Outside the cafeteria, a pop-up was serving craft coffee from a roastery in Santa Cruz. On a teak bar sat an espresso machine just like the Founder’s. A sandwich board displayed a limited menu: espresso $4, cortado $5. Dozens of Corporation employees stood in line, chatting with the team of baristas about crema and milk texture. “You know this roastery?” Henry asked.

I sipped my Philtered Soul, unable to taste anything but hazelnut syrup. “They’re decent,” I said, silently vowing never to order from the roastery again. Couldn’t the Corporation stop itself from acquiring at least some parts of my life? “What if we replace what we take away?” I suggested, focusing the discussion back on work.

“Don’t bullshit me, Ethan. This is serious. If you’re aware of any outside interference to our project, it’s your responsibility to speak up.” He lowered his voice, even though we were the only two in the room. “Ting is valuable to me, obviously, but she’s also valuable to the Corporation. She’s lived half of her life in the other worlds. She understands them better than any of us could possibly hope to. If someone else—another company, a startup, an individual—attempts to find her, it’s lights out. The Corporation will destroy her before they let a competitor near her. Do you understand?”

“I can’t do it anymore,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m fascinated by the industry, and I’m grateful for my experience here, the brilliant people I’ve met, but personally I need a reset. I just feel so optimized.” He emphasized that last word, optimized. Wasn’t that an ideal state for MBAs like Robert? For all of us in Silicon Valley? We strove for optimization. We invented services to clean our apartments, to bring us groceries, to drive us from the office to restaurants so trendy we designed special bots to snag reservations. We dined within the time slots marked in our calendars before being driven home, listening to songs an algorithm discovered for us as we reviewed and reprioritized our to-do lists in the backseat.