dozing vendor on the sidewalk. He was ancient, and possibly blind. His mirrored lenses reminded her of the glasses she had taken from Amadou’s house, to remember him after he died. The vendor barely moved as she placed some money on his table, next to an army of tiny souvenir snow globes with bronze helixes twisted inside. Marlow seized an electric blue hijab and a wide pair of tortoiseshell sunglasses. She tugged them on and turned to face the place where she was born.
But it was gone. There was no hospital at 1000 Tenth Avenue. She definitely had the address right, for there it was spelled out in iron, above the gate in the fence that stood between her and something stunning: the enormous, life-size version of the helix inside the snow globes. The structure spiraled into the clouds, an endless chain of bronzed, disembodied, interlocking arms. Each set, Marlow saw as she walked through the gate and moved closer, began at the fingertip, crossed angelically at the elbows, and ended abruptly at the shoulders. When Marlow got up close, she saw that each pair was unique. Some of the arms were burly, with a finish raked to look like hair. Others were delicate and feminine, with brutal, long nails or rings climbing the fingers. And some, Marlow saw with a shiver, were small and smooth. Not quite full-grown.
Marlow put her own hands against the pair of arms in front of her—a woman’s hands, clearly, with a tattoo that said AIDEN above the left fourth knuckle. She pulled herself forward to peer over the fingers, to look at the inner edge of the sculpture. There was information stamped inside every right wrist: name, age, hometown. The hand she was holding belonged to Ariel Long, twenty-two, of Fort Pierce, Florida. In the semicircles of grass that flanked the memorial on all sides, people stood still and somber with headsets covering their eyes and ears. Above Marlow’s head, tiny drones wove around the chain, hovering above information plates.
A plaque where the chain began read simply: Each set of hands belongs to an American lost in the wake of the Spill. Next to the plaque was a pile of handmade tributes—unlit pillar candles, roses gone dry and brown-tinged, and printed, laminated photos piled up on top of each other. A small flag staked into the grass: black, with a graphic of white quilted cubes. NEVER AGAIN, the flag said, beneath the squares.
Something must have sensed Marlow pausing there. A hologram appeared in front of her: an arrow pointing her toward the slender silver mesh building the chain of arms wound around. “Want to learn more about the world before the Spill?” an automated voice asked in a pious hush. “Housed inside our Internet Archive is the former World Wide Web. Programmers have been working for decades on recovering the information lost or damaged in the Spill, and today, we’re proud to say, we have on display 97.6 percent of the old internet as it existed from its invention in 1989 until its destruction in 2016.”
Marlow stepped into line behind a family of four. All of them were wearing orange ponchos that pictured, on their backs, two gray skyscrapers and an American flag beneath the words THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF 9/11. The teenage daughter was having, Marlow could tell, a silent conversation with someone she was attracted to. She kept touching her hair self-consciously, as if the other person could see her. Every ten seconds or so, she giggled at top pitch.
“Time to hang up with your boyfriend and show a little respect, Barbara,” the mother snapped. “You’re on hallowed ground.”
The daughter rolled her eyes. “I’ve been on hallowed ground all day,” she muttered. “You promised we would go IRL-shopping.”
Marlow walked in behind them. A bot in an eggplant polo—female, at least a generation old, dingy around the eyes, with a whisper of scrubbed-off graffiti at her jaw—nodded at her pleasantly. So here were New York’s bots, which made sense. The government was always buying up the old models discarded by industry, installing them in museums and public school classrooms.
“In 2016,” the bot said, its voice dull and stiff, “the web was open-publish. Anyone could post whatever they wanted on it. People made up their own passwords, often from meaningful dates or pet names. Sunglasses off, please,” it added as Marlow passed. “Just ahead, you’ll be walking through our retina scanners. We like to know who’s visiting us for security purposes—and so we can