care systems. She watched as the newlyweds renounced carbs and started traveling with friends from the gym, and she watched as they got sick of all that and started a blog about Catherine’s slow-cooker shortcuts and Danny’s home repairs. Orla didn’t like a bit of their marriage, not online and not in real life. But she was curiously undeterred. She understood now, in a way that she hadn’t in college, that waiting for him was just part of her life. That she would never really stop. When people bumped her on the street without seeming to see her at all, she brushed it off with the thought: Someone is waiting to brag that he knows me.
So it wasn’t buried quite as deep as the back of her mind, the notion that maybe this business with Floss would prop her up at a height Danny couldn’t ignore. Somewhere he could find her easily, and see that, all along, he’d been right.
CHAPTER SIX
Marlow
Constellation, California
2051
The morning after she slapped Jacqueline’s flamingos, Marlow woke to a reminder from her device, one that filled her with fear and a deep longing for the chemicals that blunted her anxiety.
She was due, in forty-five minutes, to meet both her mother and mother-in-law at the dress shop, to try on her sowing gown.
She walked, taking Lohan instead of Pitt, so that she wouldn’t have to pass her childhood home close-up. It was bad enough glimpsing it from three blocks away. The house’s rooftop garden was overgrown, the mortifying jumble of vines and brown leaves indistinguishable from the tidy grass pigtails that had been there when they moved in. “The houses all have hair!” Marlow had crowed that day, as her father pulled the car up to the gray-sided Colonial Type 5 with the moss-colored metal roof. She had thought herself very clever, and her parents had laughed at the joke. By the time the sun set, though, most of the other children had said the same thing. A chorus of house-hair comments echoed up and down the fresh pavement, the opening chords of a town that had gone from soulless to settled in twelve hours. Marlow could still remember standing in the street that evening, as the town’s first man-made sunset went off without a hitch and the banners unfurled ceremoniously from the streetlights. Welcome to Constellation, they said. Where Fame Is Our Patriotic Privilege. On went the cameras. The new neighbors cheered, introduced themselves to each other. Marlow’s mother had turned to her, eyes shining. “You’re officially famous, honey,” she said, and laughed when Marlow asked why. “Because you’re here,” her mother said. “That’s how it works now.”
She reached the center of town and walked around the fountain, its jets firing high into the cloudless blue. The lilies floating in the pool at the fountain’s base were mic’d, perfect for capturing the conversations of talent who stopped to sit there. On the other side of the traffic circle, Marlow stopped to let a wave of bots cross in front of her. They emerged like cheerful commuters, throughout the day and night, from a staircase that stretched underground, designed to evoke a subway station. But no train ran underneath it. There was just a quiet cave where the bots waited to be summoned for work. They mostly served as extras, filling out empty restaurants or sparsely attended parties, their voices set to mute, while the human talent shone in the foreground. The real train, a tubular high-speed, stopped at a station set away from the filming areas, just within the perimeter. It deposited, every day, domestic workers from the south, for Constellation stars who didn’t like bots sorting through their laundry.
Marlow saw, as she crossed the street toward the dress shop, that her mother and mother-in-law were both already there. The sight of them together made her slightly sick to her stomach, but when she flicked over to her follower dashboard, she saw her total followers number skyrocketing, climbing toward twelve and a half million. The enmity between her mother and mother-in-law was the one ratings boon out of Marlow’s marriage. She knew that, at this moment, lots of people—especially retired Southern women and gay men across the country—were settling in to witness gold. The preparations for Marlow’s sowing party, which would celebrate her impending pregnancy and be four times the size of her wedding, had already been great for ratings—the mothers had fought twice so far. The first clash happened when Ellis’s mother suggested using repurposed coffee