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He gazed through his windshield at the fake red-brick exterior, the debased shrubbery surrounded by wood chips. Beijing, Moscow—they were all over the world, McDonald’s, colonizing, anesthetizing, and it was said that no country containing one had been at war since. Of course, they were already def…

I made a brief, meticulous study of Thomas Keene: his smooth self and his fat shadow self, his olive Armani, his sandy hair and small round eyes. I scrutinized him for one granule of cynicism, a scintilla of evidence that at bottom he didn’t believe a word he was saying. I found nothing. This ex—fa…

“It sounds expensive, all this,” I said. “Who pays for it?”

“Well,” he said, reluctantly. “Most of the start-up equity comes from Time Warner and Microsoft. But we’re completely independent, all that means is that they’ll have access to certain kinds of media options before anyone else.”

“I g…

“Not at all,” Thomas said, leaning into this challenge with such relish that he actually shoved the table an inch in my direction, rattling our water glasses. “But with all due respect, Charlotte, I think you may be the exception, here. Most of us are desperate for raw experience. We work in office…

And in that moment, Charlotte, too, experienced a falling away; her life fell away, her friends—they fell away. She’d been clinging to them these past weeks, wanting to be like Melanie Trier, like other people. But now she saw, or felt, that this wasn’t possible. She made her choice: Moose, and Mic…