True diligence is following the improbable path. I read the sentence in a detective novel in childhood, when I was 8 or 9 years old, and then the phrase stayed with me forever after.
For a long time I wrote True Diligence in stylized curly letters on the inside page of every notebook, or sometimes on the front cover. I had notebooks for writing down clues, because even at 9 I wanted to work for the Internal Intelligence Service. What child doesn’t secretly wish to be a spy?
We were terrified and fascinated by Service in equal measure. Service was dark cars moving down the block, men and women in forgettable clothing stopping our parents on the street for brief random interrogations. Service was the force that made people disappear—when I was in the first grade, my friend from across the street climbed into the back of a black car with her parents, and their apartment stood empty for a year before other people moved in—but also Service carried a kind of dark glamour, an aura of power that called to us.
We played Ghosts and Agents all the time, my friends and I, but eventually they drifted off into other interests and I still wanted to be a spy, so after high school I applied successfully to the Service Academy in Los Angeles. I was talented and moved through school quickly, and afterward I was posted to Fillmore, a pretty town about 80 kilometers north of LA. My parents came to visit me there in my first year.
“This is lovely, Ibari,” my mother said, when she stepped off the train. The town made a good first impression. The central station was beautiful, one of those Southern California structures with no serious boundary between indoors and out, a tiled platform that turned into a waiting area with benches, then archways opening out to the street.
My parents had been on the train since Ohio, and they looked worn and dazed, blinking in the relentless sunlight. I was only in my mid-twenties at that point, which is to say I hadn’t thought much about the reality of aging parents, and their haziness was a glimpse into a future where I was the adult and they were confused. I didn’t like it.
“Not a cloud in the sky,” my father said.
“Do we need a taxi?” my mother asked. “I wouldn’t mind walking a bit, stretching my legs.”
“My house is close,” I said. “We can easily walk there if you’d like.”
“Downtown residency permit?” my father asked, and whistled softly.
“What can I say,” I said. “I’ve been well-behaved.”
I’ve spent a long time thinking about the nature of life in a surveillance state, which is perhaps obvious given my work, but there are observations I’ve made that I share with no one, and one of them has to do with the way in a place like this, reality splits into two.
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This will seem a bit obvious—there’s your actual job, which is Service, and then there’s your cover, which is what you tell everyone you do—but for a long period of my life, at the beginning of my career, there was truth in both versions.
At the Service Academy I’d been trained in espionage and investigation, obviously, in relevant law, in the ins and outs of running down leads, interrogation, documentation, maintaining relationships with confidential informants, etc., but also I’d earned a master’s in urban planning, and this was my cover. As far as my parents and everyone else in my life was concerned, I was an up-and-coming academic with a tenure-track job at the local college. My parents didn’t know I was Service, because no one in my life knew I was Service.
Here was the branching, as I thought of it, the point where one reality split off into another: It was actually true that I was a junior professor in an urban planning department. I’d applied for and earned that position, or so I told myself—if strings were pulled behind the scenes, that was well above my pay grade—and I took that job seriously. With that being the case, was it really just cover? It was a real job, a real life. When I introduced myself as a college instructor in urban planning, it wasn’t a lie. There was an expansiveness about it. It was like getting to live two lives at once.
But in every version of reality I had an absolutely clean record, no subversion or other crimes of any kind, which had qualified me for a permit to live in an attractive neighborhood close to downtown. My parents and I walked out of the train station and up the hill together, and as an exercise in gratitude I tried to see Central Avenue through their eyes: the double row of palm trees, the century-old restored movie theater, the candy-colored awnings above the shops, an overall impression of having been unmoored from time and history sometime around 1965.
“I feel like I’m in a time capsule,” my mother said, and then quickly, “In a good way, I mean. It’s nice here.”
“It is nice,” I said. I really did like it here, for the most part. In Fillmore, as in most backwaters without a significant history of subversion, the State operated with a fairly light touch: identity cards, neighborhood permits, and facial recognition technology, like everywhere, but none of the random interrogations and drone surveillance that one might expect in larger cities.
My father took a nap on my couch while my mother and I went for a walk. We took a circuitous route that led us back through downtown. As we turned back onto Central Avenue, my attention was diverted by a scene playing out farther up the block and across the street. A black van had pulled up in front of the florist’s. The shop had been open an hour earlier, but now a crew had gone to work on it: The sign had been painted over, and two men were carting armloads of flowers into the van. The owners—a couple in their sixties whom I’d been surveilling for some time—were standing nearby, seemingly in shock. A second van pulled up, and the couple were led inside. They didn’t resist.
In a moment, the two vans were gone, and with them all trace of the business and the business’s owners. The shop was locked and blank now, no merchandise, no signs, the erasure complete. I knew, because I’d reported on this couple to my supervising officer, that they’d criticized the State on social media. They might be sent to prison, or to a black site, but I thought it more likely that they’d be sent to a work camp servicing the massive agricultural operations in the valley, a decade or so of picking strawberries or kale in the sun and sleeping in locked dormitories. People were rarely able to return to their previous life after that. I didn’t expect to see them again.
“This weather’s perfect,” my mother said.
Dinner that night was at a metal table I’d purchased for my backyard grove, as I thought of it: two ancient orange trees and a lemon tree that together formed a canopy. This was my favorite place in the world, and the main reason why I’d bought the house.
“Ibari,” my mother said, “I brought something for you from home.”
Home, for them, was Ohio, where they’d moved from New York when I’d left for the academy. I’d never lived there, and hearing the place called home was obscurely irritating. My mother had brought an ancient canvas tote bag to the table—could this possibly be the same one she’d used for grocery shopping in my childhood in New York?—and from it she pulled a battered old notebook, on which TRUE DILIGENCE and associated curlicues took up the entire front cover.
“Good lord,” I said. “Where did you find that?”
“I was cleaning out the storage unit,” she said, “and thought you might like to have it. What does the phrase mean?”
“True diligence?” I was going for lightness. I felt I’d succeeded. “Just a phrase I liked when I was a little kid. I think I must have seen it on TV or read it in a book somewhere.” If asked, I could have cited the book title, the author, and possibly the page number. Why was I lying about it? Because lying was my job. I pushed this thought down.
“I opened it up,” she said, “before I knew what it was. You should’ve been a detective.”
“Why,” I said, “what’s in it?” She was passing it across the table. I opened it, and for a moment didn’t understand what I was looking at. A timetable? No, the times of day when the neighbor at the apartment building across the street entered or left the building, except it was all only between 4 pm and 6 pm, because that was the time when I was sitting at my desk by the window doing homework, between school and dinner. He came and went a lot during that period, which I’d apparently found suspicious. The heading was straightforward: Times when Andy Commidy (sp?) enters or leaves home, with separate columns for enters and leaves. His schedule was remarkably consistent. I’d started the notebook after my friend across the street had disappeared, I remembered now. I was 7. But all these years later, I couldn’t remember my friend’s name.
“Wow,” I said, “I’d forgotten what a weird kid I was.”
“You should’ve been a detective,” she said again. Could she possibly know? It wasn’t possible, I told myself, but on the other hand, how did I know my mother wasn’t Service too? One of the more exhausting aspects of life in a surveillance state is that anyone can be surveilling you at any time, including the person whom you are yourself surveilling.
“I like the academic life,” I said. “It’s peaceful.”
“Anything you did here would seem peaceful, I’d think,” my father said. “Nice little town.”
“Well, Ibari,” my mother said, and raised her wineglass. “It looks like you’ve found a quiet life in a beautiful place.”
“Here’s to that,” my father said, and I smiled and joined them in sipping wine. Why did that comment bother me so much? She’d meant it kindly. Soon enough they returned to Ohio, and I settled back into the rhythms of my life. I was good at my work, both in Service and at the college. My students seemed to like me well enough, and I enjoyed teaching them. My Service work involved surveillance on a handful of local people, adults much older than me, who’d attended the last pro-democracy demonstrations a decade earlier.
It was easy work, observing their activities, listening to their mind-numbingly boring phone calls, meeting regularly with their next-door neighbors, friends, and colleagues. In my cover life, I liked my colleagues at the college. My home was beautiful. The dating pool was small, but I maximized it by dating both women and men. I collected a few local friends and enjoyed their company.
But in the years that followed my parents’ first visit, my mother’s comment—a quiet life in a beautiful place—stayed with me in a way I didn’t understand. It was like a splinter I could ignore for months at a time. Occasionally, in unexpected moments, I was struck by an uneasy sense that I was living the wrong life, or conducting my life in the same way I checked items off my grocery lists, or doing the wrong thing, or in stasis.
Sometime around my 40th birthday, while my friend Nico was visiting, I broke my glasses. I was picking oranges in the backyard when it happened. I’d taken the glasses off for only a moment, to wipe sweat from my face, but managed to drop them. I stepped back, looking at the ground in the dim greenish light under the orange tree, and heard a quiet snap under my shoe. The nose bridge was broken.
“You got a backup pair?” Nico asked, from the lounge chair. She’d been reading a book.
“In my office at the college,” I said.
“Do you have tape?”
“Probably. Keep reading, I’ve got this.” But all I seemed to have in the house, tape-wise, was a reflective silver tape that my cousin Anton had left behind on a recent visit, when he’d come for a few days with his 4-year-old twins, who were forever immersed in complicated art projects. The tape was very narrow but surprisingly strong. I carefully wound it around the broken section, then the right lens popped out, so I added more tape on the right. The glasses felt secure when I put them on, but the overall look was insane. I was staring in the mirror when the doorbell rang.
“Nice repair job, Ibari,” the UPS driver said. He came around often enough that we were on a first-name basis. In those days I did a lot of online shopping.
“Thank you. I just stepped on them.”
“Happens to the best of us,” he said, and raised his device close to my face. “Voice?”
“My voice is my passcode,” I said reflexively, and waited, with the driver, for the signature of my voice and the image of my face to match with my address in the UPS system, so that the driver could leave the small package he held, which I thought was probably my new toothbrush. Instead, his device emitted a sharp warning beep.
“Seems like there’s a problem with the face scan,” the driver said.
“Let’s try that again.” He raised the device.
“My voice is my passcode.” The beep came again.
“Try again without the glasses?”
“My glasses have never been a problem,” I said, but took them off anyway. “You’re sure you can’t just leave the package?”
“Without ID verification?” The driver grinned. “I didn’t know you did stand-up. OK, take three?”
“My voice is my passcode,” I said, with the glasses in my hand, and this time the machine produced a melodic chime.
“There you go,” the driver said. “Enjoy the rest of your day.”
I thanked him, and brought the little package in. I felt very strange. It was as if a curtain had been pulled aside, just for a second, and I’d seen the machinery hidden behind it. I’d never really thought about facial recognition systems before, because they were everywhere and always had been, my face recorded and uploaded to a central database several times a day since earliest memory. The question was whether the glasses could thwart any facial recognition software, or if it was just a faulty UPS scanner. I returned to the backyard with a feeling of carrying a dangerous secret. I wanted to test my glasses again.
“Nico,” I said, “you want to go for a walk, maybe get some iced tea downtown?”
Nico smiled. “Your poor glasses,” she said. “Yes, iced tea sounds perfect.”
We walked slowly, in the direction of iced tea. It was a hot day, but the solar fans in the business district created a gentle breeze. There was a man walking a block or so ahead of us. One of the former pro-democracy agitators whom I’d been surveilling. I’d studied him so carefully that I’d have known him anywhere.
“When do you need to be back in LA?” I asked.
“I thought I’d take the 4 o’clock train.” It was still only late morning. As we entered the tea shop, a discreet scanner embedded in the door frame flashed white—Face not found—but confirmation didn’t come until I reached the front of the line, ordered an iced tea, and stared directly into the screen to pay with credit.
“I’m sorry,” the barista said, and swiveled the screen so I could read the message: Facial recognition error. “I can’t remember the last time this happened.”
“Oh,” I said, “no problem, let’s do fingerprints.” I pressed my right index finger to the screen, and a moment later a green check mark appeared. Nico was studying the muffins.
“I think these glasses are throwing off the scanners,” I said.
Nico went still for just a second, and shook her head. The movement was barely perceptible. She was still looking at the baked goods.
“The muffins here look good,” she said, as if I’d said nothing.
This was when I understood: My friend was Service. I had no doubt that she was who she said she was, which is to say an associate professor in the physics department at UCLA, but also she was something else. It shouldn’t be disappointing, I told myself. A lot of people were Service. I was Service. The barista could be Service. Anyone around you, at any given moment, could be observing and reporting. But was she reporting on me? We were quiet on the walk back to the house. The iced tea tasted like cardboard.
“I’ve never reported on you,” Nico said, when we were close to my house. She spoke so quietly that I barely heard her, and I knew it wasn’t a coincidence that she’d waited until our backs were to the downtown camera array.
“OK.” I felt vastly relieved. I knew that rationally there was no reason to believe her, but all my life I’ve had a sense of intuition, and I felt very strongly that she was telling the truth. And then, because she was my closest friend and she’d taken the risk first: “I’ve never reported on you either,” I said.
She didn’t stop walking, but I heard a slight intake of breath.
“You know,” she said, again very softly, “I think it doesn’t take that much to become a ghost.”
“You’re probably right.” I appreciated the warning. Ghost was slang for a person who ran afoul of the State. A ghost is undesirable. A ghost lives in the shadows. A ghost is not entitled to a home, or health care, or the protections of the law, or a social security number, bank account, credit, or entry into most spaces, because does a ghost even really entirely exist?
Excerpted from the book Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel. Copyright © 2026 by Emily St. John Mandel. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
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