In the architects’ rendering of the reception area of the Forthrast Family Foundation’s sixth-floor suite, blazered and skirted guests had lounged around its coffee table, sipping lattes and checking their phones under the alert but hospitable eye of a receptionist stationed behind a stylish curving desk as they waited for their hosts to show up and keycard them in.

The reality, this day and every day since they’d moved in, was that this was wasted space. They’d never got around to hiring a receptionist, so no one had ever sat behind the stylish desk. Its office chair had long since been poached, leaving more room for boxes of office supplies that tended to pile up there. Guests didn’t sit around the coffee table waiting to be buzzed in; their hosts knew where they were, and vice versa. The door leading back into the offices was propped open. Stationed next to it, plugged into a wall outlet, were charging docks for two different brands of telepresence robots: wheeled contraptions sporting flat-panel monitors thrust into the air at about the altitude of a person’s head, capable of purring around the office under the control of persons who weren’t physically present but who had the right passwords, and the right software installed on their systems. Even these had been gathering dust. The foundation had invested in them a few years ago, and Jake had frequently used them to “attend” meetings from his home in Idaho, but they had been superseded by virtual equivalents, or better robots that could walk up and down stairs on two legs. So walking through the reception area, which the architects had tried so hard to make nice, now had the feel of entering through the loading dock and the mail room.

She headed for her office, which was in the corner overlooking the lake. En route, she passed by the smaller of their two conference rooms. Sitting in a ragged semicircle with their backs to her were some half a dozen people who she guessed were young, based on their clothing, posture, and body types. Addressing them was Marcus Hobbs, a foundation executive who among other things looked after the summer intern program. Formerly this had been informal and ad hoc to a degree that, as Marcus had pointed out, actually put the foundation at some risk of lawsuits, or at least bad publicity. He’d tidied things up and instituted regular procedures for publicizing it, collecting and evaluating applications, screening applicants, and keeping track of metrics. So, the half-dozen kids sitting in that room were not just a random assortment of nephews, neighbors, and friends of friends, but the survivors of a selection process that had commenced the day after last year’s crop of interns had gone back to school.