Crossing the street to the park, the foursome would have drawn stares from curious locals, had the curious locals not advanced to more sophisticated technology that enabled them to stare differently, by scanning all that Sophia had just made public. Without discussing it they went straight to the tower in the middle. This was made of the same buff sandstone as the nearby courthouse. It was just a folly, not a real fortification—only two stories high, with an upper deck surrounded by a crenellated parapet. A windowless steel door, painted Parks Department green, bore testimony to generations of bored teens’ fruitless efforts to kick their way in—or, failing that, to attest to who sucked. A plaque next to the door supplied information they’d already seen in their glasses, which was that the tower had been erected by otherwise idle laborers during the Depression under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration. This seemed like the kind of historical/political minutia that Princeton kids ought to have heard of, so they all followed the inevitable hyperlink and spent a minute standing there reading about it. It was the sort of basically dead and inert topic that Wikipedia had actually been pretty good at covering, and enough time had passed that AIs had gone over all of this material and vetted it for mistakes.

Once they had got the gist, their attention drifted back to the here and now. Julian and Phil took turns reading the graffiti on the door, a palimpsest of slut shaming in which they found undue fascination and furtive amusement—exhibiting social, verging on moral, retardation that Sophia’s expensive training had given her all the tools to perceive and to analyze but no weapons to change.

“What is the agenda?” Anne-Solenne asked loudly enough to silence the boys.

“Flowers on graves,” Sophia answered.

“Let’s go then,” Phil said. “Because this place sucks.” It was an index of his social deftness that he managed to announce this in a dry and almost stately manner that nonetheless made it understood that he was channeling the ancestral voices of all the boys who had stood where he was standing scratching imprecations into the green paint with pickup-truck keys.

“It’s of the essence,” Sophia said, “that I be seen doing it.”

“Because, you know,” Anne-Solenne added, completing the thought, “the people in those graves—”

“Are dead,” Julian said, pushing his glasses up on his forehead. “They’re not going to know.”

Something flickered in Sophia’s peripheral vision. She turned her head to see a sport-utility vehicle of the largest class, authentically bug spattered and road dusted, easing into a span of eighty-seven consecutive empty parking spaces. Visual stigmas pasted on it and hovering above it let her know that its sole occupant was Pete Borglund, fifty-six years of age, the second and current husband of Karen Forthrast Borglund, Alice’s eldest daughter.