’d get a box of materials meant to coach you through withdrawal: Honey’s books on going private, videos of her lectures, and a bulky machine that would play the oily-looking discs the videos came on.
A while later, when the woman with the terrible voice was still singing, Marlow looked down at her own feet and arms and realized she was dancing. On a table. A man—one of the brothers from earlier—laughed when he