The chapter opens with an epigraph in which Echo London wonders if the events of the novel mean Time’s Eye, an omnipotent watcher, has punished her.

Echo walks to work along a path that shows the technological wonders of her age—smart electronic panels, automated walking paths, AI assistants, and security bots. She has synesthesia that manifests as seeing colors in numbers, so she carefully avoids looking at the advertisements. She is on her way to the F. M. Lewis Library, a place she loves for its books, the patrons, and surrounding community. The building is nestled in the trees and has hallmarks of Renaissance architecture. A belligerent and intoxicated man bumps into her. A security bot notes that the man is intoxicated, so it calls the police on the man.

Percy Grafton, who usually supervises Echo from Atlanta via videoconference, is there in the flesh at the library to tell Echo her branch is closing. Angry patrons and members of Human.exe, an anti-AI group that wants to prevent the development of artificial general intelligence, are already protesting outside. Percy tells Echo her only choice for work is to take the director position at the People’s Library, a library of virtus—digitized versions of real people. Ada, an AI librarian, will manage the administrative processes of the library. Echo is angry, so she goes outside to join the protestors, who by now have become violent. Ultimately, however, she doesn’t join the protest because she is too afraid to fight the bureaucracy.

Nine months later, Echo stops by F.M. Lewis, now a shelter for unhoused persons. The building looks neglected. Echo turns to the path to work when she sees a rogue virtu, not for the first time. It wears a white mask. It leads her on a chase, stopping each time it seems she will lose it. Technically, limits put in place as a result of Human.exe’s activism against artificial general intelligence should prevent virtus from exceeding their programming by running away. These limits have apparently failed. No one has responded to Echo’s reports on the escaped virtus.

The cat-and-mouse chase is a strange new behavior for virtus. The virtu takes off its mask, revealing binary digits (ones and zeros). Echo sees the ones as a blinding burst of red that stuns her momentarily. The virtu must be aware of her synesthesia.

Time’s Eye (the all-seeing timepiece of the library) looms over Echo as she enters the People’s Library. The clock is “[e]ver watchful […] visible from every vantage point, positioned to stand sentinel over all that took place within these walls. An arbiter. Maybe a judge” (22). The library has a modern, clean architectural style—cantilevered over Lake Erie, bright glass everywhere, and bamboo fiber walls. Echo sees it as “defying gravity [….] The structure rose like a cathedral of knowledge, spun from glass and hempcrete and bamboo, housed with virtual people, their lives and stories eternally adrift” (21).

Echo has settled into her job, but the place still feels alien to her. After nine months as director, she should have already interviewed each of the virtus to get to know the collection and check for file corruption. She has procrastinated because doing so is nothing like getting to know a collection of real books. She encounters Walter Spriggs, custodian for the library. When she escapes from Walter, she checks out Jesse Cooper, a member of the Golden Thirteen group, the Navy’s cohort of Black commissioned officers during World War II.

Echo has always loved the feel of handling a new book and finds interacting with the virtus to be unsatisfying. Despite her feelings, Echo looks forward to the interview with Jesse Cooper.

When Echo begins the interview, Jesse’s flat expressions are proof of her belief that the virtus haven’t achieved artificial general intelligence. When she asks Jesse about the one lesson he’d like people to take from his life, he tells her, “Never let anyone define for you what it means to be a human being” (28).

Echo scans the library for threats as patrons enter it. She is vigilant because someone exploded a bomb in the library the previous year, likely Human.exe, which fears virtus are the next step in developing AGI that will be the downfall of humanity.

Echo sees a teen boy whose shifty eyes lead her to call her AI assistant Gina, whom she talks to via a sub-dermal implant. The boy lands in the maker space, a loud place where young patrons can use AI support to create novel artifacts that they could potentially sell. Echo sees but doesn’t call security on a woman in a blue suit because of the way the woman is dressed. The woman later confronts Echo and accuses her of being a hypocrite. She tells Echo she remembers Echo helping her find the last human-written novel when Echo was the librarian at F. M. Lewis. The woman throws a liquid substance at Echo. Echo calls security.

Echo returns to her office after the police interview her. The only personal touches in the office are a Gęlędę mask (a mask used in rituals of the West African Yoruba) and a favorite book. She returns home to clean herself up and thinks about the attack. Echo does fell like a hypocrite for working at the library. She has so far avoided recording the brief biography required of all staff and adding it to the library’s collection because she feels uncomfortable doing so. She has always told herself that trying to change the institution from the inside was the best way to address concerns about the impact of AI and automation on humanity.

She knows a part of her decision was a desire to afford her life, including housing, instead of relying on UBI (universal basic income) to survive. To receive UBI, potential candidates have to take a test to measure the impact of social media, automation, and technology on human minds. Echo thinks AI is so ubiquitous that it is almost impossible to avoid it.

Echo has a tense videoconference with Percy. Percy tells her the engineers believe a flaw in the old coding used to build the virtus is behind the escapes. They are re-writing the code. When Echo offers to talk with engineering directly, Percy reminds her that this is his job, not hers. When she admits she saw the rogue virtu while visiting F. M. Lewis, Percy reprimands her, telling her that if she doesn’t like her job, there are many candidates who would like to take her place.

He relents when she speaks up for herself, calling her his “girl” because of her response. He refuses her request to make space for a collection of digital and hard copy books. Echo thinks he sees her as a wayward but “treasured pet” (45). He leaves to do a round of media interviews about the attack.

Rebecca and Ulysses London, Echo’s parents, show up after hearing about the attack on the news. The conversation is awkward. Since Echo took the job at the People’s Library, her already difficult relationship with her father has worsened. They never got along. Her father is an accountant who has lost clients to AI and automation. Echo encourages her parents to get some lunch in the library café, She goes to the quarterly staff meeting.

The quarterly meeting takes place in a Ghanaian-themed room. The staff heatedly discuss new candidates for inclusion in the library. Echo gets one automatic entry. She chooses Zera Yacob, a 17th-century philosopher from Ethiopia. Echo debates where to put Yacob—in the philosophical section or the religious one—but ultimately decides to place him in the philosophy one. The collection already includes authors (shelved under the reference section) and entries on all the jobs lost to automation. Echo takes the complete list to Walter Spriggs, whom she always consults about the staff’s choices.

Echo is by herself once the meeting ends. She has always struggled to have a social life. She recalls going to lunch with her staff and having to leave after numbers on the menu triggered her synesthesia, leading her to snap at her staff. Embarrassed by her behavior, she revealed her condition. It turned out her staff suspected as much already.

Echo is shutting down the library when the woman in the navy suit appears again, this time dressed just like the rogue virtu, including a mask. A knife protrudes from the woman’s chest. She tells Echo, “Zero. It all begins with nothing” (59). Echo takes the mask and briefly places it on her own face and sees it has a constellation of lights inside. She places the mask in her bag.

Detective Donovan Reid arrives and questions Echo. Echo lies, telling the detective she has never seen the woman before. She says nothing about the mask. Echo heads home, intending to explore the mask. Percy calls to tell her to stay home and away from the library until further notice.

Echo heads home and feels qualms about taking the mask. She is unable to settle down once she arrives. Her apartment has pillows that are precisely arranged, and she takes care to curate the smell of the apartment with scent crystals. She takes a shower (one of only 10 minutes, since the technology in her apartment allots that amount of time). Echo thinks losing her job at F.M. Lewis and the disturbing encounter with the woman at the library mean “[e]verything that had gone wrong in the last couple of years was because of technology” (62). Her analytical brain takes over, and she has to admit “[t]ech had given her the library and the virtus. As much as she’d resisted in the beginning, she’d quickly come around. She’d had better conversations with those digital impressions of people than the real things” (62).

She decides her best bet for learning more about the mask is to talk to the virtus. She returns to the People’s Library, but it refuses to let her enter. She also forgot to bring the mask. She tells her AI assistant Gina to work on getting her into the library without letting anyone know. She returns home to retrieve the mask.

Echo returns. With Gina’s help, Echo bypasses the lockout. Echo looks to Gina and the virtus to learn more about the mask and her next steps. Jesse advises Echo to follow her conscience when deciding if it is acceptable to disobey an order or break rules.

Gina researches masks and identifies the one Echo has as a death mask—a cast taken of a dead person’s face—used in ceremonies across cultures. Recalling what the Human.exe protester told her about zero, Echo gets Gina to research the importance of zero across time. The philosopher Aristotle believed that zero was a meaningless and unnatural number. His beliefs dominated until later thinkers like British writer and philosopher Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle upon Tyne, debunked them.