glanced into people’s shopping carts and struck up pleasant talk—what were they working on, today, with their cord or their box cutter? The worker was always named Jeff, and he was never a worker named Jeff. He was something brand-new. A store marshal.
In March, Orla got herself drunk one night. She watched the antisuicide channel for a while, the looped urgings to persist from the actress with the pink cheeks who used to do insurance commercials. “Our country has been challenged,” she said, ninety-six times a day. “But our bravest people are working hard to end this trying time. If your file has already leaked, and you need help, please call the number below. If your file remains private, please: stay calm and stay positive. Know that these evil people will be caught soon. Do not give up hope.”
But for Orla, it was time to give up hope. She started packing.
* * *
Then she was back in her childhood room, all but ten pounds the same, like none of it had ever happened—Marlow, Floss, fame, 6D, the last ten years of her life. She told her parents everything. They listened. They never said a word about her breaking their hearts. The only way Orla knew her mother was ashamed: Gayle drew the blinds the day she got home and kept them that way forever.
Together, the three of them watched Dana Marshall every night. Dana—the woman Orla had first seen in Andriy’s apartment, filling in for her runaway colleague—had become the on-air star of the Spill. No one had known her before, and people would quickly forget her after, but for the moment they hung on her every word and sometimes copied her hairstyle.
Dana Marshall told them, one day, that she had a major update. That when they thought of this time as something that would end when some people were arrested, they were seeing things all wrong. Hackers weren’t in an office somewhere, finding and leaking files daily, she said. No: the Spill manned itself. For nearly a decade, the hackers had worked on bots that could root through data of anyone who shared anything online, who texted or emailed or backed things up on servers they didn’t own or used a screen instead of a pen at the doctor’s office. They located lies and debts and vices with search-engine speed and detached precision. The bots chewed through firewalls and curled up on infrastructure. They caught rides into people’s Twitter accounts via the fake-follower generators people like Floss used. They swan-dove into Facebook’s endless ocean of data, snatching up user profiles, shaking them out, collecting liabilities that came loose like coins. They spit out human-sounding DMs on Instagram, ravaging anyone who wrote back to the flattery. And then, when they had all the information they needed, they simply automated common sense. They could find a mistress easily: she would be nowhere in a man’s email, absent from his thousands of photos, but her number would be saved as something laughably benign, called briefly at the same time each week. The bots sifted bank statements for discrepancies in money going in and money going out. They turned up searches for ghastly porn and at-home abortion how-tos. They found names that appeared in cruel text chains, then went and found the same names in contacts. They copied and pasted. They hit Send.
The only reason all the files had not been released at once, Dana Marshall concluded, was presumably to keep the country down as long as possible.
“It turns out we’re all so boring,” she sighed. “So alike in our tells and desires. So limited in our insults and strategies. You know how many times I googled ‘physical appearance, stage four breast cancer’ when I was lying to my husband? That’s how they got me.” This was why everyone liked Dana Marshall. She always editorialized, and she was just as fucked up as the rest of them.
In April, Orla started leaving the house—only on errands Jerry invented to coax her out, and only late at night. She was on such an errand when she heard about Andriy. At least, she figured it was him, though she knew neither his last name nor his hometown. But there was a forty-eight-year-old Andriy in Delaware who had stabbed his daughter’s pediatrician, after a file told him that the man kept photos of her on his laptop. When Orla heard this story, buzzing soberly through the radio speaker of the Taurus, she was leaning over the dashboard