They had drawn curious looks from the moms in the park and some old-timers in a barbershop near their parking space. But, at a rough guess, half of the locals were wearing glasses, not merely to correct their vision but to fortify everything with data. Grandma Alice had liked to repeat an old joke that in a town like this, you didn’t need to use your turn signals because everyone knew where you were going. It had become less and more true since she had died. Less because cars now made up their own minds as to when the blinkers should be put on, and more because you really could know everyone’s business now, in a way that the small-town busybodies of Alice’s generation could only have aspired to. The open and trusting culture of communities such as this one had carried over to the digital age. If you had a ten A.M. appointment with the physical therapist, everyone in town could know as much by checking your calendar, which could be accomplished just by looking hard enough at a widget floating above the car that was driving you there. Consequently, cars in a town like this, when seen through glasses, looked somewhat like old-timey sailing ships festooned with signal flags and aflutter with banners.

This all had to do with editors. If you were the kind of person who was enrolled at Princeton, you tended to speak of them as if they were individual human beings. The Toms and Kevins of the world, and most of the population of this town, were more likely to club together and subscribe to collective edit streams. Between those extremes was a sliding scale. Few people were rich enough to literally employ a person whose sole job was to filter incoming and outgoing information. For way less money you could buy into a fractional scheme, which was still very much a rich-person thing to do but worked okay for the 1 percent as opposed to the 0.001 percent. That was about where Sophia, Phil, and Anne-Solenne sat. Julian was stuck with his family’s editor until such time as he went out and made a pile of money. Had he been unable to afford even that—had he been a full-ride financial-aid student—Princeton would have supplied him with a fairly decent editor as part of the same package that gave him room, board, and a library card. It paid off for the university in the long run not to have its less well-heeled students disgorging flumes of sensitive data into the public eye.