It’s not because of his injuries. Yesterday, he summoned a doctor with an app. (The Next Big Thing, “like Uber for health care,” for those who can afford it. Danny is an early-round investor.) He had his cuts glued and his ribs taped up. The doctor offered him OxyContin. Instead, Danny put the pain in a small blue box in his mind, which triggered a biofeedback subroutine that enabled him to ignore it. This was one of the only useful tricks he learned from a New Age therapist his father insisted he see when he was a kid. It probably didn’t work for anyone with a normal brain.

That accomplished, he tossed his phone and all his tech and got brand-new devices, still in their shrink-wrap, from a closet in his home. He scrubbed them all and ran heavy-duty encryption and antivirus protocols when downloading his data from the cloud. He’d already taken his old computer and disks and smashed them to bits with a hammer.

Danny still has a hard time believing in magic. But he believes in viruses and malware, and he knows how to kill those.

Then he used one of his NetJets credits and booked a private plane to Middleton.

Despite his precautions, there have been little glitches all day, knocking him off schedule, the minutes snowballing until he’s hours behind. The power went out in his house this morning, taking all his systems offline. His Uber driver’s phone froze up, so he couldn’t find Danny’s address. The bank put a hold on Danny’s account, which required an actual phone call with a live person to untangle, like he was some kind of caveman.

When he finally got to the San Jose airport to meet the private jet, he couldn’t escape the feeling that something was following him. Every CCTV camera seemed to be an eye turned in his direction. He had the irrational conviction that there was something measuring his steps, comparing his gait to a database, keeping track of him as he made his way to the plane. He knows the technology exists. He’s met the CEOs who are selling it, in fact. But he never felt like it would be aimed at him. He would have considered it paranoid.

He thought about how much of an airplane’s flight depended on the flawless performance of innumerable lines of code in hundreds of different devices, and wondered if it was that smart to board.

He shook it off and got on the jet. He put in his brand-new earbuds. Danny doesn’t actually like music that much. It’s distracting. But the earbuds keep him from having to speak with people, which is even more distracting.