Direct, unfiltered exposure to said flumes—the torrent of porn, propaganda, and death threats, 99.9 percent of which were algorithmically generated and never actually seen by human eyes—was relegated to a combination of AIs and Third World eyeball farms, which was to say huge warehouses in hot places where people sat on benches or milled around gazing at stuff that the AIs had been unable to classify. They were the informational equivalent of the wretches who clambered around mountainous garbage dumps in Delhi or Manila looking for rags. Anything that made it past them—any rag that they pulled out of the garbage pile—began working its way up the editorial hierarchy and, in rare cases, actually got looked at by the kinds of editors—or more likely their junior associates—who worked for people like Sophia. Consequently, Sophia almost never had to look at outright garbage.

The more important and high-judgment role played by her editor was to look at any data coming the other way—sound and imagery captured by her glasses, for example—and make sure it never found its way into the wrong hands. Which basically meant it never went anywhere at all.

Maybe a few times a year, Sophia actually talked to her editor. This was one of those times. “I authorize you to put me in Family Reunion Mode for twenty-four hours,” she said.

“Okay,” replied her editor with an It’s your funeral intonation, combined with a light overlay of I hope your mother doesn’t kill me.

Anne-Solenne, Phil, and Julian reacted with a mixture of laughs and mock horror as, in their view, Sophia erupted with vivid displays of personal data, like a circus clown solemnly doffing her top hat to reveal a flower arrangement, a trained marmoset, and a confetti cannon mounted to her skull.

The gaffers in the barbershop and the moms in the picnic shelter had seen the Land Cruiser as just an old-school SUV, with no identifying markings save an escutcheon of dead bugs on the grille proving that it had covered much ground since its last wash. At this moment, however, it was lighting up, letting them all know who had just pulled into town and giving them limited, temporary access to Sophia’s social media contrail. But all of that data was being exhibited with the color scheme, texture palette, typeface, UI conventions, and auditory cues—in sum, the art direction—of her personal brand. Before she opened the door of the car to reveal hairstyle, makeup, clothing, and accessories marking her as Not from Around Here, the same had been preannounced, to anyone wearing glasses, by the digital penumbra of Family Reunion Mode.

“Let’s check out the park,” she proposed, “this won’t take long.”

“Yeah—it’s tiny,” Phil said.

“That’s not what I meant,” Sophia chuckled. “I mean, my rellies will be here before you have time to get bored.”