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TR · P02
Nobody decided
Nobody agreed to any of this, and nobody had to.
Readers ask me where the ending is. Here is the honest reply: there isn't one, because the thing the novels describe has not ended. It is not a plot. It is a direction of travel, and the reader is already on it.
Try this before you argue with me.
Name the day you agreed to be tracked. Not the day you bought a phone. The day you agreed that where you were, all day, every day, for the last nine years, should be a retrievable fact. There is no such day. You did not agree. You accepted eleven reasonable things at eleven reasonable moments, each of which improved something, and none of which was the decision.
Name the day you agreed that your car should be photographed at four points on a journey you take twice a week. Name the day you agreed that a shop should know what you buy, and when you stopped buying it, and what that suggests. Name the day the school began to score your child's attention. Name the day your insurer started pricing you on evidence rather than on averages.
Each of those arrived separately. Each arrived with a reason that was good. Nobody in that chain was acting in bad faith, and nothing in it was a crime.
That is the argument the second novel makes, and makes at length. It says that this kind of control does not arrive by decree, because a decree can be refused. It accumulates. It is assembled out of individually defensible decisions taken by competent people who are each solving a small and genuine problem, and it reaches its conclusion without anybody ever choosing the conclusion.
The book puts it in three words near the end, and then does not explain them.
No one decided.
A novel about a crime ends when the criminal is caught. Nothing in these five books is a crime. There is nobody to catch, nothing to prosecute, and no moment at which somebody could have been stopped. That is why there is no ending, and it is the finding rather than the failure.
If the last page leaves you in the air, notice which of us is still in the middle of it.
These essays sit beside the novels. Download any of our novels, free and in full.