How can this taxi be crawling like this?

  It’s nearly nine in the evening. Rush hour is long over, and yet we still keep slipping into traffic jams, idling at lights, weaving from lane to lane along these broad six-lane avenues. Dusty buildings. Shops glowing each in its own color. Neon signs. Little street stalls selling fast food. Coffee shops. Pedestrians. Cars. Dust-coated palms in public squares, flowering shrubs, buses.

  If I were alert and foolish enough to roll down the window, I’d feel the omnipresent stench of exhaust fumes, the fiery bite of over-roasted coffee sold on every corner, the murmur of the crowd, the distant thunder of the metro.

  But I’m not that foolish.

  The taxi inches forward through the evening swirl of the SaBra megalopolis, which coils around itself like debris caught in a whirlpool. The sun is setting, but in a place this vast-this man-made-darkness never truly comes. The streetlights have long since flickered on, their glow supposedly engineered to imitate daylight but in reality just the product of the cheapest light panels available. The illumination spills like silvery milk. Mixed with smoke from cafés and taco ovens, with the breath of engines, the light seems almost tangible, spreading and twisting around the human mass.

  SaBra. Maybe thirty million Brazilians live here-along with those who’ve come from neighboring countries, and those who drift around the globe looking for someplace better. A megalopolis that, from orbit, looks like a single organism stretching from what used to be S?o Paulo to Brasília, deep into the continent’s heart, leaving the swampy, shrinking Amazon off to the side. A discarded prototype of an ecumenopolis. A defective part. One of the fruits of human imagination-along with greed, stupidity, and short-sightedness. It seems no pandemics, wars, or financial collapses can stop humanity from remaining savages, molding something grand out of mud just to satisfy its own vanity-and breaking everything in the process. Just look around. The people who designed and built this could hardly have imagined that it would become a favela nearly a thousand kilometers long.

  Can’t we go any faster?

  Gradually the street opens up. The small shops give way to campuses and bus stops. That means we’re close.

  On my ankle rests the bracelet they put on people sentenced to probation. It’s deactivated for now. How did I get it? A rather stupid story.

  Without drifting into philosophy-let’s just say I siphoned off modest sums through cryptocurrency manipulations. You know the type. Fake transactions. Fabricated exchange rates. Trusting buyers in online stores. A couple thousand dollars here and there. It was enough for a good life. Oh, I held legitimate jobs from time to time as well, just to look inconspicuous and avoid drawing the attention of regulatory agencies and the AIs that assist them. I circulated among bloggers, minor academics, clerks, modest entrepreneurs. I attended parties and official functions. Money flowed in and out.

  Sometimes I teamed up with others like me-nimble-fingered people with a particular kind of mind-and we would snatch and divide larger pieces. Not too large. Never large enough to provoke someone powerful enough to grab us where it hurts. The thrill, the mild greed, the intoxicating sense of luck-they invigorate better than wine and inflate your self-worth.

  And during one such raid, our luck ran out.

  After lifting a batch of encrypted wallets, we grabbed a program elsewhere to crack them. Who could have known that part of its algorithm would alarm certain high-ranking institutions? Before our pursuers closed in completely, we returned everything, apologized, and scattered in different directions like ground squirrels fleeing a fox. I had never been that frightened. Waking at night, jolting upright at the sense of approaching danger, losing strength without knowing when the chase would end. Somewhere along the way I lost contact with my temporary colleagues. After switching two countries and three cities, I was still caught.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  But Fortune didn’t abandon me entirely.

  After spending half my savings on a lawyer and enduring three nauseating court hearings, I received eighteen months of house arrest, a bracelet on my ankle, and an obligation to report in person to an inspector at the police station. In addition, I was forbidden from using any kind of computers, laptops, tablets, or communication devices-except for a phone, which a grim police technician inspected once a week. As it turned out, I wasn’t allowed to move even a step beyond my home. I would leave my high-rise building, sit down on the dusty sidewalk, and smoke. That was my only permissible form of a walk.

  After the complete freedom I had maintained for myself all my life-ever since leaving my parents and college-such an exquisite restriction felt worse than torture or a prison cell. The elderly judge in his sweat-soaked wig likely hadn’t chosen it deliberately. He simply didn’t dare dismiss the official papers from another country, but he also wasn’t about to pretend he cared. The minimum sentence. Formalities observed. The state won’t spend an extra dollar-or peso, or whatever they call it here. He probably stopped thinking about me before the bailiff had even escorted me out of the courtroom.

  But the senior officer responsible for people like me-the small fry wearing ankle bracelets and sitting cooped up in their apartments like hens-took his work seriously. He oversaw an entire department of such supervisors.

  When I realized I wouldn’t lose a hand or be shipped off to Alcatraz, a grim sense of humor took hold of me, and I nicknamed him “The Bear in a Suit.” He truly was formidable: tall, immensely broad-shouldered, with almost no neck at all. His intelligent, motionless dark eyes terrified me. There was no doubt that, besides being highly intelligent, he was also very cruel. But he dispensed his cruelty sparingly, dripping it onto those under his authority the way water drips onto a forehead in that ancient torture. He knew how to make a person feel his power without doing much of anything. He never raised his voice. He never threatened punishment. He was generally laconic. Yet beneath his well-tailored suit, enormous muscles showed, and I was certain Officer Bear knew exactly how to grab me, twist me, squeeze me-so that it would hurt.

  Very much.

  Just anticipating that pain sent beads of sweat down my back.

  His name was Jean Paulo Rodrigues Mendes.

  I remember nothing of the first three days of my house arrest. Shock, probably. I washed, sat, lay down, ate, drank-and the rest is filled with a gray fog. Then my mind cleared, if only because every three days I had to visit the supervising officer, who would extract data from the bracelet on my ankle, make a note in his computer, and send me on my way.

  But the merciful haze no longer shielded my brain.

  I paced the apartment, not knowing how to occupy myself. My entire conscious life had been tied to constant immersion in the flow of information in one form or another. I was used to being online. News, messengers, continuously updating feeds, mail, schedules, remote connections. That was my life. That was what I wanted to do. Stripped of it, I was worse than a fish thrown onto the shore-because I didn’t die; I kept dragging out a helpless existence. My brain literally battered itself against the walls of my skull, deprived of its habitual sense of omniscience.

  For several days I fought the urge to ignore the prohibitions and secretly obtain at least a smartphone through the black market, to return to the network. But reason and self-preservation overcame those nervous impulses, and I calmed down. If the punishment system, by depriving me of communication tools, hoped to force me to reflect on my sins, to repent, to submit-it was mistaken. The opposite happened.

  I filled with a cold, calculating fury.

  Five hundred and forty-eight days-and I’m free. And I will never be caught again.

  While I’m under supervision, I’ll use only legal means to ease my position. There’s no point hoping for leniency or a reduced sentence. The one who expects less is never disappointed.

  Five hundred and forty-two days left.

  I’ll endure.

  Now I spend most of my free time sitting on the bench by the entrance to my building, on the sidewalk, on the curb. I read paper newspapers. Paper books. I watch the weather, the birds, the passersby. To keep from growing hoarse or inarticulate from long silence, I read poems and news articles aloud. I fight the egg-white sprawl of my consciousness, whose boundaries blur from solitude and confinement. I’m not afraid of losing my professional skills, but the lack of communication will certainly leave its mark. I’m sure of it.

  I have to hold on.

  Taxi! Can’t you go any faster?!