Noma was right. At the Corporation, I would lose myself in a sea of other people like me. Liberal arts grads searching for meaning through work. Some, exposed to the evils of the dark web, convinced themselves it was their responsibility to keep the internet clean: not just from dick pics, but from more serious offenses, like hate-group schemes and child pornography. Honorable work, but psychologically damaging. And to what end? So the Corporation could serve ads to preteens? Corporation employees lined Valencia Street each morning, waiting for the shuttle, united by their miserable but well-paid vibe. They upgraded their hotel rooms and their plane seats to counteract the misery, bought two-hundred-dollar T-shirts and bamboo sunglasses in failed attempts to block out the voices in their heads that screamed, Get me the fuck out of here, this isn’t what we agreed, and on the shuttle they stared wistfully out the window, at the sign that says “Santa Cruz This Way,” dreaming about being on the beach, reading a novel they had so far only photographed and shared, never opened.

The Founder, on the other hand, granted himself accelerated vesting. His shares in DateDate were awarded the day the company was acquired. He believed in the primacy of the inventor. No one else was entitled to anything. Not even me, a friend. Noma informed me that accelerated vesting was common. Usually founders grant the same rights to their team, especially if the team is small. It had happened to her at a couple of other startups; her promised equity had been converted into a decent nest egg, allowing her to drift from startup to startup without worrying about a consistent source of income. I’d assumed she had family money, like so many other Stanford people I knew, and admired her for earning her own way. Of course, she’d been lucky to work for founders who looked out for their employees. The Founder would not be leaving me with a nest egg. I knew better than to compare, but my earnings were a thousand times less than what he would receive. I felt cheated, robbed of the potential to earn more, and also dismayed by these feelings of capitalist greed rising within me.

I provided the Founder with a truncated version of the integration tasks I’d been assigned at the Corporation, but didn’t say more in front of the researcher. “I’m Ethan,” I said, and shook the researcher’s hand. He introduced himself as Ben and said he should get back to checking in on the ants. When he left, the Founder said, “He was telling me about how our ability to dig deeper into the hidden world of ants can teach us about overlooked ecosystem functions.”

I should have asked the Founder how he was doing, but it’s so much easier to talk about the concrete details of the observable world. The pursuit of knowledge can be a wonderful distraction. “Like what?” I asked.

Noma turned to the car, idling out front. The passenger window came down, and Soren stuck his head out. “Beware the tyranny of petty things,” he shouted as the car pulled away. Noma laughed.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s nothing,” she said. But it wasn’t nothing: it was something Soren and Noma shared.

My sister and her husband were staying in the city en route from Napa to Santa Monica for their delayed honeymoon. Cat suggested we meet at a wine bar near their hotel, off Market. I descended the stairs into a sleek, dimly lit cellar. Waiters delivered plates of cheese and charcuterie. A sommelier described a wine as angular and acidic.

Vanessa Liao knew more about the Corporation than most of the people who worked there. She published the sharpest takes on the Corporation’s latest moves, since she’d known the news sometimes weeks in advance. Allie called her the Apple of reporters—not the first, but always the one with the most elegant response. “Apple when Steve was in his prime,” Allie qualified. Other journalists re-shared her blog posts, and major newspapers began picking up her pieces. Tech outlets courted her, but she remained stubbornly independent. Rumor had it that she was in talks with editors in New York about writing a book on the Corporation.

In her newsletter, Liao confirmed that the Corporation had hidden the Portals technology in the DateDate codebase before the acquisition as a way to fast-track its launch and circumvent government regulations. Most importantly, Liao explained that while the technology found in the DateDate codebase was the foundation for Portals, its potential was far greater. “What if,” she mused, “they didn’t think about shareholder value for one day? To judge by what I’ve learned about the technology, the Corporation could, theoretically, invent a way to travel to entirely new places. Not to new planets or to deep pockets of the Pacific, not to the past or to the future, but to places parallel to this world, that exist alongside us. Portals to alternate worlds.”

“Too bad,” the vaguely familiar guy said. “We’re throwing a shindig at Franklin’s. Let me know if you change your mind.” I didn’t place him until he stepped off the bus: my study partner in the only computer science class I ever took. It was impossible to escape Stanford in San Francisco. I searched his name and read about the meal-delivery service he founded that promised to make millennials feel like they could cook restaurant-quality dinners at home. They took care of the hard parts for you; the butternut squash, for instance, was pre-chopped into bite-size squares, and the spices were measured out in neat little packets. Who did the prep work for services like his? Not him, I was certain. I recalled my meetings with User Operations, in which we evaluated the work of our new content reviewers, an anonymous team in the Philippines.

Robert went on to explain how his set of metrics offered an accurate picture of whether the people who opened their phones to use our app were happy. I nodded along, not caring what he did, thinking instead of his profile on the internal wiki, which I’d scanned on the way to the meeting. He graduated from Pomona five years ago, moved to Hollywood to become a screenwriter, and a couple years later, presumably jaded, enrolled at Stanford Business School. Somewhere in there he worked at Deloitte. As he scribbled more numbers on the board, I thought about his screenplays, and what it was about Hollywood that drove him away. Should I interpret his move into business as a withdrawal from the arts, or some kind of subversion? Perhaps he was still working on his screenplays during the shuttle rides home.

I dreaded waking up for the call. I was in Japan for the first time, in the Lost in Translation hotel. Why should I be held hostage to promises I’d made on the other side of the planet? I wanted to go on a solo train ride to Kyoto, like Scarlett. I wanted to sing karaoke with Bill Murray. Still in bed, I scanned the room for a fax machine, like the one Bill Murray’s wife uses to communicate with him about their home decor, thinking I could fax Noma, an old-fashioned, new-for-us way to communicate. But there was no fax machine, so I reached for the TV remote. A beautiful woman appeared, in soft focus, a bare shoulder showing, before the scene cut to panoramas of cherry blossoms and ancient temples. I locked the image in my head, lay back on the bed, and slid a hand down my pants.

“We can bring you back because you’re tethered to here. What you see in the other worlds exists only there.”

That we’re all tethered to a single place was a false assumption. As much as I wanted to remake myself in California, I was still at least partially tethered to Missouri. When someone asked where I’m from, I used the two states interchangeably. Where was the line? Ting might be tethered to that other world, but I refused to believe she wasn’t also tethered to this one. “What if we exchange something here for something there?” I proposed.