shit—it just wasn’t anything new. Orla saw that the bots had gleefully salvaged Floss’s naked pics and thrown them back into the world. But who hadn’t seen that already? As for Orla: one morning, months after she came home to Pennsylvania, her iPad lit up and showed her an endless compilation. It was all there: early tweets of Floss’s the bots could tell had come from Orla’s IP address. The Lady-ish posts Orla had written, declaring Floss famous. The emails they had signed from Pat White. Photos of them, clips from the show, all of it culminating in the Instagram comment from Orla’s account, the one Floss left on Anna Salgado’s picture: this is floss and i agree. you should! The effect the bots intended was clear: whatever Orla had been going for, she had done more harm than good. She owed the world a life. Orla’s file, a snide addendum from the bots said, had been forwarded to Anna’s family. Apologies.
Orla reviewed it all calmly, then tossed the tablet into a drawer without turning it off. This was the glitch in the bots’ lethal system: they couldn’t tell when the worst in someone had already come to light.
* * *
Three years later, the files were finished, but people were still losing jobs, leaving spouses, killing themselves. Life grew in around death. Graveyards were hopelessly backlogged. High schools had more memorial scholarships than seniors to receive them. Jumpy parents sneaked baby monitors into their teenagers’ rooms. Orla had four dresses just for funerals; and even as they got sicker, Gayle and Jerry insisted that they go to so many. “We want a good turnout at ours,” Gayle sniffed. They were always spooning room-temperature macaroni salad onto plastic plates. They were always making small talk with devastated people. Orla was tired of hearing bad news, tired of passing it on. Tired of listening to last wishes and of ginning up nice things to say. Tired of pitching in to help clean out the apartments of the dead. Tired of the cards with that day’s deceased pictured over Bible verses or silly Irish platitudes. Tired of not knowing when it was all right to throw the cards away. Sometimes she wanted to shout, I lost someone, too. My daughter. Where’s my fucking luncheon?
She got it—she got two—the next year. Gayle and Jerry died within eight months of each other—first him, then her—from bone cancer that swept through the house like a cough. Soon afterward, when Orla was visited by a lawyer—a girl younger than her, trembling, whose pearl studs did not distract from her night-before eyeliner—she learned what was likely to blame. While Orla was away, in college, the CoreStates Bank had changed names several times and finally been torn down to make way for a flame-resistant fabric factory. “Good American jobs,” Orla could remember Gayle saying proudly. Something in the product’s chemical coating had been seeping into her parents’ groundwater for years. Now they and two more Hidden Ponds residents were dead, and young lawyers were asking around. In any other time, Orla imagined, this would have set Mifflin ablaze with uproar, but the people who came to Gayle’s and Jerry’s funerals were bored. Cancer, these days, seemed vanilla, regardless of how it was caught. The people were accustomed to dramatic ends, and they had all become wake connoisseurs. “Oh, the TGI Fridays?” Orla’s Aunt Marge said, dismayed, when Orla told her about Jerry’s funeral. “The back room at Applebee’s is so much more intimate.”
Without knowing where she was going, Orla got ready to leave her home. She peeled the photos off her bedroom door and put her trophies out for the recycling. She paid men, from her parents’ checkbook, to replace the bathroom sinks and strip the kitchen’s ivy-patterned wallpaper. She did some things herself. She caulked trim that had pulled away. She fixed a door her late beagle had scratched the finish off in the nineties.
She ate Pizza Hut and Apple Jacks and watched the news alone. She listened to a congressman on a morning show, pitching a new and better version of the web, one the government would facilitate, one that would protect Americans instead of leaving them vulnerable. “The private sector had their chance,” the congressman said. “People don’t like the idea of the government running the internet? They don’t like the government watching them? Let me tell you something: nobody ever had privacy. Privacy was an illusion. Believing that we had it is what left us