WORD OF THE NEW FIRES never reaches Nick. He gets his news from bus stops and coffee shops, telemarketers and census takers, panhandlers in small towns all the way up the coast willing to reveal secrets hidden from almost every commentator and analyst, often for free.

In Bellevue, Washington, he lands the perfect job: glorified stock boy, hurtling around on a mini-forklift in an enormous Fulfillment Center, unpacking mountainous pallets of books, scanning their bar codes, then storing their precise locations in the vast, 3-D storage matrix. He’s supposed to set land speed records. He does. It’s a kind of performance piece for that most rarefied of audiences, no one.

The product here is not so much books as that goal of ten thousand years of history, the thing the human brain craves above all else and nature will die refusing to give: convenience. Ease is the disease and Nick is its vector. His employers are a virus that will one day live symbiotically inside everyone. Once you’ve bought a novel in your pajamas, there’s no turning back.

Nick unpacks the next carton, number thirty-three for today. He can open, scan, and shelve over a hundred crates on a good day, one every four minutes. The faster he goes, the longer he can stave off his inevitable robot replacement. He counts on a couple of years before efficiency comes to kill him. The harder he works, the less he needs to think.

He gets the crate of paperbacks up on their steel shelves and takes stock. The aisle rises on girders into an endless chasm of books. Dozens of aisles in this Fulfillment Center alone. And every month, new Fulfillment Centers across several continents. His employers won’t stop until everyone is fulfilled. Nick squanders a full five precious seconds of his time-motion gazing down the gorge of books. The sight fills him with a horror inseparable from hope. Somewhere in all these boundless, compounding, swelling canyons of imprinted paper, encoded in the millions of tons of loblolly pine fiber, there must be a few words of truth, a page, a paragraph that could break the spell of fulfillment and bring back danger, need, and death.