The Candy House

Thirty-three is still young enough to register as “young.”

Registering as “young” is especially welcome to those who may not register as “young” much longer.

My editor, Nan Graham

But knowing everything is too much like knowing nothing; without a story, it’s all just information.

machine to salve the dread of paranoids and ease the minds of people who felt unlike themselves; whose dreams had gotten strange; who believed they were being watched from within or used to watch those around them; who could no longer concentrate

One horror of motherhood lies in the moments when she can see both the exquisiteness of her child and his utter inconsequence to others.

The collective. He was feeling the collective without any machinery at all. And its stories, infinite and particular, would be his to tell.

He knew what the vision meant: human lives past and present, around him, inside him.

What pained Gregory was the thought of a dying man trying to repair, and atone for, a world he had inadvertently wrought.

Bix Bouton had directed an enormous bequest to Mondrian, Christopher Salazar’s not-for-profit. Over gasped objections from Gregory’s siblings, Hannah laconically explained that in their father’s final year, when his ALS was known only to Lizzie, he’d been gripped by an imperative to contact Miranda Kline, the anthropologist. Kline hadn’t been heard from since eluding a decade before. But Bix had recently attended the wedding of Sasha’s son, Lincoln, a high-level counter, and quietly enlisted Lincoln’s help to find Miranda Kline. Lincoln traced her digital trail to Brazil, where it turned out she had died the year before, in 2034, at age eighty-four. Lincoln next tracked down Lana Kline, the daughter Miranda remained close to until her death. It was Lana who arranged a meeting with Christopher Salazar, who had helped her mother to elude back when eluding was still new. Bix met several times with Salazar in the last months of his life, unbeknownst to anyone, even Lizzie.

“Seeds,” Athena croaked, passing it to him. “Eureka Gold: It’s cloned from an actual crop grown by Beats in California in the 1960s. The whole forest burned up in the early ’20s. Space travel: We’re going to a real place that doesn’t exist.”