Through the mosquito-netted window, freezing cold New York wind swept the room as Mary Ann made her way back from the kitchen countertop to the couch. Compared to her previous trip, her walk lacked coordination. She moved with the cross-legged convexity of amateur skiers, but the couch turned out to be quite far. She settled for the orange living room table, sat on the one slender IKEA chair (opposite a low, uncomfortable wooden bench with no back support), and lay her whole torso on the cold metal surface, arms crossed, facedown, eyes closed. She started crying. Soon she realized she was thinking of how this would look to others—like a movie audience or something—her sad, beautiful body arched and moving up and down from the sobbing, a picture-perfect image of scripted pain. Then she realized she was still thinking of herself, performing for attention, demanding to be looked at; that even in absolute, heartrending suffering she was still a prisoner of her desire to be seen, she was still fake. That no matter how much she hurt, she was still so much a piece of utter shit that she couldn’t access one true, genuine feeling, and if she couldn’t now, defenseless and weak, then when? Then she started crying for real.

[...] she had walked with her father up to her coach, and the three of them had sat on the small white plastic bench poolside, Coach in center, the tiny bench creaking under unusual nonprepubescent weight, the sound of two dozen pairs of young arms breaking the water and the smell of chlorine she already felt like she missed, and she had quietly sobbed and looked down at the red-tile floor while her father did the half-lying for her. She had never seen an adult enter the pool in civilian clothes before.

Many years later, when the moral weight of her dad’s lies on her behalf appeared less significant, she still regarded her retirement from the pool as the watershed moment of her youth. It had been the one time in her life she had taken a decision clearly against what was expected of her, against a community she belonged to, against family tradition. And it had felt horrible. In a way, all her life since then, her gradually decreasing but still joyful involvement with the Church, her luminous years in Provo, her budding career at the Las Vegas Sun, her rooming with and pretty much taking care of Orson—all of it could be described not as a forced adherence to an externally set, premade mold, but as a conscious, happy convergence of her personal wants and needs with the expectations of her community. Really, she had chosen all of it, and it all fit. It felt right.

When he got back from Pittsburgh, there was nothing left to do. Outside, Toronto was shedding its winter coat and gearing up for an abnormally hot summer, its elms and oaks and maples silently sprouting the green silk of life. In Ray’s minimally furnished apartment, light flooded the living room windows and illuminated his computer screens, turning them into Petri dishes of dust and smudged fingerprints. Even though the bot itself had not achieved perfection, and had to use small approximations of its own, there was nothing Ray could do to reach its level; it just couldn’t be done. Deep inside, machine learning systems were not individuals, Cardanus was not one brain: the evolution of artificial intelligence had lately converged toward multiagent systems, nets of individual nodes working simultaneously and collaborating in a kind of swarm intelligence. Tasks that could proceed separately, with no mutual dependency or even communication, were called “embarrassingly parallel.” The difference between an agent’s performance results and optimal performance was called “regret.” Cardanus, with its myriad interconnected cells working by trial and error, free of the shackles of corporeity, had brought to the table a game-changing regret minimization technique that Ray, alone in an apartment filling up with summer, had no way to possibly emulate. It wasn’t a fair fight. And it was over.

“And what do I need to know?” said Mary Ann.

“Not a lot. The basics of Hi/Lo counting, just to understand what I’ll be doing from the platform,” said Erica. “But mostly you’ll be acting.”

“To tell them when to bet more?” said Mary Ann.

“To distract them when the deck is cold,” said Gabrielle. “And to get them excited when it’s hot. The reason card counters get caught is they need to be looking at the cards and change their bets a lot, and supervisors spot them. But the guys we’re helping won’t even be looking at the table. They’ll be drunk, chatting up their waitress, staring at Erica’s a—tushy on the platform.” She glanced at her toddler, who seemed concentrated on his cooking. “Pit boss will be happy to see them bet big.”

“What happens if they get caught?” said Mary Ann.

“Nothing. They get asked to not play blackjack anymore,” said Gabrielle.

“And what happens if we get caught?” said Mary Ann.

Gabrielle looked down at the cards.

“We go to jail,” said Erica, with a matter-of-factness Mary Ann found concerning, but kind of inspiring.

Relieved of her daily nursing duties, Mary Ann found in her anger a natural way to channel her newfound energy. Karen’s bedridden languishing might have been over, but the patent injustice that had caused it, the evil that had threatened the life of her lifesaving aunt, sure wasn’t. While her earlier, effortful attempts at self-improvement had done nothing to make her feel better, helping her aunt became a welcome distraction from self-centeredness. It was a reflex, something that just seemed to happen. Opening herself up to the possibility that what made her feel marginal and used about Las Vegas might come not from her but from the city itself suddenly made her less alone in her struggle. And doing something for them—the thousands like her Vegas hurt and exploited—maybe really could help her too.

Opportunity presented itself with incredible punctuality. In the staff changing room at the Pos, where an overlapping of schedules enabled her weekly encounter with Gabrielle, Mary Ann found herself suddenly receptive to her colleague’s usual brand of locker-room talk about the exploitation of the workforce. Finally willing to listen, she discovered that her anger was not unique to her. That after years of what they perceived as too-cautious compromise with the powers that be—with the new CBA years away in the future, and a staggering number of nonunion professions still at the mercy of Wiles’s whims—a small, more intransigent group of waitresses, dealers, and various employees had decided they’d had enough, and formed a Shadow Union. Most importantly—and here, thought Mary Ann, lay the perfectly timed coincidence—she learned that this group of rebels now needed her.

The rebels’ stated goal for the so-called strike was “to systematically shrink the owner’s profit margins by means of nonconfrontational casino-wide sabotage, including but not limited to slowdowns, instigation to sobriety, noninvasive advantage gambling coaching et al., both as retribution for and as leverage against the unfair and discriminatory treatment of the workforce and the industry’s demeaning and unconstitutional staffing policies.” What it meant in practice was that, in the CBA-sanctioned impossibility of an actual strike, the Shadow Union (SU) had elected to go stealth. Cocktail waitresses were, as the recent wave of layoffs had abundantly proved, one of the most replaceable job figures in the country, given the intersection of low skill requirements and high rewards/desirability of position. Bartenders and hotel staff had it just as bad, with technological advancements threatening the very existence of their jobs and making redundancies easily justifiable. And, of course, models and dancers had it worst of all. The CBA’s generic arbitration clause, covering a broad nondiscrimination provision, rendered legal action against the layoffs more or less impossible—even discounting the obvious difference in firepower of the legal teams involved. In short, the only way to get back at Wiles effectively was to do so invisibly.

The first meetings of the blackjack saboteurs, before Mary Ann’s recruitment, had been a complete failure. The Committee had wasted weeks on a wild goose chase involving gift-shop decks like the one Gabrielle had cracked open for Erica’s lecture. A bold plan. The two rounded corners on each card were all that distinguished recycled decks from the otherwise-identical real deal in play at the tables, thus preventing gift-shop customers from getting funny ideas. Without the canceling corners, cards could be furtively reintroduced in play by any close-up magic enthusiast to get a substantial—and very illegal—advantage over the house. So the committee had debated the possibility of acquiring noncanceled decks from collaborationist inmates at High Desert State (Nevada Department of Corrections, Clark County), the unwilling labor force in charge of the actual rounding out of the used cards for mass souvenir-market introduction. While, as it turned out, there was no shortage of SU members with close (sometimes very close) personal ties with more or less every prison in the state, the idea was voted against by the Board of Directors of Strike Modalities (the Board, for short) and officially ruled “dumb as fuck.” A bit too bold. Chances of saboteurs ending up themselves shaving aces of diamonds at High Desert State projected in the high 90s. The committee had gone back to work, looking for something more subtle.

Maybe they could get away with this. Maybe they really were invisible. Even Mary Ann’s appearance, the thing that had made her stand out throughout her life and filled her head with foolish ambition, became part of a pattern, repeated and ubiquitous like the cameras overhead. This could work. She felt a sense of calm wash over the preoccupations of the last few days. The dealer announced the numbers softly, with a slight, endearing lisp: twentythix, black; thixteen, red. Alongside all of it, Mary Ann could feel a growing desire not to disappoint Erica, an urge to make her proud. Erica seemed to like her, to believe in her contribution to the cause; to think she was worth something. The glossy white ball sank into the number pockets with a satisfying click. She wanted to help, she really, honestly did. She could feel it now. She wanted to be part of something bigger and do something for Karen and for all the others here. She’d been selfish for far too long.

The casino was at war. Mary Ann saw it now. Everywhere she looked, workers in Positano uniforms were putting their job on the line by performing highly specialized, imperceptible acts of sabotage. Erica knew all of their names. Wraith-thin, mustachioed Ultimate Texas Hold’em dealers “inadvertently” lifted the corner of one of their hole cards just a little too much, hoping the player to their left would be smart enough to use the information to their advantage. Bartenders laced the drinks of the most unrestrained losing players with chamomile and herbs (and, Mary Ann hoped, nothing else). There was an electricity in the air, a current buzzing over the casino’s perpetual background swoosh.

And she was part of it. It was her energy too. The one she’d been feeling ever since Aunt Karen’s incident, the spontaneous, effortless drive toward others and away from herself and her obsessions. She’d traded in her personal hunger for social anger. In just a few weeks, the energy had won her a new friendship, filled her weekly schedule, given her something real to look forward to for the first time in years. She went out to East Fremont with Erica. She studied Hi/Lo counting on obscure probability theory papers, then settled for Wikipedia. She listened to visitors’ stories of lost loves, lost jobs, found fortunes, exotic travels. Las Vegas is a city of stories. She could be part of it. She could help.

A funny side effect of her parents’ accident had been the souring of her relationship with Gerardo. They’d been seeing each other for a little over a year, she a talented twenty-four-year-old medicinal chemist, he forty-seven and married and a civil engineer. When they met, he had been exactly double her age, and he’d joked he’d be sixty when she turned thirty, then a hundred when she turned fifty. Larissa was the only one she’d told; her mom would’ve lost it if she’d found out. They had been instantly, madly in love, and with him she’d felt sheltered and cared for in a way she never believed she needed, and was almost embarrassed for. So naturally, when everything happened, she’d imagined falling onto him like a shipwrecked sailor on a raft, as if that were the natural thing to do. Gerardo had thought so, too, it seemed, and redoubled his attentions while also pulling away just enough to give her the time she needed to grieve, proving his innate ability to always do and say the right thing. And yet. And yet what in the end did happen was she’d cooled off, toughened herself up to survive in a world where everything you loved got revoked from you like that, and it was better not to need anything outside of you at all. Weird how these things go.