where television anchors in creased lipstick sat across from her, asking questions. They all wanted to see her right away, before she healed too much. They asked her what was going through her mind when she realized what Marlow was doing. They asked her whether she thought Constellation, that grand and indulgent experiment designed to lift the country’s Spill-ravaged spirits, to glamorize sharing again, was actually—and here they paused and raised their perfect eyebrows—dangerous.
Their questions didn’t really matter. Honey had already decided on her answers. “I studied old interviews,” she told Marlow. “I learned what to do, how to just say what you want to say, no matter what they’re asking.” She grabbed the H-shaped wheel of the drone, even though it was flying independently, and jerked it side to side. “Pivot, pivot, pivot,” she chanted.
She stole her talking points from people who stopped her on the street, to tell her they were sorry she got bitten. Constellation was ten years old by then, a juggernaut, ripe for backlash. Now there was a reason to pounce: Constellation had hurt Honey—a young girl, an innocent girl (so they thought)—and it wasn’t all Marlow’s fault, was it? Marlow was clearly unhinged, but that wasn’t the whole story. Of course it was bound to go bad, this world where people were filmed all day. It was their fault, too, as followers—they had gotten addicted to watching. And they had let their guards down. Though they refused to use things like Amerigram, they were slipping into sharing, weren’t they, when they partook in the Constellation Network feeds? If they liked a star’s necklace or catchphrase, they said it. They parted, when they commented, with just a bit of themselves. They handed it over to the government. Now, looking at the wound on Honey’s face—seeing what had happened to her when she’d put herself out there, sharing as much as anyone could—they felt the suspicions they’d had all along about this new web reheating, demanding action.
Oh, they should let her go, they told Honey, gripping her arm. But before they did: Did she ever think that maybe they’d all be better off off-line? Without any internet, period? The way people were in the 1900s?
Honey listened keenly, and heard the plea between their words: they were desperate for someone to lead the way, to help them escape the internet. America needed an antisharing renegade, a patron saint of privacy. And if she could be that saint, she bet, she wouldn’t have to go back to West Virginia.
So when journalists asked about Marlow, Honey pivoted fiercely. She talked about how badly she’d wanted to be known, like the kids in Constellation, about how she had bought into the post-Spill propaganda—sharing was good now, sharing was safe now. She wondered aloud whether the government was really any better at protecting data now than Facebook and Twitter and banks and insurance companies had been before the Spill. She used the word privacy over and over; sometimes she just said, firmly, “Privacy good. Sharing bad.” She said, raising her voice to distract from the fact that she was only fourteen years old, “The only way to know what you share with the government is safe is not to share with the government at all.”
It worked. She was young and blue-eyed, scrappy and freshly maimed, and people called her brave. They said the questions she asked were theirs, too. Honey was invited to speak to clubs of troubled teens, to attend galas, to sit as an honorary junior member on the boards of various charities. She was given an hour to shout at the camera each night on a cable-news station. Publications put her name on lists of the year’s most interesting people—“me,” she told Marlow now, thumping the second button of her pajamas, “me.” A woman with children to feed quickly wrote a book for Honey to call hers, and Honey promoted it hard. She did late-night-show karaoke games and kids’ programs where drones pelted her with sticky green goop. But mostly, she went on repeating herself until she grew bigger than a star. She was not just someone people looked at. She became someone they obeyed.
The man who ran the network that aired her news show took her in. He and his wife lived on Central Park South. “I had my own bathroom,” Honey said. “It blew my mind, that bathroom.” The couple had never had children, and though Honey was seventeen by the time they got it formalized,