It occurred to Ray that by taking a free cocktail and tipping $1, he could probably scale back the house edge very close to the breakeven point, maybe, who knows, even profit slightly. He needed to raise his bets a bit to qualify for the comp, but a quick math check told him he was still better off, EV-wise. He ordered a vodka and tonic he didn’t want.

“Las Vegas is our town. There’s a lot of good in it, in its families, in its workers, in its unions. But its industry is sick, colleagues—outdated, dying. It is a cancerous incarnation of an old perceived notion of what entertainment is, and … and I would add male entertainment … yes … and it needs to change. And they know it too. But instead of changing their product, the people in charge look for new customers who will like the product they have already. New markets to—”

“Isn’t she great,” said Erica, with a nudge.

“She … she is,” whispered Mary Ann.

“She’s my friend,” said Erica. “Maidon. Told you you should meet her sometime.”

“—so that domination can perdure. Look around,” the girl said, gesturing with a hand at the artificial spectacle of the Cavea, as if to encompass the entire city. Her plumes now trembled with confidence as she turned a smiling face to both wings of the auditorium. “We cannot let ourselves be fooled. All of this is just a show. It is … superstructure. Beneath it all, always, are the forces and relations of production. Money, my colleagues, and power. It doesn’t matter that we make ‘good money,’ it doesn’t matter at all. Besides the fact, I mean, that not all of us do, to be honest, like, speak for yourself, right? But every time we allow complacency to distract us, every time we let our anger be redirected toward someone other than the real culprits, we are just helping the rich maintain the status quo. And of all places, we cannot let that happen in Las Vegas, a town where we have to smile and look pretty as ninety-year-olds gamble a year of our rent on the spin of a wheel.”

“First of all,” said Bryan, “I can’t fucking believe you’re actually saying you’re doing this for the good of the fish, or the land, or whatever you wanna call your little poker buddies, you greedy piece of shit.”

“Well, look at that,” said Logan. “First time I hear the man’s voice in like a year! Love you too, buddy.”

“Fuck off. Second, the tragedy of the commons, like the prisoner’s dilemma, only works in an environment where the herdsmen don’t all know each other and hold each other accountable. Where if you game the system, there isn’t shame and punishment to be faced, and you can just get away with it. It only works in an environment incapable of self-regulation.”

“Self-regulation?” Logan smiled defiantly.

“Self-regulation,” said Bryan, gripping the pool cue with both hands. The room was silent.

“Look, buddy, your silver-star-sheriff bullshit could maybe fly at your home casino in Butthole, Montana, but self-regulating communities only work when they’re small, you know? This is Vegas, thousands of poker players through this town every year. Are you gonna shame and punish all the ones who don’t live up to your little honor code? Huh? The little knight in shining Armani? The selfless hero of the oppressed who drives a fucking Tesla? Give me a fucking break. It’s over—there’s just too many of us, and many more will come, now that online sucks balls. You said so yourself back when these kids started showing up,” said Logan, turning around forty-five degrees and pointing his chin at Ray, who was very glad to see Bryan’s threatening stare remained fixed forward and downward at his knife-wielding interlocutor.

It was a war old Tom would have never been able to fight. His need for reassurance and peacemaking would have made the ruthlessness of conflict impossible. He would have caved, for sure. But what he found now, in his first weeks as a lone wolf (and he would go entire days speaking no words out loud other than “Call,” “All in,” and “The number forty-two with the hot sauce, please”), was that life without the approval of a guiding figure was not the emotional wasteland he had always feared it would be. That he really could be content with being his own man—how had Patrick put it?—going his own way. Wasn’t that what true alphas did? And as for reassurance, does it come in sweeter, more concentrated form than the sight of bills growing in his desk drawer to little currency turrets, slowly but surely, indicating without a doubt that one is doing things right?

Things were going well, great even, and the troubles at the apartment were a small price to pay for his good fortune. Besides, he would probably move out soon, at this rate.

Yet Logan’s proposition posed a dilemma: If given the chance to make a ton of money by less-than-unimpeachable means, would he take it? If he agreed to play Logan’s game, making an easy living off of drunk businessmen, he wouldn’t be the best. In fact, he would have qualms about even calling himself a real poker player. But his fears about the future would be gone, and in no time he would again be a wealthy young man, someone who’d made it. It was, he realized, a question he’d managed to keep at bay throughout his years of meteoric success, when the two things had proceeded conveniently parallel: Did he really want to be the best at poker, or did he just want to be rich?

The hours crawled by at geological speed. If it weren’t for the dealer shifts—every thirty minutes, even with no game actually taking place, with change-of-the-guard-type solemnity—it would be easy to think the high-stakes room existed outside the domain of Time. A couple more regs showed up later in the morning, but neither stuck around long.

By the middle of the afternoon, conversation at table 14 sounded like something out of Beckett.

“We should start a game,” said Bryan.

“I’m gonna die if I don’t,” said Eike.

“I’m dead already,” said JJ.

“It’ll just be the four of us,” Calvin said. “Nobody else will play.”

“I don’t think he’s even coming,” said JJ.

“We should still start a game,” said Bryan.

It was all so much bigger than her. There was so much at stake she barely understood, and yet here she was. Technological advancements threatening the future of century-old jobs, gender and age discrimination, the rights of the workers versus the owners’ drive to keep an industry afloat. Thousands of families, children, lives sweated out under the desert sun, the entire economy of a region, the political balance of a key swing state in the upcoming election. And at the center of it all, Mary Ann, a harpsichord, and the flimsy plastic toy bulging awkwardly against her left thigh.

The big reveal, the secret plan Wiles wanted Lindsay to unveil to the world, was a surprise partnership with Gifty’s Zach Romero. Romero was the most beloved young businessman in Las Vegas, so different from Wiles in age, aspect, and demeanor that Lindsay was having a hard time picturing them in the same room. Yet now the two richest men in town were joining forces, and would revolutionize the hospitality game forever, or so it seemed.

Gifty would provide the digital platform, a clever reimagining of their social media algorithm as an opt-in service for hotel visitors; Wiles supplied the infrastructure, his entire network of Vegas resorts available for capillary microcustomization of the tourist experience; an army of dedicated workertainers (as a sly PR initiative, job offers would be first sent out to Wiles Group personnel made redundant in the last two years) would strive to bend the confines of the collective to the benefit of the individual, constantly repackaging Las Vegas to suit each visitor’s algorithmically determined tastes and needs.

She could say no, and still have the life she wanted. This was how they tempted you, by presenting the way of the market as the only way to achieve what you want. It’s me or What’s New in Henderson forever, honey. But she could move to San Francisco on her own, she could finish her stories, query a few agents, wait the excruciating months or years before someone at the gates decided to let a young woman from the forgotten periphery of America inside the secret world of Letters. She could forget all this even happened.

She would say no, because she had to. Didn’t she?

He finally saw that he’d looked at the Cardanus incident all wrong. He’d focused on his own mistakes, obsessing about the ways he was different from the computer. But that wasn’t the important part. What mattered was how similar they were. The computer hadn’t played some radical new style that had taken them all by surprise. It had played more or less like they did, just better. So what was impressive wasn’t that a reinforcement learning system had gotten really good by playing trillions of hands. It was that they, the Brains, the simple, flawed humans, had been going in the right direction all along. That decades of slow, dumb, suboptimal evolution of the game—from the cowboy-hatted romantics to the number-crunching nerds—had gradually led humanity as a whole to the level of play Ray was able to express: not perfect, but pretty goddamn good. What mattered, that is, was not the fight between a multiagent AI and himself—an individual, discrete consciousness. What mattered was the discovery that humanity itself was a multi-agent system, and that each of us is but a node, a single agent, both fundamental and useless at the same time. And since humanity didn’t act like a supervised system, but much like Cardanus, a self-governing one, that meant that exploration of all possible policies was as important to it as the exploitation of established knowledge. To the whole huge system—Humanity—failing was good. It was vital.